What distinguished Dominic's foundation from older monastic orders was its structure: friars were not bound to a single monastery but organized into provinces and sent to preach and teach across them, and the order required its members to pursue formal theological study, sending its earliest recruits to the universities of Paris and Bologna rather than keeping them enclosed. This design let the Dominicans become the teaching order of the medieval university, producing Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas within a generation of Dominic's death and shaping Catholic theology for centuries.
Dominic himself traveled constantly between houses, preaching, arbitrating disputes and directing the order's rapid expansion until his own death at Bologna in 1221, worn out, by his companions' account, from a mode of life as austere as anything he had asked of his friars. Two images attach to him in later art and legend. One is a dog carrying a torch in its mouth, playing on the Latin pun Domini canes, hounds of the Lord, and said to derive from a dream his mother had while pregnant with him, in which a dog leapt from her womb carrying a burning torch that set the world alight. The other is a star, said to have rested over his head at his baptism, taken as a sign of the light his preaching would carry. He was canonized in 1234, thirteen years after his death, by Pope Gregory IX, who had known him personally.