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Biography

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Alberto Berdini, known in religion as Alberto da Sarteano and in English as Albert Berdini of Sarteano, was born in 1385 in the hill town of Sarteano in southern Tuscany, then belonging to the Republic of Siena. He received a humanist education typical of the early Italian Renaissance and studied law at the University of Siena. Drawn to the religious life by the preaching of Bernardine of Siena, the leading figure of the Observant reform among the Franciscans, he entered the Order of Friars Minor in the Observant branch in the early years of the fifteenth century, made his profession, and was ordained a priest. He combined the intellectual formation of a jurist and humanist with the austerity and itinerant preaching of the Observants.

Throughout the 1420s, 1430s, and 1440s he ranked among the most renowned popular preachers in Italy. Contemporaries styled him Rex Praedicatorum, the King of Preachers. Together with Bernardine of Siena, John of Capistrano, and James of the Marches, he belonged to the inner circle of Observant leaders who sought to restore a stricter Franciscan life, to counter Conventual relaxation, and to evangelize the cities. His sermons addressed factional violence, usury, ostentation, and the call to repentance, and he preached in major centres of Tuscany, Lombardy, and beyond. His reputation reached the papal court as well as the urban publics of the peninsula.

Pope Eugene IV, who favoured the Observants and was engaged with the Council of Florence, employed Alberto as an apostolic nuncio in negotiations with Eastern Christians. In the years around 1439–1441 he travelled to Egypt, where he conferred with the Coptic patriarch in an effort related to the union discussed at Florence, and he also sought contact with Christian Ethiopia and visited the Holy Land. These missions did not produce a durable reunion of the Coptic or Ethiopian churches with Rome, but they are significant episodes in fifteenth-century papal diplomacy and in Franciscan activity in the Eastern Mediterranean. Alberto reported on the condition of Eastern Christianity and on the prospects of union.

Within his order he served as a provincial minister and as vicar general of the Observant Franciscans of the Cismontane family, working to organize Observant houses and to maintain discipline. He died in Milan on 15 August 1450 during a period of activity in Lombardy. He has long been venerated as Blessed among Franciscans and in his native region. He was not raised to the honours of the altar by a formal canonization of the universal Church; his historical importance rests on his work as preacher, Observant reformer, and papal diplomat in the age of the Council of Florence.

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