The sultan demurred on his priests’ behalf, having seen one of them “slipping away from his view when he heard Francis’s words.” So Francis made another offer. He would enter the fire alone, and if he came out unharmed, the sultan and his retinue would convert. But again the sultan turned him down. He told Francis that if, in fact, he emerged unscathed, the sultan still would not convert because he “feared a revolt among his people.” A more generous explanation for the sultan’s rejection of Francis’s offer was that he had no desire to risk seeing his new friend burned alive.
And he did consider Francis his friend. The sultan called him Brother Francis and admired him for his bravery and the depth of his religious conviction. Francis, in turn, admired the sultan for his reason and humanity. More important, Francis’s hard stand on Christianity being the only way to salvation softened. “When, during his stay among the Muslims, he experienced how God had graciously accepted them in the otherness of their religion and culture and blessed them with good gifts, he knew that he too had to accept the Muslims in their otherness and approach them with respect for God’s sake,” writes Dr. J. Hoeberichts in Francis and Islam.
When it came time for Francis to return to the Christian camp, the sultan tried to give him “many precious gifts,” which St. Bonaventure claims Francis “spurned as if they were dirt.” It is doubtful that Francis was so rude, and even questionable whether he did, indeed, turn down all gifts. Among the relics in his basilica in Assisi is a silver-and-ivory horn that he is said to have brought back from this visit. Al-Kamil also presented Francis with a far more precious gift: a pass guaranteeing him safe conduct to all the holy places. It is not known whether Francis ever availed himself of the pass to visit Jerusalem and Bethlehem, but it is known that when Francis and Illuminato left, the sultan had an honor guard escort them to the path leading to the Crusader camp. He also asked Francis to include him in his prayers.
If Francis was a changed man, Cardinal Pelagius was not. The sultan felt increasingly unable to continue his defense of Damietta: He was distracted by an attempted coup d’état in Cairo, famine spreading across Egypt, and a new threat from the advancing Mongol armies of Genghis Khan. An epidemic was also raging through Damietta, and he worried about the residents’ defensive strength were the Crusaders to attack. In October 1219, while Francis lay ill in the camp, the sultan sent two captive knights to Pelagius with an extraordinary offer: He promised to give the Crusaders Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Galilee, and Nazareth if they would abandon their quest for Damietta and just leave Egypt.
King John of Jerusalem, who had barely saved the camp from being overrun because of Pelagius, advised the cardinal to accept the offer, as did many other European nobles. But Pelagius refused to negotiate with the infidels. (He was supported by the avaricious Venetians, who wanted to secure Damietta as a trading center.) In short order, Pelagius turned down the sultan’s offer.
There is no indication that Francis was involved in the sultan’s peace overtures, but he surely would have supported the bloodless return of Jerusalem. The carnage and pillaging he had already witnessed in the name of Christ must have shaken him to his core. And, just as the sultan feared, it got worse.
Shortly after Pelagius turned down the peace offer, he sent a scouting party toward Damietta; they reported that the outer wall was unmanned. On November 5, 1219, three months after Francis arrived at the siege of Damietta, the Crusaders swept into the city and took it with barely any opposition. Pelagius may have been vindicated, but Damietta proved to be a scene from hell. The streets were deserted, most of the inhabitants having either fled or died. Bodies were rotting in makeshift graves attended by vultures. The city’s population had shrunk from eighty thousand when the Crusaders arrived to barely three thousand.
Was Francis witness to the subsequent looting of the rich city’s booty, the rape of its women, the selling of the Crusader captives as slaves? Damietta’s children at least were spared and shipped off to Christian-held Jaffa, where they were converted to Catholicism. But the anarchy among the Christian troops and fights over the division of Damietta’s spoils went on for some three months before the city was brought under control.
Francis and his friars, more of whom had arrived from Acre, were given a house to use as a ministry. That the militant Christians were in need of a refresher course on the teachings of Jesus goes without saying, but perhaps the friars’ most attentive audience were the “infidels” they set out, with considerable risk, to convert. “The Saracens gladly listened to the Friars Minor preach as long as they explained faith in Christ and the doctrine of the gospel,” writes Jacques de Vitry, the bishop of Acre, in his thirteenth-century history of Crusades and the Holy Land. “But as soon as their preaching attacked Mohammed and openly condemned him as a liar and traitor, then these ungodly men heaped blows up them and chased them from their cities.”
