Download PDF | ( Monastic Orders) Michael Robson, The Franciscans In The Middle Ages Boydell Press ( 2006)
255 Pages
INTRODUCTION
St Francis of Assisi imitated Jesus Christ, his divine master, as closely as he could, abandoning his possessions for the benefit of the poor. His voluntary poverty was perceived as the recovery of an earlier strand in the Christian tradition, the belief that Christ and the Apostles had lived in simplicity and some physical hardship. As a symbol of this life of sacrifice the friars’ badge of identity was the cord around their waist; they were known as the cordati.’ The cord’s three knots signified the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.” As the movement spread, friars reached almost every diocese of Christendom; within a century of the founder’s death there were 1,421 friaries, with the greater number to the north of the Alps.’
Friars left their mark upon the medieval Church and society — their itinerant ministry took them to almost every parish. Their origins coincided with the growth and expansion of cities in western Europe. Their apostolate was attuned to the pastoral needs of the city and they became part of its fabric. They brought the Gospel to the laity in colourful, dramatic and intelligible terms, preaching in both church and piazza. This adaptation became a salient feature of their preaching and the allied ministry of hearing confessions. Friars preached peace in the divided cities of Italy, and friars restored peace and harmony, frequently in a public demonstration of reconciliation. Their sermons against usury and their social influence led to the creation of the monte di pieta in several Italian cities during the second half of the fifteenth century. The monte was a charitable, non-profit organisation which lent money at a low rate of interest. Some cities revered individual friars as the founders of the monte.*
Innumerable communes supplied the friars with alms and contributed to the construction of their churches. The friars’ church was a place of devotion and instruction and the friary was the home of men committed to the dissemination of Christian values. They inspired a new form of architecture designed to accommodate large crowds for sermons and they were decorated by many of the finest artists, from Cimabue to Sassetta, via Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi, Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti and Piero della Francesca. Devotion to the holy name was promoted by Bernardine of Siena whose monogram of YHS, set like the golden rays of the sun, decorated many churches and houses in Tuscany and spread to other parts of Western Europe. The church of San Francesco occupies a central site in many Italian cities to this day; Greyfriars Street or La Rue des Cordeliers are reminders of the suppressed friaries of England and France.
The friars’ ranks included preachers and contemplatives, philosophers and ascetics, craftsmen and artists, theologians and musicians, missionaries and scientists, historians and mystics, poets and artisans. They filled many of the highest ecclesiastical offices as well as the most humble and menial. Several friars were renowned for their sanctity and their tombs became places of pilgrimage. While the lives of innumerable friars remain hidden from view, many were lauded by contemporaries. The friary was the home of a large and vibrant religious community which ministered to an urban population. Its members were men possessed of remarkable skills.’ Friars brought news of events from the surrounding villages, the countryside and overseas, a service underlined by the cosmopolitan nature of the community. Their ranks included a handful of well-travelled men who had served as missionaries and messengers. As a member of a cosmopolitan order the friar inhabited a world which was not circumscribed by a parish, city, diocese or nation. The friary was a place of natural resort, especially for travellers and merchants who found themselves outside the systems of medieval parishes.* These men needed confessors and other spiritual ministrations. Men with an attachment to the friars in one city might request burial in the friary nearest to their place of death.’
The order’s apostolate was grounded in its impressive educational structures. The order and the new universities grew side by side and their histories were closely entwined in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The leading theologians were mendicants, Albert the Great, Bonaventure, John Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas. The friars’ schools were widely regarded as centres of theological excellence. The order pioneered a form of study to equip men for the apostolates of preaching and hearing confessions. Two friars were instrumental in the foundation of Balliol College, Oxford, and Pembroke College, Cambridge.* Alumni of the schools contributed to the Church in a variety of ways. The liturgical revisions of Haymo of Faversham acquired an importance and popularity beyond the order. The friars’ interest in contemporary events produced several histories of local and international importance. William of St-Pathus, the confessor of Queen Marguerite of Provence, wife of Louis IX, wrote a biography of the canonised king about 1303. The friars’ preaching revitalised the western Church and even their critics acknowledged that their message had reached the boundaries of the world.
