On the Road with Francis of Assisi

by Linda Bird Francke

  After a last, nostalgic cappuccino at the Caffè Meletti, we leave Ascoli via the Roman bridge over the River Tronto. Francis performed a miracle here, saving a man who had fallen into the river, but our crossing is uneventful. We are bound, via the elegant palace city of Urbino (through which Francis may or may not have passed), to the most important—and well documented—town Francis visited in the Marches: San Leo.

  To see San Leo is to blink and think your eyes are deceiving you. It does not seem possible that a town could exist on top of a rock spur that rises over nineteen hundred feet—the equivalent of a twenty-three-story building—straight, and I mean straight, up from the surrounding plain. That Dante modeled his version of Purgatory on the terrain of San Leo seems completely apt. And here we are, at its formidable base, with road signs directing us to San Leo’s skyscraping center as if it were just some ordinary destination. As we begin corkscrewing toward the summit on the road cut into the rock, I fight feelings of vertigo I never knew I had, and wish I had brought a parachute.

  Francis was not intimidated but excited when he and Brother Leo reached the foot of San Leo in the spring of 1213. High above them, they were told by villagers, there was a celebration going on at the castle of Montefeltro to honor the knighting of one of the Montefeltro counts. The feasts and tourneys had drawn nobles from all over the region to San Leo, which Francis saw as a good recruiting opportunity. According to the Little Flowers of St. Francis, he said to Leo, “Let’s go up to that festival for with God’s help we will gather some good spiritual fruit.”

  So up Francis went, as do we. He arrived in San Leo’s small main square, named after Dante, as do we. Our mirror dance continues when we check into the small Hotel Castello over a restaurant on the main square to discover that our windows overlook the elm tree and stone wall in a corner of the square where Francis addressed the assembled nobles. “And in fervor of spirit he climbed onto a low wall and began to preach,” the Little Flowers continues. Speaking, as ever, in the vernacular, Francis so electrified the partying nobles with his sermon of penance and deliverance that they fell silent and listened to him “as though an angel of God were speaking.”

  Among the nobles in the piazza was Count Orlando, a “great and wealthy Count from Tuscany” who was already an admirer of Francis by reputation. The count was so moved after seeing and hearing Francis in person that he took him aside to discuss with him the “salvation of my soul.” Ever the diplomat and mindful that he had crashed the nobles’ party, Francis suggested that the count spend the day with his friends, “since they invited you to the festival,” and meet with him that night, after the feast.

  The building in which they met that night, the Palazzo Nardini, turns out to be directly across the piazza from our hotel. But there is a problem. It is locked, and only the parish priest, Don Sergio, has the key. Romina, the Castello’s nice young owner, phones Don Sergio and makes a date for me to meet him at the legendary palazzo the next morning at 8:15. And thus begins an urgent search for an English-speaking interpreter.

  Romina apologizes that she can’t do it; breakfast is a busy time at the Castello for locals going to work. Perhaps Francesca, across the square at the tobacco shop, can translate for me. Francesca is enthusiastic about the idea and anxious to practice her English—she is taking English lessons—but the tobacco shop is also very busy in the early morning and her ailing father cannot cover for her. Perhaps her English teacher can help. She’ll give him a ring. If that fails, the plan is for me to see the inside of the Palazzo Nardini with the padre, then adjourn with him to the tobacco shop so Francesca can translate any questions I might have.

  I already know the story of the all-important meeting between Francis and Count Orlando from Francis’s medieval biographers, but I do not want to miss a word or detail about where the meeting actually took place. This transaction would change not only Francis’s life but religious history.

  “Brother Francis,” the Little Flowers quotes the count, “I have a mountain in Tuscany which is very solitary and wild and perfectly suited for someone who wants to do penance in a place far from people or who wants to live a solitary life.” The mountain, which the count told Francis he would give him in return for the salvation of his soul, was—and is—named La Verna; there, eleven years later, Francis would become the first person on record to receive the stigmata.

  Francis, who was always looking for remote spots to lose himself in contemplation, praised God for this unexpected turn of events and thanked the count, saying that after the San Leo celebrations ended, he would send two of his friars to the count’s home in Chiusi, just a mile or so from the promised mountain, to see if it was suitable for “prayer and penance.”

