On the Road with Francis of Assisi (22 page)

“Brother Francis,” the
Little Flowers
quotes the count, “I have a mountain in Tuscany which is very solitary and wild and perfectly suited for someone who wants to do penance in a place far from people or who wants to live a solitary life.” The mountain, which the count told Francis he would give him in return for the salvation of his soul, was—and is—named La Verna; there, eleven years later, Francis would become the first person on record to receive the stigmata.

Francis, who was always looking for remote spots to lose himself in contemplation, praised God for this unexpected turn of events and thanked the count, saying that after the San Leo celebrations ended, he would send two of his friars to the count’s home in Chiusi, just a mile or so from the promised mountain, to see if it was suitable for “prayer and penance.”

According to the
Little Flowers,
the dispatched friars got lost but finally arrived at Orlando’s castle to be greeted “as though they were angels of God.” To make sure nothing untoward befell the friars on their exploration of La Verna, the count sent fifty armed men with them. The friars evidently found La Verna suitable and, locating the perfect plateau on the side of the mountain, set to building a little hut out of branches with the help of their escorts and their swords.

And so the Franciscan stewardship of La Verna began, attested to in a remarkable document from Count Orlando’s brothers and sons after the count died. The document, dated July 9, 1274, makes legal, forever, the oral gift the count had made to Francis on May 8, 1213, in San Leo. The deed also promises the return to the friars of a tablecloth that Francis, Count Orlando, and his children ate meals off, a wooden wine cup and bread bowl used by Francis, as well as Count Orlando’s leather belt, which Francis blessed and used to “girt” the count when he received his habit, presumably that of the Third Order. And all this began right across the piazza from our hotel.

While we await word about the interpreter, we tour tiny San Leo, taking in the ninth-century parish church of Santa Maria Assunta, with its Roman pillars and assorted Byzantine capitals recycled from a pagan temple to Jupiter. It is Sunday, and a steady stream of Italian families file through the church, lighting candles until there are none left. A group of visiting choristers suddenly breaks into song, and
Nobis Domini Gloria
fills the air.

Francis was most certainly in this wonderfully simple, rough stone church, lit only by three small windows, and was probably at the nearby twelfth-century cathedral, which is now covered with scaffolding and closed to visitors. He would not have been at San Leo’s main attraction, however, the massive fifteenth-century fortress even farther up the rock spur, which was commissioned by the duke of Urbino and later used as a national jail.

The fortress’s most famous prisoner was the eighteenth-century intellectual, alchemist, and Mason the count of Cagliostro, who was convicted of heresy in Rome and sentenced to life imprisonment in the fortress. He survived for four years in a solitary cell into which his food was lowered through a trapdoor in the ceiling so that his jailers would not have eye contact with him and succumb to his charisma. As further punishment for his embrace of science during the absolutist and hideous Inquisition, his only window, with a triple iron grid, looked out on the churches of San Leo. The Inquisition theme continues back in San Leo’s museum. Every conceivable medieval torture device—spiked tables, spiked neck collars, spiked chairs, spiked castration belts, along with graphic illustrations of how they were used—is displayed.

I am more interested in the elm tree under which Francis preached in 1213. The tree collapsed of old age in 1637, a date ingrained in the minds of San Leo’s many amateur historians; its remains were taken to the Franciscan convent of Sant’Igne farther down the rock, where it has gradually disappeared, bits picked away by pilgrims as relics. The current tree was planted in 1937—with great ceremony; it was carried up the rock in a carriage, accompanied by young people in medieval dress and Franciscan friars singing Gregorian chants; the scene is reenacted every year in May. So dear is the tree to San Leo that it appears on the town’s coat of arms, making San Leo the only town in Italy, the historians assure me, to honor the memory of Francis officially.

