On the Road with Francis of Assisi

by Linda Bird Francke

  Francis arrived on the shores of the Adriatic in June 1219, probably at the port of Ancona, with a substantial number of friars who were eager to go with him to convert the Saracens. The captain of the ship who consented to take them to Egypt drew the line at such a crowd, however. He would take twelve friars, no more. Francis could not bring himself to choose which friars would go and which would be left behind—so he turned to a small boy who happened to be there and asked him to pick the eleven friars who would accompany him to Egypt by pointing. The boy’s selection process is recreated in the Marche town of Ósimo by a huge fresco in the church formerly dedicated to St. Francis and since rededicated to St. Joseph of Cupertino, with Ancona’s domed duomo clearly visible in the background. So that’s a vote for Ancona as the departure point, but then again, every region—and every port—in Italy competes for Francis.

  The six-week voyage that followed was marked by storms, hunger and thirst, disease, and even death. Francis’s shipmates included mercenaries and priests, criminals and impoverished men hoping to find salvation by answering the Pope’s call. There is talk of mayhem and even murder onboard. But this time, on his third try, Francis achieved the land of the Saracens.

  It is also not clear whether the ship landed first at Acre, the Christian stronghold on the coast of Palestine where huge medieval Crusader halls have recently been unearthed. There was already a Franciscan contingent in Acre, headed by the controversial Brother Elias, who held the imposing title Guardian of Syria. But Francis would not have lingered in seductive Acre, which Julien Green describes in God’s Fool as “Granada as we know it today, in all the splendor of its Moorish beauty.” Acre, now the northern Israeli town of Akko, sported fountains and hanging gardens, cypress-lined paths, and cool, tile-floored houses, all of which Elias relished but which would have offended the austere Francis. His goal was to meet the sultan at the heart of the Christian-Muslim conflict in Damietta, two hundred miles to the southwest.

  By the time Francis arrived in the Christian camp in the late summer of 1219, the Crusaders and their hangers-on had been here for more than a year. Francis was evidently appalled at the dissolute nature of the camp, especially among the knights he had idealized all his life. There was so much savagery, drinking, and whoring going on that at first he put his idea of converting the sultan on hold and instead concentrated on saving the souls of the Christians who had gone astray. He was evidently quite successful, so successful with virtually everyone he talked to that the bishop of Acre complained he was losing his staff members to the Franciscan Order. But Francis’s chief conversion goal remained the sultan, whose forces were defending the nearby fortress town of Damietta on the eastern bank of the Nile, with its Muslim population of eighty thousand.

  The seemingly impregnable city, with its double and triple walls, high ramparts, and one hundred red ocher towers, was surrounded by natural defenses—the Nile on one side and on the other Lake Manzaleh, a marshy body of water that, in more peaceful times, was—and still is—a lively refuge for migrating herons, storks, pelicans, and flamingos. Damietta, a rich trading center, sat two miles upriver from the sea, and to protect it from attack from the Nile, the Egyptians had ingeniously blocked river access by installing a huge iron chain that stretched from the city’s ramparts to a citadel on an island near the opposite bank of the river.

  That citadel, we are told by historians, was clearly visible from Ras el-Bahr, which means, unbelievably, that the view from our hotel balcony encompasses the area where the great chain blocked the river. To further strengthen Damietta’s defenses, the Egyptians had blocked the mouth of the river during an earlier crusade with huge stones plucked from the Pyramid of Zosa, the oldest step pyramid in the world. The then sultan had considered taking even bigger stones from the great pyramids at Giza but settled for the smaller Zosa at Sakkara, whose stones are still submerged in the Nile. That explains why the fishing boats we see going out every day have to leave and reenter the Nile through a very narrow channel.

  Damietta’s seeming impregnability had turned back one Crusader assault after another until the Christians came up with an ingenious plan of attack: They lashed two ships together and constructed a tower of sorts the same height as the well-manned citadel. In August 1218, a year before Francis’s arrival, the Crusaders floated their tower upriver, successfully stormed the citadel with scaling ladders, and cut the chain. With that stroke, they had not only made Damietta more vulnerable but opened the Nile all the way to Cairo. But al-Kamil’s army continued to defend Damietta successfully.

