Her father shuts her out; two strangers take her in

CORTONA, Tuscany, early 1270s AD — Saint Margaret of Cortona sat under a fig tree in her father’s garden at Laviano and cried. Her son sat beside her. Her father had just turned the two of them out of his house. It was the early 1270s AD, and the boy was seven or eight.

St. Margaret had grown up in Laviano, a village on a small hill not far from Lake Trasimeno. Her father was a farmer. Her mother died when she was seven, and two years later her father married again. St. Margaret and her stepmother never got on, and the stepmother disliked her more as the years went by.

At sixteen St. Margaret left home to live with a young nobleman from Montepulciano. They had a son. She often asked the nobleman to marry her. Every time he promised, and he never did. After nine years he was murdered while he was on a journey.

According to Catholic Tradition, the nobleman’s dog came back alone. The dog led St. Margaret to his body, buried under some oak trees. When she saw the dead man, she became very afraid of how God would judge her. She was sorry for her sins at once. The nobleman had given her jewels and property, and St. Margaret gave them back to his relatives. She swapped her fine clothes for a plain black dress. Then she walked home to her father, leading the boy by the hand.

At Laviano, St. Margaret knelt at her father’s feet in tears. She told her father about her nine years with the nobleman and asked him to forgive her. Her stepmother urged him to send her away. He drove St. Margaret and the boy out.

A voice under the fig tree

Under the tree St. Margaret didn’t know what to do. She had no one to help her. She asked Christ to be her guide, her father, her husband and her Lord. Then she was tempted to go back to the kind of life she had just left. She was young and beautiful, and her father had thrown her out. Plenty of powerful men would have wanted her to live with them the way she had lived with the nobleman.

She prayed instead. While she prayed, she heard inside her heart what she was to do. She was to go to Cortona and do whatever the Friars Minor told her.

She got up and set out at once with the boy. Cortona stood on a hill about ten miles to the north. The two of them walked there over a mountain road. They came into the town through a gate called the Porta Berarda.

Two women on a steep street

St. Margaret knew no one in Cortona. She didn’t know the way to the friars’ house either. She was climbing the steep streets inside the gate. There she met two noblewomen of the town, Marinaria and Raneria. They were the first people she had met in Cortona.

The two women could see that St. Margaret was a stranger with a child. She was tired and unhappy, so they went over to her. St. Margaret told them what her life had been and that she was sorry for it. She said she had come to find the Friars Minor.

Marinaria and Raneria took her and the boy into their own house.

St. Margaret started work there straight away as a servant. The two women took charge of her son’s schooling. They also took her to the Friars Minor at the church of San Francesco. That was where she had been told to go.

Years later, St. Margaret’s confessor wrote down the words she heard Christ say to her when she prayed. Christ reminded St. Margaret of those first days in Cortona: “I placed thee, particularly in the first days, in the company of the noble Ladies Marinaria and Raneria.”