On the Road with Francis of Assisi

by Linda Bird Francke

  When Francis was brought here in April 1226 by his friars and a doctor from Rieti, Alberino was in the wilderness; now it is a tiny hilltop oasis in the built-up Siena suburb of Ravacciano. A lull in the traffic, however, affords a glimpse of medieval Siena as Francis knew it: clearly visible in the nearby city walls is the twelfth-century, arched Porta Ovile, through which Francis first walked to Alberino in 1212 and, finally, fourteen years later, was carried on horseback.

  The little chapel at Alberino is a stone diary of Francis in Siena, the pages inscribed on plaques on the wall. One plaque tells the charming story, recounted in the Little Flowers, of the boy and the turtledoves he was taking to market in Siena—until he ran into Francis. Francis somehow convinced the boy to give him the doves so they would not “fall into the hands of cruel men who will kill them.” Francis then took the doves on with him, presumably to Alberino, where he made nests for them so the doves could “fulfill the Creator’s commandment to multiply.” And multiply they did until Francis blessed the doves and gave them permission to leave.

  Other Francis artifacts in the chapel are familiar ones: a replica of the San Damiano cross hanging over the altar; his stone pillow behind a grille on the wall; the representations of yet another miraculous tree, which grew here from the staff he planted in the ground on his first visit in 1212. (This tree lived for four hundred years and survived being cut down in the 1600s to reemerge one hundred years later.) There are other familiar themes, like the plaque commemorating Francis’s gift of his cloak to a poor man on the road between Rieti and Siena. And there is a plaque commemorating a more mysterious exchange that took place on that same road on this his last visit to Siena.

  Three poor and identical women appeared on the road as Francis and his doctor approached on horseback. “Welcome, Lady Poverty,” Celano quotes the women as saying to Francis, an unlikely salutation from strangers, which “filled him with unspeakable joy.” Francis asked the doctor to give something to the women; he gave them coins. But as suddenly as the women had appeared, they vanished, leaving Francis and the doctor with the conclusion that they had been the heavensent Franciscan virtues of Chastity, Poverty, and Obedience.

  We experience a taste of that obedience ourselves in Siena. We are being shown around the city by Father Paolo, a sturdy, sixty-seven-year-old Franciscan friar who had come to Siena’s thirteenth-century church of San Francesco via postings in Naples and the Philippines. Because we had arranged to meet Father Paolo at the cavernous brick church on the northeastern ridge of Siena, we have booked a hotel outside the city walls near the millennium escalators installed for Jubilee, which carry us up the ridge almost to San Francesco’s front door. Alberino turns out to be a short walk from the church. It is the next leg with Father Paolo that almost does us in.

  We accept the priest’s generous offer to show us all the places in Siena that Francis is known, or is thought, to have gone, and without further ado, we set out. Even now I can visualize Father Paolo in his gray habit and black watch cap as he strides ahead of us around the outside of the northern perimeter walls of Siena in the midst of late afternoon traffic to fetch up finally at the beginning of Francis in Siena: the northwestern gate of Porta Camollia. It was through this arched portal in 1212 that Francis made his first and triumphant entry into Siena on the shoulders of the excited Sienese. According to Father Paolo’s steady stride, Francis either walked or was carried along the Via Camollia to Siena’s distinctive white and gray striped cathedral, where he preached in the Piazza del Duomo.

  That sermon, Father Paolo says, brought peace to the warring people of the city and won Francis their hearts. Mounting the steps of the duomo and keeping a firm grip on his umbrella, the otherwise taciturn friar reenacts the gist of the personalized sermon Francis delivered with such effect. “You [‘put in Christian name,’ he says], do the work of the devil. You have the chance to convert and do penance. Before you is either salvation or damnation.” After hearing Francis, the Sienese evidently chose salvation.