  The suffering and devastation that greeted Francis in the Christian camp convinced him the only road to peace lay in his mission to convert the sultan. The Crusaders and the Muslim troops had engaged in innumerable but inconclusive skirmishes, with heavy losses on both sides. Floods had drowned many of the Crusaders’ horses and ruined their store of food; dysentery and disease had ravaged Christian and Muslim alike, the high fevers leaving them with blackened skin, and an outbreak of scurvy had killed as many as ten thousand Christians. Still, the bloody attacks and counterattacks continued into the summer of 1219.

  Francis did what he could, caring for the sick and injured, comforting the dying, and praying for their souls. His own health, already fragile, deteriorated further. The hot and squalid camp was thick with flies, which spread disease from one to the next, and Francis was not spared. He developed an eye infection, thought to be trachoma, which led to chronic watering of his eyes, painful sensitivity to light, and clouding of his vision. He became jaundiced and, for the rest of his life, is thought to have suffered from hepatitis.

  He was also pained by the dangerous schism that had developed in the camp between the military commanders and the Pope’s representative, Cardinal Pelagius. The arrogant and stubborn Spanish cardinal, who dressed himself—and his horse—in scarlet, was constantly challenging the military strategy of King John of Jerusalem, who was recognized by everyone except Pelagius as the senior military officer in charge.

  On August 29, 1219, their wrangling led to a disaster, which Francis had seen coming. The troops in the camp, who wanted nothing more than to go home, were on the verge of mutiny. Pelagius, thinking military action would lift morale, ordered the reluctant King John to send the troops to attack al-Kamil’s camp, some three miles away at Fariskur.

  Francis spent the night before the siege in prayer and in the morning, as recorded by Celano, faced a dilemma. “The Lord has showed me that if the battle takes place … it will not go well with the Christians,” he told Brother Illuminato. “But if I tell them this I will be considered a fool: if I am silent, I will not escape my conscience. What therefore seems best to you?” Illuminato advised him to follow his conscience and “to fear God rather than men,” but predictably, when Francis relayed his prophecy to the Christians and presumably to Pelagius himself, his warnings fell on deaf ears. Instead, and just as predictably, the Christians ridiculed Francis and branded him a coward.

  But Francis was right, and the siege turned into a complete rout for the Christians. Al-Kamil had cleverly concealed his horsemen in palm groves around his camp and waited to unleash them until the Crusaders, having met little resistance, entered Fariskur. Meanwhile Francis, who was anxiously waiting back at the Crusader camp, kept sending Illuminato out to see what he could see of the battle, but there was nothing until his third foray. “And behold, the whole Christian army was turned to flight and the battle ended in shame, not triumph,” writes Celano.

  It also almost ended with the death of Francis. The majority of the Crusader forces had panicked and fled from the surprise onslaught of the Muslim forces, many to be run down and hacked to death. Only the Spanish knights held their ground and tried to stem al-Kamil’s counterattack, but most were slaughtered. The Muslim troops came very close to overrunning the Christian camp and killing all who were in it. Only the last-minute stand by the seventy-year-old King John with his small contingent of knights managed to turn back the Muslims and sav
e the camp.

  Francis’s prophecy that the battle would not go “well” for the Christians turned out to be a stunning understatement: Six thousand Crusaders were either killed or captured in the carnage. Francis mourned “especially over the Spaniards when he saw that their greater impetuosity in the battle had left but a few remaining,” writes Celano. The Muslims compounded their victory by beheading fifty knights from each of the military orders and displaying the heads on wooden stakes along the way to Fariskur, leading the British biographer Adrian House to wonder wryly whether Pelagius realized the date of his impetuous battle orders coincided with the beheading of John the Baptist centuries earlier.

