On the Road with Francis of Assisi

by Linda Bird Francke

  The way back down from the Sarteano hermitage is easier, of course, both for us and, presumably, for Francis. He would need the spiritual renewal he had received here to continue his journey to save as many souls as was humanly possible. What was becoming increasingly apparent, however, was that he was succeeding beyond expectation. The response to Francis and his traveling message of peace and redemption was bringing him so many new converts that he had to rethink the structure of his movement. The answer would come to him in the little Umbrian hill town of Alviano—and multiply his followers by the thousands.

  14

  Shrieking Swallows in Alviano

  ALVIANO, where Francis silences the swallows and considers a Third Franciscan Order · SAN ROCCO, the Third Order’s Porziuncola near Montefalco · the tiny shrine of SANT’ILLUMINATA near ALVIANO, where Francis might have formulated the whole idea

  The drive to the picture-book castle town of Alviano is spectacular. The road hugs the banks of the Tiber River, then rises to run along a dramatic gully past a huge, artificial lake, the Lago di Carbara, and continues on to the Lago di Alviano and the Alviano Oasis. The “oasis,” a huge marsh area created by the damming of the Tiber River, attracts some 150 species of migratory birds and is managed by the World Wildlife Fund. The WWF oversees the nature walks through the oasis and its “hides,” from which bird-watchers can see migrating cranes and fish hawks and geese. There must be close to three thousand geese and ducks on the lake the October afternoon we are there.

  Birds of a different sort are central to an important chapter of Francis and his legend at Alviano. It was here, inside the charming walled and turreted fortress town overlooking the lake, that Francis is thought to have created the Third Franciscan Order, this one composed of urban laypeople. And all because of a flock of swallows.

  According to his medieval biographers, Francis came to Alviano around 1212 to preach but ran into a natural obstacle. There were so many nesting swallows making so much noise—“shrieking” is the word used by Celano—that the people gathered in Alviano’s central piazza could not hear him. Francis solved the problem by simply addressing the birds. “My sister swallows, now it is time for me also to speak since you have already said enough,” he advised the swallows, which according to Celano immediately fell silent.

  According to the Little Flowers of St. Francis, the people were so astonished when Francis quieted the “shrieking” swallows that “they wanted to follow him and abandon the village.” Francis dissuaded them—with a promise: “Don’t be in a hurry and don’t leave, for I will arrange what you should do for the salvation of your souls.” It was from that moment, the Little Flowers claims, that Francis started formulating the idea of a Third Order, “for the salvation of all people everywhere.”

  It was a brilliant concept. People had been flocking to Francis wherever he preached. Married couples, widows, mothers, fathers embraced his teachings and wanted to live a Franciscan life. “Many of the people, both noble and ignoble, cleric and lay, impelled by divine inspiration, began to come to St. Francis, wanting to carry on the battle constantly under his discipline and under his leadership,” writes Celano.

  The challenge was that many of these new converts had family obligations and could not become itinerant preachers or enter convents or monasteries. They wanted to follow Francis in their everyday lives. The result is the subject of an ongoing debate among Franciscan historians. Some claim that Francis merely urged his secular followers to live godly lives in their own homes, while others, including several of his medieval biographers, insist Francis established what was known as the Brothers and Sisters of Penance, or the Franciscan Third Order, for both secular penitents and clerics. “Thus through Blessed Francis’s perfect devotion to the Blessed Trinity, the Church of Christ was renewed by three new orders,” says the Legend of the Three Companions. “His three distinct orders were each in due time approved and confirmed by the sovereign pontiff.”

  Whatever its original makeup, the Third Order would prove to be an enormous success. Francis had tapped into the religious resurgence sweeping the towns and cities of Italy, a resurgence due largely to his preaching tours. “It is an historical fact that around 1215 in the urban centers of Italy we see a sudden increase in the number of penitents, even among married persons,” writes G. G. Messerman in his 1961 history of the penitential movement. The “unexpected increase” of urban penitents, he continues, is “attributed to St. Francis of Assisi.”

