When Francis parted from his father and home for good, in 1206, he intended to return to his mission of repairing San Damiano. But as he walked through the forest outside Assisi, robbers beat and robbed him of his last possession, the cloak that Bishop Guido had given him; even so, “he jumped out of the ditch. . . [and] glad with great joy, he began to call out the praises of God” (Legend of the Three Companions 23). This great joy in the face of adversity or in the most ordinary moments of life was one of the most distinctive parts of Francis’s character.
To support himself and win materials for rebuilding San Damiano, he begged in the streets of Assisi, using his skills as an actor and minstrel as much to entertain as to beg. He received scraps of food (some spoiled) and ate them, first with distaste but then joyfully, and managed to drag vast amounts of stone back, but his begging and antics mortified and grieved his family: “when his father saw him in this pitiful plight, he was filled with sorrow. . . he was both grieved and ashamed to see his son half dead from penance and hardships and. . . he cursed Francis” (Ibid.). Francis paid no attention to his father’s curses or the mockery of his brother but persisted until the work was done, living as a hermit near San Damiano all the while and winning the admiration of passersby for his patience.
Soon he became inspired to share his insights by preaching in public; this was when he began to attract followers. Francis and the early Franciscans preached with a direct and heartfelt simplicity, in the vernacular, in a style that was far removed from the dry Latin sermons that the people would have heard in church. Two of his first followers were Bernard di Quintavalle, a wealthy property owner of Assisi, and Peter of Catanio, a lawyer. Both gave all of their worldly possessions to the poor, donned the habit, and joined Francis in wandering the streets in search of materials and rebuilding another church, San Pietro della Spina. Next to join was Brother Giles, a man of Assisi. And they continued to come—Sabbatino, Morico, John of Capella, Barbaro, Bernard of Viridente, Philip the Long; even Angelo di Tancredi, Francis’s childhood friend and a noble, joined them soon—until there were 12; a number of these first adherents would be Francis’s closest companions for the rest of his life. They endured mockery and suspicion (their ragged and dirty appearance being against them) but persevered in preaching publicly, not only in Assisi but in the surrounding countryside, and in repairing churches, until Francis realized that he was there not only to rebuild small churches but to renew the whole institution of the church. During this period, Francis attended Mass regularly at Santa Maria degli Angeli, which was associated with the Abbey of San Benedetto; it later became the mother church of the Franciscan Order.
Through the example of their lives, their works of service and charity, and most important, the charisma and energy (Adrian House calls it “an almost radioactive energy”) of Francis, the Franciscans became increasingly influential around Assisi and well beyond. Much of their effort during this phase was directed at missionary work: they wandered about Italy and beyond in pairs looking for new recruits who would help them to expand. Bernard and Giles even ventured through France and Spain, as pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela. Although sometimes the early friars were received with suspicion, mockery, or violence, on other occasions they were given food and shelter— Francis would not allow them to accept money as alms—and, best of all, their message began to take hold.
They called themselves the Friars Minor, the Lesser Brothers. As Francis would say, “the Lord has willed that they be called Lesser Brothers, because they are the people whom the Son of God asked of the Father. . . what you did for one of these, the least of my brothers, you did it for me” (Assisi Compilation 101). The designation marked their humility, and it would be codified in their first Rule.
With the advent of followers and the expansion of the original mission, it became necessary to formalize a rule to guide them. The Rules that were in place for other monastic orders or for the regular clergy did not work for Francis’s ragged little band. The problem that it presented for the norm was in the novelty of a mendicant order of friars: they did not inhabit a monastery, like the Benedictines or other monastic orders that already existed; they roamed freely, rejecting permanent houses and living in wattle huts, caves, or other rough shelters instead. They begged for their sustenance as opposed to depending on endowed funds or farming extensive estates, as many monastic foundations did. They had no possessions in common, not even books; Francis’s original intent was that they would own nothing at all. What Francis would have seen around him was monks and priests living in relative ease—if not luxury—in sturdy and comfortable houses with steady supplies of food and books to use for liturgical purposes as well as for education and edification—well above the standards that the truly poor were forced to endure. And for another thing, few of Francis’s followers were priests, as yet; Francis himself was never to become one. (A priest of Assisi named Silvester, who had earlier chiseled extra money out of Francis for stones that he had already sold him, had a change of heart and became the first priest of the fledgling First Order.) So Francis devised a new rule, drawing mostly on passages from scripture; it was simple on the surface, but deceptively so: there was no doubt that Francis expected rigid adherence to his precepts. His way of life, then, might well have threatened established norms and been suppressed, had it not been for his personal magnetism and the enthusiasm that he raised in his listeners, as well as his complete devotion to the church as an institution.
Francis’s First Rule exists today as revised in 1221. First and foremost it requires obedience and reverence to the pope and his successors, but immediately upon that, it enjoins obedience to one another, chastity, and abnegation of property. A postulant to the Order will be given “two tunics without a hood, a cord and trousers, and a caperon reaching to the cord” (First Rule 2), the sum total of permissible possessions; the brothers were frequently observed giving even these few garments away to someone in need of them. The rule goes on to prescribe modes of prayer and fasting, of punishment and service to the poor and sick, of missionary work (including missions to the Saracens), and of relations with women. Friars are forbidden to ride on horseback unless compelled by sickness—early stories tell of barefoot traveling friars leaving bloody footsteps in the snow.
