Saint Francis sold cloth. Perugia locked him in with knights.

PERUGIA, Umbria, 1202 AD — Assisi lost the battle. Perugia took its prisoners back to the city, and then split them into two groups.

This was 1202 AD. Assisi and Perugia are two cities in Umbria, in Italy. They had gone to war with each other. The two armies met in open country about half way between them, near a place called Ponte San Giovanni. Assisi was beaten.

Saint Francis of Assisi was one of the men Perugia took. He was about twenty. The old accounts say “about”, and not one of them gives his exact age. He was not a soldier. He worked in his father’s cloth business. He had marched out with the other men of the city. The Church declared him a saint twenty-six years later, in 1228 AD.

Close enough to see

The war started inside Assisi. The nobles there had fallen out with the townspeople and gone to Perugia for help. Perugia declared war.

The two cities are close. Assisi is built in terraces up a hillside, with the whole Umbrian plain below it. From the windows of the houses you can see all the way to Perugia.

Rich, but not noble

St. Francis’s father was Pietro Bernardone, and he sold cloth. That was a good business to be in. Cloth merchants were the richest traders of that time. They were the bankers of the age as well. Their heavy wagons carried the money the Popes had collected in England and France.

Buying trips were long and dangerous. The roads were not safe, so a merchant needed a strong guard. He was going to the big fairs, where traders from all over Europe met and stayed for weeks. Pietro Bernardone made those journeys, some of them as far as France.

None of it made the family noble. St. Francis was a merchant’s son and not a knight. The oldest account of the prison gives a different reason for putting him in with the knights.

Sorted by rank

Perugia kept the knights and the nobles it had captured in one place. The townsmen it had taken — the popolani (the common people) — went somewhere else. St. Francis went in with the knights.

Not because his father had money. The earliest full account of that year in prison was written by three men who had known St. Francis. They give the reason in one line. St. Francis was put with the knights “for that he was a noble in his manners.” They meant the way he behaved.

The men he spent the year with were not the nobles who had run off to Perugia. A few of Assisi’s nobles had stayed and fought on the townspeople’s side. Those were the men shut in with him.

The man nobody would speak to

They were in chains. St. Francis was cheerful in them anyway.

Then one of the knights hurt another prisoner. Everybody else in the room decided they would have nothing more to do with him.

St. Francis kept sitting with him. Nobody else would. St. Francis kept telling the other prisoners to sit with the man too. In the end they did.

Going home

St. Francis was held for more than a year. The quarrel that had started the war was one Assisi had with itself. In November 1203 AD the two sides let a panel of arbitrators settle it. The arbitrators announced a deal between the city’s lords and its common people. Peace was made between the cities, and the prisoners at Perugia were let go.

St. Francis went home to Assisi with the men who had been taken with him. He also had a low fever he had picked up in the prison, and he took that home too.