I leave the relics, feeling rather guilty at having any uncharitable thoughts. I have grown very fond of Clare and Francis in the course of my research, and looking at some of their personal artifacts, especially their old clothes, makes me feel like a voyeur rummaging, uninvited, through their closets.
I don’t have a clear, physical impression of Clare, but I do of Francis. To Celano’s everlasting credit, he provides a detailed portrait of Francis in his biography of the saint. Beyond his short stature, which a later examination of his bones would pinpoint at only five foot three, three inches shorter than the average medieval Italian man, Francis had a “cheerful countenance,” a “round” head, a face “a bit long,” a forehead that was “smooth and low,” “black” eyes, hair, and a beard, “not bushy.” His eyebrows were “straight,” his nose “symmetrical, thin and straight,” his ears “upright, but small,” his temples “smooth,” his lips “small and thin,” his teeth “set close together, even, and white.”
Celano goes on to describe this appealing-sounding man as having a “slender” neck, “straight” shoulders, “short” arms, “slender” hands, “long” fingers, “extended” fingernails, “thin” legs, and “small” feet. “His skin was very delicate, his flesh very spare,” Celano ends.
As we move on to see the other vestiges of Francis and Clare dotted around Assisi, it is extraordinary to think that we are walking on the same streets they did and seeing at least a few of the same medieval structures they did. The first-century Temple of Minerva in Assisi’s central Piazza del Comune, for example, is clearly visible in one of Giotto’s frescoes in Francis’s basilica. Now a secular Franciscan church, the pagan temple in their time was used as the local jail.
Not surprisingly, some visitors to Assisi, and not only the many pilgrims and religious groups, feel a deeply spiritual presence on these streets. One friend of mine spent a month here after being treated for cancer and returned home in a newly serene state of mind. Another friend, a Muslim diplomat, told me he had experienced a spiritual awakening in Assisi second only to one he had felt during a pilgrimage to Mecca.
But another aspect of Assisi is undeniably commercial. As uncomfortable a reality as it might be, Francis, and to a lesser extent Clare, is a profitable industry for Assisi. The only one, in fact. Besides the many restaurants and hotels supported by visitors to Assisi, shops all over town sell multisized replicas of the San Damiano cross, religious medals with Francis’s likeness on them, and his signature tau cross carved out of olive wood, which many visitors wear on leather cords around their necks.
Pottery shops sell ashtrays and plates with scenes from Francis’s life on them, and at least one bakery sells “Pane di San Francesco,” a local bread laced with the limoncello liqueur so popular in Italy. One shop even sells Umbrian wine with replicas of the saints by Simone Martini on the label—St. Francis on the red wine, St. Clare on the white.
The Francis we have come to know as a saint would have been disgusted by the money changing hands in his name. The Francis we know less well as a young man, however, would have welcomed the exchange and perhaps even profited from it.
Francis was born into an emerging merchant class to a mother who is thought to have been French and a successful Assisi fabric merchant, Pietro di Bernadone. Pietro amassed a sizable fortune bringing home embroidered silks and velvets and damasks from France, fashioning them into stylish clothes in his workshop, and selling them to the nobles and affluent burghers of Assisi. Consumerism was taking hold in the late twelfth century, a trend that marked the accumulation of fancy clothes and dress for status, rather than simpler clothes for warmth and practicality. Pietro added more to his coffers by investing in land around Assisi, amassing so many farms, orchards, meadows, and forests that it is believed he was one of the hill town’s larger landowners.
No one is absolutely sure where the Bernadone family lived in Assisi. Some historians believe they lived in a house known as the T.O.R. Casa Paterna near the Piazza del Comune. Others believe the family home was on the Vicolo Sup. San Antonio, also near the Piazza del Comune. The choice of that location is supported by the presence of a tiny, charming shrine with fading frescoes that has been called the Oratorio di San Francesco Piccolino since the thirteenth century and that, with unsubtle religious symbolism, bears a placard in Latin stating Francis was born here—in a stable.
