permission to visit Palestine upon a missionary enterprise, together with special privileges for their entrance into sacerdotal orders.

Those of the ten friends who were not yet priests, were ordained at Venice in June 1537.

They then began to preach in public, roaming the streets with faces emaciated by abstinence, clad in ragged clothes, and using a language strangely compounded of Italian and Spanish.

Their obvious enthusiasm, and the holy lives they were known to lead, brought them rapidly into high reputation of sanctity.

Both the secular and the religious clergy of Italy could show but few men at that epoch equal to these brethren.