EARLY LIFE

The man we know today as Saint Francis was born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone in Assisi, a town in Umbria, Italy, in 1181 or 1182. Perhaps to reflect his love for France, where he traveled often in the course of business, the young Giovanni’s father changed his name to Francesco soon after his birth. His parents were Pietro and Pica di Bernardone. The family belonged to the wealthy merchant class; his father dealt in cloth, and the young Francis was brought up to follow in his father’s footsteps. His father was indeed one of the wealthiest men in Umbria and owned a number of estates in the vicinity of Assisi as well as dealing widely in cloth.

Although the amount of education that Francis received is debated, it is clear that he received enough to express himself eloquently in a variety of ways. He attended the parish school of San Giorgio near his home. He was never intended to be a scholar, though his biographers describe him as clever; much spoiled by his parents, he grew up instead pursuing pleasure. His mother, in particular, who may well have come from France, instilled in him a love of poetry and song, of courtly manners and chivalry; his model then was the troubadour. Many sources tell us that the young Francis had a strong interest in the Arthurian legends and that he and his future followers shared the secular value of chivalry, whatever the church may have felt about it. Early sources are very kind to Pica, but much less so in their descriptions of Pietro, despite the fact that his father would seem to have indulged Francis’s excesses rather than to have driven him very hard.

The young Francis led a very different life from the one he would later lead. He enjoyed finery and lavish parties, spending a great deal of money and running around with a wild crowd of youths who ate and drank too much and scandalized the community, although more by wildness than by viciousness; both Thomas of Celano and Henry of Avranches suggest that he was by no means celibate at this period of his life. In appearance he was small and slight, “his face a bit long and prominent,” dark-haired and dark-eyed, “his nose symmetrical, thin and straight” (First Life 83); later he would sport a tonsure and a beard, but he dressed like a popinjay in his youth.

Although he helped his father with the family business, he showed little interest in settling down to anything serious at all, and in fact Thomas of Celano notes that “he squandered and wasted his time miserably. . . outdid all his contemporaries in vanities and came to be a promoter of evil” until his twenty-fifth year. Even his faults, however, reflected the generosity, gaiety, and charm that would make him so charismatic as a religious leader; he early demonstrated the love of nature that would make him the patron saint of animals and ecology in later eras, as well. He never, before or after his religious conversion, displayed the animosity against and contempt for women so characteristic of clerics of the time, adopting instead an attitude of friendship, respect, and chivalry.

We know that Francis accompanied his father to France in 1197, to the cloth fair in Champagne; Pietro Bernardone had the reputation (as well of the success) of a ruthless businessman, and no doubt when Francis accompanied and assisted his father, he was expected to follow suit. On their return, however, they found a region thrown into turmoil by the death of the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI. Tensions among rival cities across Italy were exacerbated, including one between Perugia and neighboring towns in Umbria. Francis got caught up in the conflict, first as a builder, helping to fortify Assisi against attack, then as a soldier himself, in 1202 at the Battle of Collestrada. Unfortunately, the force that Assisi sent forth against the Perugians was inadequate to the task; the battle was described as a massacre, and the Assi-sians soundly beaten. Mistaken for a noble, Francis was taken prisoner rather than put to death, and he found himself imprisoned for almost a year, until a ransom was negotiated and paid by his father; his cellmate was Angelo di Tancredi, who would become his lifelong friend. His health, and perhaps his soul, was permanently affected by his imprisonment; some scholars believe that he contracted tuberculosis and that this would be the ultimate cause of his death.

His character, at least, was not immediately affected. He left prison emaciated and weakened, but he still sought out revelry and indulgence, and he toyed with the notion of a military career. He even ventured forth to become a soldier in the retinue of Walter de Brienne, in 1205, but a second illness and a fateful dream sent him back to Assisi—or perhaps it was the death of Walter in Apulia (later he would encounter Walter’s brother, John de Brienne, in Egypt; see below). At any rate, Francis would return home from this experience to spend the next year discerning his mission; part of this discernment involved a pilgrimage to Rome and another, consultation with his lifelong mentor, Bishop Guido of Assisi. The latter had arrived in Assisi in 1204, and hearing accounts of a prodigal youth who may have seemed debauched by night, but who gave away quantities of money and food to the poor all the while, was one of the first to recognize religious genius in Francis. He would frequently assist Francis in negotiating the intricacies of church politics and hierarchy as Francis’s mission became more concrete.

Perhaps with Guido’s encouragement, Francis journeyed to Rome at the end of 1205 or the beginning of 1206; here he had his first experience of begging, when he exchanged clothing with a beggar and stood in his shoes for a day. He witnessed the abject poverty of the beggars there, in the midst of the grandeur of the city and the wealth of the church. His return to Assisi marked a new sobriety in him.