Their preaching and devotional literature provided a boost for the growing use of the vernacular in prose, poetry and hymns. For example, mastery of local languages was reflected in the diocese of Exeter, where their penitentiaries were the only ones who understood Cornish sufficiently well. Vowed to chastity, obedience and without anything of his own, the friar renounced social and economic status. He was an accessible man in social terms and was a familiar figure in hospitals and the homes of the sick. He was to be seen visiting prisons and the homes of the aristocracy. He was frequently selected as a mediator in urban disputes or between local communes. He could be invited to preach before the king." Equally he might be selected as the ambassador of his community or his country to announce or negotiate peace; he was no stranger to the battlefield. His status as a member of a large international order made him an ideal instrument of the crown, crossing from one territory to another and recognisable by his habit.
A further symbol of this global dimension was a ministry to travellers, who moved around the markets. Friars were expressly licensed by the local bishop to hear the confessions of foreign merchants visiting the fairs of western Europe. Francis’s vision was global and his Rule (regula vitae) made provision for friars who were inspired to become missionaries in remote lands. He led by example on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. His boldness in walking into the heart of the Muslim camp during the battle for Damietta in 1219 was breath-taking and betokened his respect for people of different faiths. By the turn of the fourteenth century friars were working on missions to the Ethiopians, Indians, Mongols, Persians and Syrians.” They were the only Catholic religious or priests ministering in Syria, the Holy Land, Arabia and Egypt. In 1322 James, bishop of Caffa, claimed that the friars had ministered in Morocco and India as well as China for several decades and had given new martyrs to the Church.
St Francis remains one of the most attractive figures of the medieval Church. His exceptional abilities as a preacher soon brought him to the attention of his neighbours. The acceptance of disciples, albeit initially few in number, began to change the nature of this small fraternity, which would soon be transmuted into an international religious order. His was the last Rule to win papal approval before the religious upheaval of the sixteenth century. However, what was permissible and desirable for a dozen friars in Umbria about 1210 was less practicable for the population of more than a hundred at the Cordeliers of Paris a century later. Fidelity to the Rule was a matter of the utmost concern for friars and this caused them much heart-searching. Within four years of the saint’s death a crisis of leadership occurred; unable to resolve their doubts about their founder’s teaching, friars sought papal intervention in 1230 and this resulted in Quo elongati, the first interpretation of the Rule. The controversial conduct of Elias of Cortona concentrated the friars’ minds on their vocation and the limitations of the office of the minister general. The general chapter emerged as the ultimate source of authority in the order at the expense of the minister general in 1239. The failings of the ministers during the 1280s and 1290s stiffened the reformers’ resolve to seek a measure of independence and therein lay the forces of separation. The desire for a more satisfactory observance of the Rule and the Testament stoked opposition. These disputes resulted in two versions of the friars’ life.
The accommodation between Francis’s vision and the needs of a conventual life for a large community contained the seeds of discord and eventual division. While Francis believed that Christ knew penury and hardship, his followers were required to formulate their own rationale for the order and justify its scriptural and theological bases. The onslaught of the secular masters of the University of Paris in the 1250s was deeply damaging; it also created a durable satire which branded the friars as pseudo-apostles and hypocrites. Although Pope Nicholas II's Exiit qui seminat placed the friars on the moral high ground, it proved to be a false dawn and the practicalities of a large number of friars claiming to be living in poverty caused further controversy.
The order’s espousal of evangelical poverty, which became the criterion of its fidelity to the Rule and its rationale, brought tensions in its wake.
David Knowles comments that the friars were ‘riven by a succession of acrid controversies over the observance of their founder’s conception and command of Christlike poverty.’* Even though the Benedictines had groups of monasteries with dependent priories and general chapters, there was nothing comparable to the mendicant centralisation which undoubtedly heightened and exacerbated the bitterness. The impatience, character-assassination and
unishment meted out to Ubertino da Casale and Angelo Clareno constituted a black day in the history of the order with a reputation for making peace. Despite currents of reform among the Friars Minor Conventual, there was a remarkable lack of foresight at ministerial level in the 1420s and 1430s when there was still time to preserve the organic unity of the order. Instead of offering decisive leadership and an openness to renewal, many ministers placed the focus on obedience.