  According to the Little Flowers, the dispatched friars got lost but finally arrived at Orlando’s castle to be greeted “as though they were angels of God.” To make sure nothing untoward befell the friars on their exploration of La Verna, the count sent fifty armed men with them. The friars evidently found La Verna suitable and, locating the perfect plateau on the side of the mountain, set to building a little hut out of branches with the help of their escorts and their swords.

  And so the Franciscan stewardship of La Verna began, attested to in a remarkable document from Count Orlando’s brothers and sons after the count died. The document, dated July 9, 1274, makes legal, forever, the oral gift the count had made to Francis on May 8, 1213, in San Leo. The deed also promises the return to the friars of a tablecloth that Francis, Count Orlando, and his children ate meals off, a wooden wine cup and bread bowl used by Francis, as well as Count Orlando’s leather belt, which Francis blessed and used to “girt” the count when he received his habit, presumably that of the Third Order. And all this began right across the piazza from our hotel.

  While we await word about the interpreter, we tour tiny San Leo, taking in the ninth-century parish church of Santa Maria Assunta, with its Roman pillars and assorted Byzantine capitals recycled from a pagan temple to Jupiter. It is Sunday, and a steady stream of Italian families file through the church, lighting candles until there are none left. A group of visiting choristers suddenly breaks into song, and Nobis Domini Gloria fills the air.

  Francis was most certainly in this wonderfully simple, rough stone church, lit only by three small windows, and was probably at the nearby twelfth-century cathedral, which is now covered with scaffolding and closed to visitors. He would not have been at San Leo’s main attraction, however, the massive fifteenth-century fortress even farther up the rock spur, which was commissioned by the duke of Urbino and later used as a national jail.

  The fortress’s most famous prisoner was the eighteenth-century intellectual, alchemist, and Mason the count of Cagliostro, who was convicted of heresy in Rome and sentenced to life imprisonment in the fortress. He survived for four years in a solitary cell into which his food was lowered through a trapdoor in the ceiling so that his jailers would not have eye contact with him and succumb to his charisma. As further punishment for his embrace of science during the absolutist and hideous Inquisition, his only window, with a triple iron grid, looked out on the churches of San Leo. The Inquisition theme continues back in San Leo’s museum. Every conceivable medieval torture device—spiked tables, spiked neck collars, spiked chairs, spiked castration belts, along with graphic illustrations of how they were used—is displayed.

  I am more interested in the elm tree under which Francis preached in 1213. The tree collapsed of old age in 1637, a date ingrained in the minds of San Leo’s many amateur historians; its remains were taken to the Franciscan convent of Sant’Igne farther down the rock, where it has gradually disappeared, bits picked away by pilgrims as relics. The current tree was planted in 1937—with great ceremony; it was carried up the rock in a carriage, accompanied by young people in medieval dress and Franciscan friars singing Gregorian chants; the scene is reenacted every year in May. So dear is the tree to San Leo that it appears on the town’s coat of arms, making San Leo the only town i
n Italy, the historians assure me, to honor the memory of Francis officially.

  I am at the ready for my tour of the Palazzo Nardini at 8:15 the next morning. A thick fog—which I realize later is a cloud—has enveloped San Leo, and I hear Don Sergio arriving in his car before I see him. Don Sergio is in such a hurry that he leaves his car engine running and his headlights on. We hurtle into the palazzo and up the stairs to the second floor into what is known as the Oratorio di San Francesco, but there is little here to commemorate Francis’s meeting with Count Orlando. A modern painting of St. Francis with some angels at La Verna hangs on the wall. There’s a marble altar, which could use a dusting, and what looks to be office furniture scattered about. And we’re back out the door.

  The English teacher, Ugo Gorrieri, has arrived at the tobacco shop next door, but Don Sergio has driven off into the fog, and there is nothing for my interpreter to translate. He is not surprised by my disappointment. When Countess Nardini lived in the family palazzo, Ugo explains, the room, which the family had previously used as a bedroom, was converted into a chapel. A piece of the original tree was displayed there, the chapel was furnished with medieval furniture, including a simple wooden altar, and catechism classes were held there. The chapel was a source of great pride to San Leo. It was opened every day, by one of Countess Nardini’s servants, for anyone to visit. But the room was essentially abandoned after the countess died twenty years ago. She left the house and its chapel to the local parish, and … Ugo raises his eyebrows and shrugs.