  Directly across the splendid medieval piazza—indeed, all of Siena is splendid—is a tantalizing possibility for Francis: the enormous, eleventh-century Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala. Originally a rest stop for travelers and pilgrims along the heavily traveled Via Francigena, the ospedale grew to offer medical treatment as well. Though there is no record of Francis being treated here for his eyes, many believe he must have been. In the process now of being converted to a museum to display Siena’s overflow art treasures—a stunning Duccio exhibit is under way while we are here—the “hospital” seems such a natural location for the ailing Francis that I sense his presence up and down the marble corridors, especially outside the Clinica Oculistica.

  But Father Paolo is off again. We leave the piazza and its Bishop’s Palace, where Francis is thought to have stayed on occasion, and stride past a view of St. Catherine of Siena’s house, where Francis might also have stayed because of its proximity to therapeutic mineral springs. Somewhere else in this university city, the “unlettered” Francis had a legendary exchange with a Dominican doctor of sacred theology. The intellectual Order of Preachers and the humble Order of the Friars Minor had a tremendous rivalry at the time, and this exchange clearly casts Francis as the winner.

  According to Celano, the learned preacher was querying the biblical directive from Ezekiel—“If you do not warn the wicked man about his wickedness, I will hold you responsible for his soul.” He was both relieved and enlightened when the poorly educated Francis offered him his interpretation—that simply by example, the brilliance and reputation of the pure soul would expose the wickedness of others. “My brothers,” the Dominican professor reported to his order, “the theology of this man, held aloft by purity and contemplation, is a soaring eagle, while our learning crawls on its belly on the ground.”

  The Lord had reminded Francis of the importance of example in a revelation at Alberino. Francis had prayed to the Lord to tell him when he was pleasing him as his “servant” and when he was not. Francis woke up his brothers to report to them the Lord’s answer. “ ‘Know that you are in truth my servant when you think, speak, or do things that are holy,’ ” Francis recounted. “And so I have called you, brothers, because I want to be shamed in front of you if ever I am not doing any of those three.”

  Still we walk on in the wake of Father Paolo, not knowing the significance, if any, of the various palazzos and churches we are passing. It finally dawns on us that we are simply following the long, semicircular route Francis took through Siena from the Porta Camollia to the duomo, then on to the Porta Ovile, from which he first saw the tiny chapel on the hill that would become Alberino. And so we return to where we started, having followed Father Paolo in Francis’s footsteps for a good two hours.

  Francis’s last stay at Alberino was not a happy one. Whatever medical treatment he received in Siena did not improve his condition. His spirits were raised, however, by the gift of a pheasant from a Sienese nobleman. “Brother Pheasant” took such an immediate liking to Francis that every time the friars released it back into the wild, it returned to Francis’s cell. The doctor finally took the pheasant home with him, but the bird’s heart was broken and it refused to eat. Frightened it would die, the doctor took the pheasant back to Francis, whereupon “it threw off its sadness and began to eat with joy.”

  Francis was not as fortunate. One anguishing night at Alberino, he came close to death. He began to vomit, the Assisi Compilation tells us, “because of the disease of his stomach.” Francis was often nauseated, but this time the strain of his retching led to a life-and-death crisis: According to his medieval biographers, “he vomited up blood all night until morning.”

  Various modern explanations are offered for the hemorrhaging. A gastric ulcer might have been the cause according to a 1999 study, “The Illnesses of Francis During the Last Years of His Life.” But there is also the possibility of stomach cancer or Francis’s ongoing and recurring bouts with malaria with its attendant par
asites. To the friars in 1226, however, the nightlong vomiting of blood that left Francis “almost dying from weakness and the pain of his illness” simply signaled the end.

  Gathered around him in his cell at Alberino, the friars begged Francis to bless them and to leave a remembrance so all could say: “Our father left these words to his sons and brothers at his death.” And so Francis hastily summoned a friar priest and told him: “Write that I bless all my brothers, those who are and who will be in the religion until the end of the world.

  “Since I cannot speak much because of my weakness and the pain of my illness,” Francis continued in what has become known as the Siena Testament, “I am showing my will to my brothers in these three words: may they always love each other, as a sign of remembrance of my blessing and my testament; may they always love and observe our Lady Holy Poverty; and may they always remain faithful and subject to the prelates and all the clerics of holy Mother Church.”