I am at the ready for my tour of the Palazzo Nardini at 8:15 the next morning. A thick fog—which I realize later is a cloud—has enveloped San Leo, and I hear Don Sergio arriving in his car before I see him. Don Sergio is in such a hurry that he leaves his car engine running and his headlights on. We hurtle into the palazzo and up the stairs to the second floor into what is known as the Oratorio di San Francesco, but there is little here to commemorate Francis’s meeting with Count Orlando. A modern painting of St. Francis with some angels at La Verna hangs on the wall. There’s a marble altar, which could use a dusting, and what looks to be office furniture scattered about. And we’re back out the door.

The English teacher, Ugo Gorrieri, has arrived at the tobacco shop next door, but Don Sergio has driven off into the fog, and there is nothing for my interpreter to translate. He is not surprised by my disappointment. When Countess Nardini lived in the family palazzo, Ugo explains, the room, which the family had previously used as a bedroom, was converted into a chapel. A piece of the original tree was displayed there, the chapel was furnished with medieval furniture, including a simple wooden altar, and catechism classes were held there. The chapel was a source of great pride to San Leo. It was opened every day, by one of Countess Nardini’s servants, for anyone to visit. But the room was essentially abandoned after the countess died twenty years ago. She left the house and its chapel to the local parish, and . . . Ugo raises his eyebrows and shrugs.

The parish priest also controls entry to the convent of Sant’Igne, which Francis established on another trip to San Leo, when he was lost in the dark.
Igne
translates to “fire” and describes the miraculous light that suddenly appeared around the lost Francis, illuminating the road he was looking for. Francis promptly founded a hermitage there, which he named Sacred Fire. It grew into a sizable monastic complex over the centuries and is said to be very beautiful, but Don Sergio is nowhere to be found, and and the caretaker, Romina’s cousin Angelo, says he can’t open the convent without the priest’s permission. We are reduced to groping our way to Sant’Igne through the dense fog on the way down the rock pinnacle, but we can barely see the road, let alone the convent.

I am relieved to emerge into sunlight halfway down the pinnacle. San Leo and all its wonders are completely invisible as I look up, and I wonder, briefly, if the magical place ever existed. It occurs to me as we drive toward Rimini on the coast, the same route Francis took in reverse to San Leo, that he, too, might have been enveloped in a similar cloud, and that it was the cloud, not the darkness, that the “Sacred Fire” had penetrated.

Our tour of the Marches with Francis ends, regrettably, in San Leo. (I’ve spared you the many lesser documented and beautiful places that local legends hold he also visited, including the breathtaking hermitage of Soffiano, at the end of a forested gorge.) Francis went on from the Marches to preach in other provinces, of course, saving more souls over the next few years and winning more friars. Many more. No fewer than five thousand Franciscan friars, an astonishing number, would gather at the Porziuncola in the spring of 1219 for a general chapter of the order.

However gratified Francis must have felt that so many had answered his call, he did not feel his missionary work was done. His friars were already fanning out around Christian Europe to try to set up foreign missions, and the first tentative forays were being launched to Morocco.

But Francis had a larger vision of converting the Saracens. He had twice failed to reach the land of the Muslims. This time, he made it.

16

Finding Francis Along the Nile

E
GYPT:
D
AMIETTA,
where Francis preaches in the Crusader camp and foretells a disastrous battle ·
F
ARISKUR,
where he meets and befriends the sultan ·
A
CRE,
where he receives devastating news from Assisi

T
he view is hypnotic. One balcony off our hotel room overlooks the Nile and its peaceful fleet of bright blue fishing boats. The other balcony looks north over the Mediterranean and the lighthouse that guides the fishing boats to safe harbor. We are in Ras el-Bahr, a gated Egyptian resort near Damietta in the eastern Nile delta. It was very near here, in 1219, that Francis arrived by sea at the decidedly nonpeaceful mouth of the Nile to join the encamped Christian troops during the Fifth Crusade.

Francis had come to Egypt as a man of peace. His goal was wildly ambitious: to end the blood spilled on the sand, marshes, and mountain passes of the Holy Land by converting none other than the sultan of Egypt, Malik al-Kamil, to Christianity. The sultan’s troops were presently defending the fortress city of Damietta from the Crusaders, or “Franj” as the Arabs called all Europeans. If Francis failed in his missionary mission, he might very well succeed, at least, in becoming a martyr.

