to avoid dealing with pressing political problems. Henry shared many of his religious views with Louis of France, and the two men appear to have been slightly competitive in their piety. Towards the end of his reign, Henry may have taken up the practice of curing sufferers of scrofula, often called "the King's evil", by touching them, possibly emulating Louis, who also took up the practice. Louis had a famous collection of Passion Relics which he kept in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, and he paraded the Holy Cross through Paris in 1241; Henry took possession of the Relic of the Holy Blood in 1247, marching it through Westminster to be installed in Westminster Abbey, which he promoted as an alternative to the Sainte-Chapelle. Henry was particularly supportive of the mendicant orders; his confessors were drawn from the Dominican friars, and he built mendicant houses in Canterbury, Norwich, Oxford, Reading and York, helping to find valuable space for new buildings in what were already crowded towns and cities. He supported the military crusading orders, and became a patron of the Teutonic Order in 1235. The emerging universities of Oxford and Cambridge also received royal attention: Henry reinforced and regulated their powers, and encouraged scholars to migrate from Paris to teach at them. A rival institution at Northampton was declared by the King to be a mere school and not a true university. The support given to Henry by the Papacy during his early years had a lasting influence on his attitude towards Rome, and he defended the mother church diligently throughout his reign. Rome in the 13th century was at once both the centre of the Europe-wide Church, and a political power in central Italy, threatened militarily by the Holy Roman Empire. During Henry's reign, the Papacy developed a strong, central bureaucracy, supported by benefices granted to absent churchmen working in Rome. Tensions grew between this practice and the needs of local parishioners, exemplified by the dispute between Robert Grosseteste, the bishop of Lincoln, and the Papacy in 1250. Although the Scottish Church became more independent of England during the period, the Papal Legates helped Henry continue to apply influence over its activities at a distance. Pope Innocent IV's attempts to raise funds began to face opposition from within the English Church during Henry's reign. In 1240, the Papal emissary's collection of taxes to pay for the Papacy's war with Holy