  The parish priest also controls entry to the convent of Sant’Igne, which Francis established on another trip to San Leo, when he was lost in the dark. Igne translates to “fire” and describes the miraculous light that suddenly appeared around the lost Francis, illuminating the road he was looking for. Francis promptly founded a hermitage there, which he named Sacred Fire. It grew into a sizable monastic complex over the centuries and is said to be very beautiful, but Don Sergio is nowhere to be found, and and the caretaker, Romina’s cousin Angelo, says he can’t open the convent without the priest’s permission. We are reduced to groping our way to Sant’Igne through the dense fog on the way down the rock pinnacle, but we can barely see the road, let alone the convent.

  I am relieved to emerge into sunlight halfway down the pinnacle. San Leo and all its wonders are completely invisible as I look up, and I wonder, briefly, if the magical place ever existed. It occurs to me as we drive toward Rimini on the coast, the same route Francis took in reverse to San Leo, that he, too, might have been enveloped in a similar cloud, and that it was the cloud, not the darkness, that the “Sacred Fire” had penetrated.

  Our tour of the Marches with Francis ends, regrettably, in San Leo. (I’ve spared you the many lesser documented and beautiful places that local legends hold he also visited, including the breathtaking hermitage of Soffiano, at the end of a forested gorge.) Francis went on from the Marches to preach in other provinces, of course, saving more souls over the next few years and winning more friars. Many more. No fewer than five thousand Franciscan friars, an astonishing number, would gather at the Porziuncola in the spring of 1219 for a general chapter of the order.

  However gratified Francis must have felt that so many had answered his call, he did not feel his missionary work was done. His friars were already fanning out around Christian Europe to try to set up foreign missions, and the first tentative forays were being launched to Morocco.

  But Francis had a larger vision of converting the Saracens. He had twice failed to reach the land of the Muslims. This time, he made it.

  16

  Finding Francis Along the Nile

  EGYPT: DAMIETTA, where Francis preaches in the Crusader camp and foretells a disastrous battle · FARISKUR, where he meets and befriends the sultan · ACRE, where he receives devastating news from Assisi

  The view is hypnotic. One balcony off our hotel room overlooks the Nile and its peaceful fleet of bright blue fishing boats. The other balcony looks north over the Mediterranean and the lighthouse that guides the fishing boats to safe harbor. We are in Ras el-Bahr, a gated Egyptian resort near Damietta in the eastern Nile delta. It was very near here, in 1219, that Francis arrived by sea at the decidedly nonpeaceful mouth of the Nile to join the encamped Christian troops during the Fifth Crusade.

  Francis had come to Egypt as a man of peace. His goal was wildly ambitious: to end the blood spilled on the sand, marshes, and mountain passes of the Holy Land by converting none other than the sultan of Egypt, Malik al-Kamil, to Christianity. The sultan’s troops were presently defending the fortress city of Damietta from the Crusaders, or “Franj” as the Arabs called all Europeans. If Francis failed in his missionary mission, he might very well succeed, at least, in becoming a martyr.

  We might have become involuntary martyrs ourselves on the chaotic road to Damietta from Cairo—one report notes that more foreigners die in traffic accidents in Egypt than in any other country—had we not once again been blessed with good fortune. A friend in New York has put us in touch with a former Egyptian ambassador to the United States, Dr. Abdel Raouf el-Reedy, who lives in Cairo. The ambassador, it turns out, was born in Damietta and graciously arranges a visit to his family still living there to coincide with our research on Francis in Egypt. We make the three-and-a-half-hour trip to Damietta in a rented minivan with the ambassador, his sister, and a driver, Mahmoud, giving silent thanks all the way that we had not rented our own car and attempted to follow the road signs, almost every one of which is in Arabic, through the slalom course of cars, trucks, and buses to the nontouristy, industrial port city.

