CHAPTER 1

THE WORLD OF SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI

A CLIMATE OF WAR

Saint Francis of Assisi (1181–1226) was born into a culture of continual war. When Francis was six years old, Christian armies were defeated in the Holy Land by the Muslim armies of Saladin; the city of Jerusalem was lost. When he was eight, kings of France, England, and the Holy Roman Empire brought armies to the Holy Land, only to fail to recapture Jerusalem. By the time Francis was twenty-one, in 1202, Pope Innocent III had launched the Fourth Crusade, which never reached the Holy Land. The crusading armies were taken by a fleet from Venice to attack and ultimately sack Constantinople, the center of Eastern Christianity. The crusading knights set up a Western dynasty in Constantinople, which was eventually defeated and thrown out in 1261. As much as any event in the history of Christianity, this has been a lingering source of resentment and disunion between Western and Eastern Christianity.

During this period Pope Innocent III also initiated the Albigensian or Cathar Crusade against cities in southern France. From 1209 to 1229, Cathar cities were put under siege and eventually sacked. This was an extremely ferocious campaign; the Albigensian crusaders showed no mercy to the conquered as they massacred the defeated people in the name of God.

Closer to where Francis was raised, in Assisi, Italy, social, economic, and political differences led to constant skirmishing among the small armies of competing cities and the local aristocracy. The growth of the cities saw the financial and social advancement of the merchant class, men like Francis’ father, Peter Bernardone, ambitious to control their own affairs and expand their influence. As the cities worked to expand their authority over the neighboring countryside, they came into conflict with the feudal aristocracy, who wanted to hold on to their land. The growing cities of Italy were also constantly at war with one another. In 1201, when Francis was twenty, he got involved in one of the perpetual skirmishes between the cities of Assisi and Perugia. He proudly marched out clad in knightly armor on a new horse, only to be captured when the superior army of Perugia