His soldier brothers seize St. Thomas Aquinas and lock him in a tower

ACQUAPENDENTE, 1243 AD — Saint Thomas Aquinas’s elder brothers, soldiers in the Emperor’s army, overtook him on the road north of Rome and carried him off by force on their mother’s orders. He was not yet twenty, a novice of the Dominican friars on his way to Paris, and his family meant to hold him until he gave up the friar’s habit. They kept him locked in a castle tower for between eighteen months and two years. He came out still a friar.

St. Thomas was a son of Count Landulf of Aquino, who lived at the castle of Rocca Secca in the hills between Rome and Naples. His family wanted him to hold high office in the Church. As a small boy he was placed with the Benedictine monks of Monte Cassino, the great abbey near his home, where his uncle was abbot. His father expected him to rule there one day as abbot, or else to take a place at court.

Instead, as a student at Naples, some time between 1240 and August 1243 AD, St. Thomas took the habit of the Order of Preachers against his father’s will. The Order of Preachers was a new order of friars who begged for their living. A preacher from their house at Naples, Father John of St. Julien, had drawn him to join them. His mother, Theodora, did not object to a son in religious life. She objected to a son of a princely house wearing the habit of an order that lived by begging. The family wanted him to leave the Dominicans and become an abbot or a courtier; St. Thomas wanted to stay a Dominican.

Theodora set out for Naples to bring him home. As soon as St. Thomas heard she was coming, he left for Rome by a side road and went into the friars’ convent of Santa Sabina. Theodora followed him there and called for him at the porch. St. Thomas refused to see her. The head of the Dominican order decided to send him out of Italy altogether, to Paris, with a few other friars. While Theodora went about Rome complaining and making threats, St. Thomas travelled north. She sent a messenger on horseback to her elder sons, who commanded the troops of the Emperor Frederick II in Tuscany, with orders to take him by force.

The brothers caught him near the small town of Acquapendente, between Siena and Lake Bolsena. St. Thomas was resting by a spring with two friars when a troop of horsemen rode up. His brothers shouted at him for disobeying his parents and ordered him to take off the habit and come home. One of them, Raynald, took hold of him and tried to tear the habit from his shoulders, and could not. The brothers took him back to Rocca Secca. When St. Thomas still refused to give up the habit, the brothers moved him on Count Landulf’s orders to the village of Monte San Giovanni, two miles away, and locked him in the tower of the castle there.

Count Landulf came to the tower from time to time. He left two sets of clothes with his son, a costly suit and a Benedictine monk’s habit, and said he would be satisfied if St. Thomas put on either one. A second proposal went further: St. Thomas could keep his Dominican habit and still be abbot of Monte Cassino, the abbey where he had been placed as a boy. St. Thomas refused. He told them sharply that he wanted to be a Dominican in the Dominican Order.

Father John of St. Julien got into the castle several times and brought him a new Dominican habit. Count Landulf was so angry that he kept his son under closer guard for some days.

His brothers made one more attempt. They brought a woman into his room to try to seduce him. St. Thomas snatched a burning stick from the fire and drove her out.

The friars took their complaint to Pope Innocent IV and to the Emperor Frederick, and both sent orders that St. Thomas be set free. The brothers were too proud to free St. Thomas on command, but they agreed to look the other way while he escaped. He was let down from a window of the castle in a basket, into the arms of friars waiting below, and they took him to Naples. In January 1245 AD, after a short trial period, he made his permanent vows as a Dominican.

His relatives then asked Pope Innocent IV to cancel the vows. Some argued that a prince who might inherit the family’s titles and lands should not become a begging friar. St. Thomas stood before the Pope and his court in Rome, with his mother and his two soldier brothers beside him. The Pope questioned him closely on why he had joined the Friars Preachers, sent him away with a blessing, and forbade anyone to interfere with his vocation again.