The Saint and the Sultan by Paul Moses

Author:Paul Moses [Moses, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-58951-4
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2009-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

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The Outsider

Sailing into the most frustrating years of his life, Francis arrived amid the canals of Venice in the spring or summer of 1220. In the months and years that followed, he found himself more and more marginalized within the order he founded. Powerful and learned men such as Cardinal Ugolino had begun to organize and reshape the Order of Friars Minor, positioning it to grow dramatically. We need not consider the historical debate over whether Ugolino acted with good intentions or deliberately compromised Francis’s vision—he may have done both. The point is that Francis, having lost control of the order during his absence, lacked the full authority to act on the insights he gained during his trip to the East. He harbored dramatic new plans for sending out friars to live peacefully among Muslims, but he had trouble getting his order to remain true even to the essentials of his vision for it. He had become an outsider.

Leaving Venice, Francis traveled west to Verona and then headed south to Bologna. He learned that a new building in the university city was known as the “house of the brothers”—that is, it was owned by the brothers in violation of Francis’s explicit warning against possessing worldly goods. Francis ordered the house closed immediately. “Not even the sick remained but were cast out with the others,” Thomas of Celano wrote, adding that the person who told him the story was among the sick people who were ejected.

Angelo Clareno, who stressed Francis’s anger at the changes in the order, later told a more detailed story that he said came from a brother who saw Francis preach in Bologna. In that account, Francis headed straight for the place where his brothers lived and saw that a house had been built that violated the level of poverty he expected from his brothers. Francis quickly walked away and went to stay at the house of Dominic’s Order of Preachers, which had established itself in the university center so that members could become better educated. Given the competition between the two orders, it was a great rebuke for Francis’s friars. One of Dominic’s men, Clareno went on to say, told Francis that his brothers were despondent and tried to convince him to return, giving them a chance to repent. After some coaxing Francis agreed, only to wind up cursing a highly respected brother and doctor of law, Brother Pietro Stacia, whose teachings contradicted the purity of the order’s Rule. Francis was so angered that he refused to pardon the friar even years later, according to this account.

The evicted brothers appealed to Cardinal Ugolino, who happened to be in the region at the time, probably trying to drum up more troops for the Crusade. Ugolino provided a detour around Francis’s objections by declaring that he, and not the brothers, owned the building; the friars’ vow of poverty had not been broken. He made the announcement while preaching in public, a not-so-subtle way of telling Francis from the authority of the pulpit that he had to back off.

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