Francis

Francis of Assisi, known in his lifetime as Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone, was born in Assisi in Umbria in the early 1180s, the son of the cloth merchant Pietro di Bernardone. His baptismal name was Giovanni. He grew up in a prosperous household during an age of communal rivalry in central Italy and, as a young man, shared the social life of Assisi’s merchant elite and took part in local warfare. Captured in a campaign against Perugia in the first years of the thirteenth century, he spent a lengthy period as a prisoner of war. After his release he fell ill and entered a period of spiritual unrest that early companions and biographers present as the beginning of his conversion from a worldly youth to a life of evangelical poverty.

In the middle of the first decade of the thirteenth century he underwent a public break with his former status. Early lives describe him repairing ruined churches around Assisi, especially San Damiano, after a prayer before its crucifix, and then renouncing his claim on his father’s goods before the bishop of Assisi. He lived thereafter by begging and manual work, preached repentance in the towns of Umbria, and, after hearing the Gospel commission to the apostles, attracted a small group of companions. He composed a short form of life based on Gospel texts. In 1209 or 1210 he obtained from Pope Innocent III permission to live according to that rule, which is the origin of the Order of Friars Minor. The movement spread rapidly through Italy and into other regions of Latin Christendom.

Clare of Assisi and her companions formed a community of women at San Damiano, later known as the Poor Clares. A way of penance for laypeople associated with the friars also developed. Francis traveled widely in the Italian peninsula and, during the Fifth Crusade, went to Egypt, where early sources record that he was received by the Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil near Damietta. He remained attached to a simple, unpropertied observance for his brothers and, as the order grew, faced disputes over organization, learning, and the holding of buildings. A revised rule received papal confirmation from Honorius III in 1223. In the same period he promoted devotion to the humanity of Christ, including a Christmas celebration at Greccio that later tradition associated with the Nativity crib.

According to his companions, Francis received the stigmata on Mount La Verna in 1224, the first such case widely reported in medieval Christian sources. Nearly blind and in failing health, he spent his last months in and around Assisi and composed the Canticle of the Creatures, a praise of God through sun, moon, elements, and death. He died at the Porziuncola on 3 October 1226. Pope Gregory IX, who had known him as Cardinal Ugolino, canonized him on 16 July 1228. His body was later translated to the basilica built in his honor at Assisi. He is commemorated on 4 October and is invoked as patron of Italy, of animals, and of ecology, and as founder of one of the principal mendicant orders of the Middle Ages.