Bernardine of Siena personifies the purity and vigour of the Observant reform in the first half of the fifteenth century, when the initiative was passing to the reformers. The two branches of the order co-existed, sometimes in the same city, and were valued by the local Church. On the eve of the dissolution in sixteenth century England many testators gave alms to Observant and Conventual communities alike. The order carried virtually all before it in the thirteenth century. Although the friars’ schools produced numerous outstanding theologians in the fourteenth century, it had already surrendered its intellectual dominance. The Observants played a vital role in the preservation of Francis’s ideals. Bernardine of Siena, John of Capistrano, James of the Marches and Albert da Sarteano were among the most famous preachers of their epoch. Despite such vigour, new movements of reform appeared and the Observants did not escape criticism, as the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1539) attests. Within fifteen years of Leo X’s Ite vos, which officially divided the order in 1517, another reform movement, the Friars Minor Capuchin, was born. This book was completed on the threshold of the eighth centenary of the conversion of St Francis. His challenge to respond openly and imaginatively to the Gospel has attracted people since the year 1206. That call is equally fresh and inviting today.
The sources
Hagiography was regulated by its own assumptions and conventions. The hagiographers celebrated the saints, whose virtues and miraculous powers were accentuated. This framework was eternal as well as temporal and Francis’s death was unself-consciously reported as his passing from the shipwreck of this world."* There were abundant instances of the way in which the saints’ conduct was profoundly changed by the grace of God and elevated to a higher level of communion with both their Creator and creatures. The legendae were intended to be read in the church and the monastic refectory for the instruction and edification of a religious community. Nonetheless, changing tastes are discernible in the work of Francis’s first biographer, Thomas of Celano, who described the character and appearance of the saint:
he was of medium height, closer to shortness; his head was moderate in size and round, his face a bit long and prominent, his forehead smooth and low; his eyes were of moderate size, black and sound; his hair was black, his eyebrows straight, his nose symmetrical, thin and straight; his ears were upright, but small; his temples smooth.”
The vita was not a biography in the modern sense because the author was uninterested in the faults of the individual, unless these failings offered an occasion to contrast moments of weakness with the triumph of grace and the resultant conversion. Similarly, parental and sibling ties were of little interest and they constituted a preamble to the work of grace. The act of conversion rendered the family redundant, a fact reflected in the two vitae by Thomas of Celano. Hagiography articulates the prevailing values of the Church and this conditions and distorts examples of Francis’s contact with women. The Vita secunda’s arresting claim that Francis knew only two women by their faces reveals more about the reforming Lateran Councils, which combated clerical marriage and concubinage, than a saint, whose warmth and spontaneity drew people in vast numbers."* While the biographers of St Anthony of Padua (+1231) narrate the grace of God at work in the saint who had left the Augustinian Canons to become a friar in 1220, the sources for the life of Francis of Assisi carry an added complexity due to the polemical climate in which they were composed. The sympathies of the biographer and his audience are thinly disguised in the vitae compiled from the later 1230s. The biographer thenceforth not only recounts the wondrous virtues of the saint, but also izterprets them for contemporaries, seeking to offer a reliable and authoritative portrait.
Thomas of Celano, the author of the Dies irae, was part of the mission to Germany which was relaunched in 1221, although he was back in Umbria before the death of the saint. His account of Francis is largely derivative. He wrote at the request of Pope Gregory IX for the canonisation on 16 July 1228. This gives the vita a wider perspective because the pope wanted to present Francis as a model of the mendicant mission. The Vita prima was completed some months later and approved by Pope Gregory IX on 25 February 1229.
This was the first official biography and it was located within the traditional models of sanctity culled from the Bible and the Fathers of the Church. The hagiographical influence of the lives of Sts Anthony the hermit, Augustine of Hippo and Martin of Tours provide the context for the radical change which occurs in the life of Francis of Assisi. The Anonymous of Perugia, written by John of Perugia between the general chapter of 1239 and before the death of Gregory on 22 August 12.41, reflects the new clerical orientation of the order. His account of the history of the order is a partisan one. He endeavours to justify the present orientation of the movement with Haymo of Faversham at the helm. Emphasis is placed on the ministry of preaching and the admission of Sylvester, a priest of Assisi. The friars’ relations with members are the hierarchy are underlined.