  Francis would write a “norm of life” for the Brothers and Sisters of Penance, believed to be his Letter to the Faithful, in which he exhorts his lay followers to follow a religious life of penance, charity, humility, and prayer. “Oh, how happy and blessed are these men and women when they do these things and persevere in doing them, since the spirit of the Lord will rest upon them,” Francis writes. The consequences are dire, however, for those who don’t. “No matter where or when or how a man dies in the guilt of sin without doing penance and satisfaction,” Francis warns, “the devil snatches up his soul from his body with so much anguish and tribulation that no one can know it unless he has experienced it.”

  Approved orally by Pope Honorius III in 1221 and more formally in 1289 by Pope Nicholas IV, the first Franciscan Pope, the “rule” for the Brothers and Sisters of Penance contained a revolutionary provision: In the pursuit of peace, members of the Third Order were forbidden to carry arms and were instructed to avoid taking oaths. The result was a serious blow to feudalism and the ability of warring governments, communes, and landed families to order up armies. The prohibition so infuriated the bellicose tendencies of some members of society at the time that yet another Pope, Gregory IX, had to issue a Papal bull in 1228 defending the right of the increasingly persecuted members of the Third Order not to carry arms or enter military service.

  Nonetheless, the Third Franciscan Order attracted extraordinary people who wanted to follow Francis and his life of penance. Francis’s close female friend “Brother” Jacopa in Rome joined the new order. So did members of some of Europe’s royal families: the widowed princess St. Elizabeth of Hungary; the widowed queen St. Elizabeth of Portugal; King St. Louis IX of France; and King Ferdinand V and his queen, Isabella I, of Spain.

  According to a Third Order website, Christopher Columbus also joined the Third Order, as did the artists Giotto, Raphael, and Michelangelo; the scientist Louis Pasteur; the musicians Franz Liszt and Charles Gounod; and the poet Dante, who is buried in the church of St. Francis in Ravenna, allegedly in a Franciscan habit. The Third Order would also produce many, many Popes and, beyond the “royal” saints, St. Margaret of Cortona, a single mother turned penitent, and St. Rose of Viterbo, who converted an entire village by standing for three hours, unscathed, in a burning pyre.

  Fraternities of the Brothers and Sisters of Penance sprang up all over Italy and soon spread through Europe. Some were laypeople, known today as the Secular Franciscan Order, or S.F.O.; others were clerics, who became known as the Franciscan Third Order Regular, or T.O.R. The men and women established their own convents and churches and eventually had their own Franciscan habits. By the mid-fifteenth century, they also had their own minister general and their own Porziuncola, at the Little Church of San Rocco near the Umbrian high hill town of Montefalco.

  Because of its historical significance, we had gone to Montefalco to try to find San Rocco. Local legend holds that Francis established a convent here in 1215, the year the Third Order took hold, and miraculously caused a spring to appear to supply fresh water. But we also went to the skyscraping Montefalco, known familiarly as the “balcony of Umbria,” to see the vibrant fifteenth-century fresco cycle of Francis’s life by the Florentine artist Benozzo Gozzoli in the old San Francesco church and to indulge in Montefalco’s unique and universally celebrated red Sagrantino wine. It is tempting to think that Francis, who passed often through Montefalco, indulged as well in the wine from the town’s ancient vineyards.

  We found San Rocco with conside
rable difficulty in the adjacent and tiny village of Camiano. The ancient church stands now on private property in a small, gated community, and we never would have achieved it had it not been for a passing woman who unlocked the gate for us, insisting that, by law, San Rocco has to be accessible to anyone who wants to see it. What she neglected to tell us about was the dog that was presumably guarding the house next to the church and that immediately took a strong dislike to us.

  Standing in front of the ancient, slightly peaked, almost windowless old stone church made our visit worth it, though. Solid and unadorned, San Rocco looks nothing like the tarted-up Porziuncola in Assisi. The old church breathes authenticity and seems a natural place for Francis’s followers to have convened so long ago and to make pilgrimages to today.

