By day, the brothers did the kinds of work that Francis felt were sanctioned by the Gospel. They renovated churches, tended to lepers, performed manual labor for farmers and artisans, preached, and prayed. They could accept a payment of bread and fruit for their labor, but they were not allowed to have money. Nor could they, in any way, save up for the next day. They could not own any dwelling they lived in. (They rented the church in the Portiuncula from a local abbot.) They could not store up food. They couldn’t soak vegetables overnight.

An entailment of the rule of poverty was humility. In the “Testament,” Francis writes that he and the other friars were subject to all, superior to no one. (He eventually called the group the Friars Minor, as they are still known today.) They were to see themselves as brothers even to people whose lives directly opposed their aims—notably, the rich. Some political reformers who would have loved to embrace Francis have not, because he did not call for social change. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, in his prison diaries, holds up Francis, with quiet scorn, as an example of how, in the abuse of the poor by the rich in the Middle Ages, religious devotion led to passivity, “the mattress against the bullet.”

A corollary of Francis’s devotion to humility was his distrust of book learning. Almost proudly, it seems, he called himself “illiteratus.” He never owned a complete Bible. He never became a priest. To him, book learning smelled of wealth—only rich people had books at that time—and thus of arrogance. One medieval source records his response to a novice who asked for a psalter: “When you have a psalter, you will want a breviary; and when you will have a breviary, you will install yourself in a throne like a great prelate, and you will command your brother: ‘Bring me my breviary!’ ” He then took some ashes from the hearth and rubbed them into his body, all the while repeating, “I’m a breviary, I’m a breviary!” Over time, his hostility to scholarship encouraged some people—for example, members of religious orders devoted to education, such as the Dominicans—to regard the Franciscans as a bunch of oddballs and half-wits, which, no doubt, some of them were. Francis accepted into the community anyone who applied. There was no test, no waiting period.

The story about the psalter seems to represent Francis as a man of rigid principles. He was not. To every rule, he made exceptions, on the spot. No friar could ride a horse (a symbol of wealth), but if the friar was sick, all of a sudden a friar could ride a horse. No new entrant, in divesting himself of his goods, could give them to his family, but if it turned out that the man’s giving away his ox would impoverish the family, the ox stayed home. Francis believed in discipline—fasting, hair shirts—but he didn’t eat bugs, and he warned the friars that excessive fasting was harmful to “Brother Body.” Also, he occasionally advised his followers to find their own way to salvation. On his deathbed, he said to them, “I have done what was mine to do. May Christ teach you what is yours!” This is strange, since he had so clear a program for a Christian life. He may not have meant to be permissive, but he often was.

Which was certainly owing in part to another of his characteristics, attested to by everyone who knew him: an extreme natural sweetness. He was courteous, genial, extroverted—he was fun, a quality not always found in saints—and he laid it upon the brothers, as a duty, to be cheerful. That’s why, to Gramsci’s annoyance, he couldn’t hate anyone. You could say he was in a kind of trance. It wasn’t actually a trance—he ran an effective organization for more than a dozen years—but he was different, morally, from most of us. There is a small book from the late fourteenth century, “I Fioretti di San Francesco” (“The Little Flowers of St. Francis”—it’s the text on which Rossellini’s movie is based), that narrates Francis’s life as a series of miracles. One chapter tells of a ferocious wolf that was preying upon the citizens of Gubbio. People were afraid to go outside the city gates. So Francis sought out the wolf and gave the animal a stern lecture, telling him he deserved to be hanged for his crimes. But, Francis added, he knew that the wolf had been driven by hunger. If the townspeople gave him food every day, would he stop attacking them? Would he promise? Francis stretched out his hand, and “the wolf lifted up his right paw before him and laid it gently on the hand of St. Francis, giving thereby such sign of good faith as he was able.” The deal held. When the wolf died, two years later, the townspeople were sad.

In Western Europe, the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries were a high tide of heresy. Penitent groups went from town to town, calling on people to change their lives. Some of these groups, especially those which dwelled on the corruption of the Church, were prosecuted. In 1209, the Pope launched the Albigensian Crusade against the heretics of southern France. Twenty thousand people were slaughtered in the course of one day. In that year or the next, Francis went to Rome to secure Papal approval for his community, and thereby head off any accusation of unorthodoxy. The group’s conspicuous poverty, after all, could easily be seen as a rebuke to the rich, ostentatious Church. You might wonder why Francis thought that he and his men, scarcely known at that time, could walk to Rome in their bare feet and get a hearing from the Pope. Yet, as so often happened in Francis’s early career, what he wanted came true. He had powerful friends all his life, and a couple of them, higher-ups in the Church, interceded with the Pope on his behalf.

The other thing that protected Francis was his sincere obedience to the Church. In this period, many religious radicals claimed that the Church, along with the rest of the material world, was evil. But Francis didn’t hate the world—he loved it—and he said that he would never criticize a priest, because the priests were the only ones empowered to celebrate the Eucharist, that is, to offer us the body and blood of Jesus and thus join us to him.

This was exactly what Rome wanted to hear. At that time, because of the heresy hunt, the leaders of the Church were being accused of persecuting any group consisting primarily of laypeople. Here, however, was a group of evangelical laymen whom they could be seen to endorse. And so the Pope gave them his approval, though in a limited way. The Franciscans were authorized only to preach penance. That permission would not make them a religious order, but it would give them some protection from the charge of heresy.

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Francis was now in a position to enlarge his group, to spread his message. By 1217, he was dispatching men to France, Germany, Hungary, Spain, and also to the Middle East. As usual, his preparations were casual. Most of the friars didn’t speak the language of the countries they were going to. In Germany, Augustine Thompson says, they answered Ja to everything, which eventually got them jailed, and worse. In time, they reached North Africa, and in 1220, in Morocco, five of the men were murdered. Others returned to Assisi discouraged. Francis reproached them for not accepting abuse submissively. In 1219, he himself had gone on the road, to Egypt—where the Fifth Crusade was encamped—with the purpose of converting al-Malik al-Kamil, the sultan of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, to Christianity. Unsurprisingly, he did not succeed, although the two men apparently had a civil conversation.

Like many other radical movements, Franciscanism was bound up with the personality of its founder. The men adored Francis, and he could control them with a glance, a word. But now there were many Franciscans who hadn’t met Francis or who rarely saw him. Under those circumstances, they were bound to deviate from his rules. Sometimes they were forced to. Whatever their devotion to poverty, they could not sleep on the ground in winter when they were in Germany. In time, such exemptions led to further ones. After all, sleeping on the ground was hard in Italy, too. At the same time, Franciscanism had become famous. Beds—and an honored place within the Church hierarchy—were being offered to the friars. Francis’s trip to Egypt took him away from Assisi for less than a year, but, by the time he returned, rules that had seemed to him crucial had been changed, often to make them conform to the practices of other communities. Francis had always felt that the Franciscans had no obligation to be like any other group. This had been his pride, and his followers’ pride. No longer. And what could he do? The brothers now numbered in the thousands, working all across Europe. How could he hold them with his eyes, his words?