Secure in Damietta, the Crusaders turned it into a Christian town, installing a Roman Catholic as bishop, much to the disgust of the native Orthodox Coptic Christians, and converting the city’s handsome mosque, the second oldest in Egypt, into the Cathedral of the Virgin. Francis surely prayed at the mosque turned cathedral, the remains of which, unbelievably, are still here. The building is being reconstructed now, as a mosque, which it became again only eighteen months after the Christians converted it to a cathedral. And again, all because of Pelagius.
Francis is thought to have departed Damietta for Acre in February 1220, leaving behind the increasingly belligerent Pelagius, who having captured Damietta, soon decided to march on Cairo and take all of Egypt for Christ. He failed in August 1221, and with him, the Fifth Crusade. The annual Nile flood would turn to mud the route the Crusaders were taking to Cairo. The sultan’s forces added to the mire by demolishing the dikes holding back the surging river, leaving the Crusader forces completely stranded. Rather than lose his army to the surrounding forces of the sultan, Pelagius was forced to surrender Damietta and sign an eight-year truce. After three years of hardship and the loss of thousands of lives, the Crusaders had come up completely empty—no Jerusalem, no Nazareth, no Bethlehem, no Cairo, not even Damietta. At least they were still alive: Instead of slaughtering them, the sultan let the Crusaders sail away—which was all, in fact, he had ever wanted.
The puzzle that remains is where Francis was between the late winter of 1220, when he is thought to have left the camp at Damietta with King John, and his next recorded sighting, in Acre, that summer. Nobody knows. The romantic explanation is that Francis used the sultan’s gift of safe conduct to visit Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Christendom’s holiest church, built on Golgotha by the emperor Constantine over the sites where Christ was crucified, buried, and rose again. But surely Francis’s biographers would have recorded such a momentous event.
The more likely explanation is that Francis was lying sick in Acre, sick not only physically but at heart. He had failed on the two missions that led him to Egypt: He had not converted the sultan, and he had not been martyred. He had witnessed mass death, rape, pillaging, and epidemic disease. Moreover, his faith in the tactics and infallibility of the Church surely had been shaken. “He had also observed … that the Muslim al-Kamil had demonstrated a greater humanity and desire for peace than his Christian counterpart, Pelagius,” writes Adrian House.
The news that a young friar brought Francis from Assisi in July 1220 was just as depressing. There were rumors at the Porziuncola that he was dead. The two vicars Francis had left in charge while he was in Egypt had summarily moved to bring the order more in line with other, traditional orders by changing the requirements for fasting and relaxing Francis’s insistence on extreme poverty. They had even erased the Gospel dictum—“Take nothing with you for your journey”—from the Rule.
Clare and the Poor Ladies were also being pressured to abandon their rule of extreme poverty and, like the Benedictines, accept the ownership of property. Moreover, the friars who had been assigned to look after the Poor Clare
s and collect their alms were no longer allowed to see or even speak to them. The Third Order, too, was suffering and in danger of splintering. Was everything Francis lived for about to be lost?
His year in the Holy Land came to an abrupt end. Francis left Acre on the first Venetian galley to try to salvage his orders and return his friars to what Jacques de Vitry approvingly calls the Franciscan “life of the primitive church.” But the wheels of modernization were turning too fast for Francis. His vision of his friars joyfully following his example of simplicity, humility, and poverty in the love of Christ was doomed.
