On the Road with Francis of Assisi (20 page)

15

The Marches Again—Green Fields, Blue Adriatic

A
NCONA,
where Francis sails, unsuccessfully, for Syria ·
S
IROLO,
where the returning Francis saves a man’s life ·
Ó
SIMO,
where he preaches with an adopted lamb ·
S
AN
S
EVERINO
and
A
SCOLI,
where he wins many new friars ·
S
AN
L
EO,
where he is given the mountain on which he will receive the stigmata

W
e 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 sanctioned 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.

Today, the ferry trip from Zadar to Italy takes a few hours; for Francis the return trip turned out to be even more fraught than the outgoing one. According to St. Bonaventure, the stranded Francis had no money to pay for his passage, and the hard-hearted sailors of a ship going to Ancona refused his entreaties “to take him with them for the love of God.” Francis had to resort to the age-old method of secretly stowing himself and his companion friar in the hold of the ship. They might very well have starved to death had not a well-wisher, “sent by God for this poor man,” arrived at the ship just before it sailed and secretly handed the food Francis and his brother would need on the passage to a God-fearing sailor who was instructed to distribute it to them “in a friendly fashion in their time of need.”

The time of need turned out to be universal aboard the ship as it ran into such a “great storm,” according to Celano, that the sailors had to “spend many days laboring at the oars.” The food supplies onboard dwindled until only the few alms miraculously provided for Francis remained—which prompted a second miracle. The small cache of food “multiplied so much that while they were delayed at sea for many days by the relentless storm, it fully supplied their needs until they reached the port of Ancona,” writes St. Bonaventure. By then, the hard-hearted sailors had changed their attitude toward the stowaways, realizing that they had “escaped many threats of death through God’s servant.”

Francis, safely back on dry land, decided to save souls closer to home, in the Marches. He did not give up his determination to convert the Saracens: He would try, and fail again, in 1213 after falling gravely ill in Spain en route to Morocco. At this point in his legend, however, Francis left the port in Ancona and “began to walk the earth and to sow in it the seed of salvation,” writes St. Bonaventure. His preaching tour started in Ancona and went on through the coastal towns and mountain villages of the Marches, “reaping fruitful harvests.” After their initial mistrust of Francis, the simple, land-loving people of the Marches had become more receptive to him than the populations of any other part of Italy, and soon, Celano writes, “many good and suitable men . . . followed him devoutly in his life and proposal.”

Following Francis on his preaching tour of the Marches turns out to be an unexpected delight for us. The entire eastern edge of the small province fronts on the sunlit Adriatic and on the west is bounded by the snowcapped Sibilene mountains. In between, the Marches’ fertile land is a dazzling patchwork of farms and vineyards, and its old, inland hill towns are virtually tourist-free. We eat splendid Marche meals of fresh grilled fish;
coniglio in coccio,
rabbit cooked in white wine and milk;
olive Ascolane,
a Marche specialty of giant breaded and deep-fried olives stuffed with minced meat and cheese; and top it all off with a nightly bottle of Verdicchio, the local white wine.

Francis’s first and very pleasant stop, as is ours, was in the tiny seaside resort village of Sirolo, seven miles from Ancona. Local legend holds that he stayed here in an inn built into the city walls, and we stay in that same inn, now a tony seven-room hotel called the Locanda Rocco. Francis is said to have performed a miracle from an upstairs room—he saved the life of a man who was about to fall from the inn’s adjacent arch onto the cobbled stone street below. We stay in that room.

One of our windows looks straight out at the “miraculous” stone arch entry into the town, embedded with a Crusader cross. Another window overlooks the Adriatic, and still another frames the distant, floodlit, and mammoth pilgrimage Sanctuary of Loreto, which contains what the faithful believe is the original stone house of the Virgin Mary in Nazareth, flown here by angels in 1294. Francis reportedly predicted the airborne delivery of the Virgin’s house to Loreto, then the site of a thriving Franciscan community, a prophecy that seems perfectly in keeping with the medieval ethos of the Marches.

