The Martyrdom of the Franciscans: Islam, the Papacy, and an Order in Conflict

By Christopher MacEvitt

A study of three hundred years of medieval Franciscan history that focuses on martyrdom

While hagiographies tell of Christian martyrs who have died in an astonishing number of ways and places, slain by members of many different groups, martyrdom in a Franciscan context generally meant death at Muslim hands; indeed, in Franciscan discourse, "death by Saracen" came to rival or even surpass other definitions of what made a martyr. The centrality of Islam to Franciscan conceptions of martyrdom becomes even more apparent—and problematic—when we realize that many of the martyr narratives were largely invented. Franciscan authors were free to choose the antagonist they wanted, Christopher MacEvitt observes, and they almost always chose Muslims. However, martyrdom in Franciscan accounts rarely leads to conversion of the infidel, nor is it accompanied, as is so often the case in earlier hagiographical accounts, by any miraculous manifestation.

If the importance of preaching to infidels was written into the official Franciscan Rule of Order, the Order did not demonstrate much interest in conversion, and the primary efforts of friars in Muslim lands were devoted to preaching not to the native populations but to the Latin Christians—mercenaries, merchants, and captives—living there. Franciscan attitudes toward conversion and martyrdom changed dramatically in the beginning of the fourteenth century, however, when accounts of the martyrdom of four Franciscans said to have died while preaching in India were written. The speed with which the accounts of their martyrdom spread had less to do with the world beyond Christendom than with ecclesiastical affairs within, MacEvitt contends. The Martyrdom of the Franciscans shows how, for Franciscans, martyrdom accounts could at once offer veiled critique of papal policies toward the Order, a substitute for the rigorous pursuit of poverty, and a symbolic way to overcome Islam by denying Muslims the solace of conversion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Mar 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9780812296778

Book preview

The Martyrdom of the Franciscans

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor

Edward Peters, Founding Editor

A complete list of books in the series

is available from the publisher.

The MARTYRDOM of the FRANCISCANS

Islam, the Papacy, and an Order in Conflict

Christopher MacEvitt

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: MacEvitt, Christopher Hatch, 1972– author.

Title: The martyrdom of the Franciscans : Islam, the papacy, and an order in conflict / Christopher MacEvitt.

Other titles: Middle Ages series.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] | Series: The Middle Ages series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019030172 | ISBN 9780812251937 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Franciscans—History—To 1500. | Martyrdom—Christianity—History. | Christianity and other religions—Islam. | Christian martyrs—Islamic countries. | Church history—Middle Ages, 600–1500.

Classification: LCC BX3606.3 .M33 2020 | DDC 272—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030172

To Pamela, my partner in every adventure,

and Evander, whose arrival has made every day

a voyage to a land of wonder

CONTENTS

Note on Names

Introduction

Chapter 1. I Acquired the Martyrs:

Bishops, Kings, and the Victory of the Martyrs

Chapter 2. Do Not Fear Those Who Kill the Body:

The Desire for Martyrdom in the Thirteenth Century

Chapter 3. To Sustain the Frail:

Franciscan Evangelization in the Thirteenth Century

Chapter 4. Their Blood Has Been Spilled Everywhere:

Evangelization, Martyrdom, and Christian Triumphalism in the Early Fourteenth Century

Chapter 5. The Infidels Learned Nothing:

Poverty, Rejection of the World, and the Creation of the Franciscan Passio

Chapter 6. For the Damnation of Infidels:

Martyrdom and History in the Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Ministers-General

Epilogue. The Afterlife of the Martyrs

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

NOTE ON NAMES , TRANSLATIONS , AND TRANSLITERATIONS

Aldous Huxley once wrote that too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. While he was not addressing the vagaries of spelling conventions, it is an apt summary of my own approach to spelling personal names and names of geographic locations. When translating personal names from Latin, I have generally used the vernacular version of the name most common in the land of the person’s birth: thus, Giovanni for Italians, Jean for those from northern France, Johan for those from southern France. For very well-known figures, such as Francis of Assisi and popes both famous and obscure, I have used the English versions of their names. For the transliteration of Arabic names, I have followed the conventions of the Encyclopedia of Islam. I have left Arabic titles and names from Latin sources in the original; thus Muhammad is spelled a number of different ways, as is qāