Francis of Assisi and the Founding of the Franciscan Order

Francis of Assisi was an Italian merchant’s son who gave up his wealth to live in radical poverty and, around 1209, won approval from Pope Innocent III for a small brotherhood of penitent preachers. That group became the Order of Friars Minor, the Franciscans, which spread across Europe within a generation and changed how the medieval Church reached ordinary people in the growing towns.

Francis remains one of the most popular saints in Christianity, admired far beyond the Catholic Church for his humility, his love of nature and his commitment to peace.

Background: Assisi and the new towns

Francis was born in Assisi, in Umbria, in 1181 or 1182. His father, Pietro di Bernardone, was a prosperous cloth merchant who traded with France; his mother was called Pica. He was baptised Giovanni but became known as Francesco, “the Frenchman”.

Italy at this time was being transformed by trade and the growth of cities. Merchants grew rich, and many Christians worried that the Church, wealthy and often worldly, was failing to answer their spiritual needs. Lay movements of poverty and preaching had already appeared, some of which, such as the Waldensians, were condemned as heretical.

Conversion

As a young man Francis was known for his generosity and love of fine clothes and festivities. He fought for Assisi against neighbouring Perugia and was taken prisoner after the defeat at Collestrada around 1202, spending about a year in captivity. Illness followed.

In 1205 he set out to join a military expedition in southern Italy but turned back at Spoleto. Over the next months he withdrew to prayer, cared for lepers and, according to his early biographers, heard Christ speak from the crucifix in the run-down church of San Damiano, telling him to repair his house.

Francis took the words literally and sold cloth from his father’s shop to fund the repairs. The furious Pietro took him before the bishop of Assisi around 1206. There Francis renounced his inheritance and, in a famous gesture, handed back even the clothes he was wearing.

Founding the brotherhood

In 1208, hearing the Gospel passage in which Christ sends the apostles out without money, staff or shoes, Francis adopted that way of life. Companions soon joined him, beginning with Bernard of Quintavalle, a wealthy citizen, and Peter Catani, a lawyer.

Around 1209 or 1210, with eleven companions, Francis went to Rome. Pope Innocent III, who was cautious about unofficial lay preachers, gave verbal approval to a short rule made up mainly of Gospel texts. The brothers were allowed to preach penance, and they called themselves fratres minores, “lesser brothers”.

In 1212 Clare, a young noblewoman of Assisi, left her family to follow Francis. She and her companions settled at San Damiano, founding the enclosed women’s order later called the Poor Clares. A third order for lay men and women who stayed in ordinary life followed.

Rapid expansion

The friars’ way of life was new. Unlike monks, they did not stay in one monastery; they travelled, preached in the vernacular, worked or begged for food, and owned nothing individually or in common. This “mendicant” model suited the crowded towns of the 13th century.

After a general chapter in 1217 the friars organised provinces and sent missions beyond the Alps, to France, Germany, Spain and Hungary. The first friars reached England in 1224. Missions to Muslim lands followed: in 1219, during the Fifth Crusade, Francis crossed the lines at Damietta in Egypt and met Sultan al-Kamil, who received him courteously but was not converted.

Growth brought tension. Many new members were educated clerics, and the order needed houses, books and rules. Cardinal Hugolino, later Pope Gregory IX, became its protector. Francis stepped down from leading the order around 1220, and a revised Rule, the Regula bullata, was confirmed by Pope Honorius III on 29 November 1223.

Key people

• Francis of Assisi (1181/82-1226), the founder, who never wanted to rule an institution and preferred to call himself a “lesser brother”.
• Clare of Assisi (1194-1253), founder of the Poor Clares, who defended the ideal of strict poverty for her sisters until her death; her own rule was approved by the pope only days before she died.
• Bernard of Quintavalle, the first companion, a rich citizen who gave his goods to the poor in 1208.
• Cardinal Hugolino of Ostia, protector of the order and later Pope Gregory IX, who helped turn the movement into a structured order and canonised Francis.
• Elias of Cortona, an able but controversial administrator who led the order after Francis and oversaw the building of the great basilica at Assisi.
• Bonaventure (c. 1217-1274), minister general from 1257, whose official life of Francis, the Legenda maior, shaped the saint’s image for centuries.

Sources for Francis’s life

Unusually for a medieval figure, Francis left writings of his own, including two rules, letters, prayers and his Testament, dictated shortly before his death. In the Testament he urged the friars to remain poor and to work with their hands.

Thomas of Celano wrote the first biography at the request of Gregory IX in 1228-1229 and a second one in the 1240s. In 1266 the order decided that Bonaventure’s life should replace the earlier biographies, and many copies of the older texts were destroyed. Modern historians compare all these sources carefully, since each reflected the debates of its own time.

Final years and death

At Greccio at Christmas 1223 Francis staged a living nativity scene, a custom often seen as the origin of the Christmas crib. In September 1224, during a retreat on Mount La Verna, he is said to have received the stigmata, wounds resembling those of the crucified Christ, the first such case widely reported in Christian history.

Nearly blind and seriously ill, he composed the Canticle of the Creatures, one of the earliest poems in Italian, praising God through “Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon”. He died at the Porziuncola chapel below Assisi on 3 October 1226. Pope Gregory IX canonised him on 16 July 1228 and laid the foundation stone of the Basilica of San Francesco the next day.

Legacy

Within decades there were thousands of friars across Europe and beyond. Franciscans taught at the universities of Paris and Oxford, producing thinkers such as Bonaventure, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. They preached, heard confessions, served as missionaries as far as Mongol China, and also acted as inquisitors.

The ideal of absolute poverty divided the order. The “Spirituals” clashed with the majority, and in 1323 Pope John XXII condemned the claim that Christ and the apostles owned nothing. In 1517 the order formally split into the Observants and Conventuals, and the Capuchins emerged soon after.

Francis’s image spread through art, notably the fresco cycle in the Upper Church at Assisi traditionally attributed to Giotto (see also the Scrovegni Chapel). He was named patron saint of Italy in 1939 and of ecology in 1979, and in 2013 Jorge Mario Bergoglio became the first pope to take the name Francis.

Myths and facts

• The Prayer of Saint Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace” is not by Francis. It was first published in France in 1912.
• Friend of animals: stories such as the sermon to the birds and the taming of the wolf of Gubbio come from early biographies and the later Fioretti; they reflect his reputation more than verified events.
• A priest: Francis was never ordained a priest; he was a deacon.

Timeline

• 1181 or 1182: Francis is born in Assisi.
• c. 1206: He renounces his inheritance before the bishop of Assisi.
• c. 1209-1210: Pope Innocent III approves the first rule.
• 1212: Clare of Assisi joins the movement.
• 1219: Francis meets Sultan al-Kamil in Egypt.
• 1223, 29 November: Honorius III confirms the final Rule.
• 1226, 3 October: Francis dies at the Porziuncola.
• 1228, 16 July: Francis is canonised by Gregory IX.

Why it matters

Francis turned a personal conversion into a movement that brought the Gospel into the streets and squares of medieval towns. The Franciscan order, alongside the Dominicans, reshaped preaching, learning and religious life across Europe, and Francis’s example of simplicity still resonates eight centuries later.