Francis of Assisi

• 1. Introduction

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  Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone was a young man who loved fine clothes, spent money lavishly, and delighted in the songs of troubadours. The world would come to know him as Francis of Assisi. He was the son of a prosperous silk merchant, born around 1181 in a small Italian town, and as a youth he lived high-spirited and carefree. Yet this same man would one day strip himself naked before a bishop, renounce his inheritance, and choose to live as a beggar. He would call the sun his brother and the moon his sister. He would preach to birds, broker a truce with a wolf, and cross enemy lines during a crusade to stand before a sultan. By the time he died, singing a psalm in a borrowed hut, marks resembling the wounds of crucified Christ were said to have appeared on his body. What turned a merchant's pleasure-loving son into one of the most venerated figures in Christianity? And why, eight centuries later, does a pope still take his name?

• 2. The Renunciation

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  In the marketplace, Francis was selling cloth and velvet on behalf of his father when a beggar approached and asked for alms. After finishing the business deal, Francis abandoned his wares and ran after the man, giving him everything in his purse. His friends mocked the charity. His father scolded him in rage. This was the early crack in a life built on comfort.

  Around 1202, Francis joined a military expedition against Perugia and was taken prisoner at Collestrada. He spent a year as a captive, and an illness there forced him to re-evaluate his life. He returned to Assisi in 1203 and slipped back into his carefree habits. Two years later he set out for Apulia to enlist in the army of Walter III, Count of Brienne, but a strange vision turned him back home and drained his interest in worldly life. When a friend asked whether he was thinking of marrying, Francis answered, "Yes, a fairer bride than any of you have ever seen," meaning his "Lady Poverty."

  In the forsaken country chapel of San Damiano, just outside Assisi, Francis said the Icon of Christ Crucified spoke to him: "Francis, Francis, go and repair My church which, as you can see, is falling into ruins." He took it literally and sold cloth from his father's store to help the priest there. When the priest refused the money, Francis threw the coins on the floor. To escape his father's wrath, he hid in a cave for about a month. His father dragged him home, beat him, bound him, and locked him in a small storeroom, until his mother freed him.

  Before the Bishop of Assisi, in the midst of legal proceedings, Francis renounced his father and his inheritance. Some accounts say he stripped himself naked as a sign of that break, and the bishop covered him with his own cloak. For months afterward he wandered the hills behind Assisi as a beggar, worked as a scullion at a neighbouring monastery, and begged stones to rebuild San Damiano with his own hands. Over two years he restored several ruined chapels, among them the Porziuncola, the little chapel of St. Mary of the Angels, which became his favourite home.

• 3. A Rule And A Following

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  One morning in February 1208, Francis was at a Mass in the chapel of St. Mary of the Angels. The Gospel of the day was the "Commissioning of the Twelve" from the Book of Matthew, in which Jesus sends his disciples to proclaim that the Kingdom of God is at hand. Francis took it as a personal command. He put on a coarse woollen tunic, the dress of the poorest Umbrian peasants, tied it with a knotted rope, and began exhorting people to penance, brotherly love, and peace. He had no license to preach, which made his work unusual.

  Within a year, Francis had 11 followers, and the brothers lived a simple life in the deserted leper colony of Rivo Torto near Assisi. In 1209 he composed a short rule for them, the Regula primitiva, drawn from verses in the Bible. Its essence was "to follow the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ and to walk in his footsteps." He then led his 11 followers to Rome to seek permission from Pope Innocent III to found a new religious order.

  In Rome the brothers met Bishop Guido of Assisi, who was traveling with Giovanni di San Paolo, the Cardinal Bishop of Sabina and confessor to the pope. The cardinal agreed to represent Francis. The pope admitted the group informally at first, telling them to return for an official audience as God increased them in grace and number. Having the group tonsured recognized Church authority and shielded the followers from accusations of heresy, the kind that had struck the Waldensians decades earlier. After a dream in which he saw Francis holding up the Lateran Basilica, the pope endorsed the order. Tradition places this on the 16th of April 1210, the official founding of the Franciscan Order. Francis was later ordained a deacon, but never a priest.

• 4. Clare And The Wider Orders

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  In 1211, the young noblewoman Clare of Assisi heard Francis preaching in the church of San Rufino and wanted to live as he did. On the night of Palm Sunday, the 28th of March 1212, she secretly left her family's palace. Francis received her at the Porziuncola and gave her a religious habit like his own, establishing the Order of Poor Clares. He first lodged her, her younger sister Caterina, and other young women with Benedictine nuns, then transferred them to San Damiano. That became the first monastery of the Second Franciscan Order.

  For people who could not leave their daily affairs, Francis created the Third Order of Brothers and Sisters of Penance. Its members, laity or clergy, neither withdrew from the world nor took religious vows. They simply observed Franciscan principles in ordinary life. Now called the Secular Franciscan Order, it soon spread beyond Italy.

• 5. The Sultan And The Crusade

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  In the late spring of 1212, Francis set out for Jerusalem but was shipwrecked by a storm on the Dalmatian coast and forced home. On the 8th of May 1213, Count Orlando di Chiusi gave him the use of the mountain of La Verna, calling it "eminently suitable for whoever wishes to do penance in a place remote from mankind." It became one of his favourite retreats for prayer.

