On the Road with Francis of Assisi

by Linda Bird Francke

  Francis also had an aversion to his friars’ studying or teaching in universities, because he felt such intellectual pursuits diverted them from prayer and their spiritual relationship with God. Both these aversions converged in Bologna.

  Francis was so incensed that he ordered the center and its library destroyed. The minister either ignored the order or rebuilt the center after Francis left, which leads to a truly horrifying story. According to the Kinship of St. Francis, Francis put a curse on the disobedient minister, who immediately fell ill. Even after two friars came to Francis and asked him to lift the curse, he refused. And the minister was doomed. As he lay on his bed “a fiery drop of sulfur came down from on high on his body, and it bored completely through him and the bed on which he was lying. And with a great stench, he expired.”

  It is difficult to lend any credence to the story of the cursed minister as we stand in Bologna’s massive, palazzo-rimmed Piazza Maggiore, where Brother Bernardo endured such abuse in the name of a kinder, gentler Francis. Far nicer to imagine is the miracle Francis performed here, curing a half-blind boy by making the sign of the cross over him. Nicer still is to imagine the sermon Francis delivered in this piazza, the only sermon for which there is an eyewitness account.

  Paul Sabatier, Francis’s most respected nineteenth-century biographer, sets the date of the Bologna sermon as 1220, which would place it on Francis’s stop here on his way home from Venice. Francis seems to have recovered some of his health: The eyewitness, an archdeacon in Bologna’s cathedral, gives a traditional description of Francis as a “plain man … whose apparel was poor, his person in no respect imposing, his face not at all handsome.” His words and his delivery on the theme of “Angels, people and demons,” however, were anything but plain to “almost every person in the city,” among them many “learned people who were there.”

  Francis did not threaten the assembled crowd with words of thunder and brimstone but spoke “with wisdom and eloquence.” “His ways were those of conversation; the substance of his discourse rested mainly upon the abolition of enmities and the necessity of making peaceful alliances,” the archdeacon reports. Francis’s charisma was obviously still very much intact. Not only did he bring “peace and harmony” to the warring nobles in the crowd, says the archdeacon, but he so inspired the men and women of Bologna that they “flocked after him,” trying to touch “the hem of his garment.”

  Francis is memorialized in Bologna by a massive, thirteenth-century, buttressed church, down the street from the Piazza Maggiore. Described in the Rough Guide as a “huge Gothic brick pile,” it is nonetheless an important cultural and religious center. Friar Antonio Ranzini proudly shows us the church’s three-thousand-book library (which Francis would surely have ordered destroyed) and a bust of Father Martini, a renowned Franciscan organist and composer, who instructed none other than Mozart. The library had recently been the setting for a concert by the Conservatorio Bologna—two hundred people came—and many more are expected to visit the annual mechanized Nativity scene that is being set up in the sacristy.

  Night is falling along with the drizzle as we tour the convent’s gorgeous, hedged-in cloister and admire in one of the cavernous church’s eleven chapels a stunning blue, white, and gold ceramic arca with scenes of Francis receiving approval of his Rule from Pope Innocent III and preaching to the overflow crowd in the Piazza Maggiore. It is dark as we take our leave of Bologna to drive to our suburban hotel. Francis’s stay here in 1220, however dramatic, was short, and so is ours.

  Francis had much on his mind as he pressed on to Orvieto to meet with the Pope. He knew, sadly, what he had to do to keep his movement from disintegrating. The answer had come to him en route in a dream of a little black hen who tried futilely to spread her wings wide enough to protect her many chicks. (We see several representations of this dream in paintings in southern Italy, the hen having been replaced by a giant clergyman sheltering many tiny friars in his black cloak.) His movement now had at least six thousand followers, and to survive it needed the formal, written protection of the Church. What had begun as a spontaneous movement of “companions” was about to become an official order of the Church and subject to canonical law.

  Pope Honorius III agreed in his meeting with Francis and, at Francis’s request, named Ugolino, the bishop of Ostia, as the official protector of what had begun, simply, as the Penitents from Assisi. “The era of sweet evangelical anarchy was over and done with,” writes Julien Green in God’s Fool.

