Saint Francis of Assisi - The Saint Who Chose Poverty

The wealthy young man least likely to become a saint

Picture Francis as a young man in Assisi: the son of a prosperous cloth merchant, fond of fine clothes, songs, companionship, and dreams of chivalric glory. Nothing about that beginning suggested that Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone would spend his final years living radical poverty, suffering serious illness and failing eyesight, bearing the wounds later known as the stigmata, and composing one of the earliest celebrated works in the Italian vernacular. Francis of Assisi's story has often been softened into garden statues and gentle scenes with birds. The historical Francis is more demanding: a medieval penitent and preacher whose pursuit of the Gospel reshaped Western Christianity.

This article continues our library on the saints, building on the pillar guide Who Are the Saints and Why Do Catholics Pray to Them?, which introduces sainthood and intercession more broadly. Here, the focus is Francis himself: his conversion, his founding of the Franciscan Order, his remarkable meeting with a Muslim sultan, the stigmata, and why his legacy has outgrown the boundaries of Catholicism entirely.

A Wealthy, Restless Youth

Francis was born around 1181 or 1182 in Assisi, a hill town in Umbria in central Italy, to Pietro di Bernardone, a prosperous cloth merchant, and his wife Pica. Later traditions supply additional details about Pica's origins, but the secure historical picture is simply that Francis grew up in a well-to-do merchant household. Early biographers remember a sociable young man drawn to fine clothing, songs, generosity, and the ideals of chivalry. In 1202, when Assisi fought neighboring Perugia, Francis joined the Assisi forces and was captured after their defeat.

That ambition ended badly. Francis was captured in battle and held prisoner in Perugia for roughly a year, an experience that marked the beginning, though not yet the completion, of a slow inward turning. He returned home changed, restless in a way his old life could no longer satisfy, though it would still take several more encounters before the direction of that restlessness became clear.

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The Conversion: War, a Leper, and a Voice from the Cross

Two moments are most often credited with completing Francis's transformation. The first was deeply personal and physical: riding through the countryside one day, he encountered a leper, a figure his culture treated with instinctive horror and avoidance. Overcome, by his own later account, with something stronger than his revulsion, Francis dismounted, embraced the man, and gave him alms — a small act he would later describe as the turning point of his entire life, the moment "what had seemed bitter to me was turned into sweetness of soul and body."

The second episode belongs to the early Franciscan biographical tradition. While Francis was praying before the painted crucifix in the small, dilapidated church of San Damiano outside Assisi, Christ was said to have addressed him with the command to repair His house. Francis initially understood the instruction literally and began rebuilding ruined churches, using proceeds from his father's goods in a way that intensified the conflict between them. The dispute eventually came before the bishop of Assisi. There, according to his early biographers, Francis returned his money and clothing to his father and publicly renounced his claim on the family property, declaring that he could now say without reservation, “Our Father who art in heaven.” The scene became a defining image of his break with his former status and his embrace of religious poverty.

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Lady Poverty and the Founding of the Franciscan Order

What followed was not a swift leap into fame but a period of penitential life, manual work, begging, prayer, rebuilding churches, and service to people with leprosy. Francis adopted simple clothing and increasingly centered his life on following what he understood to be the poverty and itinerant preaching of Christ and the apostles. Later Franciscan literature would famously personify this commitment as “Lady Poverty” and even speak of Francis's mystical marriage to her. The image captures something real in his spirituality, but the elaborate bridal allegory belongs especially to the developing Franciscan tradition around him rather than functioning as a simple quotation from Francis himself.

Slowly, companions began to join him. Around 1209–1210 Francis and his first brothers went to Rome seeking ecclesiastical approval for their Gospel way of life. Franciscan tradition records that Pope Innocent III gave the group oral approval. The movement that became the Order of Friars Minor expanded rapidly, and Pope Honorius III formally approved Francis's Later Rule in 1223. Within Francis's lifetime the friars had already moved well beyond Umbria, carrying their preaching and penitential life into other parts of Europe and the Mediterranean world.