The most generally recognized location of the Bernadone home, however, and the one marked on tourist maps, is under the seventeenth-century Chiesa Nuova, just south of the Piazza del Comune. With some excitement we walk the short distance to the house from the oratorio but find its semiexcavated remains quite dull. There is archaeological value in the subterranean section of the ancient cobbled street on which the house fronted and the presumed remains of Pietro Bernadone’s shop where Francis worked for his father selling cloth. But we don’t sense any presence there of Francis.
More interesting is the suggestion of a porta del morto, or “door of the dead,” in the house’s old vaulted brick-and-stone exterior wall. One of Assisi’s intriguing medieval trademarks, the small and elevated porta del morto is thought to have been opened only to transfer dead bodies outside, but it probably also had a more practical use, as a security measure. Most houses in Assisi had two entrances—one on the street level, which opened into the stable or whatever business the family was in, the other, higher, leading into the living quarters and reached by wooden steps that were taken up at night for safety. Quite a few houses in Assisi still have a porta del morto, though the “doors” have long since been either cobbled over or glassed in as windows.
The only hint of Francis we find at the house he presumably lived in for the first twenty years or so of his life with at least one younger brother, Angelo, is the iron-barred carceri or cell displayed inside the Chiesa Nuova at ground level. It was in this “dark cellar,” according to the Legend of the Three Companions, that Pietro locked up his rebellious son for days on end to dissuade him from his spiritual conversion. But I’m getting ahead of the story.
Pietro was away on one of his months-long buying trips to France when Francis was born. Francis’s mother, Lady Pica (whether she really was a noble “Lady” or even French has never been determined), took her son to be christened at either Santa Maria Maggiore, the first cathedral in Assisi, or the “new” cathedral, dedicated to San Rufino, Assisi’s patron saint, which was then under construction.
I would like to think that Francis was baptized in the charming eleventh-century Santa Maria Maggiore, adjacent to the Bishop’s Palace on the equally charming, small, tree-lined Piazza del Vescovado. The old cathedral’s simple stone Romanesque façade, with its one rose window, and the faded frescoes in its barrel-vaulted nave seem much more in keeping with the simplicity of Francis than the cavernous San Rufino, Assisi’s current cathedral, which took another hundred years to complete.
Redone in the sixteenth century, San Rufino’s Gothic interior seems quite cheerless by comparison with the warmth of Santa Maria Maggiore. But whether Francis was baptized there or not, San Rufino would play a major role in the legend of Francis and Clare. A splendid pair of sculpted stone lions guard the doors to the cathedral, and during his conversion, Francis is said to have stood on top of the lions to preach to the incredulous people in the cathedral’s piazza. His makeshift pulpit would have been clearly visible from the house Clare grew up in, and perhaps the adolescent Clare first saw him from a window and was stirred by his message of peace and love—unlike the people who initially jeered at him and thought this son of Assisi had gone mad.
Francis was certainly in San Rufino in later years. He would preach often in the cathedral, and he undoubtedly entered San Rufino, as we do, through a door in its original and splendid twelfth-century stone façade. He may also have walked on the cathedral’s original, uneven stone floor, a portion of which is visible beneath protective glass.
But what tips the scales toward San Rufino as the site of Francis’s baptism
is that just inside the entry, on the right, is the marble baptism font at which Francis was baptized, as was Clare eleven years later. Lady Pica had her son baptized Giovanni or John, after John the Baptist, but the name was short-lived. Pietro evidently did not want his son named after a desert saint, and when he returned from France, he changed his son’s name to the more businesslike Francesco or Francis, which means “the Frenchman.”
Francis, by all accounts, was a wild and spoiled youth who cut quite a figure in Assisi. An indulged member of the nouveau riche, Francis always had a purse full of money, which he lavished on food and drink with his friends, and on stylish clothes for himself. According to the Legend of the Three Companions, “He would use only the finest materials and sometimes his vanity took an eccentric turn, and then he would insist on the richest cloth and the commonest being sewn together in the same garment.”
