On the Road with Francis of Assisi

by Linda Bird Francke

  We drive the fifteen minutes from Assisi to the hill above the ancient village of Collestrada on the border between the two warring hill towns, a journey that took the men of Assisi four hours. The battlefield on which the armies met is now a shopping mall, with no hint of the carnage that took place there. Already tired, Assisi’s men were no match for the furious forces from Perugia, who had only to sweep down from their town and cross the Tiber River at Ponte San Giovanni. The sons of Assisi were quickly overwhelmed. Then slaughtered. The displaced nobles in Perugia rode down the Assisians fleeing for cover throughout the valley and the woods and hacked them to death.

  Ironically, it was Francis’s pretension that saved his life. The Perugians spared the nobles and took them prisoner for the ransom they would fetch. Francis, mistakenly identified as a noble by the clothes he wore, his manners, and especially the fact he had a horse, was spared as well. That meant money in the bank to the Perugians and a year of hell for Francis.

  We follow him from the industrial town of Ponte San Giovanni to Perugia, where he would spend the next twelve months or so in a dungeon somewhere under the town, without light, without sanitation, without adequate food or clean water, without a change of clothes in the cold of winter and the heat of summer.

  He almost died.

  2

  Lost in Perugia

  THE HILLTOP CITY where Francis is imprisoned · ASSISI, where he returns, very ill, and goes back to his frivolous ways

  Perugia sprawls across Umbria’s high hills, a red-roofed city with a modern population of 150,000, more than six times the current population of the commune of Assisi. Whatever possessed the sons of Assisi to think they could defeat this muscular stronghold, assuming the skewed population ratio was roughly the same in their time, is beyond me. Even now Perugia is quite forbidding in its inaccessibility, and getting there is not half the fun for us—or certainly for Francis. He was undoubtedly marched up the hills and paraded through the cobbled streets with the other captured Assisians, jeered at and stoned by Perugia’s citizens. We escape any such humiliation, but after maneuvering all the hairpin turns up the hillside, we can’t find a place to park.

  It is the afternoon rush hour; the first parking lot we come to, just inside the city walls, is full, and the Italians’ natural penchant for driving uncomfortably fast strains our resolve to press on. Instead of reentering the narrow speedway to look for another lot, we take the path of least resistance and follow a convoy of local cars into the hill town itself. Our high-fives of self-congratulation when we find a parking place on the street turn into a grueling forced march, up and down the steep streets, then up and around and down and up again until we achieve the city’s historic, and at first unwelcoming, medieval center.

  Virtually all the Italians we encounter in our geographic search for St. Francis are extremely helpful, giving us advice and driving directions, a few even leading us to tricky destinations in their own cars. In one extraordinary gesture, the young owners of the upscale pasta takeout in the tiny village near our rented villa invite us to their home for a five-course dinner and to listen to their recording of Francesco, a musical about Francis that they have seen four times in Assisi.

  An exception is the woman behind the commune desk in Perugia at the massive medieval Palazzo dei Priori, Perugia’s equivalent of a city hall. We are trying to locate the dungeon Francis was locked in, if it still exists. We fail. “I don’t know where it was,” the woman says with a shrug. “Perhaps it was right under this building.” When I ask her if she could refer me to anyone with more knowledge of Francis and medieval Perugia, she shakes her head. “There is nothing about St. Francis in Perugia,” she says. “Go to Assisi.” “What about the church of San Francesco al Prato?” I persist, pointing to the thirteenth-century church marked on the map she’d given me. “It’s closed,” she says.

  We have better luck on a return trip to Perugia with a professional local guide named Inger. The dismissive woman in the commune office had been right about the closing of the church of San Francesco. The church had suffered water damage, Inger tells us, and is being renovated for use as a concert hall. I imagine that would please the young Francis, the troubadour, though in later life he would decry any music that did not contribute to the worship of God.

