First Encounter With Francis of Assisi

I. The Century before the Outbreak

i. The cenTury beFore The ouTbreak 1180-1226: These two dates marking the beginning and end of Francis’s life might in themselves seem insignificant, in the real sense of the term. They need only be resituated in their historical context in order to see how a providential mission was prepared and how it later blossomed. Happy those young people twenty years old in 1220! In every field they were called to become involved in a great and tumultuous adventure of which the chronology published at the end of this book gives only a pale image. Let us look quickly at Christianity in the time of Philip Augustus and Innocent III: We will more easily share their desire for a man sent by God and will welcome this penitent from Assisi with the same fervor. The Golden Century In the economic sphere, the West was undergoing its first great increase in trade. Barter was disappearing little by little ; trade was king and money attained everyday and universal usage. The crusades unleashed an unprecedented commercial movement; Greeks, Venetians, and Genoans sailed the Mediterranean; goods from both Niger and Scandinavia began to turn up in provincial French towns; Tuscan banks set up exchange branches in important cities like Lyons, Troyes, and as far away as London; they even handled papal finances and took over functions once held by the Curia. Despite repeated condemnations, usury was eating away at the wealth of the aristocracy at the same time that a new First Encounter with Francis 12 class of “haves” began to fill its coffers. The term “usury” in thirteenth-century Florence was only held to apply to loans where the interest was greater than 30 percent! As a new measure of wealth, gold succeeded the square foot of land; it bought comfort, prestige, and power; it opened the doors of political councils, it allowed the purchase of a title, a noble spouse, or an ecclesiastical benefice. Everything was put on the market. Such was the idol against which Saint Francis would raise the standard of disinterest and holy poverty. These Venetians and Lombards had one passion alone, and it was overriding: doing business. A whole era, an entire civilization, ran the risk of falling headlong into the trap of a dangerous, gilded materialism. One voice had to make itself heard to proclaim once again the necessity of a choice between God and Mammon .6 The Century of the Commune Prosperity was accompanied by a whole series of demographic and political phenomena. Civilization, heretofore almost exclusively rural, became more urban in a displacement of both population and activity into the city. During the course of the twelfth century, Florence jumped in size from 60 to 187 acres (with a population of 50,000 in 1200); Parma, from 57 to 190; Bologna, from 62 to 247; and Pisa to a total of 30,000 inhabitants in 1228. New city walls and new churches had to be constructed for the borghi, and these took on the dimensions of small cities in themselves. As for the borghesi, the “bourgeois” or burghers, they had become a social class that held money, prestige, and power. Because they were involved in all financial and military undertakings , the merchants, bankers, and ship owners gained, if not equality under the law with the nobles, at least an equivalence of privilege, as well as control over the use of 6 Cf. Y. Renouard and B. Guillemain, Les Hommes d’affaires italiens du moyen âge (Paris: Tallandier, 2009). First Encounter with Francis 13 communal finances. They were in control almost everywhere: they elected their own podestà and consuls. Occasionally the birth of a commune and accession to political life were accompanied by uprisings, but refractory bishops and lords were eventually swept away by this wave of communalism. It is in this sense that industry and negotiation, having become an essential element of the medieval world, brought to it a veritable revolution, all of whose consequences it would be impossible to list and weigh.7 The commune at Assisi was begun in 1200. Francis was twenty years old; he was the son of a very influential fabric merchant. He threw himself with total abandon into the quest for adventure, he experienced the uncontrolled enthusiasm of street demonstrations, he shared in the citywide euphoria at the destruction of the Rocca8 and the rebuilding of the city’s ramparts. His personality would benefit from this...