On the Road with Francis of Assisi (24 page)

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 Clares 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
“D
ESERTED
I
SLAND
”
where Francis strengthens his resolve ·
B
OLOGNA,
where he vents his wrath ·
A
SSISI,
where he resigns as head of the Franciscan Order

T
he 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 nightmare 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!’ ”

Francis also had an aversion to his friars’ studying or teaching in universities, because he felt such intellectual pursuits diverted them from prayer and their spiritual relationship with God. Both these aversions converged in Bologna.

Francis was so incensed that he ordered the center and its library destroyed. The minister either ignored the order or rebuilt the center after Francis left, which leads to a truly horrifying story. According to the
Kinship of St. Francis,
Francis put a curse on the disobedient minister, who immediately fell ill. Even after two friars came to Francis and asked him to lift the curse, he refused. And the minister was doomed. As he lay on his bed “a fiery drop of sulfur came down from on high on his body, and it bored completely through him and the bed on which he was lying. And with a great stench, he expired.”

It is difficult to lend any credence to the story of the cursed minister as we stand in Bologna’s massive, palazzo-rimmed Piazza Maggiore, where Brother Bernardo endured such abuse in the name of a kinder, gentler Francis. Far nicer to imagine is the miracle Francis performed here, curing a half-blind boy by making the sign of the cross over him. Nicer still is to imagine the sermon Francis delivered in this piazza, the only sermon for which there is an eyewitness account.

Paul Sabatier, Francis’s most respected nineteenth-century biographer, sets the date of the Bologna sermon as 1220, which would place it on Francis’s stop here on his way home from Venice. Francis seems to have recovered some of his health: The eyewitness, an archdeacon in Bologna’s cathedral, gives a traditional description of Francis as a “plain man . . . whose apparel was poor, his person in no respect imposing, his face not at all handsome.” His words and his delivery on the theme of “Angels, people and demons,” however, were anything but plain to “almost every person in the city,” among them many “learned people who were there.”

Francis did not threaten the assembled crowd with words of thunder and brimstone but spoke “with wisdom and eloquence.” “His ways were those of conversation; the substance of his discourse rested mainly upon the abolition of enmities and the necessity of making peaceful alliances,” the archdeacon reports. Francis’s charisma was obviously still very much intact. Not only did he bring “peace and harmony” to the warring nobles in the crowd, says the archdeacon, but he so inspired the men and women of Bologna that they “flocked after him,” trying to touch “the hem of his garment.”

Francis is memorialized in Bologna by a massive, thirteenth-century, buttressed church, down the street from the Piazza Maggiore. Described in the Rough Guide as a “huge Gothic brick pile,” it is nonetheless an important cultural and religious center. Friar Antonio Ranzini proudly shows us the church’s three-thousand-book library (which Francis would surely have ordered destroyed) and a bust of Father Martini, a renowned Franciscan organist and composer, who instructed none other than Mozart. The library had recently been the setting for a concert by the Conservatorio Bologna—two hundred people came—and many more are expected to visit the annual mechanized Nativity scene that is being set up in the sacristy.

Night is falling along with the drizzle as we tour the convent’s gorgeous, hedged-in cloister and admire in one of the cavernous church’s eleven chapels a stunning blue, white, and gold ceramic
arca
with scenes of Francis receiving approval of his Rule from Pope Innocent III and preaching to the overflow crowd in the Piazza Maggiore. It is dark as we take our leave of Bologna to drive to our suburban hotel. Francis’s stay here in 1220, however dramatic, was short, and so is ours.

Francis had much on his mind as he pressed on to Orvieto to meet with the Pope. He knew, sadly, what he had to do to keep his movement from disintegrating. The answer had come to him en route in a dream of a little black hen who tried futilely to spread her wings wide enough to protect her many chicks. (We see several representations of this dream in paintings in southern Italy, the hen having been replaced by a giant clergyman sheltering many tiny friars in his black cloak.) His movement now had at least six thousand followers, and to survive it needed the formal, written protection of the Church. What had begun as a spontaneous movement of “companions” was about to become an official order of the Church and subject to canonical law.