John Colombini

John Colombini, known in Italian as Giovanni Colombini, was a merchant and civic official of Siena who later founded the religious congregation called the Jesuati. He was born at Siena in Tuscany of a family of standing in the city. An exact year of birth is not preserved in the surviving sources; later writers place it around the beginning of the fourteenth century. As a young and middle-aged man he engaged in trade and in the public life of the Republic of Siena, holding office that included the dignity of gonfalonier. He married Biagia Cerretani, a woman of noble Sienese family, and they had children. Accounts of his earlier years, written after his death by members of his congregation, portray him as successful, ambitious, and at times severe in business and politics.

His conversion is associated in the traditional lives with the reading of a legend of Saint Mary of Egypt. The story of that desert penitent is said to have struck him while he waited at home, and to have led him to a sudden and lasting change of conduct. He began to practise fasting and other austerities, to give large alms, and to serve the sick and the imprisoned. His wife at first resisted the alteration in their household and appealed to the bishop of Siena; she later accepted a religious vocation of her own. Colombini disposed of much of his property. Disciples joined him, living in common poverty, wearing a simple habit, and invoking the name of Jesus so frequently that they were called Jesuati. They also took Saint Jerome as a patron and were known as Apostolic Clerics of Saint Jerome. The community was composed chiefly of lay brothers who devoted themselves to works of mercy rather than to clerical ministry.

In 1367 Colombini and a group of his companions went to Viterbo to lay their way of life before Pope Urban V, who had returned to Italy from Avignon. The pope gave formal approval to the congregation. On the return journey toward Siena, Colombini became ill and died at Acquapendente on 31 July 1367. His body was carried to Siena. The Jesuati survived their founder for nearly three centuries. They were known in later generations for hospital work and for the distillation of medicinal spirits; the congregation was suppressed by Pope Clement IX in 1668.

Colombini has been honoured as a blessed in the Catholic Church, and his feast is kept on 31 July. Lives of him were composed in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by Jesuati writers, and he appears in the major collections of saints’ lives. Because the early sources are hagiographical rather than archival, many precise dates of his youth and of the first years of the congregation remain uncertain. What is securely attested is his origin in Siena, his marriage and family life, his conversion from a mercantile and civic career, the foundation of a penitential lay congregation in fourteenth-century Tuscany, the papal approbation of 1367, and his death at Acquapendente on the last day of July in that year.