  But Francis did not die. In fact, he rallied a bit. Brother Elias, the order’s minister general, rushed to his side and decided to take Francis, before the heat of the summer, to the mountain hermitage just outside Cortona, where he might improve. And briefly, he did.

  Perhaps it was the sound of the water rushing by the Celle di Cortona or the sweet mountain air or the call of the birds, but Francis gained enough strength there to dictate a more thorough and ultimately provocative document, known as the Last Testament.

  Francis began the forty-one-sentence testament with a history of his conversion twenty years before: “The Lord granted me, Brother Francis, to begin to do penance in this way: While I was in sin, it seemed very bitter to me to see lepers. And the Lord Himself led me among them and I had mercy upon them. And when I left them that which seemed bitter to me was changed into sweetness of soul and body; and afterward I lingered a little and left the world.”

  Francis went on to reminisce about his first converts in Assisi and the doubts that ensued—“And after the Lord gave me brothers, no one told me what I should do”—and the simple Rule he adopted from the Gospels to lead them “that the Lord Pope confirmed for me.” He extolled the virtues of his earliest companions, who “were content with one tunic, patched inside and out, with a cord and short trousers,” then added wistfully, in light of the more hedonistic friars to come: “And we had no desire for anything more.”

  But then the tone turns stern and authoritative, as if he were still the order’s minister general. He “firmly” wishes the friars to do “honest work” with their hands and to “beware” receiving any “churches or poor dwellings or anything that is built for them” that is not in keeping with Holy Poverty. Other directives begin with the words “I firmly command,” “I firmly wish,” “I strictly forbid,” “I strictly command.” However ill he was, Francis was obviously not going to go quietly into that good night.

  But what makes the Testament so controversial is the seeming contradiction it contains. On the one hand, Francis stated clearly that the “brothers” should not say, “This is another Rule,” but should take the Testament rather as “a reminder, admonition, exhortation, and my testament, which I, Brother Francis, worthless as I am, leave to you, my brothers.” On the other hand, Francis instructed the leadership of the order to read “these words” every time they read the Rule; to “not add or subtract” from the words, and to understand these words from the Lord “simply and without gloss and observe them with holy manner of working until the end.”

  The early friars and later like-minded friars would take literally and “without gloss” Francis’s dictates in the Testament against owning or accepting any property that did not conform to Holy Poverty, prompting a bitter division in the order. The struggle between the Spirituals, as the sometimes fanatic purists were known, and the Conventuals, the more progressive friars, who studied or taught at universities and eschewed remote hermitages to live in houses and worship at their own churches, would go on for years. Pope after Pope would have to address the schism, starting with the order’s guardian, Cardinal Ugolino, who became Pope Gregory IX in 1227. To the fury of some of the fanatical Spirituals, Pope Gregory decreed in 1230 that Francis’s Testament was not legally binding, a decree that led a group of Spirituals in Tuscany to accuse him publicly of heresy.

  It is tempting to think that Francis, close to death, was deliberately ambiguous in his Testament. His early Rule had been rejected, after all, and the later Rule he had written at Fonte Colombo had been greatly modified by Ugolino and Pope Honorius III. This Testament is pure Francis, unabridged, unedited—and unyielding.

  What is equally memorable about the Testament is that Francis summoned the energy to write it. After a brief rally, his health had begun to deteriorate dramatically during his brief interlude at the celle. “The swelling began in his abdomen, his legs and his feet,” Celano writes, “and his stomach became so weak that he could hardly eat any food at all.”

  Francis wanted to return to the Porziuncola in Assisi, but Elias hesitated. The direct route from the celle to Assisi went right by Perugia, and the fear was that the Perugians might try to kidnap the dying Francis, bury him in Perugia, and thus establish the city as a profitable pilgrimage destination. If Francis were to die en route, the fear was even greater of losing possession of his body to any number of hill towns, especially Perugia. A further reward would be the division of his body into valuable relics for profit or for future distribution in return for favors. So Elias decided to bring Francis home on a long and circuitous route through the hills around Gubbio.

