Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Franciscans were founded by Francis of Assisi, an Italian saint who began preaching around 1207. He traveled to Rome in 1209 to seek approval from Pope Innocent III to form a religious order, and within a year of his first sermon he had eleven companions living with him at the deserted leper colony of Rivo Torto near Assisi.
The three branches of the Franciscan First Order are the Order of Friars Minor (OFM), also called the Observants; the Order of Friars Minor Conventual (OFM Conv.), also called the Minorites; and the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin (OFM Cap.), the Capuchins. Each operates under its own minister general and governance structure.
The controversy centered on whether Christ and his apostles had owned any property. The Spiritual Franciscans argued they had owned nothing, while Pope John XXII declared that doctrine heretical in his 1323 bull Quum inter nonnullos. The dispute drew in figures including minister general Michael of Cesena and philosopher William of Ockham, who fled to the protection of Louis of Bavaria, and resulted in four Spirituals being burned at Avignon in 1318.
Agnellus of Pisa led a small group of Franciscan friars to England in 1224. They began at Canterbury and expanded to London and Oxford, and from those three bases swiftly spread to the principal towns of England. The branch became known as the greyfriars.
The Poor Clares, officially the Order of Saint Clare, were founded by Clare of Assisi and Francis of Assisi on Palm Sunday in 1212. They are a contemplative order of nuns and constitute the Second Order of the Franciscans. By 2011, there were over 20,000 Poor Clare nuns in over 75 countries.
The Franciscan Gabriele Allegra, working through the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum in Hong Kong, produced the first complete translation of the Catholic Bible into Chinese in 1968 after a forty-year effort. The translation was inspired by an earlier attempt by the Franciscan Giovanni di Monte Corvino, who had worked on a Chinese biblical translation in Beijing in the fourteenth century.