Francis of Assisi
Francis of Assisi gave his clothes back to his father in the bishop's square, went out to beg and preach with nothing, and in fourteen years had an order of thousands, a rule approved by two popes, and a church that has been arguing about what he meant ever since. He was born in 1181 or 1182, the son of a cloth merchant of Assisi, and spent his youth as the merchant's son: money, songs, a year as a prisoner of Perugia after a battle in 1202, an attempt to go for a knight. The turn came slowly between 1205 and 1208 - a voice in the ruined church of San Damiano, a leper he kissed, the sale of his father's cloth to repair the church, the father's suit before the bishop in 1206 at which he stripped and handed back everything - and then a Gospel text heard at Mass in 1208, that the disciples should take neither purse nor staff, which he took literally. Within a year he had eleven companions, and in 1209 or 1210 he walked to Rome and Innocent III, against the curia's judgement, gave verbal approval to a rule that consisted of poverty and preaching. The brothers were not to own anything, singly or together, and were to work or beg. By 1217 there were provinces; by 1221 there were five thousand at the chapter at Assisi. He went to Egypt in 1219 with the Fifth Crusade and crossed the lines to preach to the sultan al-Kamil, who listened and sent him back. He resigned the government of the order in 1220, could not accept what the ministers made of it, and in 1223 rewrote the rule under Cardinal Ugolino, who softened it and became Gregory IX. In 1224, in a retreat on La Verna, he received the stigmata, the first recorded. He was blind by then. He wrote the Canticle of the Sun in Umbrian in his last year, praising the sun, the moon, water, fire and bodily death, and died on the ground at the Portiuncula in October 1226. Gregory canonised him in 1228 and laid the foundation of a basilica his rule forbade.
- Lived: 1181 CE – 1226 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: friar, saint, founder
