On the Road with Francis of Assisi Read Online Free PDF Page B

himself continued to be foolish. He did not know how else to live. When Assisi’s displaced nobles began to return from Perugia in 1205, the price of Assisi’s defeat being the commune’s capitulation to the nobles’ demands for compensation, Francis went back to singing and carousing and indulging his friends.
    He did become more charitable, however. In a scene commemorated by Giotto in Assisi, Celano writes that, at some point after Francis was “freed from his chains” in Perugia, he encountered an unfortunate knight in the road “who was poor and well nigh naked.” Francis, who had always idolized knights, “was moved by pity” and gave the knight the “costly garments he was wearing.” Francis made the gesture “for Christ’s sake,” according to Celano, which may very well be true, but then again, Francis may have been identifying with the knight because of the good fortune that had suddenly come his way.
    An unknown noble from Assisi, possibly one of his fellow prisoners from Perugia, invited Francis to ride with him to Apulia in southern Italy to join Pope Innocent III’s forces against the imperial troops backed by the princes of Germany. The issue at hand was really a custody fight over guardianship of young Frederick II, son and heir of the late Emperor Henry VI, whose widow had entrusted the child’s education to the Pope instead of to the imperial court. The bloody struggle between Church and State over Frederick had been going on for almost seven years by the time Francis learned of the nobles’ impending mission. “Upon hearing this,” writes Celano, “Francis, who was flighty and not a little rash, arranged to go with him.”
    It would be a very expensive endeavor. To be a knight required a full suit of custom armor, a chain-link protective blanket and trappings for his horse, a well-turned-out squire to ride with him. Then there were the weapons—a lance, a sculpted sword, assorted daggers—and an out-of-armor wardrobe that would be suitable for a man of noble status. It is thought that Pietro Bernadone had to sell several of his properties to outfit his son properly, but it must have seemed worth it for the higher social standing that having a knight in the family would bring the Bernadones.
    The twenty-four-year-old Francis must have been ecstatic in the winter of 1205 as armorers all over Assisi hammered out his battle dress. Glory and honor were within his reach. He even had a reassuring dream about his future as a Papal warrior, which “raised his spirits with a vision of the heights of glory,” Celano writes. In the dream, his father’s house was filled with “the trappings of war, namely saddles, shields, lances and other things,” rather than the more customary “piles of cloth to be sold.” All these arms would “belong to him and his soldiers,” a voice told Francis in the dream. The interpretation seemed as simple then as it does now. “When he awoke, he arose in the morning with a glad heart, and considering the vision an omen of great success, he felt sure that his journey to Apulia would come out well.”
    It did not.

3
    The Missing Letter in Spoleto
    T HE GOLDEN CITY
where Francis gives up becoming a knight ·
M ONTELUCO,
the hermitage he founds near Spoleto just because it is so beautiful · the
C ARCERI,
the cave near Assisi where he prays for guidance
    S poleto rises out of the Umbrian hills like a golden beacon, its bell towers and churches gleaming against the blue sky. Twenty-four miles south of Assisi and a day’s ride by horse, Spoleto is known today for its classical music summer festival and the frescoes of the fifteenth-century artist Fra Lippo Lippi in the apse of the cathedral. In 1205, according to Francis’s biographers, it was the town where he had to abandon his quest for knighthood.
    It was spring when Francis and his traveling companion set out from Assisi on what might very well have been a hot day. His new armor must have felt heavier