Needless to say, there are no marked sites in Assisi that record the ne’er-do-well youth of Francis, save for the streets themselves, which he prowled late into the night with his friends, singing and carrying on and undoubtedly wenching in the spirit of the times. He wasn’t just part of the pack; he led it. “He was the admiration of all and strove to outdo the rest in the pomp of vainglory, in jokes, in strange doings, in idle and useless talk, in song, in soft and flowing garments,” writes Thomas of Celano. Francis agreed. In his Testament, written in the Bishop’s Palace in Assisi shortly before he died, he refers to the first twenty-five years of his life as a time “while I was in sin.”
Francis received his rudimentary schooling in reading and writing Latin at the church of San Giorgio, over which the Basilica of St. Clare was constructed, just a few streets from his family home. Little remains of the old church except, perhaps, the back wall of the basilica’s glassed-in Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament.
Francis was definitely not a Latin scholar. There are missteps in the two surviving letters in his own hand, which evidently made him sympathetic to the errors made by the better-educated friars who took his dictation. “And what is no less to be admired,” writes Celano, “when he had caused some letters of greeting or admonition to be written, he would not allow even a single letter or syllable to be deleted, even though they had often been placed there superfluously or in error.”
He did, however, speak fluent French, then the universal language of commerce. He also sang in French, and well. All his early biographers praise his voice—“strong, sweet, clear, and sonorous,” says Celano. There were limitless songs, both bawdy and chivalric, for him to choose from. It was the time of the French troubadours, who traveled all over Italy, entertaining the nobility (the majores) in their castles and the common folk (the minores) at tournaments and religious festivals, of which there were no fewer than 150 a year in Assisi. The troubadours sang the stories of brave knights and heroic deeds, passing on the legends of Charlemagne and Roland and the legendary court of King Arthur; his bravest knight, Lancelot; and Lancelot’s forbidden love, King Arthur’s wife, Guinevere. A whole class of Italian jongleurs emerged to interpret the French into an argot of Franco-Italian, and everyone on the streets, including Francis, learned the stories of heroism, sacrifice, and courtly love.
Standing in the Piazza del Comune, it is easy to imagine the troubadours and jongleurs captivating the medieval crowds, who had no other source of entertainment. In the busy but peaceful piazza, it is harder to imagine the violence and bloodshed that marked twelfth-century Assisi.
Francis grew up in a time of civil foment and bloody confrontations between feuding families, rival hill towns, peasants and nobles, and most particularly, Church and State. The State was not the Italy we know but the Holy Roman Empire, which kept a tight grip on most of the region, including the prosperous but increasingly rebellious Assisi. Assisi had been captured by the emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1160, twenty years before Francis was born, and its people had chafed under the imperial yoke ever since. Assisians wanted their independence and had risen up against the imperial forces in 1174 but had been defeated. It was only a matter of time before the people would try again.
Looming above the piazza at the top of the hill town is the Rocca Maggiore, the restored twelfth-century military fortress from which the German forces of the emperor, supported by most of Assisi’s nobility, kept one eye on Assisi, the other on the road from Assisi’s always threatening archrival, the Papal town of Perugia, fifteen miles to the west. All the while the frustration and fury of Assisi’s middle-class citizens continued to fester, directed not only at the emperor’s forces in the Rocca but at Assisi’s feudal lords, who levied taxes and tariffs on the merchants like Pietro Bernadone while giving the growing burgher class few political rights.
Francis was seventeen when the people rose again in 1198, and though there is no record of his having taken part in the ransacking of the garrison, few of his biographers doubt that he and his friends were eager participants. It was a bloody moment in Assisi’s history. The townspeople slaughtered the imperial forces, tore down the fortress stone by stone, then turned their wrath on the nobility. Some feudals threw in their lot with the newly formed independent commune of Assisi, but others did not.
In the ensuing class warfare, which lasted for two years, many of the nobility were massacred and their estates sacked. The more prudent feudals fled to nearby Perugia; they included the noble Offreduccio family with their six-year-old daughter, Clare, who left just before their house next to the Cathedral of San Rufino was razed. The canny Bernadone bought up as much of the nobles’ deserted land as he could, presumably at bargain prices.
