On 11 November , the friars of the Franciscan Order, founded in , settled outside the gates of Erfurt as the first mendicant order of the city. From , the order spread throughout the empire as far as the Baltic Sea within a decade and favoured the cities for its monasteries. In Erfurt, they first took over the abandoned Church of the Holy Spirit, which had previously belonged to an Augustinian nunnery.
At the instigation of the Archbishop of Mainz, they began building a church and monastery in —30 and probably devoted themselves to nursing the sick. Seven years after their arrival, in , they moved into convent buildings on the Gera river on a plot of land given to them by the archbishop's vicedominus of Apolda , Gunther. The monastery was ravaged by fires several times; in , numerous Franciscans died of the plague. Therefore, it can be concluded that the buildings must have been of a certain size.
The Franciscans probably soon founded a school and, from the beginning of the s, a house of studies studium custodiale , studium particulare existed in Erfurt for the education first of the young friars in the Custody of Thuringia, a subdivision of the Saxon Franciscan Province Saxonia founded in , but the studies soon developed both in terms of their level of content and their extent.
The lector had a socius at his side, and from , a second lector is recorded. The first Franciscans to matriculate were the provincial minister Johannes von Chemnitz in and his successor from Johannes von Minden who, from onwards, also acted as magister regens , head of Franciscan studies, and held a chair at the university. They opposed the Reformation ; the Guardian of the convent, Conrad Clinge, had been a cathedral preacher in Erfurt since and vehemently defended the Catholic faith.
As no new friars were allowed to be admitted, the monastery died out; it was dissolved in , after the death of the last Franciscan, and the convent buildings were used as a school. For a short time, Minorites from Cologne once again came to the monastery buildings from , but they had to leave as early as when the Swedes returned to Erfurt.