  During the Fifth Crusade in 1219, Francis went to Egypt, where a Crusader army had besieged the walled city of Damietta for over a year. He traveled with Friar Illuminatus of Arce, hoping to convert the Sultan of Egypt or be martyred trying. The sultan, Al-Kamil, a nephew of Saladin, had succeeded his father in 1218 and was encamped upstream of Damietta. A bloody and futile Christian attack on the 29th of August 1219 was followed by a four-week ceasefire. Probably during that pause, Francis and his companion crossed the Muslim lines and were brought before the sultan, staying in his camp for a few days.

  Reports say little beyond noting that Al-Kamil received Francis graciously and that Francis preached to the Muslims before returning unharmed. No known Arab sources mention the visit. Francis and his companion later left the Crusader camp for Acre and sailed for Italy in the latter half of 1220. Drawing on a 1267 sermon by Bonaventure, some later sources claim the sultan secretly converted or accepted a death-bed baptism. Whatever happened, the consequence outlasted Francis. After the fall of the Crusader Kingdom, the Franciscans of all Catholics would be allowed to remain in the Holy Land, recognized as Custodians of the Holy Land, a presence held almost without interruption since 1217.

• 6. Order Under Strain

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  The Franciscan Order grew at an unprecedented rate compared to earlier religious orders, but its organization lagged behind. There was little to govern it beyond Francis' example and his simple rule. Word reached him of five brothers martyred in Morocco, and he returned to Italy by way of Venice. Cardinal Ugolino di Conti was named by the pope as the order's protector.

  To manage the strain, Francis drafted the "First Rule," the Regula non bullata, which reaffirmed poverty and the apostolic life while adding more institutional structure. The pope never officially endorsed it. Brother Peter was succeeded by Brother Elias as Francis' vicar. Two years later Francis revised the text into the "Second Rule," approved by Pope Honorius III on the 29th of November 1223. It called on the friars "to observe the Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, living in obedience without anything of our own and in chastity," and it set rules for discipline, preaching, and entry. Once the rule was endorsed, Francis withdrew more and more from external affairs. In 1221 and 1222 he crossed Italy, going as far south as Catania in Sicily and as far north as Bologna.

  Around 1220, at Greccio near Assisi, Francis celebrated Christmas with the first known crèche, or Nativity scene. He used real animals so worshipers could contemplate the birth of the child Jesus directly, through the senses. His biographers Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure describe a straw-filled manger set between a real ox and donkey. According to Thomas, it was beautiful in its simplicity, the manger serving as the altar for the Christmas Mass.

• 7. The Wounds And The End

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  On the mountain of Verna, during a 40-day fast in preparation for Michaelmas, Francis is said to have had a vision on the 17th of September 1224, three days after the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. Brother Leo, who was with him, left the first definite account of the phenomenon of stigmata. "Suddenly he saw a vision of a seraph, a six-winged angel on a cross. This angel gave him the gift of the five wounds of Christ." Some have suggested the marks were due to purpura, a known complication of the quartan malaria Francis is thought to have suffered.

  Suffering from the stigmata and from trachoma, Francis sought care in Siena, Cortona, and Nocera, to no avail. As he went blind, the bishop of Ostia ordered his eyes cauterized with hot irons, and Francis claimed to have felt nothing. He was brought back to a hut next to the Porziuncola, where he dictated his spiritual testament. Francis died on the evening of Saturday, the 3rd of October 1226, singing Psalm 141, "Voce mea ad Dominum." In 1935, Edward Frederick Hartung concluded that Francis had probably contracted trachoma in Egypt and died, aged 45, of quartan malaria, a finding published in the Annals of Medical History.

  On the 16th of July 1228, Francis was declared a saint by Pope Gregory IX, the former cardinal Ugolino di Conti. The next day the pope laid the foundation stone for the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi. Francis was buried on the 25th of May 1230 under the Lower Basilica, but Brother Elias soon hid the tomb to protect it from Saracen invaders. The burial place stayed unknown until it was rediscovered in 1818. His skeleton was put on public display for the first time in 2026.

• 8. Brother Sun, Sister Moon

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  Francis believed nature itself was the mirror of God. He called all creatures his "brothers" and "sisters," preached to the birds, and supposedly persuaded a wolf in Gubbio to stop attacking the locals if they agreed to feed it. In the Canticle of the Sun, composed in 1224, he gave thanks for Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Water, Fire, and Earth, all of them rendering praise to God. He believed commoners should pray in their own language and often wrote in the Umbrian dialect rather than Latin, which leads some literary critics to call him the first Italian poet.

  The Fioretti, or "Little Flowers," is a collection of legends that grew up after his death. One tells how, finding birds filling the trees along a road, Francis said, "wait for me while I go to preach to my sisters the birds," and not one flew away. Another describes the wolf of Gubbio, "terrifying and ferocious, who devoured men as well as animals." Francis made the sign of the cross, commanded the beast to hurt nobody, and brokered a pact: because the wolf had "done evil out of hunger," the townsfolk would feed it regularly, and it would no longer prey on them. Some modern commentators have wrongly called Francis a vegetarian, but records show he ate meat. His favourite dish was shrimp pie.

  His devotion to creation reached far beyond his lifetime. On the 29th of November 1979, Pope John Paul II declared Francis the patron saint of ecology. In 2015 Pope Francis published the encyclical Laudato si', named from the Canticle of the Sun, presenting Francis of Assisi as "the example par excellence of care for the vulnerable." Along with Catherine of Siena, Francis was named patron saint of Italy, and he is the namesake of the city of San Francisco. When Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was elected pope on the 13th of March 2013, he chose Francis as his name, the first pope to do so, in honour of the poor man of Assisi who had once been told, "Don't forget the poor."