Francis of Assisi
Francis gives his father back his clothes (Giotto)
By 1200 AD, the Catholic Church had gotten very powerful. Bishops and Popes were often rich men who cared more about getting rich collecting tithes than they did about praying or helping poor people. In 1205 AD, a young man named Francis, from the town of Assisi in northern Italy, had a vision from God. God told Francis to start a new group of monks who would live simply and help the poor.
Francis meets Pope Honorius (Giotto)
Francis wasn't born poor. When Francis was born, about 1182 AD, his father was a rich cloth merchant in Assisi. Francis went to good schools and when he grew up he fought for his town in Italian wars. But when Francis was 23 years old, he got very sick, and then had this vision from God. Francis left the war and made a pilgrimage to Rome, where he sat and begged along with other beggars. Francis vowed that he would always live among the poor. He told his father he wouldn't take his money, became a monk, and in 1209 began preaching to crowds of people in Assisi. Given that thousands of Albigensians had just been killed by the French king for their revolutionary religious ideas, this was a brave thing to do. Francis wore a rough brown robe and went barefoot. He told people to follow the teachings of Jesus and live like Jesus.
A lot of people liked Francis' ideas, and he became very famous. Thousands of men joined up to be Franciscan monks. By 1210, only a year later, even the Pope in Rome said that Francis' monks could be an official part of the Catholic Church, and he and his followers were tonsured.
Francis meets Malik al-Kamil (also Giotto)
Once his Franciscan monks were solidly established, Francis started the Poor Clares, a group of Franciscan nuns, for women, led by a volunteer named Clare. In 1219, when Francis was 37 years old, he sailed to Egypt with the Fifth Crusade. During a cease-fire, Francis tried to convince the Ayyubid commander Malik al-Kamil to abandon Islam and become a Christian. But al-Kamil wasn't interested, and the Fifth Crusade lost its battles and returned to Italy. Francis, now middle-aged, spent most of his time organizing the growing numbers of Franciscan monks and nuns. By this time there were Franciscan monks and Poor Clares in Israel, France, Germany, Hungary, and Spain. Francis wrote down a lot of his thoughts, often writing in Italian instead of Latin. In 1223, when Francis was about forty years old, he showed a Nativity scene for Christmas in a cave near Assisi, which started a fad for Nativity scenes all over Italy and southern Europe. But people didn't live as long in those days as they do now - three years later, Francis died of an eye disease. He was 44 years old.
To find out more about Francis of Assisi, check out these books from Amazon or from your local library:
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