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Clare of Assisi and the Poor Clares

Francis's radical example did not appeal only to men. In 1212, a young noblewoman of Assisi named Clare, deeply moved by hearing Francis preach, secretly left her family's home on Palm Sunday to join his way of life. Francis received her and, with several other women who followed her example, helped establish what became the Poor Clares, a contemplative religious order built on the same commitment to poverty, prayer, and simplicity. Clare would go on to lead her community at the Church of San Damiano — the very chapel whose crucifix had spoken to Francis years earlier — for the rest of her life, and is recognized today as one of the great religious innovators of the medieval Church in her own right.

Francis later established a third branch of his movement as well: a lay order for men and women who wished to live according to Franciscan spirituality without formally becoming friars or nuns, allowing his vision of Gospel simplicity to take root far beyond the walls of any monastery.

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Crossing the Battle Line: Francis and the Sultan

Francis's strongest connection to the lands that POHL writes about came during the Fifth Crusade. In 1219 he traveled to Egypt while the crusading army was besieging Damietta and, with Brother Illuminato, crossed into the Muslim camp to meet Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil, the Ayyubid ruler of Egypt and nephew of Saladin. The meeting itself is historically well attested, including by sources outside the later Franciscan legendary tradition. What Francis and al-Kamil actually said to one another is much harder to reconstruct.

Francis went as a Christian missionary, not as a modern interfaith diplomat. His own Rule for friars living among Muslims and other non-Christians allowed two approaches: peaceful Christian witness without quarrelling, and explicit proclamation of the Christian faith when the friars judged it God's will. Early sources present Francis as willing to preach Christ before the Sultan. Al-Kamil did not convert, but Francis was received and eventually allowed to leave safely. Later narratives add dramatic details — including an ordeal by fire and particular gifts — whose historical certainty is considerably weaker than the meeting itself.

The encounter has nevertheless become one of the most important episodes in Franciscan memory because it occurred in the middle of a religious war without ending in violence between the two men. The Custody of the Holy Land itself remembers Francis's 1219 encounter with al-Kamil as formative for the Franciscan manner of presence in the Middle East. But the institutional history needs a distinction: the first Friars Minor reached the Holy Land province in 1217, before Francis met the Sultan, while the later Custody developed over the following century and received decisive papal recognition in 1342. Francis's encounter helped shape the spiritual memory of that presence; it did not single-handedly create the Custody in 1219.

Franciscan tradition places Francis in the eastern Mediterranean and Holy Land between 1219 and 1220. His experience of the lands associated with Christ later acquired another striking expression at Greccio in Italy.

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Greccio and the Nativity Tradition

At Christmas in 1223, Francis arranged a living commemoration of Christ's birth at Greccio, a mountain village in central Italy. According to Thomas of Celano, Francis wanted people to see with their own eyes something of the poverty and physical circumstances of the infant Jesus: a manger filled with hay, with an ox and a donkey nearby. A priest celebrated the Eucharist over the manger while Francis, who was a deacon, proclaimed the Gospel and preached.

It is often called the “first nativity scene,” but that phrase needs qualification. Christians had depicted the Nativity in art centuries earlier. Greccio's importance lies in the distinctive living devotional reenactment that helped shape the later Western Christmas crèche tradition. Pope Francis's apostolic letter Admirabile Signum explicitly connects the Greccio event with Saint Francis's earlier visit to the Holy Land and notes that the landscape may have reminded him of Bethlehem.

That makes Greccio especially relevant to Francis's Holy Land spirituality. Franciscan devotion repeatedly returned to the physical humanity of Christ — birth, poverty, suffering, places, bodies, and tangible signs — a spirituality that helps explain why Franciscans would become so closely associated with the Christian holy places.

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The Canticle of the Creatures

In his final years, amid severe illness and failing eyesight, Francis composed the Canticle of the Creatures, also known as the Canticle of Brother Sun. Written in the Umbrian vernacular rather than Latin, it is one of the earliest celebrated texts in the developing Italian literary tradition. The poem praises God through “Brother Sun,” “Sister Moon,” the stars, wind, water, fire, and “Sister Mother Earth.” Later portions also praise those who forgive and finally welcome “Sister Bodily Death.”

