Francis of Assisi

Born around 1181 to a prosperous cloth merchant in Assisi, Francis abandoned his inheritance after a conversion experience to live in poverty, preaching, serving lepers, and rebuilding churches. He founded the Friars Minor (Franciscans), received the stigmata late in life, and died in 1226; he was canonized within two years.

His radical embrace of poverty broke with his family and the commercial world of his city, and his later years brought the pain of the stigmata, failing health and eyesight, and grief as his rapidly growing order moved away from the strict poverty he envisioned.

Francis taught poverty, humility, joy, and reverence for all creation — addressing the sun, moon, and animals as brothers and sisters in his Canticle of the Creatures — and sought to imitate Christ literally. He preached peace, and famously crossed the lines of the Fifth Crusade to meet the sultan al-Kamil.

Francis preached peace amid the violence of the Crusades, crossing into the enemy camp during the siege of Damietta (1219) to meet the Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil — an encounter remembered as a rare gesture of dialogue in an age of holy war.

The tension between his ideal of absolute poverty and the institutionalization of his order provoked lasting disputes among his followers (the Spirituals versus the Conventuals). The historicity of some famous episodes and the stigmata is examined by historians, though his transformative influence is not in doubt.

Francis of Assisi reshaped medieval Christianity through the Franciscan movement and the ideals of poverty, humility, and care for creation; patron saint of ecology and of Italy, he remains among the most universally admired religious figures in history.