The sessions were presided over by Brother Elias, Francis sitting at his feet and pulling at his robe when there was anything that he wished to have put before the Brothers.
Brother Giordani di Giano, who was present, has preserved for us all these details and that of the setting out of a group of friars for Germany.

They were placed under the direction of Caesar of Speyer, whose mission succeeded beyond all expectation.

Eighteen months after, when he returned to Italy, consumed with the desire to see St.Francis again, the cities of Wurzburg, Mayence, Worms, Speyer, Strasburg, Cologne, Salzburg, and Ratisbon had become Franciscan centres, from whence the new ideas were radiating into all Southern Germany.
The foundation of the Tertiaries, or Third Order, generally in the oldest documents called Brotherhood of Penitence, is usually fixed as occurring in the year 1221; but we have already seen that this date is much too recent, or rather that it is impossible to fix any date, for what was later called, quite arbitrarily, the Third Order is evidently contemporary with the First.[19] Francis and his companions desired to be the apostles of their time; but they, no more than the apostles of Jesus, desired to have all men enter their association, which was necessarily somewhat restricted, and which, according to the gospel saying, was meant to be the leaven of the rest of humanity.

In consequence, their life was literally the _apostolic life_, but the ideal which they preached was the _evangelical life_, such as Jesus had preached it.
St.Francis no more condemned the family or property than Jesus did; he simply saw in them ties from which the _apostle_, and the apostle alone, needs to be free.
If before long sickly minds fancied that they interpreted his thought in making the union of the sexes an evil, and all that concerns the physical activity of man a fall; if unbalanced spirits borrowed the authority of his name to escape from all duty; if married persons condemned themselves to the senseless martyrdom of virginity, he should certainly not be made responsible.

These traces of an unnatural asceticism come from the dualist ideas of the Catharists, and not from the inspired poet who sang nature and her fecundity, who made nests for doves, inviting them to multiply under the watch of God, and who imposed manual labor on his friars as a sacred duty.
The bases of the corporation of the _Brothers and Sisters of Penitence_ were very simple.