Since the outset, Music and Franciscanism have formed a perfect union: the tam theoricam quam practicam of ‘Ars musica’ became a fundamental part of the proselytism and communication of the ideals of the Saint from Assisi and his ‘Order’. The traces of Franciscan presence in European musical circles between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are conspicuous, starting with one of the greatest Franciscan exponents of the 13th century, the German Giuliano da Spira, the ‘Magister Cantus in the Regis Francorum’; from the Gregorian tradition to 13th-century metric music, from the Cantorino di Reims and its primitive polyphonies to the monadic lauds in the vernacular language of Cortona, from 14th-century ars novistiche (novel art) compositions to the mathematical speculation of ars subtilior (subtle art), and from 15th- and 16th-century lauds to 16th-century polyphonic architecture. The history of Mediaeval lauds bears testimony to the symbolic ‘marriage’ between music and the Order. It is the story of the development of a religious-devotional way of thinking and also of society at the time, in full political and cultural ferment: confraternities of a secular-bourgeois nature that required new lyrical-musical productions, guilds and urban artistic creation that took part in the birth of vernacular literature, as well as in the ideals of early Franciscanism.