17
Cruising the Venice Lagoon
The “DESERTED ISLAND” where Francis strengthens his resolve · BOLOGNA, where he vents his wrath · ASSISI, where he resigns as head of the Franciscan Order
The vaporetto cuts through the blue water of the Venice lagoon, heading toward the island of Burano. Gleaming behind us in Venice are at least three buildings Francis would have seen when he arrived here from Acre in 1220—the Palazzo Ducale in St. Mark’s Square, the towering campanile that functioned then as a lighthouse, and the signature Basilica di San Marco. What does not show is the basilica’s shady past. In 828 the ancient Venetians stole the body of St. Mark the Evangelist, founder of the Egyptian Coptic Church, from Alexandria and built Venice’s most famous church to house it. Four hundred years later, the medieval Venetians stole the basilica’s famous sculptures, the horses of San Marco, from Turkey during the Fourth Crusade. The life-size horses, among shiploads of other priceless treasures, arrived in Venice after the sacking of Constantinople in 1204.
Francis, too, figures into the lore surrounding the Basilica of San Marco. According to one medieval text, the Kinship of St. Francis, a Venetian abbot named Joachim foresaw his coming years before Francis was born and painted a portrait of him in San Marco wearing what would become his familiar “habit and cord.” As further proof of his vision, the abbot pictured Francis in bare feet with the stigmata clearly visible, “maintaining he was a most holy man and should be honored by everyone.”
Whether or not Francis felt honored by anyone when he arrived in Venice, he must have felt exhausted. He had been very sick on the voyage home, according to one of his modern biographers, suffering a recurrence of high malarial fevers as well as liver disease. His eye infection was also worsening, and he was plagued by sharp pains behind his eyes. Perhaps that is why he sought a place to regain his strength and the solitude to plan his reentry into the affairs of his fractious order. That place is identified vaguely by his medieval biographers as a “deserted island” in the lagoon of Venice.
Unbelievably, that island, which has been home to Franciscan friars since 1233, has long since been identified. It is known as the Isola del Deserto—and that is where we are headed.
There is magic in the way the afternoon light plays off the water in Venice. The ripples in the silver lagoon are alternately pink and gold as we move slowly in a fishing boat to the four-acre island through an allée of staked fishing traps. The Isola del Deserto is very near the colorful lace-making island of Burano, where per the instructions of the friars on the island, we have hired Alessio, Burano’s garrulous former postman, to transport us in his boat. The twenty-five-horsepower motor driving Alessio’s boat gives him time to regale us with stories about the Franciscan convent on the island.
Where once there were thirty to forty friars, now there are only seven, he tells us. The frati used to run a school on the island, but no more. As a child during and after World War II, Alessio would swim from Burano to the island, holding his clothes on his head, to get something to eat. “Everyone has forgotten how hungry the people were,” he says.
The island looks as magical as the light on the water as we draw closer. Almost completely encircled by tall cypresses and a waterside walk, the island has only one sign of habitation visible from the water, the convent’s tall bell tower. The little, sheltered dock we land at, however, reveals a quite substantial complex of buildings. We approach them along a tidy gravel path past a rude wooden cross and along a high brick garden wall to the sunbaked church, San Francesco del Deserto—to be greeted by Friar Antonino.
If the late actor Walter Matthau had been cloned, he would have reappeared as the eighty-two-year-old Friar Antonino. The friar carries an English script in his hand about the convent’s history, which he delights in reading rapidly, theatrically, and virtually unintelligibly. We are with an Italian friend, Angela Seriaccholi, who is also researching a book on Francis, and she implores him to speak in Italian, which she will translate for us, but no; Friar Antonino is on a roll and won’t give up his performance art. So, uninformed but entertained, we dutifully follow him from the thirteenth-century cloister to the fifteenth-century cloister, from the fifteenth-century chapels of the Madonna and St. Bernardino to the thirteenth-century sacristy, with its original stone floor visible under glass, and on to the Oratory of St. Francis.
Francis reportedly chose this spot to pray in during his monthlong stay on the island. The oratory was outside then, and has since been enclosed, making the gaunt, life-size sculpture of Francis kneeling in prayer inside it visible through a grate in the inside oratory wall as well as from the outside. According to Friar Antonino, the site was enclosed and roofed in soon after Francis’s death, at the order of St. Anthony. “Quick! Quick!” Friar Antonino ad-libs St. Anthony’s instructions. “We must build a church and put in an altar, just in case Francis is canonized. Then this will be the first church dedicated to him.”