We might have become involuntary martyrs ourselves on the chaotic road to Damietta from Cairo—one report notes that more foreigners die in traffic accidents in Egypt than in any other country—had we not once again been blessed with good fortune. A friend in New York has put us in touch with a former Egyptian ambassador to the United States, Dr. Abdel Raouf el-Reedy, who lives in Cairo. The ambassador, it turns out, was born in Damietta and graciously arranges a visit to his family still living there to coincide with our research on Francis in Egypt. We make the three-and-a-half-hour trip to Damietta in a rented minivan with the ambassador, his sister, and a driver, Mahmoud, giving silent thanks all the way that we had not rented our own car and attempted to follow the road signs, almost every one of which is in Arabic, through the slalom course of cars, trucks, and buses to the nontouristy, industrial port city.

Our good fortune continues when we arrive at Ras el-Bahr, a tiny spit of land jutting out from Damietta into the Mediterranean, to discover that the hotel the ambassador has booked us all into, the Beau Rivage, is at the epicenter of Francis in Egypt. The ambassador is unaware of the fine points surrounding the Fifth Crusade and had chosen the hotel simply because it is owned by English-speaking Egyptian friends.

These friends, Anwar Hamdoun, a Ph.D. who taught Arab Islamic culture and civilization at San Diego State for five years, and his wife, Susu, who holds a Ph.D. in education from Temple University and has applied it by designing graduate-degree programs in Saudi Arabia, are also unaware of the fine points of the Fifth Crusade. The Crusades are not a popular subject in Egypt, and neither one of these charming academicians turned hoteliers realizes that the location of their hotel is nothing short of miraculous for our research.

The Crusaders, some sixty thousand strong, were camped on the west bank of the Nile, near the convergence of the river and the sea. That happens to be our exact location on modern Ras el-Bahr. It is entirely possible that our balcony view of the resort’s palm-shaded esplanade along the river and behind the hotel, Ras el-Bahr’s neat grid of summer homes, would have been of the thousands of tents and pavilions that sprawled through the dusty Crusader camp.

The medieval camp teemed with people, unlike the very few we see in the off-season Ras el-Bahr, some of them additional security the hotel has laid on because we are American. Even in the summer, few foreigners these days visit this resort for middle-class Cairenes, a reality that stands in sharp contrast to the multilingual, multinational thousands encamped here eight centuries ago.

Many of the English, French, Spanish, Germans, and Italians were military men—knights, archers, foot soldiers, Levantine mercenaries—but as many as twenty thousand more were civilian camp followers, including pilgrims, servants, merchants, cooks, some of the knights’ families, and several shiploads of French prostitutes. Many among the military men were indeed carrying the banner of Christ, but a sizable number were atheists or profiteers looking to scavenge the riches of Egypt.

This motley crew for the Fifth Crusade, scheduled to begin in 1217, had been assembled by Pope Innocent III, the same Pope who had approved Francis’s Rule. Still smarting from the failure of his Fourth Crusade thirteen years earlier, which had ended with the sacking of Constantinople, Innocent had advanced this crusade with the skills and verve of a top public relations man.

In written word and traveling sermons, the Pope demonized the seventh-century prophet Muhammad, the founder of the Islamic faith, as a “pseudo-prophet,” the “son of perdition,” and “the beast.” He charged the Saracens, Muhammad’s religious heirs who had wrested Jerusalem from the Christians in 1187, with defaming the Christian holy places and holding Christian captives, including women, in “dire imprisonment” and “most severe slavery.” And he issued his trump cards: the promise of eternal salvation not only to anyone joining this particular army for Christ but also to those who paid for “suitable” men to go in their stead.