  The extraordinary loss of life moved Francis to act on his conviction that the only way to end this bloody clash between faiths was for him to go see the sultan. Francis was convinced that once he showed al-Kamil the light, the Muslim sultan would embrace the teachings of Jesus Christ, his soul would be saved, and the hostilities would cease. (Francis had held the same conviction the year before in his failed attempt to reach Morocco to convert the miramamolin, as the commander of the believers or sultan there was known.) This time, soon after the massacre and with Pelagius’s grudging approval, Francis set out with Illuminato for the sultan’s camp.

  We are sitting in the office of the governor of Damietta, Dr. Abdel Azir, who is a friend of Ambassador el-Reedy. The governor is not familiar with the details of the Fifth Crusade and has never heard of Francis of Assisi. It is the Seventh Crusade or Franj War that he and everyone else in Damietta is familiar with, the Crusade that ended in an overwhelming Muslim victory in 1250. Once again the Crusaders had besieged Damietta, leading the then sultan to raze the fortress city at the end of the thirteenth century and move it four miles inland to a new, less vulnerable position, where we’re presently sitting, sipping coffee.

  The defeat of the Seventh Crusade is a source of great pride to the people in the province of Damietta. The Muslims not only took prisoner King Louis IX of France but slaughtered many of his army of ten thousand. The Muslim victory is commemorated in a museum in the nearby city of El-Mansura, where the house in which King Louis was imprisoned along with two of his brothers has been proudly restored and all the paintings show either Crusaders bleeding to death or King Louis in chains. Sitting in the governor’s office, I notice an elaborately carved wood bas-relief depicting the king of France on his knees in front of scimitar-wielding Muslim warriors, which is a little nervous-making, but the governor is charming. And, it turns out, very helpful.

  He has assembled a group of local experts in an adjoining conference room to tell us what they know about the Fifth Crusade. Seated around the table are two men from the Department of Egyptian Antiquities, a local author and Crusade historian named Mahmoud Al Zalaky, and a Coptic priest, Bishoy Abdel Masih. (The Egyptian Coptic Church, founded by St. Mark around A.D. 61, is a still-flourishing Christian Orthodox religion with its own Pope.) There are also local newspaper reporters and photographers to record the meeting as well as a television crew.

  Bishoy Abdel Masih offers a disquieting fact. During the Fifth Crusade, he says, the Roman Catholic Crusaders killed twenty thousand Egyptian Orthodox Coptic Christians on the western bank of the Nile because they were scared they would join the Muslims. He has much more positive feelings toward the Franciscans, however, who were allowed by the sultan to establish a convent in Damietta in 1250, the same year as the bloody end to the Seventh Crusade. It is now a Christian school run by a French nun for twelve hundred girls and boys. Would we like to see it? We would, and we feel heartened during our visit to see a bust of Francis in the school’s church.

  And would we like to go to Fariskur? Mahmoud Al Zalaky, the local historian, says he thinks he has identified the site of al-Kamil’s camp to which Francis went. And so, after more coffee, gift exchanges, and many press photographs, we set out in a convoy of cars with the ambassador, the historian, the bishop, and a detail of armed guards to stop briefly at the Christian school and, from there, to pick up the trail of Francis.

  Francis’s journey along the three miles to Fariskur was far more dangerous than ours. The Saracen and Christian camps were so close to each other, St. Bonaventure reports, that “there was no way of passing from one to the other without danger of death.” The peril was heightened, he continues, by the sultan’s “cruel edict” that whoever brought back “the head of a Christian would receive as a reward a gold piece.” To buoy their spirits as they trod the perilous path, Francis and Brother Illuminato recited the twenty-third psalm, which in the medieval texts translates, “Even if I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I shall not fear evil because you are with me.”

  The August heat must have been insufferable and the intense light painful to Francis’s eyes, but on they trudged, these two men dressed in brown rags. Until al-Kamil’s sentries pounced on them “like wolves,” and beat them and insulted them and tied them up with chains. Why they weren’t killed is a mystery. “Sultan, Sultan,” Francis and Illuminato kept saying, which may have saved their lives. Al-Kamil was continually sending peace feelers to the Crusader camp, and the sentries might have thought that the two were bringing him back an answer.