However entertaining the friar’s performance, I pause to admire a painting of Francis with Venetian birds. According to St. Bonaventure, Francis and a “brother” were walking through the “marshes of Venice” when they came upon a “large flock of birds singing among the reeds.” In what has become a familiar sequence of events, Francis, who wanted to recite the canonical hours with his friar, asked his “Sister birds” to stop singing so the two men could hear each other. The birds obliged until the “holy man of God” gave them permission to sing again and the birds “resumed singing in their usual way.”
Near the painting are the remains of yet another tree that miraculously grew from a staff Francis planted in the ground here when he returned from Acre. The pine tree lasted for 481 years, until it collapsed in the eighteenth century. The stump of the “giganta,” as Friar Antonino describes it, is in the church. Outside—near the convent’s extensive garden of cabbage, radicchio, eggplant, and fennel, and its orchard of apple, pear, apricot, cherry, fig, and persimmon trees—is the overgrown stone grotto where the tree had stood, shored up by guy wires in its last days.
The island is lovely and, it turns out, quite busy. The convent not only is open to the public, but according to a younger friar we meet, Friar Augustino, offers well-attended weekend spiritual retreats, counseling for engaged couples, a weeklong summer camp for young people, and a ten-day icon-painting course in June. In the spirit of Francis, especially after he returned from his meeting with the sultan, the convent also hosts meetings between representatives of different religions.
It is easy to see why Francis lingered on this serene island before tackling the problems that lay ahead. He began by writing a defiant letter of support to Clare, who was fighting the Church for her “right” to live in extreme poverty. “I, little Brother Francis, wish to follow the life and the poverty of our most high Lord Jesus Christ and his most Holy Mother, and to persevere in it until death,” he wrote. “And I beg you and advise you to live always in this most holy life and in poverty. Beware of departing in any way from it because of the advice or teaching of anyone whatsoever.”
Francis continued his hard line when he left the island to go on to Bologna. Our feelings are more mellow as we depart at sunset and head back to Burano through the inky shadows cast on the water by the island’s sentinel cypresses. The night turns cold on the vaporetto, and we think of Francis girding himself to return to his divided flock.
Bologna is a ni
ghtmare for us—as it was for Francis. Our joint issue is lodging. For us, it is the international leather trade fair that has filled every hotel room for miles around. (We finally find a wildly expensive room in a suburban hotel, crammed with Pakistani leather dealers.) For Francis, it was not the lack of lodging but the abuse of it.
One version of the Bologna legend reports Francis arrived in the city to discover that the Franciscan convent established here years before by Brother Bernardo had been transformed into an elegant, comfortable residence, known as “the house of the brothers.” The irate Francis promptly threw all the friars—including his dear friend Brother Leo, who was ill at the time—out of the house.
Granted, Francis was ill himself and undoubtedly irritable, but still, his actions seem severe. The convent had been a gift to Brother Bernardo from a local judge during the earliest days of the Franciscan movement after the judge had watched Bernardo withstand public abuse and derision while preaching in the main piazza. “They pulled his capuche, one backwards, one forward; some threw stones, and others, dirt,” reports the Little Flowers. Bernardo’s patience and cheerful endurance, made more poignant by the fact that he, who was now wearing rags, had studied law at the University of Bologna, moved the judge to offer him a house in which he could “serve God fittingly.” That convent, the first established by the Franciscans, had been the source of great pride, but now, to Francis, it was a betrayal of holy poverty.
Another version of Francis’s stern stay in Bologna is more complicated. He discovered that the Franciscan minister of Bologna, which was home to Italy’s foremost university, had started his own library and center of study—without Francis’s permission. This was anathema to Francis on two counts. Not only had the minister disobeyed the rule of obedience but he, too, had violated holy poverty. Francis was vehemently opposed to his friars’ owning books, because books, which had to be hand-copied on parchment, were very expensive and tended to inflate the egos of their owners. “After you have a psalter,” he had admonished a young friar, “you will desire and want to have a breviary [prayer book]; after you have a breviary, you will sit in a chair of authority like a great prelate and you will tell your brother: ‘Bring me the breviary!’ ”
On the Road with Francis of Assisi Page 21