  The Third Franciscan Order continues to thrive worldwide, and its members reportedly number in the millions. We had met several members ourselves on our journey—the smiling, elderly sister who runs a hostel for pilgrims in Assisi, an attractive young woman at a convent in the Marches, an extremely helpful man in New York—and they all owe a spiritual debt to this little church of San Rocco, where six hundred years ago the Franciscan Third Order was formally organized, and to the miracle of the shrieking swallows in Alviano, where two hundred years earlier the idea was born.

  That miracle is recreated and celebrated in Alviano in the Chapel of the Swallows off the beautiful Renaissance courtyard inside the reconstructed sixteenth-century castle. The fresco of Francis silencing the birds has a familiar quirk: One of the faces in the thirteenth-century crowd listening to him preach belongs to the seventeenth-century woman Donna Olimpia, who commissioned the fresco.

  Because we are in Alviano, we feel compelled to visit the nearby hermitage of Sant’Illuminata. The Franciscans inherited the second-century convent and hermitage in the twelfth century, and Francis is said to have stayed there often in a grotto whose singular stone slab “bed” is surfaced with a panno di velluto, or cloth of velvet. That description is intriguing enough to draw us up the mountain. We stop to ask directions from an old woman walking along the mountain road, having learned that young people are less apt to know the whereabouts of Francis sites, and she directs us higher up toward Guardia. After several wrong turns, we see a tiny yellow sign with a cross on it, and turning down an unmarked gravel road through an olive grove, we chance upon the little cell in the side of the hill, bearing the small inscription “Crypta di San Francesco.”

  It would seem that, having visited so many Franciscan hermitages, we would be sated and even blasé about finding yet another. But these isolated caves, and the reverence they continue to inspire, never cease to amaze me. Here we are, on top of a mountain with nothing around for miles, in front of a roadside cave barely three feet wide and ten feet deep, and there are fresh flowers in the assorted tin cans outside the grated opening and candles burning inside on the altar.

  A brochure we picked up in Alviano tells us that this little fissure in the rock was created in a “furious” earthquake and is a miniature La Verna, the much more dramatic mountain fissure where Francis would later receive the stigmata. But it is the “velvet” stone bed that has drawn us here, and we get the flashlight from the car to discover that the slab’s surface does indeed have a velvety, porous texture.

  Perhaps Francis rested and meditated here after preaching in Alviano, and perhaps it was in this very grotto that he formulated his vision of a lay order for his followers. It is a lovely, quiet spot with a splendid view of Lake Alviano from across the road. He must have been as reluctant to leave this tranquillity to return to the real world of preaching as he was from every hermitage, in which he often spent months at a time. “He sometimes feared that, under pretext of withdrawing into solitude to pray, his body was in reality seeking only to escape from the fatigues of preaching throughout the world, this world for which Christ did not hesitate to come from heaven on earth,” records the Legend of Perugia.

  But Francis did not give in to his fatigue. Instead, he expanded the geography of his evangelical zeal. As a younger man, he had dreamed of becoming a knight and forcefully routing the Muslim infidels from Jerusalem. In this year of 1212, he dreamed again of going to the Middle East, but this time to peacefully convert the infidels to Christianity.

  He didn’t make it.

  15

  The Marches Again—Green Fields, Blue Adriatic

  ANCONA, where Francis sails, unsuccessfully, for Syria · SIROLO, where the returning Francis saves a man’s life · ÓSIMO, where he preaches with an adopted lamb · SAN SEVERINO and ASCOLI, where he wins many new friars · SAN LEO, where he is given the mountain on which he will receive the stigmata

  We are sitting in a cafeteria in the busy Adriatic port of Ancona, watching the huge commercial ferries unload. One eighteen-wheel truck after another rumbles past the windows with ever-more-exotic route markings—Athens, Sofia, Skopje, Patras, Piraeus, Bucharest, Warsaw. Passengers and similar trucks join the loading line for other exotic ferry destinations: Zadar, Dubrovnik, Split, Izmir and Istanbul, Bodrum, Rhodes, and the Greek Islands. One ferry will go all the way to Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile.