We leave the main piazza to clamber up to La Rocca after fortifying ourselves with cappuccino at a sunny outdoor trattoria. Standing on the fourteenth-century reconstruction of the fortress, we can see what a brilliant vantage point it had been for the imperial forces—every building and church in Assisi is clearly visible. So is the road to Perugia and, in the distance, the nobility’s temporary sanctuary itself. Also visible are the surviving crenellated gates or pòrte through the twelfth-century city walls that the victorious Assisians quickly built after the siege of La Rocca with the stones from the dismantled fortress. All of Francis’s biographers agree that he must have learned the art of stonemasonry by helping to construct those walls, a skill he would rely on during his conversion.
We retrace our steps to join the swarms of tourists and pilgrims milling about the fountain in the sun-warmed piazza in front of the Basilica of St. Clare. It is late on a mid-October afternoon, and the smell of roasting chestnuts gives a pungent flavor to the crystal-clear air. A newspaper kiosk is doing brisk business in multinational journals and magazines on one edge of the piazza, while on another, a brightly painted van pumps out the Toreadors’ Theme from Carmen. Drawn by the music, children cluster around the van to covet an eclectic offering of toys laid out on the ground—a rooster with a peacock tail, an old Barbie wearing an Italian flag as a miniskirt, a replica of the milk-heavy wolf who nursed Romulus and Remus.
It is a beautiful afternoon. The sun turns Assisi’s stone and stucco houses, with their enviable balconies and roof gardens, into impossibly warm shades of tan and ocher—“a beige tweed city,” I write in my notes. In contrast, the view beyond the city walls and across the Spoleto Valley is a mélange of color—the rich green of fall crops, the dark brown corduroy of tilled fields, the pink and purple hills on the far side of the valley as a backdrop. Just an arm’s length away, over the piazza’s marble-columned balustrade, groves of ancient olive trees begin their steep, stepped descent toward the valley, and white butterflies flit among the ripening fruit.
Francis could easily have stood on that very spot eight hundred years ago, looking out over that same valley. Assisi was much smaller in his day, and San Giorgio lay outside the city walls, but the elevation would have been the same. Francis would have seen many more trees back then; the valley floor was thick with oak forests and wetland marshes, which have since been drained. But on a day as clear as ours, he m
ight have seen Perugia—with no realization as a schoolboy of what was to come.
Three years after the citizens of Assisi waged their war of independence against feudalism and the empire—and risked excommunication by Pope Innocent III for not turning the city over to Papal protection—Perugia declared war on Assisi. The displaced nobles of Assisi who had fled to Perugia wanted not only vengeance but compensation for their losses, which the commune of Assisi refused to honor. The furious nobles persuaded Perugia, a longtime rival of Assisi, to teach the hill town’s upstarts a lesson. So Francis, then twenty-one, and his friends prepared for the glorious victory they would inflict on Perugia, their heads filled no doubt with the glories of heroism and bravery in battle that had been sung to them by the troubadours and the jongleurs.
What a sight it must have been when the church bells in Assisi sounded the call to arms in November 1202 and the commune’s citizens mustered in front of San Rufino to march against Perugia. One of Francis’s modern biographers, Julien Green, imagines the scene. The cathedral’s piazza was ablaze with the flags of each quarter of the town that would lead the column to war. Behind them would come the infantry, armed with swords, pikes, and crossbows; then the men on horseback encircling a wagon drawn by white oxen, draped in Assisi’s flag and bearing a traveling altar complete with a crucifix, lighted candles, and priests saying mass.
Francis, though not an aristocrat, rode through the city gates with the noble knights because his family was rich enough to own a horse. He no doubt was wearing some sort of splendid battle dress, underscoring his early biographers’ observation that he often dressed better than his social position “warranted.” The fanfare of trumpets that sent Assisi’s army on its way must have been thrilling to young Francis, who thought his heraldic battlefield fantasies were about to fulfilled. They weren’t.
On the Road with Francis of Assisi Page 2