  The cortege finally set out from the Celle di Cortona and, in June 1226, returned Francis safely to the Porziuncola. However grateful Francis must have been to be home, he lasted there for only two weeks. The summer heat was stifling in the wooded valley, making it hard for Francis to breathe. So once more Elias and Francis’s closest friars packed him up and moved him, to a new hermitage, eighteen miles away, high in the mountains above Bagnara.

  The scenery changes radically as we approach Bagnara along the old Via Flaminia. The valley narrows, the wooded hills are craggier, and there are very few open fields. We stop briefly, as did Francis, at the walled medieval hill town of Nocera Umbra. The town seems gloomy, but there is good reason. Nocera Umbra was hit very hard by the 1997 earthquake; 80 percent of its old stone houses were damaged, if not destroyed, and its civic symbol, a tall rock tower, was leveled. So we press on, after an artichoke sandwich in a rather desultory coffee bar, to follow Francis to the tiny community of Bagnara.

  In its Roman heyday, Bagnara was a spa town, and evidently it still is, though its population of fewer than two thousand does not speak of a thriving spa economy. But the air is definitely cooler in Bagnara’s hills, which would have eased Francis’s breathing. And perhaps the healing powers of Bagnara’s water brought him some relief, though by now Francis was beyond any medicinal cure.

  Virtually blind, his spleen and liver enlarged by malarial parasites, his abdomen and legs hideously bloated by the fluid retention of dropsy, the rest of his body emaciated, and his pallor gray from anemia, Francis was obviously not long for this world.

  Messengers raced back and forth between Bagnara and Assisi, and plans were formalized for Francis’s final return to the city of his birth in August 1226. Bishop Guido was away, but Francis would stay, under guard, in the Bishop’s Palace. To make sure no one could kidnap him en route, knights were dispatched to bring him safely home. What a poignant scene it must have been. Francis was too weak to ride a horse on his own, so the knights, some of whom were his childhood friends, took turns carrying him in their arms.

  Francis was not too weak, however, to give the knights a final lesson in humility. As the procession wound its way through the hills northeast of Assisi, Francis and his escorts stopped in the poor village, now vanished, of Satriano. The hungry knights went door to door trying to buy food and drink but came back empty-handed.

  “You didn’t find anything because you trust more in those fl
ies [coins] of yours than in God,” St. Bonaventure quotes Francis. Francis sent the knights back out, advising them this time to “humbly ask for alms” after offering the villagers the “love of God as a reward.” To the knights’ amazement, according to Celano, they “bought more with the love of God than with money.”

  Francis and his military escort entered Assisi through the Porta Perlici, which still stands on the northeastern edge of the hill town and bears an 1199 inscription designating it the gateway to the Marches. The knights ensconced Francis in the Bishop’s Palace on the Piazza del Vescovado, then took up guard duty outside. Francis had come full circle, from his childhood nearby in his family’s house; his rudimentary schooling at San Giorgio, now St. Clare’s basilica, just around the corner; his nude renunciation of his father in the palace’s courtyard; and now, his approaching death.

  “Brother, what is your prognosis?” Francis asked Buongiovanni, a friend and doctor from Arezzo who came to visit him in the palace. When the doctor replied that, with the grace of God, all would be well, Francis pressed him for the truth. “I am not a coward who fears death,” the Legend of Perugia quotes him as saying. “The Lord by his grace and in his goodness, has so closely united me to himself that I am as happy to live as I am to die.” The doctor then told him straight out that his disease was incurable and that he would die either at the end of September or on the fourth day of October. Instead of despairing, Francis exulted at the news and cried out—“Welcome, Sister Death!”

  Without further ado, Francis summoned Brother Leo and Brother Angelo to praise Sister Death with him. And together, with the friars fighting tears, Francis added a new and final verse to the Canticle of the Sun:

  All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death,

  From whose embrace no mortal can escape.

  Woe to those who die in mortal sin!

  Happy those She finds doing your will!

  The second death can do no harm to them.