Francis’s Rule, like any other, required approval from the church in order not to be deemed heterodox. Fortunately for Francis, it was evident to church authorities even early on that the popular religious movement that he would inspire would be beneficial to them.
Francis and his band accordingly set off to Rome to visit the Papal See. Here they encountered their old friend, Bishop Guido of Assisi, who was able to advise and assist them in negotiating the bureaucracy of the See. After conferring with lesser figures for a few days, they were eventually granted an audience with Pope Innocent III himself. Thomas of Celano reports that Innocent had had a vision shortly before, of the Lateran basilica about to fall into ruin, “when a certain religious, small and despised, propped it up by putting his own back under it lest it fall” (Second Life 17). When Innocent met and talked to Francis, he was supposed to have recognized that small and despised man who would save the church, and he readily granted his approval of the Rule. This dream was famously depicted by Giotto di Bondone among the frescoes on the walls of Francis’s basilica. Francis became a great admirer of Pope Innocent III, and Innocent promoted the interests of the Order in turn, recognizing its great value in evangelizing among the poor and humble and countering the popular perception of the clergy as addicted to luxury and leisure.
After their visit to Rome, the friars returned to the valley of Spoleto. They had previously inhabited a variety of hermitages, but now they shared a single cowshed. They occupied themselves in labor and prayer, continuing to beg for food, according to the rule of poverty. As yet, Francis did not allow them even to own prayer books, so they prayed from memory and in contemplation of the cross. They slept on the floor, each in the space allotted for him; Francis himself wrote their names on the beams under which each had his place. Soon, however, it became clear that they would need a place for prayer, so they erected an oratory made of reeds, along with a cell for private meditation. Here they lived until a peasant claimed it as a stall for his ass.
When they were evicted from this initial abode, Abbot Maccabeo of the Benedictine monastery of San Benedetto offered them the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, “a dilapidated little chapel in a forest. . . [which] with the surrounding land was also known as the Porziuncula, or Little Portion,”9 outside Assisi, where Francis had been attending Mass. Francis accepted with a proviso: as they could not own property, they would be considered to be renting it for an annual fee of a basket of fish from the river. This was the condition that Francis wished to impose on any house that the Order would occupy in the future—that it be known that the friars were mere renters, not owners, of the property—and it would be a sore point as the Order grew.
Here, around the mother church of the Order and the permanent home of Saint Francis, the friars built huts in which to live. There was no abbot, Francis having refused such a designation for himself; all were to be equal in rank. Eventually there would be priors of individual settlements and a Minister General of the Order, but it would not officially be Francis, who always refused to appoint himself leader, even when most regarded him as such. He did retain control of admitting novices to the Order in the early days, however, as well as dictating the terms of membership in his Rule. He was determined to admit no one who could not comply with his understanding of absolute poverty.
The Third Order, the lay order of people who embraced poverty, chastity, and obedience appropriate to their stations in life, perhaps arose during this phase (between 1209 and 1215; some insist that it was considerably later), when laypeople in the area chose to follow Francis more closely, inspired by his early disciples. And the Second Order, founded by Clare in 1212, grew almost as rapidly as the First; the women were granted San Damiano as a headquarters by the bishop.
The First and Second Orders maintained close connections in the early days, visiting freely with one another; indeed, the friars begged for alms to support the nuns, because everyone recognized that it would be unadvisable for them to do so on their own behalf. The friendship between Francis and Clare was especially intense and might be described as romantic, although unquestionably platonic—a meeting of minds and understandings of spirituality. Theirs was an unusual conjunction of two charismatic and inspired leaders who had the ability to sway many followers from a wide variety of stations and places.
Many of Francis’s best-known followers and closest companions were in place by 1215: the first 12, of course; Brother Leo, a priest who would be Francis’s confessor and secretary; Rufino di Scipione, scion of a wealthy and influential family of Assisi; Masseo di Massignano; Brother Juniper, who became the trusted companion of Clare; and later the biographer Thomas of Celano, the troubadour Brother Pacifico, and the scholar Brother Elias, whose future would be so brilliant and so troubled.
During the period from 1212 to 1215, Francis made two abortive attempts to evangelize the Saracens. The first, in 1212, found Francis en route to Syria, but he was shipwrecked on the way and forced to return to Italy. Again, in 1214, he set out for Morocco, but was sidelined in Spain by illness. In the meantime, he occupied himself with preaching in Central Italy and in contemplative retreats at his mountain refuge of La Verna, but he never forgot his desire not only to convert the infidels but to bring peace between warring Christians and Muslims. Across Europe, the rhetoric surrounding crusades inspired a number of sad attempts: the Children’s Crusade of 1212, which ended at the Mediterranean shores of Italy with many of the children dying of disease or starvation, or straggling home in failure; a second children’s effort, wherein the children were sold into slavery by the men who offered to take them to Jerusalem; and a third featuring adults in Spain, which had the limited success of confining the Moors to Andalusia.
World History
