Francis of Assisi

Francis of Assisi was born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone in Assisi in 1181 or 1182, the son of a prosperous cloth merchant. Military ambition, imprisonment after Assisi's war with Perugia, illness, prayer, and encounters with people affected by leprosy contributed to a gradual conversion. He renounced his former status and embraced a life of poverty, itinerant preaching, prayer, manual work, and service. Followers gathered around him and became the Order of Friars Minor; Clare of Assisi and her community shared the Franciscan vision at San Damiano, while a wider penitential movement developed among laypeople.

Francis sought to follow Christ through humility, peacemaking, and kinship with the poor. During the Fifth Crusade he crossed military lines and met Sultan al-Kamil in Egypt in 1219. The Franciscan rule received papal confirmation in 1223. Near the end of his life, almost blind and suffering serious illness, Francis composed the Canticle of the Creatures in the Umbrian vernacular. The work praises God through the natural world, peacemakers, patient sufferers, and bodily death. Its familial treatment of creation reflects Francis's conviction that every creature depends upon the same Creator.

Francis died near Assisi on October 3, 1226, and was canonized in 1228. His canticle became one of the earliest major works of Italian religious literature and, through William Henry Draper's free English paraphrase, the historical source of “All Creatures of Our God and King.”