  As to the medieval dungeon where Francis spent such a miserable year, Inger knows just where it is. We set out at a brisk pace across the windy, high plateau Perugia sits on and along the Piazza Matteotti to the very edge of a sheer cliff into which a five-story building has been built. Inger points at the bottom floor, and resisting an attack of vertigo, I lean over to look straight down at the site where, according to Inger, Francis was imprisoned.

  How bleak it must have been, if Inger is correct—close to being buried alive. I imagine the dampness, the darkness, the airlessness. There is some thought that the prisoners were chained to the walls in the dungeons that were subsequently used to store salt. I am relieved when we turn away from our vantage point and my overwrought imagination begins to fade.

  Perugia, understandably, would never be a favorite venue of Francis, though he would return here often to preach. Several of his miracles were centered in and around Perugia—a mute restored to speech, a cripple restored to physical health. But he persisted in calling it Babylon, and with good reason. The belligerent city not only regularly attacked and pillaged its neighbors but was a den of internal intrigue. Medieval Perugia was known for its deadly poisons, its murders and mutilations, its ritual war of stones, in which teams of men heaved rocks at each other until enough were dead or wounded to signal the game was over.

  Such savagery is hard to imagine as we leave Inger and stroll around Perugia’s beautiful main square, the Piazza IV Novembre, watching its ocher palazzos turn burnt orange in the late afternoon sun. Instead of preparing to slaughter each other, the Perugians we see are preparing for their annual, weeklong Eurochocolate festival, which draws chocolate lovers from all over the world and showcases the city’s own Perugina chocolates.

  The people in the cobbled streets seem very friendly toward each other, unlike their warring medieval predecessors. At one sorry point, recorded in Franciscan annals as the “Curse of Perugia,” the animosity within the city grew so venomous that it interrupted Francis’s sleep, fifteen miles away in Assisi. A vision of the pending carnage of an all-out civil war between knights and citizens, nobles and peasants came to Francis in a dream and led him quickly to Perugia to preach peace. It was not a welcome message.

  I could imagine Francis standing on the steps of Perugia’s duomo, which also fronts on the Piazza IV Novembre, being heckled by the bloodthirsty knights who, Celano writes, “interfered with his words.” The slight friar in the tattered brown habit held his ground against the knights, warning them time and again not to “attack your neighbors with arms, kill and plunder them.” The knights evidently did not heed his warning that “wrath will teach you, for kindness has not,” because shortly thereafter, Perugia descended into civil strife with “unrestrained fury and slaughter,” just as Francis had envisioned.

  But then again, little was sacred to medieval Perugians, including the Pope. One particularly gruesome incident would occur in July 1216, when Pope Innocent III died suddenly of an embolism in Perugia while on a countrywide tour raising recruits for the Fifth Crusade. Pending the funeral rites, his body was locked for safekeeping in the cathedral, where it quickly began to rot in the heat. Upon hearing of the Pope’s death, Francis hurried to Perugia, to discover not only that the body was decaying but that thieves had broken in and stripped the body of all its clothes and Papal trappings.

  My husband and I enter the duomo with some trepidation—two other Popes, one of whom was poisoned to death, are buried there—but its vast, Baroque space seems benign. Mass is being said in a side chapel, and we linger, listening to the music of the liturgy. The cathedral has been rebuilt since the time of Francis, so there is no physical remnant of him there, but there is a great
deal of Franciscan history.

  Soon after Pope Innocent III died—and rotted—there, Francis was propelled by another dream to return to the duomo to meet with the new Pope, Honorius III. In this dream, which Francis had at the Porziuncola, his tiny chapel near Assisi, Jesus instructed him to ask the new Pope for a favor that would please God and bring salvation for humankind. Honorius was startled and his college of cardinals highly resistant when Francis asked the extraordinary favor: the Papal pardon of sin and remission of punishment to every single person who came to confess at the Porziuncola. Such a Papal indulgence was the carrot the Church offered to those who went off on the Crusades to slay the heathens, and its persuasive value would be severely diminished if redemption were available locally. But Francis persisted and the Pope finally relented, albeit with a restriction. Instead of the indulgence being granted to penitents every day, as Francis asked, it would be limited to one day a year, August 2. Francis returned home in ecstasy, saying, “I shall send them all to Paradise.” Who knows whether he succeeded, but the Porziuncola Indulgence started bringing thousands of penitents to Assisi on August 2; one chronicle in 1582 numbered them at over one hundred thousand.