The Pope’s definition of “suitable” turned out to apply to virtually anyone who agreed to join the Crusade. Because of the urgency to recruit as many people as quickly as possible, “Innocent no longer insisted on an examination of the personal fitness of the candidates,” writes one Franciscan scholar. The Pope even went so far as to revoke the indulgences formerly granted to those who chose to go to Spain to fight the Moors or to Provence to fight the heretics, thereby increasing the recruitment pool—and the incentive—for participation in the Fifth Crusade.

Francis surely heard the Pope’s call himself. It is widely believed that Francis attended the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 in Rome, where Innocent III made it incumbent upon every Christian in Europe to rid the Holy Land of its demon Muslims. Though Francis may have been somewhat distracted in Rome—it was at the Fourth Lateran Council that he first befriended his hostess, “Brother” Jacopa, and it is thought he also met the Spanish preacher Domingo de Guzmán, later St. Dominic, who would found the Dominican Order of Preachers—he could not have missed hearing Innocent’s call for a holy war. And the call continued from Pope Honorius III after Innocent died suddenly the next year in Perugia while trying to persuade the eternally warring factions there to direct their weapons at the Saracens and not at each other. Only Francis, it seems, sought a peaceful resolution.

Francis arrived on the shores of the Adriatic in June 1219, probably at the port of Ancona, with a substantial number of friars who were eager to go with him to convert the Saracens. The captain of the ship who consented to take them to Egypt drew the line at such a crowd, however. He would take twelve friars, no more. Francis could not bring himself to choose which friars would go and which would be left behind—so he turned to a small boy who happened to be there and asked him to pick the eleven friars who would accompany him to Egypt by pointing. The boy’s selection process is re-created in the Marche town of Ósimo by a huge fresco in the church formerly dedicated to St. Francis and since rededicated to St. Joseph of Cupertino, with Ancona’s domed duomo clearly visible in the background. So that’s a vote for Ancona as the departure point, but then again, every region—and every port—in Italy competes for Francis.

The six-week voyage that followed was marked by storms, hunger and thirst, disease, and even death. Francis’s shipmates included mercenaries and priests, criminals and impoverished men hoping to find salvation by answering the Pope’s call. There is talk of mayhem and even murder onboard. But this time, on his third try, Francis achieved the land of the Saracens.

It is also not clear whether the ship landed first at Acre, the Christian stronghold on the coast of Palestine where huge medieval Crusader halls have recently been unearthed. There was already a Franciscan contingent in Acre, headed by the controversial Brother Elias, who held the imposing title Guardian of Syria. But Francis would not have lingered in seductive Acre, which Julien Green describes in
God’s Fool
as “Granada as we know it today, in all the splendor of its Moorish beauty.” Acre, now the northern Israeli town of Akko, sported fountains and hanging gardens, cypress-lined paths, and cool, tile-floored houses, all of which Elias relished but which would have offended the austere Francis. His goal was to meet the sultan at the heart of the Christian-Muslim conflict in Damietta, two hundred miles to the southwest.

By the time Francis arrived in the Christian camp in the late summer of 1219, the Crusaders and their hangers-on had been here for more than a year. Francis was evidently appalled at the dissolute nature of the camp, especially among the knights he had idealized all his life. There was so much savagery, drinking, and whoring going on that at first he put his idea of converting the sultan on hold and instead concentrated on saving the souls of the Christians who had gone astray. He was evidently quite successful, so successful with virtually everyone he talked to that the bishop of Acre complained he was losing his staff members to the Franciscan Order. But Francis’s chief conversion goal remained the sultan, whose forces were defending the nearby fortress town of Damietta on the eastern bank of the Nile, with its Muslim population of eighty thousand.

The seemingly impregnable city, with its double and triple walls, high ramparts, and one hundred red ocher towers, was surrounded by natural defenses—the Nile on one side and on the other Lake Manzaleh, a marshy body of water that, in more peaceful times, was—and still is—a lively refuge for migrating herons, storks, pelicans, and flamingos. Damietta, a rich trading center, sat two miles upriver from the sea, and to protect it from attack from the Nile, the Egyptians had ingeniously blocked river access by installing a huge iron chain that stretched from the city’s ramparts to a citadel on an island near the opposite bank of the river.