  Francis did win some important concessions from Ugolino and the Pope. Honorius formally approved the secular Franciscan Third Order and informally lifted the “privilege” of property thrust on Clare. Clare won other concessions from Ugolino herself: A few friars were quietly permitted to return to collect alms for the Poor Clares, and the sisters resumed their charitable work in the neighborhoods outside their monasteries.

  But there was no room for Francis and his zealous leadership in the newly official order. Whereas Francis had answered only to Christ, the new order would answer to the Pope. Francis knew he had to abdicate to make room for a new, more efficient leader, preferably a lawyer. The Pope knew it, too. So did Ugolino.

  “From now on, I am dead as far as you are concerned,” Francis announced to the stunned friars gathered in Assisi on September 29, 1220, for their annual meeting. “But I present to you my brother, Peter of Catania, whom we shall all obey, you and me.” And with that, Francis stepped down as leader of the movement he had begun twelve years before with his first two converts.

  He did retain some authority, however. The Pope and Ugolino had given him permission to write the order’s official, new Rule. It was a task that came close to breaking his heart.

  18

  Poor Francis

  ASSISI, where Francis’s Rule is rejected

  Poor Francis. Ill and emaciated, he is sitting slumped at the feet of the minister general at the Pentecost chapter of the order in May 1221. A year has passed since the last chapter, and he is about to present the Rule he has written to the three thousand friars and provincial ministers gathered at the Porziuncola. It has not been a good year. His health is failing, and sadly, his friend Peter of Catania died six months after taking over as head of the order. The order’s new minister general is Brother Elias, and without his permission, Francis cannot even read the Rule he has written to the assembled friars. One of his biographers describes him as having to tug at the bottom of Elias’s habit to get his attention, and permission to speak.

  The Rule that Francis presents reflects the many compromises from his original evangelical vision urged on him by the Pope and Ugolino. He has followed the Pope’s instruction to require a probationary year for would-be friars rather than accepting into his order anyone “desiring by divine inspiration to accept this life.” He has reluctantly agreed to allow the Franciscan clergy to have books but “only the books necessary to fulfill their office”; similarly, lay friars who can read are allowed to “possess a psalter,” or Book of Psalms.

  Further, the friars, when they are not fasting, are allowed to eat “whatever is placed before them,” a departure from Francis’s own abstemious habit of feigning eating while secreting the food in his lap. And the friars are to be allowed two tunics, one with a hood, unlike the original companions, whom Celano describes as being “content with one tunic, patched at times within and without.”

  Even so, many of the newer friars grumble that Francis’s standards are out of touch with reality. Some friars embarking on preaching tours want to travel by horseback instead of on foot, and to take adequate provisions with them. Yet Francis has reinstated the Gospel instruction to his friars to “carry nothing with you on your journey, neither a knapsack, nor a purse, nor bread, nor money nor a staff,” and not to “ride horses unless they are compelled by sickness or great necessity.”

  He has also continued to forbid the ownership of property—“The brothers should beware that … they do not make any place their own”—
although that admonition has already been flouted. Houses are being acquired left and right by the order’s ministers, and some friars, as Francis found in Bologna, are living much too comfortably. It has also become chic among some members of the Church hierarchy to have in their households resident friars, who presumably sleep in beds and share their meals. With all these temptations, fewer friars, except for his original companions and many in the Marches, are content to be pilgrims or live in the humble huts Francis had decreed should be made of mud and wood.

  And so, the friars shelve Francis’s Rule and instruct him to rewrite it. The presenting reasons are that the scripture-laced Rule is too long and too vague. But the underlying and long-festering sentiment is that it is too hard, much too hard. Poor, poor Francis. “In his whole life we scarcely find a sadder or more poignant moment,” writes Julien Green in God’s Fool. “Francis believed with all his heart that he had received this rule from God. Men judged otherwise.”