  Our good fortune continues when we arrive at Ras el-Bahr, a tiny spit of land jutting out from Damietta into the Mediterranean, to discover that the hotel the ambassador has booked us all into, the Beau Rivage, is at the epicenter of Francis in Egypt. The ambassador is unaware of the fine points surrounding the Fifth Crusade and had chosen the hotel simply because it is owned by English-speaking Egyptian friends.

  These friends, Anwar Hamdoun, a Ph.D. who taught Arab Islamic culture and civilization at San Diego State for five years, and his wife, Susu, who holds a Ph.D. in education from Temple University and has applied it by designing graduate-degree programs in Saudi Arabia, are also unaware of the fine points of the Fifth Crusade. The Crusades are not a popular subject in Egypt, and neither one of these charming academicians turned hoteliers realizes that the location of their hotel is nothing short of miraculous for our research.

  The Crusaders, some sixty thousand strong, were camped on the west bank of the Nile, near the convergence of the river and the sea. That happens to be our exact location on modern Ras el-Bahr. It is entirely possible that our balcony view of the resort’s palm-shaded esplanade along the river and behind the hotel, Ras el-Bahr’s neat grid of summer homes, would have been of the thousands of tents and pavilions that sprawled through the dusty Crusader camp.

  The medieval camp teemed with people, unlike the very few we see in the off-season Ras el-Bahr, some of them additional security the hotel has laid on because we are American. Even in the summer, few foreigners these days visit this resort for middle-class Cairenes, a reality that stands in sharp contrast to the multilingual, multinational thousands encamped here eight centuries ago.

  Many of the English, French, Spanish, Germans, and Italians were military men—knights, archers, foot soldiers, Levantine mercenaries—but as many as twenty thousand more were civilian camp followers, including pilgrims, servants, merchants, cooks, some of the knights’ families, and several shiploads of French prostitutes. Many among the military men were indeed carrying the banner of Christ, but a sizable number were atheists or profiteers looking to scavenge the riches of Egypt.

  This motley crew for the Fifth Crusade, scheduled to begin in 1217, had been assembled by Pope Innocent III, the same Pope who had approved Francis’s Rule. Still smarting from the failure of his Fourth Crusade thirteen years earlier, which had ended with the sacking of Constantinople, Innocent ha
d advanced this crusade with the skills and verve of a top public relations man.

  In written word and traveling sermons, the Pope demonized the seventh-century prophet Muhammad, the founder of the Islamic faith, as a “pseudo-prophet,” the “son of perdition,” and “the beast.” He charged the Saracens, Muhammad’s religious heirs who had wrested Jerusalem from the Christians in 1187, with defaming the Christian holy places and holding Christian captives, including women, in “dire imprisonment” and “most severe slavery.” And he issued his trump cards: the promise of eternal salvation not only to anyone joining this particular army for Christ but also to those who paid for “suitable” men to go in their stead.

  The Pope’s definition of “suitable” turned out to apply to virtually anyone who agreed to join the Crusade. Because of the urgency to recruit as many people as quickly as possible, “Innocent no longer insisted on an examination of the personal fitness of the candidates,” writes one Franciscan scholar. The Pope even went so far as to revoke the indulgences formerly granted to those who chose to go to Spain to fight the Moors or to Provence to fight the heretics, thereby increasing the recruitment pool—and the incentive—for participation in the Fifth Crusade.

  Francis surely heard the Pope’s call himself. It is widely believed that Francis attended the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 in Rome, where Innocent III made it incumbent upon every Christian in Europe to rid the Holy Land of its demon Muslims. Though Francis may have been somewhat distracted in Rome—it was at the Fourth Lateran Council that he first befriended his hostess, “Brother” Jacopa, and it is thought he also met the Spanish preacher Domingo de Guzmán, later St. Dominic, who would found the Dominican Order of Preachers—he could not have missed hearing Innocent’s call for a holy war. And the call continued from Pope Honorius III after Innocent died suddenly the next year in Perugia while trying to persuade the eternally warring factions there to direct their weapons at the Saracens and not at each other. Only Francis, it seems, sought a peaceful resolution.