Thomas’s claim to its authorship does not rest on the weakness of rival pretensions. In the year 1285, when Thomas had been dead about thirty years and Dante was twenty years old, the Franciscan Bartholomew of Pisa wrote his _Liber Conformitatum_, in which he drew a labored parallel between the life of Francis of Assisi and that of our Lord. Having occasion to speak of Celano in this work, he goes on to describe it as “the place whence came Brother Thomas, who by order of the Pope wrote in polished speech the first legend of St. Francis, and is said to have composed the prose which is sung in the Mass for the Dead: _Dies irae, dies illa_.”[11] This testimony out of Thomas’s own century is confirmed by parallel evidence. Wadding, whose big folios in clumsy Latin give us the tradition which prevailed within the order, says: “Brother Thomas of Celano sang that once celebrated sequence, _Sanctitatis nova signa_, which now has gone out of use, whose work also is that solemn one for the dead, _Dies irae, dies illa_, although others wish to ascribe it to Brother Matthew of Acqua-Sparta, a cardinal taken from among the Minorites.” Elsewhere Wadding says: “Thomas of Celano, of the province of Penna, a disciple and companion of St. Francis, published ... a book about the _Life and Miracles of St. Francis_ ... commonly called by the brethren the _Old Legend_. Another shorter legend he had published previously which used to be read in the choir...; three sequences, or rhythmic proses, of which the first, in praise of St. Francis, begins, _Fregit victor virtualis_. The second begins, _Sanctitatis nova signa_. The third concerning the dead, adopted by the Church, _Dies irae, dies illa_. And this Benedict Gonon, the Coelestine [in 1625] rendered into French verse and ascribed to St. Bonaventura. Others ascribe it to Brother Matthew, of Acqua-Sparta, the cardinal; and others yet to other authors.”[12] These direct testimonies are confirmed by local tradition in the province of Abruzzi, in which Celano is situated, and the Franciscan origin of the hymn by its existence as an inscription on a marble tablet in the church of St. Francis at Mantua, where it was seen by David Chytraeus, a German Lutheran, who visited Italy in 1565. That the author was an Italian is indicated by the peculiar three-line stanza, which approximates to the _terza-rima_ structure of their poetry, but is not found in poetry of the Northern nations, except in later imitations.