  We leave Perugia for the comfortable villa we have rented just north of of the town, so different from the dungeon where Francis spent that miserable year while his father negotiated for his release. Yet Francis’s biographers claim he remained cheerful throughout his incarceration, to the point where, Celano writes, “His grieving companions resented his happiness and considered him insane and mad.” Francis’s answer to their derision was to ascribe his joy to his conviction that someday he would be “venerated as a saint throughout the whole world,” a boastful prophecy that surely only confirmed their opinion that he was “insane and mad.” And perhaps he was.

  The Francis who returned to Assisi at the age of twenty-two was not the naïve young man who had ridden gaily to war the year before. He was sick, very sick, most certainly with malaria and some say bone tuberculosis. He was more or less bedridden for a year, suffering debilitating fevers. When he finally began to get around with the help of a cane, he was a changed man. He would remain frail for the rest of his life and need constant care.

  His ordeal in Perugia had diminished everything about Francis, including his sense of joy. During his recovery, Celano writes, “he went outside one day and began to look about at the surrounding landscape with great interest. But the beauty of the fields, the pleasantness of the vineyards, and whatever else was beautiful to look upon, could stir in him no delight. He wondered therefore at the sudden change that had come over him, and those who took delight in such things he considered very foolish.”

  Celano’s sentiment about Francis’s joylessness rings true, but his last clause smacks of revisionist biography, for Francis himself continued to be foolish. He did not know how else to live. When Assisi’s displaced nobles began to return from Perugia in 1205, the price of Assisi’s defeat being the commune’s capitulation to the nobles’ demands for compensation, Francis went back to singing and carousing and indulging his friends.

  He did become more charitable, however. In a scene commemorated by Giotto in Assisi, Celano writes that, at some point after Francis was “freed from his chains” in Perugia, he encountered an unfortunate knight in the road “who was poor and well nigh naked.” Francis, who had always idolized knights, “was moved by pity” and gave the knight the “costly garments he was wearing.” Francis made the gesture “for Christ’s sake,” according to Celano, which may very well be true, but then again, Francis may have been identifying with the knight because of the good fortune that had suddenly come his way.

  An unknown noble from Assisi, possibly one of his fellow prisoners from Perugia, invited Francis to ride with him to Apulia in southern Italy to join Pope Innocent III’s forces against the imperial troops backed by the princes of Germany. The issue at hand was really a custody fight over guardianship of young Frederick II, son and heir of the late Emperor Henry VI, whose widow had entrusted the child’s education to the Pope instead of to the imperial court. The bloody struggle between Church and State over Frederick had been going on for almost seven years by the time Francis learned of the nobles’ impending mission. “Upon hearing this,” writes Celano, “Francis, who was flighty and not a little rash, arranged to go with him.”

  It would be a very expensive endeavor. To be a knight required a full suit of custom armor, a chain-link protective blanket and trappings for his horse, a well-turned-out squire to ride with him. Then there were the weapons—a lance, a sculpted sword, assorted daggers—and an out-of-armor wardrobe that would be suitable for a man of noble status. It is thought that Pietro Bernadone had to sell several of his properties to outfit his son properly, but it must have seemed worth it for the higher social standing that having a knight in the family would bring the Bernadones.

  The twenty-four-year-old Francis must have been ecstatic in the winter of 1205 as armorers all over Assisi hammered out his battle dress. Glory and honor were within his reach. He even had a reassuring dream about his future as a Papal warrior, which “raised his spirits with a vision of the heights of glory,” Celano writes. In the dream, his father’s house was filled with “the trappings of war, namely saddles, shields, lances and other things,” rather than the more customary “piles of cloth to be sold.” All these arms would “belong to him and his soldiers,” a voice told Francis in the dream. The interpretation seemed as simple then as it does now. “When he awoke, he arose in the morning with a glad heart, and considering the vision an omen of great success, he felt sure that his journey to Apulia would come out well.”

