High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Brothers, or Brethren of the Free Spirit, was a lay Christian movement which flourished in northern Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries. Antinomian and individualist in outlook, it came into conflict with the Catholic Church and was declared heretical by Pope Clement V at the Council of Vienne (1311–12). They are often considered similar to the Amalricans. They flourished at a time of great trauma in Western Europe during the conflict between the decadent Avignon Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor, the Hundred Years` War, the Black Death, the rise of the Cathar heresy and the subsequent Crusade against them, the beginnings of the Inquisition, the fall of the Templars and the internal strife of the Church — all of which helped fuel the appeal of their individualistic and millenarian approach to Christianity and Scripture.