  The Fariskur to which the sentries brought Francis and Illuminato in chains was very different from the sprawling town to which the local historian takes us. What Francis saw was a sea of earth-colored tents in al-Kamil’s almost one-mile-square camp. What we see is a shrine thought to be the location of al-Kamil’s tent in the peaceful center of the busy town, dominated by a huge mosque with a green and white tiled dome. We are greeted by a crowd of curious schoolchildren who keep repeating “good morning,” presumably their one phrase in English. Francis and Illuminato were greeted by the sultan’s soldiers, today represented by the graceful equestrian statues of Muslim warriors flanking the town’s entrance.

  It is hard to imagine the actual meeting between Francis and the sultan. What preconceived notions did Francis have of the Muslim ruler? Did he consider him a barbarian? A “beast”? An ignorant Arab? And what did the sultan make of the small, tattered man brought before him? Was he a beggar? A spy? A deserter? The unlikely-looking emissary of peace he was hoping for from the Christian camp?

  Francis’s medieval biographers reflect the sultan’s understandable curiosity. “When that ruler inquired by whom, why and how they had been sent and how they got there, Christ’s servant, Francis, answered with an intrepid heart that he had been sent not by man but by the Most High God in order to point out to him and his people the way of salvation and to announce the Gospel of truth,” St. Bonaventure writes.

  The sultan was evidently intrigued by Francis. Hardly a barbarian or an ignorant Arab, al-Kamil was a former medical student and intellectual who delighted in reciting poetry and debating the logic of Aristotle and the origin of the universe. Like most Muslims, he was tolerant of other monotheistic religions and counted Coptic Christians among his closest advisers. Francis, whose persuasive sermons had moved so many, was obviously articulate and intelligent, regardless of his lack of education.

  An empathy quickly developed between the two. Despite the ferocity of his troops, al-Kamil was a man of peace who had been thrust into defending his country from the Christian invaders. He had good relations with the Christian communities long established in Egypt as well as with European traders, and he wanted nothing more than for the Crusaders to pack up and leave. Francis, too, was a man of peace, but he clung to his conviction that converting the sultan was the way to achieve it. His zealous proselytizing nearly cost him his life.

  The sultan sent for a retinue of theologians to hear Francis’s arguments for Christianity. Al-Kamil certainly did not intend to convert—that would have been political suicide—but he had an intellectual interest in his guest’s thesis. The sultan also needed a cover to enter into any sort of dialogue with such an unabashed proselytizer as Francis, proselytizing being forbidden by Islam. During the several days it took for the theo
logians to gather, Francis and Illuminato remained in the camp as the sultan’s guests.

  The meeting with the theologians, recreated by virtually every artist recording Francis’s life, including Giotto, took place under the sultan’s open-air canopy. To test his sincerity, the sultan’s advisers had prepared by laying a carpet leading to the sultan’s throne with gold crosses woven into it. Were Francis to step on the crosses, their reasoning went, he would be exposed as a sham for dishonoring Christ; if, however, he refused to walk over the carpet to greet al-Kamil, he would be dishonoring the sultan. But Francis neatly circumvented the lose-lose situation.

  Entering the canopy and oblivious to the trap, he walked straight across the carpet to greet the sultan. When derided by the assembled theologians, Francis replied that Christians carried Christ’s cross in their hearts, and that the crosses in the carpet he had stepped on were those of the thieves who died that day in Jerusalem with Jesus. Round one for Francis.

  Round two was trickier. After listening to Francis continue to expound on Christianity and repeat his desire to save the sultan’s soul through conversion, the sultan’s advisers pronounced him guilty of proselytizing and urged the sultan to have Francis and Illuminato beheaded. But al-Kamil refused, citing the friars’ good intentions.

  Mercifully, round three never took place. According to different legends, either Francis or the sultan devised an ordeal by fire to test each other’s faith. It is doubtful that this challenge ever existed, but it, too, is recorded by St. Bonaventure and many artists. According to St. Bonaventure, it was Francis who suggested to the sultan that he, Francis, and the sultan’s priests walk into an “enormous fire”; if he came out unharmed, Francis said, and the Muslims did not, then the sultan would know the power of Jesus Christ and convert to Christianity.