At the end of the passage in which the sacristy is situated is the exquisite little Cappella Medici, which Michelozzo, the architect of S. Marco and the Palazzo Medici, and for a while Donatello's partner, built for his friend Cosimo de' Medici, who though a Dominican in his cell at S. Marco was a Franciscan here, but by being equally a patron dissociated himself from partisanship.

The religious bodies which from time to time controlled the affairs of the island differed in their humanity and general policy: the Dominicans were friends of the Indian and haters of the turbulent oppressor; the Franciscans were the instruments of the bad men whose only ambition was to wring pleasure and fortune out of the Indian's heart; the monks of St. Jerome undertook in vain a neutral and reconciling policy.

DOMINICANS, a religious order of preaching friars, founded at Toulouse in 1215 by St. Dominic, to aid in the conversion of the heretic Albigenses to the faith, and finally established as the order whose special charge it was to guard the orthodoxy of the Church.

The famous Dominicans and Franciscans, who had rallied to the defence of the Papacy three centuries before,those missionary orders that had filled the best pulpits and the highest chairs of philosophy in the scholastic age,had become inexhaustible subjects of sarcasm and mockery, for they were peddling relics and indulgences, and quarrelling among themselves.