Saint Francis of Assisi

Walked Into the Sultan's Tent

He was born around 1181, the son of a cloth merchant, and spent his youth spending money. He went to war against Perugia, was captured, spent a year in a cell, and came home ill and changed. He kissed a leper on the road — before the public scene with his father, and, he later said, the real hinge of his whole life — and by 1209 he had a written rule of life, a dozen followers who would grow into a religious order, and papal permission to preach. His argument was not complicated and was very hard to live: own nothing, work with your hands, beg for the rest, and treat every part of creation as family. In 1219, in the middle of the Fifth Crusade, he walked out of the Christian camp at Damietta, Egypt, across the lines, into the tent of the Sultan al-Kamil. They talked for days. Neither converted the other. He walked back out. In 1224 he became the first person recorded to have received the stigmata.

Asked to Die on the Bare Ground

He died on 3 October 1226 at the Portiuncula, a chapel outside Assisi, aged about forty-four, nearly blind from an illness caught in Egypt, and in constant pain from years of deliberate self-neglect. He asked to be taken off the bed and laid naked on the bare ground to die. He had recently added a verse to his Canticle of the Creatures welcoming death as a sister. He also apologized to his own body — which he had called Brother Ass and treated accordingly — for how hard he had been on it. He was made a saint less than two years later.