Note 6 — AUGUSTINIAN AFFAIRS

Secondly. Because although the said provinces commission their procurators to go to general chapter, they do not attain the end in view, for the reason that the said provincials of Castile, in concert with the priors of that province, not content with charging the said procurators two silver pieces [numis argentiis] and the remuneration for the mass, which are also two other pieces, given to them for their daily board by those procurators, from day to day, and being suborned with money and gilts which the procurators give unwillingly to them (but which they receive willingly) in order that they may be permitted to carry on the things charged to them and be given associates, they [i.e., the provincials and priors] as abovesaid not content with the above charges, and imagining that the procurators are carrying with them large amounts of money which they are greedy to get into their own hands, worry and harry them by annulling their powers of procuratorship, by forcing them to reveal all their affairs, which thereupon they are inhibited from using, and by forbidding them under censures from applying to the Roman curia or to the most reverend general. Moreover, they are assigned by the provincials for residence certain set convents, wherein, as happened to me, they have to lodge, although I showed them an order from the most reverend general forbidding the provincial of Castile from making any change in this regard, such being the order and sentence of general chapter, confirmed by his Holiness Clement the Eighth. But that was of no avail, for, as appears from the letters and patent of the provincial of Castile, which I have handed over to the reverend father, Brother John Baptist of Piombino,6 procurator-general [of the order], and which are now in his keeping, I have been forced to flee hither.