The residents of the Marches, including the early native Franciscan friars, were noted for their poetic fancy and mystical natures. The
Little Flowers of St. Francis
was written by a friar from the Marches and includes many stories of Marche friars overcome by religious ecstasy. One, Brother John of Fermo, “would run as if drunk: sometimes through the garden, sometimes through the woods, sometimes through the church, as the flame and force of the spirit drove him.” A later and popular Marche friar, St. Joseph of Cupertino, the patron saint for students taking exams, frequently levitated and flew through the air. His remains are preserved, under glass, at the church dedicated to him in Ósimo, a Marche hill town.

Sirolo is a perfect repository of that mysticism. An engraved stone plaque near a tiny old chapel just down the street from the Locanda Rocco tells the legend of the still-standing trees Francis planted here with his own hands, in 1212. Because of the bright color of their seedpods, the trees are known locally as the “cherries of St. Francis.”

The “cherry” trees are just inside the walls of the Vetta Marina, now a private estate and the site where Francis was given a convent by a local noble either in 1212 or on a return trip in 1215. Massimo, the estate’s caretaker and hunting friend of the owner of the Locanda Rocco, graciously shows us the ruins of the old convent, then takes us along a manicured gravel path to the edge of the estate’s seaside cliff. According to local legend, Francis stood on this dizzying 330-foot-high cliff and preached to the fish that had gathered in large numbers in the milky blue sea below to listen to the holy man.

And the Marche legends only get more charming. It is the saga of Francis and a lamb that leads us along the cattailed road from Sirolo inland to the hill town of Ósimo. According to Celano, Francis and one of his friars, Brother Paul, were walking along this road when Francis saw what he considered a sacrilege—a lamb alone among a herd of goats. Francis identified lambs with Christ, but for all his love of animals, he evidently did not like goats. “Do you see that sheep walking so meekly among these many goats?” Francis asked Brother Paul. “I tell you, in the same way our Lord Jesus Christ, meek and humble, walked among the Pharisees and chief priests.”

Francis wanted to buy the sheep to spare its humiliation among the goats, but he and Paul had no money, and the cheap tunics they were wearing were not sufficient for barter. Miraculously, a traveling merchant came on the scene and bought the sheep for them. So now, Francis and Paul had a sheep, which they took with them to Ósimo to visit the bishop.

Ósimo seems a rather cheerless, steep-streeted town when we arrive on a cold and gray morning, perhaps because we meet there with our first—and only—unpleasant encounter in all our Italian travels. We stop in a coffee bar for a warming cappuccino on our way up to the thirteenth-century Cathedral di San Leopardo, and a drunk in the bar apparently makes such rude remarks about us in Italian that an offended patron throws him out the door.

Francis’s welcome was undoubtedly warmer than ours but not altogether satisfactory. He, Paul, and the lamb proceeded up the same steep street to the cathedral and right up the steps into the sanctuary, to be greeted by the startled bishop. Celano credits the bishop with being “touched in his heart” by the parable of the sheep—but he did not offer to take the animal from Francis. So Francis, after preaching to the good folk of Ósimo the next day, left the hill town with Paul and the lamb, with Francis beginning “to wonder what to do with the sheep.”

His answer leads us from Ósimo some twenty-five miles across the Marches to the small and important medieval Franciscan town of San Severino, where Francis solved the sheep problem by presenting the animal as a gift to the Poor Clares cloistered there. Unlike the bishop in Ósimo, the Poor Clares in San Severino reportedly accepted the lamb “as a great gift from God.” According to Celano, the “maidservants of Christ . . . devotedly cared for the sheep” and made a tunic for Francis out of its wool, a tunic he received back in Assisi “with great reverence and high spirits, hugging and kissing it.”

The medieval center of San Severino, with its handsome elliptical, arcade-rimmed piazza, is rich with Franciscan lore. Francis was officially here at least twice and left a plethora of miracles in his wake—a boy cured of leprosy, a man restored to life after being crushed by a stone. Francis’s preaching converted several sons of San Severino to his order, including Brother Masseo, one of his earliest and closest friars, and Brother Bentivoglia, whose thirteenth-century body was so graphically preserved and lit under glass in one of the town’s many churches that it scared people. (His face is now covered more soothingly in wax, but his bony feet are natural.)