Conscious that the collective memory of the saint was fading through the death of those who had known him, the general chapter of 12.4.4 invited friars to forward their recollections. Leo, Rufino and Angelo, three of the early friars and companions of the saint, responded with a warm personal recollection. They delighted in anecdotes concerning the simplicity and poverty of the saint and their fresh and spontaneous account is less circumscribed than many of the later biographies. They reflect a primitive view of the order and they emphasise the primacy of the vow of poverty, the Rule and the hermitage. These reminiscences lament the direction which the order was taking in the later 1230s and 1240s. Thomas of Celano produced a revised and expanded biography, the Vita secunda or Memoriale about 1247/8, incorporating many of the illustrations of the saint’s teaching and example and concentrating upon the vow of poverty. He also reaffirms the centrality of the Portiuncula, the scene of a decisive phase in his conversion, as the spiritual focus of the order. The roots of The Legend of the Three Companions were also laid in this period. This text offers a full account of the early years of the fraternity and the road to initial papal approbation. The city of Assisi plays a central role in this text.”*
Bonaventure’s Legenda maior was conceived as a biography to bring peace and unity to an order. The last part of the prologue sets out the author's credentials as a historian: he had visited Assisi and other places associated with St Francis; the surviving companions of the saint had been interviewed. Despite these lofty claims, the biography contains little new materials. Indeed, substantial portions of the text were derived from Thomas of Celano’s Vita secunda. What the biography lacks in terms of originality it gains in mystical insights and offers a programme of full conversion. The 1266 general chapter of Paris approved Bonaventure’s biography and declared it to be the official vita; earlier biographies were recalled and destroyed.” This decision, which has provoked historians’ wrath, may have been inspired by the general chapter of the Dominicans at Strasbourg in 1260 which enacted similar legislation regarding vitae of St Dominic.”
The implementation of the decree of 1266 did not extend to paintings of the founder, which supplement the biographical tradition. On occasion, appeal was made to these portraits to settle polemical points regarding the friars’ habits.” Bonaventura Berlinghieri’s dossal in San Francesco at Pescia was executed in 1235 and contains scenes from the Vita prima, such as the sermon to the birds, stigmata, as well as different miracle stories. Professor William R. Cook notes that seven Italian dossals were painted before 1263 and were derived from Thomas of Celano. The Siena dossal — from San Francesco, Colle Valdelsa — was painted after 1263 and depends upon the Legenda maior.” Almost a hundred portraits of the saint survive from thirteenth-century Italy, mainly in Umbria and Tuscany.” Artists such as the unnamed master of San Francesco, who was active in the lower basilica, made parallels between the life of Jesus Christ and the founder. While hagiography, art and contemporary references are major sources, they should be used in conjunction with the writings of St Francis, who explains his own conversion and salient features of his piety.
Historians of the order are deeply indebted to the palaeographical skills and patient scholarship of friars, who have supplied critical editions of the major sources. Projects like the Bullarium Franciscanum, Analecta Franciscana, Bibliotetheca Franciscana Scholastica Medii Aevi, Spicilegium Bonaventurianum and the critical editions of the writings of the order’s theologians emanating from the Collegio di San Bonaventura offer invaluable assistance. A stream of admirable scholars, from Fr Michael M. Bihl to Fr Cesare Cenci, has produced editions of the decisions of general and provincial chapters as well as constitutions. Frs Celestino Piana, Ignatius Brady and Jacques Bougerol among others have devoted their energies to the publication of texts produced by the friars. Dr Andrew Little, the doyen of historians of the English province, contributed several editions of texts and his commentaries contain enduring insights. Critical editions of chronicles lift the veil on the daily life of the friars and their interests. Historians of the Franciscan movement are indebted to Gratien de Paris, John Moorman, Lazaro Iriate de Aspurz and Duncan Nimmo, who have compiled rich accounts of the order and its distinctive contribution to the medieval Church.”*
Principle of selection
The present volume begins with the conversion of Francis and concludes with
the death of John of Capistrano, a period of some two and a half centuries. The aim is to offer a rather more concise treatment than for example the works of John Moorman and Duncan Nimmo on the Franciscans, and no pretence is made at an exhaustive history of the order. I have continued to use the critical edition of Salimbene de Adam, the chronicler, which was published by Giuseppe Scalia in two volumes at Bari in 1966, and republished in two volumes by the Corpus Christianorum, continuatio mediaevalis series in 1998-9.
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