The Canticle reflects something central to Francis's entire spirituality: his love of creation was never separate from his love of the Creator, but an extension of it. Modern readers sometimes flatten this into simple environmentalism or a fondness for animals, and while both are genuinely present in his story, the Canticle itself makes clear that Francis saw the created world as already caught up in worship, whether or not anyone else noticed.

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The Stigmata at La Verna

In 1224, roughly two years before his death, Francis withdrew to La Verna in Tuscany for an extended period of prayer and fasting. Franciscan sources report that during this retreat he experienced a vision involving a crucified seraph and afterward bore marks corresponding to Christ's wounds in his hands, feet, and side. Catholic tradition has long regarded Francis as the first clearly documented Christian stigmatic. The exact day cannot be established from Francis's own writings; the Franciscan liturgical tradition commemorates the event in September.

The historical evidence is unusually early for a medieval mystical claim, although interpreting it remains a matter of faith and historical judgment. Brother Elias, announcing Francis's death in 1226, described marks of nails in his hands and feet and a wound in his side. Brother Leo, one of Francis's closest companions and present at La Verna, left a note connected with the retreat. Thomas of Celano's early biography then incorporated the event into Francis's life. These sources establish that claims about the marks circulated immediately around Francis's death; they cannot by themselves compel a reader to accept a supernatural explanation.

For Catholic spirituality, the significance of the stigmata is conformity to the suffering Christ rather than spectacle. Francis tried to keep the marks private. His declining health and serious eye problems continued through these years, yet this was also the period in which the Canticle of the Creatures took shape. That juxtaposition helps explain why Franciscan spirituality can speak so intensely about suffering while remaining equally intense in praise.

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Death and the Transitus

Francis died after sunset on October 3, 1226, at the Portiuncula near Assisi, a place central to the early Franciscan movement. Early Franciscan accounts surround his final hours with the themes that had marked his life: poverty, the Passion of Christ, blessing of the brothers, and acceptance of death. Later Franciscan tradition remembers his passing each year on the evening of October 3 through the Transitus — “the passing” — a devotional commemoration of his death before his feast on October 4. The form of the service varies among Franciscan communities; it should not be imagined as a single medieval liturgy performed unchanged since 1226.

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A Remarkably Fast Canonization

Pope Gregory IX canonized Francis on July 16, 1228, less than two years after his death. The process belongs to a medieval period before today's standardized procedures, so it should not be measured mechanically against the modern sequence explained in our guide to how saints are canonized. Contemporary and near-contemporary evidence shows that Francis's reputation for holiness and miracles spread rapidly, and Gregory IX had known Francis personally.

His body was later transferred to the new Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, where his tomb became a major pilgrimage destination. The treatment of a saint's bodily remains belongs to the wider Christian history explained in our guide to relics and why Christians venerate them.

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Why His Legacy Crosses Every Denominational Line

Francis is one of the medieval saints whose influence reaches unusually far beyond Roman Catholic devotion. The Church of England, for example, commemorates Francis of Assisi, Friar, Deacon, Founder of the Friars Minor on October 4, and Anglican Franciscan communities developed in the modern period. Some Lutheran churches also commemorate him. Many Protestants who would reject Catholic invocation of saints nevertheless admire Francis as a pre-Reformation Christian witness to simplicity, care for the poor, missionary zeal, and disciplined discipleship.

That admiration should not turn Francis into a generic modern humanitarian. He was thoroughly medieval and Catholic: devoted to the Eucharist, clergy, the Church, penance, obedience, preaching Christ, and a life patterned on the Gospel. His appeal across denominational lines is therefore interesting precisely because later Christians do not have to agree with every element of Franciscan devotion to recognize the force of his example.

His influence also reaches modern Catholic teaching on creation. In 1979 Pope John Paul II proclaimed Francis the heavenly patron of those who promote ecology, and Pope Francis drew the title of his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si' from the Canticle of the Creatures. When Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope in 2013, he chose the name Francis in honor of the saint of Assisi, explicitly associating the name with the poor and with peace.

Francis's later patronages grew from this legacy. He is especially associated with animals and ecology, while also being one of the patron saints of Italy. For the broader history of how saints become associated with particular people, professions, places, and causes, see our guide to what a patron saint is and how patronage develops.

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