In medieval Europe at this time, most people felt an almost supernatural horror of leprosy (probably a blanket name for a number of diseases with similar symptoms, including leprosy, Mycobacterium leprae, itself), which led to the ostracism and mistreatment of the unfortunates who were afflicted by it. Lepers were condemned to live outside the walls of the city, to abandon their homes, families, and livelihoods, to wear distinctive clothing and carry clappers to warn people of their approach, and to beg for their living. Many stories surround Francis’s humane treatment of lepers who lived around Assisi, including his charity to them at this critical period of his life, when he was said to have first dismounted and kissed the hand of a leper, suppressing physical revulsion at the sight and smell, and then to have taken a great sum of money to the leper hospital and distributed it to the inmates there, kissing each one’s hand as he did so. Later, he would use the humane treatment of lepers by new recruits to the Order as a sort of “trial by fire,” for them to demonstrate their poverty and humility: “thus at the beginning of the religion, after the brothers grew in number, he wanted the brothers to stay in hospitals of lepers to serve them. . . whenever commoners or nobles came to the religion. . . they had to serve the lepers and stay in their houses” (Assisi Compilation 9).

Although he still spent his evenings in revelry, his companions noticed a new sobriety in him; when asked whether he would be married, “‘Yes’, he replied, ‘I am about to take a wife of surpassing fairness.’ She was no other than Lady Poverty whom Dante and Giotto have wedded to his name, and whom even now he had begun to love.”7

Another phenomenon that marked this period of Francis’s life was his increasing need to find seclusion for prayer and his continual lapses into trances; he underwent constant emotional turmoil, constant vacillation between doubt and faith, in this process of discernment. He began to retreat to Mount Suba-sio, to the southeast of Assisi, where he sought out caves in which he could spend time in contemplation, first demonstrating his profound bent toward finding God in nature. He probably became known to the Benedictine monks who inhabited the monastery of San Benedetto on Subasio at this time; they were to become his friends and benefactors.

One day in 1206, Francis visited the church of San Damiano, which lay, neglected and in poor repair, to the south of Assisi. The Legend of the Three Companions tells us that Francis knelt in front of the crucifix there to pray, and while absorbed in the image of the suffering Christ, heard a voice saying, “Francis, don’t you see that my house is being destroyed? Go, then, and rebuild it for me.” Trembling and amazed, he undertook what he was commanded, and as the legend continues, “From that hour his heart was stricken with melting love and compassion for the passion of Christ; and for the rest of his life he carried in it the wounds of the Lord Jesus” (Legend of the Three Companions 13-14). While it might be that the legend of this experience was embroidered, there is no doubt that Francis was always deeply devoted to the cult of the crucified Christ and his sufferings on the cross.

At first Francis simply gave the priest in charge of San Damiano some money to keep the lamp burning in the church. But a sense of mission grew in him until he did something that would seem rather disgraceful today—although Francis and his followers would undoubtedly hold that the real disgrace lay in the condition of the church and the disparity of wealth that left some poor and others with more than they needed—he “stole” bolts of his father’s most valuable cloth while his father was away, took them to Foligno, and sold them (along with the very horse that he rode), and then returned to San Damiano to attempt to give the priest there the money to restore the church. The priest, doubting that Francis could be serious, sent him on his way again without taking it, but Francis persisted, trying to rebuild the church with his own hands. When Pietro returned, he was indeed furious about the theft from his stores and demanded that Francis return the money. Francis hid from his father for weeks.

When Francis emerged from hiding, filthy and unshaven, and returned to Assisi looking like a madman, the people of Assisi, including his relatives, pelted him with filth and abuse, and rather than helping him, Pietro seized him and kept him imprisoned for awhile. This was the beginning of the rift with his son that would last until the end of Pietro’s life; no doubt Pietro felt betrayed by Francis and embarrassed by his erratic behavior. When the softhearted Pica freed him at length, Francis took leave of his home once more and returned to San Damiano to continue the work of building the church; no plea or demand from Pietro moved him. Throughout this time, however, Bishop Guido had remained Francis’s friend and would now mediate between father and son. When brought before the bishop and ordered by him to repay his father’s money, Francis did so immediately, but did more besides: he stripped himself naked and returned the bundle of his clothing to his father as well. He renounced Pietro and embraced God as his true father, leaving Pietro to stalk home in anger and grief, bearing Francis’s clothes with him, while Guido wrapped him in his own cloak: “he realized that a great mystery lay behind the scene he had just witnessed, and from now on helped and watched over Francis with loving concern” (Legend of the Three Companions 20).