  19

  Following Francis to Italy’s Boot

  APULIA: BARI, where Francis turns money into a snake · BRINDISI, where he may have sailed to Egypt · LECCE, where he performs the miracle of the loaves · GAETA, where the stampede of admirers forces Francis to preach from a boat

  The light is different in Apulia, the province in the heel of southern Italy’s boot. Compared with the crisp light in the high hill towns of Umbria and Tuscany, Apulia’s light is soft and seems to bear within it its own shade. The diffusion comes from the salt in the air from the Adriatic Sea on Apulia’s east coast and from the Tyrrhenian Sea on its west.

  We go to both coasts, as supposedly did Francis on a preaching tour in the eighteen months between the rejection of his Earlier Rule in 1221 and the completion of its revision in 1223. It is hard to believe Francis had the strength to travel all the way down the Adriatic coast to Apulia, but several reputable Franciscan sources, most notably St. Francis of Assisi—Omnibus of Sources, record his whereabouts in 1221 and probably 1222 as southern Italy. Many of the dates associated with Francis are guesstimates and, like political polls, have an accuracy margin of several percentage points; but we haven’t been to Apulia, so we put our trust in the Omnibus and head south, too.

  We look for signs of Francis in the Crusader port city of Bari, where he was reportedly a guest in the huge, reconstructed twelfth-century seaside Castle Svevo. The centerpiece of Bari is the wondrous eleventh-century Papal Basilica of St. Nicholas, the patron saint of children and, of course, the model for Santa Claus, whose bones were spirited here from Turkey in 1087 and still lie in the basilica’s crypt. But we find Francis in the aptly named church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, across the street from the castle.

  A stone tablet in the entry to the church commemorates Francis’s stay in the castle, and a padlocked, velveted niche off the nave holds the small bell, the Campanello di San Francesco d’Assisi, that Francis used to call the people to hear him preach. We ring the precious relic ourselves, with the permission of Don Filippo, the church’s secular priest, giddy with the possibility that we’re holding in our hands something Francis actually held in his.

  We follow Francis farther south along the Adriatic coast road to the Crusader port of Brindisi, from which many think he set sail for Egypt. I fantasize that it is on this road, identified only vaguely by Celano as “near Bari,” that Francis graphically illustrated the evil of money to a young friar. The legend involves a sack of coins lying abandoned on the road and the young friar who urged Francis to take the money and distribute it to the poor. But Francis suspected the sack of money to be a lure of the devil. Instead of touching the money, he “withdrew about a stone’s throw and concentrated on holy prayer.” He then ordered the young friar to pick up the bag, and suddenly, instead of coins, “a large snake slid out of the bag.” The young friar had been taught a lesson he would never forget. “Brother,” Francis said to him, “to God’s servants money is nothing but a devil and a poisonous snake.”

  Padre Salvatore, a thoroughly modern forty-one-year-old Franciscan friar wearing jeans and a two-day stubble, greets us at the Franciscan church and convent. He takes us on the medieval pilgrim road, the Provinciale San Vito, to Brindisi’s busy commercial port, passing the twelfth-century Tancredi Fountain, from which the Crusaders and possibly Francis drank on their way to embark for the Holy Land. The modern pilgrimage route is by air: UNESCO flies humanitarian aid to Iraq and Afghanistan from Brindisi.

  So far on this journey to Apulia we have seen no indication that Francis preached here in 1221 or 1222. Most of the medieval history involving him along this coastal section of southern Italy concerns the Crusades and, in Brindisi, includes the recently renovated fourteenth-century Crusader ospedale or hospital of Santa Maria del Casale. Padre Salvatore takes us to see this stunning Crusader rest house, which the transient pilgrims and knights frescoed brilliantly with biblical scenes and depictions of Crusaders with their horses, shields, and flags bearing the Crusader cross. Francis’s connection to Santa Maria del Casale is that it was built over a little chapel in which he prayed and which contained one of his favorite paintings of Mary. A Franciscan convent was established after Francis’s stay here, and the remains of its arched cloister still stand next to Santa Maria del Casale, shaded by palm trees.