  The medieval port of Ancona was just as busy. European trade was brisk between North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, and commercial sailing vessels regularly arrived from and departed to these same ports, carrying spices, cloth, salt, olive oil, gold, wine. The ships also transported merchants, Crusaders, pilgrims, and missionaries. One of the missionaries, in the summer of 1212, was Francis.

  rancis was bound for Syria, determined, in the words of St. Bonaventure, “to preach the Christian faith and penance to the Saracens and other non-believers”—or die trying. Martyrdom for Christ was considered the pinnacle of perfect love by Christian extremists in the Middle Ages, and Francis, whom St. Bonaventure describes as “burning with the desire for martrydom,” was no exception.

  There was ample opportunity for Francis and other Christian evangelists. Muslim armies controlled most of what is now known as the Middle East but was then considered Greater Syria—modern Syria and Lebanon, western Iraq, northern Saudi Arabia, and most of Jordan, Israel, and Palestine. But the prize then, as it is today, was the holy city of Jerusalem.

  Liberating Jerusalem was one of was Francis’s lifelong dreams, a dream shared by many European Christians. Francis had been only six in 1187, when Jerusalem was wrested from the Christians by Muslim armies headed by the legendary Muslim Kurd general Saladin. Now he wanted to go in peace and succeed where so many others had failed.

  Four unsuccessful Christian crusades had been launched from Europe by the time Francis arrived in Ancona. The third, and most ambitious, had been led between 1189 and 1192 by the crowned heads of Europe—the German emperor, Frederick Barbarossa (who fell off his horse en route and drowned); the French king, Philip II; and the English king, Richard the Lion-Heart. The royal armies did manage to recapture much of the coastline of Palestine, including the Crusader Kingdom of Acre, which would serve as a Christian stronghold for the next century.

  But Jerusalem, though reopened by Saladin to Christian pilgrims, remained securely in Muslim hands—and stayed so during the embarrassing Fourth Crusade, which never even reached the Holy Land. The Venetians, who held the lucrative Papal contract to transport the Crusaders to the Holy Land, instead turned their sights—and their sails—on the fractious Orthodox Christian city of Constantinople. Led ashore by the blind, octogenarian doge of Venice, the Venetians and their cargo of Crusaders forgot all about Jerusalem in the frenzy of sacking Constantinople.

  That sorry crusade, which would leave Constantinople under the control of Rome for the next half century, ended in 1204, eight years before Francis decided to embark on his own crusade or, as some think, to join one already in progress.

  Francis’s arrival in Ancona in 1212 coincided with the so-called Children’s Crusade. The romantic and ultimately tragic version of this “crusade” (unofficial because the Pope had not sanctio
ned it) involves the more or less simultaneous visions of Jesus by two twelve-year-old boys in France and Germany who were instructed to lead a crusade of innocents to liberate Jerusalem. Few of the forty thousand children who set out for the Mediterranean coast made it, however—and none reached the Holy Land. Crossing the Alps claimed the lives of most of the German children, and the French children who straggled into the port at Marseilles found the Mediterranean did not part for them as promised. The tragedy climaxed when the children who set out by boat ended up either shipwrecked or captured by pirates and sold into slavery.

  An alternative version of the Children’s Crusade—and the one that pertains to Francis—is less heartrending. According to linguists, the Latin word pueri means both “young boys” or “children” and “landless serfs.” Accordingly, this theory purports that the Children’s Crusade was in fact a ragtag army of the poor and disenfranchised who were caught up in the religious fervor of the time and believed that they, not armed knights or royalty, were chosen by God to liberate Jerusalem. Francis, the living symbol of holy poverty, may very well have been one of them.

  And so he had made his way through the Marches to Ancona, as had many others, to try to get to the Holy Land. And he, like so many others, would fail. Francis managed to get himself on a boat, accompanied by an unnamed friar, but the vessel met strong unfavorable winds and, instead of sailing southeast via Rhodes for the three-week voyage to Acre, was blown ninety-five miles northeast across the Adriatic to fetch up on the Dalmatian coast. Some say Francis was shipwrecked and survived only by the protection of God, but whether or not there was an actual shipwreck, he was definitely stranded in the port of Zara, now called Zadar, in what is modern Croatia.