Why you? It was a good question. Brother Masseo repeated it three times. What do you mean, Francis of Assisi asked him. “You aren’t a handsome man in body,” Masseo explained. “You aren’t someone of great learning, you’re not noble; so why does the whole world come after you?”
Because, Francis said, there is no-one “more vile, nor more incompetent, nor a greater sinner than me”. The answer embodied a truth about his appeal: the more humble Francis was, the more people revered him. Given food flavoured with lard during Lent when he was ill, he immediately confessed it to a great crowd. On giving his cloak to an old woman in need he confessed the pride he felt, the vanity of it.
Francis didn’t have a message so much as a method, a way of being. Or rather, he was the message itself. In his mind, there was nothing to interpret. In a testament, drawn up in the weeks before his death on 4 October 1226, after 20 years of ministry and more of ill-health, he wrote: “I strictly command all my cleric and lay brothers, through obedience, not to place any gloss upon [my words] saying: ‘They should be understood in this way.’”
How then to remember a man who resisted vanity and veneration? Perhaps no-one thought more deeply about this than the Franciscan friar, Thomas of Celano. Thomas had written his first and fullest life of Francis before the end of the decade at the behest of Gregory IX as part of Francis’s canonisation. Over the next twenty-five years, the Franciscan order would require him to write three more.
Still the order was dissatisfied. In the early 1260s its minister-general Bonaventure wrote his own life of the saint. In 1266 the Franciscans ordered all previous works about their founder be destroyed. Thomas writings were unknown until 1768, when the first of them was rediscovered; one remained unknown until 2014.
Thomas was a hagiographer, not a historian. But his Francis was human in a way Bonaventure’s was not: there is, for instance, a lovely passage recounting how, when in high spirits, Francis would sing in French, pretending to play a stick, nestled in the crook of his arm, like a viola. Bonaventure had little use for human moments like that.
Thomas’s frustration with his masters is evident in words that close the last of his works, The Treatise on the Miracles of St Francis (c1250-52): “We cannot every day make up new things, we cannot change a square into a circle,” he wrote. “We cannot tailor to the differences of times and desires what has been handed on to us in this one man.” But the order begged to differ.
This is an extended version of a piece that first appeared in the October 2023 issue of History Today. The image of St Francis preaching to the birds is from the margins of Matthew Paris’s Chronica Maiora II, written mid-13th century.
Like this? You can read more of Mathew’s History Today Months Past pieces here.
Mathew Lyons 
That constant self-awareness based on self-recrimination, can appear dubious. Odd. But we look past that to what he did.
I think Francis is a very recognisable type – albeit he took things a lot further than most