  It did not.

  3

  The Missing Letter in Spoleto

  THE GOLDEN CITY where Francis gives up becoming a knight · MONTELUCO, the hermitage he founds near Spoleto just because it is so beautiful · the CARCERI, the cave near Assisi where he prays for guidance

  Spoleto rises out of the Umbrian hills like a golden beacon, its bell towers and churches gleaming against the blue sky. Twenty-four miles south of Assisi and a day’s ride by horse, Spoleto is known today for its classical music summer festival and the frescoes of the fifteenth-century artist Fra Lippo Lippi in the apse of the cathedral. In 1205, according to Francis’s biographers, it was the town where he had to abandon his quest for knighthood.

  It was spring when Francis and his traveling companion set out from Assisi on what might very well have been a hot day. His new armor must have felt heavier and heavier as they rode along, as must his shield. It is not known whether they stopped to rest at one of the towns along the way or rode straight through to Spoleto, where they were to spend the night. In any event, by the time they reached Spoleto that night, Francis was sick again with a high fever.

  In his delirium, he had a dream that began to change his life course. A voice spoke to him, according to Celano, asking him who could do better for him, the servant or the Lord. “The Lord,” Francis replied. Then why, the voice continued, was he looking for the servant instead of the Lord? “Lord, what do you want me to do?” Francis asked. “Go back to the place of your birth for through me your vision will have spiritual fulfillment,” the voice said.

  Many biographers have wondered about the “voice” in that dream. Some think it must, of course, have been the voice of God preparing Francis for his more honorable role to come. Others think the voice might have been that of Francis himself, half delirious, realizing he could not continue his journey. Still others wonder if the “voice” Francis heard was that of his traveling companion, presumably a lord, who knew Francis would not be up to the journey and could be a liability. In any event, the dream remains a critical juncture in his legend, and his illness, at least, was real. His bout with the recurring chills and fever of malaria kept him in Spoleto for some time while his companion, presumably, rode on without him.

  We follow Francis from Assisi to Spoleto, not only because Spoleto is so pivotal to his legend but also
because the high hill town houses a unique Franciscan treasure: a letter Francis wrote in his own hand to Brother Leo. I had seen the only other surviving handwritten document of his, also to Leo, in the lower church in Assisi, but there is something exciting about seeing this second document in a location outside the Franciscan-rich collections in Assisi.

  We arrive in Spoleto at noon and, with great anticipation, walk up the long, gently curving Via Filitteria to the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, where the letter is displayed in the Reliquary Chapel. The Rough Guide notes that the duomo is closed between 1:00 P.M. and 3:00, but as anyone who has been to Italy knows, Italians have their own interpretation of time, and when we reach the astonishingly beautiful twelfth-century cathedral, we find it has closed an hour early and will be chiuso until 4:00.

  But no matter. Downtime is a gift in Italy, and we spend some of it over a delicious lunch of local sausage, artichokes, and homemade pasta, and while away the rest walking around the graceful, fan-shaped piazza in front of the cathedral, dodging the local children playing soccer, and wondering who all the men carrying bright orange tote bags and milling around the piazza might be. (They turn out to be obstetricians gathered for a convention.)

  We are the first into the cathedral when the small, very round priest arrives with an ancient iron key ring the size of a bicycle tire to unlock the door. The cathedral, I quickly discover, is not a model of high technology. Each very dark chapel requires a twenty-five-cent euro coin in a light box to shed temporary electric light on its treasures, including an unfinished fresco by a teenage Pinturicchio. Nervously clutching my coin, I enter the Reliquary Chapel and position myself in front of the case on the wall that holds the letter. But when the light comes on, albeit fleetingly, I can’t believe my eyes. The case is empty.