That citadel, we are told by historians, was clearly visible from Ras el-Bahr, which means, unbelievably, that the view from our hotel balcony encompasses the area where the great chain blocked the river. To further strengthen Damietta’s defenses, the Egyptians had blocked the mouth of the river during an earlier crusade with huge stones plucked from the Pyramid of Zosa, the oldest step pyramid in the world. The then sultan had considered taking even bigger stones from the great pyramids at Giza but settled for the smaller Zosa at Sakkara, whose stones are still submerged in the Nile. That explains why the fishing boats we see going out every day have to leave and reenter the Nile through a very narrow channel.

Damietta’s seeming impregnability had turned back one Crusader assault after another until the Christians came up with an ingenious plan of attack: They lashed two ships together and constructed a tower of sorts the same height as the well-manned citadel. In August 1218, a year before Francis’s arrival, the Crusaders floated their tower upriver, successfully stormed the citadel with scaling ladders, and cut the chain. With that stroke, they had not only made Damietta more vulnerable but opened the Nile all the way to Cairo. But al-Kamil’s army continued to defend Damietta successfully.

The suffering and devastation that greeted Francis in the Christian camp convinced him the only road to peace lay in his mission to convert the sultan. The Crusaders and the Muslim troops had engaged in innumerable but inconclusive skirmishes, with heavy losses on both sides. Floods had drowned many of the Crusaders’ horses and ruined their store of food; dysentery and disease had ravaged Christian and Muslim alike, the high fevers leaving them with blackened skin, and an outbreak of scurvy had killed as many as ten thousand Christians. Still, the bloody attacks and counterattacks continued into the summer of 1219.

Francis did what he could, caring for the sick and injured, comforting the dying, and praying for their souls. His own health, already fragile, deteriorated further. The hot and squalid camp was thick with flies, which spread disease from one to the next, and Francis was not spared. He developed an eye infection, thought to be trachoma, which led to chronic watering of his eyes, painful sensitivity to light, and clouding of his vision. He became jaundiced and, for the rest of his life, is thought to have suffered from hepatitis.

He was also pained by the dangerous schism that had developed in the camp between the military commanders and the Pope’s representative, Cardinal Pelagius. The arrogant and stubborn Spanish cardinal, who dressed himself—and his horse—in scarlet, was constantly challenging the military strategy of King John of Jerusalem, who was recognized by everyone except Pelagius as the senior military officer in charge.

On August 29, 1219, their wrangling led to a disaster, which Francis had seen coming. The troops in the camp, who wanted nothing more than to go home, were on the verge of mutiny. Pelagius, thinking military action would lift morale, ordered the reluctant King John to send the troops to attack al-Kamil’s camp, some three miles away at Fariskur.

Francis spent the night before the siege in prayer and in the morning, as recorded by Celano, faced a dilemma. “The Lord has showed me that if the battle takes place . . . it will not go well with the Christians,” he told Brother Illuminato. “But if I tell them this I will be considered a fool: if I am silent, I will not escape my conscience. What therefore seems best to you?” Illuminato advised him to follow his conscience and “to fear God rather than men,” but predictably, when Francis relayed his prophecy to the Christians and presumably to Pelagius himself, his warnings fell on deaf ears. Instead, and just as predictably, the Christians ridiculed Francis and branded him a coward.

But Francis was right, and the siege turned into a complete rout for the Christians. Al-Kamil had cleverly concealed his horsemen in palm groves around his camp and waited to unleash them until the Crusaders, having met little resistance, entered Fariskur. Meanwhile Francis, who was anxiously waiting back at the Crusader camp, kept sending Illuminato out to see what he could see of the battle, but there was nothing until his third foray. “And behold, the whole Christian army was turned to flight and the battle ended in shame, not triumph,” writes Celano.