  We leave the jovial Padre Salvatore, who operates a local Franciscan radio station named Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and press farther south to the ornate, Baroque city of Lecce. Every inch of the many medieval palazzos and churches remaining in the old city seems intricately carved with saints, knights, flowers, animals, the sun and the moon. The dizzying display of sculptured artistry, made possible by the honey-colored and easily worked local sandstone, makes our frustrating visit here worthwhile.

  The frustration begins with our fruitless half-hour search for the Centro Storico, a sixteenth-century palazzo turned B and B we are booked in, somewhere in the maze of streets in the old city. Mauro Bianco, the young owner of the B and B, has anticipated the impossibility of visitors finding it on their own and offers his cell phone number with each reservation. We finally succumb and, humbled, follow Mauro on his motor scooter through one alleyway after another to fetch up at the beguiling B and B, where our funky bright red room is up fifty-two steps on the roof.

  That frustration resolved, we move on to the next. According to local legend, Francis performed the miracle of the “multiplication of the bread” in Lecce, at the palazzo of the Perrone family. When he went to the palazzo asking for bread for his monks, as friars are called in Apulia, the servant said there wasn’t any. Francis insisted that she look in the cupboard, and lo and behold, she found fresh, hot bread. The family is said to have commemorated the miracle by carving an angel holding a piece of bread on the façade of their palazzo and adding an inscription describing the event inside the palazzo’s front door. But when we set out to find the building, which Mauro has located in a Lecce reference book of medieval palazzos, the address turns out to be an uncarved and quite modern building subdivided into apartments.

  Our last hope of finding a trace of Francis is to locate the little cell where he is said to have rested during his visit here. We are successful in the thirteenth-century church of San Francesco, where just outside a chapel wonderfully frescoed with scenes from Francis’s life we find a roped-off opening in the floor and, visible below, a stone cell only six feet long and three feet wide. Our thrill of discovery is dampened, however, by the date of 1219 the church custodian attaches to Francis’s stay in the cell. That date, too, seems to involve the Crusades and supports those who believe Francis embarked for Egypt in 1219 from Bari or Brindisi and stopped in nearby Lecce en route.

  We leave Apulia with some frustration and drive northwest to the Tyrrhenian seaport of Gaeta. For all of Apulia’s pleasant, tourist-free wonders—the province’s singular and ancient trulli, conical-roofed houses and farm sheds constructed, without mortar, with the area’s thin, gray stone; the cactus-lined roads through back-to-back vineyards, whic
h produce one-tenth of the wine drunk in Europe; and mile after mile of ancient olive groves—the dates remain wrong for Francis and his preaching tour of southern Italy. Our last hope is Gaeta, where St. Bonaventure reports that Francis, while preaching, had to take refuge in a small boat and finish his sermon from the sea after the overenthusiastic crowd on the beach “rushed upon him in order to touch him.”

  And bingo! It was sometime during the winter of 1222 and early spring of 1223, we are told by Professor Fernando Robbio, a former English teacher and local historian, that Francis delivered his seaborne sermon here. “We don’t know why he came here, but the dates are certain,” he says. Just where Francis stayed, nobody knows—his cell has never been found—but Professor Robbio thinks it is buried somewhere in the convent Francis founded next to the site where Gaeta’s San Francesco church subsequently rose on a high cliff overlooking the sea.

  We pace up and down the old convent’s cloister corridor with Professor Robbio, who insists that Francis also walked up and down here in 1222. The convent is now a children’s center, the Oratorio Don Bosco, which makes it difficult to conjure up a meditative Francis amid the teenage frenzy of an upcoming soccer game. But Dr. Robbio’s enthusiasm is infectious—and understandably so.

  Gaeta figures heavily in the medieval biographies of Francis. It was here that he vented his wrath on two brothers who let their beards grow long, cursing them for setting a bad example. His outburst over this seemingly innocuous transgression suggests that it occurred during the painful rebellion within his order. “By you, most holy Lord, and by the whole court of heaven, and by me, your little one,” Celano quotes him as saying, “may they be cursed who break and destroy by their bad example what you earlier built up, and do not cease to build up, through holy brothers of this religion!”