Such is the irony of fate, that while numerous documents remain giving the names of contractors and minor masons employed in the building there is absolutely no evidence or clue of any kind as to the architect employed by Elias. We can only suppose that the document relating to this and other interesting points in connection with the decoration of the church, must have been destroyed by the Perugians when they sacked Assisi under Jacopo Piccinino and burnt so many treasures in the archives. We are consequently at the mercy of local legends, which were no doubt recounted to Vasari by the Assisans themselves when he visited the town in the middle of the sixteenth century. But there is still the evidence of our own eye to help us to know something of the builder of San Francesco, the builder of the first Gothic church in Italy. We are told he was a German; but then we know from Mr Fergusson's Handbook of Architecture that Germans were only just awakening to the Gothic influences at the time of St. Francis's death, and, when they wished to build churches in the new style they called in French masons to help them. Was it therefore likely that Germany should have given the mysterious architect to Assisi? A church recalling the Assisan Basilica may be vainly searched for in Germany or in Lombardy and this further fact inclines us to believe in the theory of M. Edouard Corroyer. [Illustration: CHURCH AND CONVENT OF SAN FRANCESCO] Whether the man who conceived the original idea of raising one church above another flanked by a colonnaded convent on the spur of a great mountain was called Philip or James, or whether he came from a Lombard or a German province seems of small importance compared with the country where he learned his art. Even supposing "Jacopo" to have been a northern Italian from the home of the Comacine Guild of master masons, which is extremely likely, everything goes to prove that he must have drawn his inspiration for the Assisan Basilica straight from the south of France. What establishes the French parentage of San Francesco is the mode of construction, especially visible in the Upper Church, and which, as M. Corroyer says, "possesses all the characteristics peculiar to the French architecture in the south of France at the close of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, of which the Cathedral of Albi [in Aquitaine] is the most perfect type. The single nave, its buttresses projecting externally in the form of half turrets, add to the likeness of the Italian church of Assisi with that of Albi in France."[63] A glance at the illustrations of the two churches will bear this theory out better than many words; and it will be seen at once that had the half turrets between the bay windows of San Francesco been completed with pointed roofs and small lancet windows, as no doubt was the intention, the likeness would be even more striking.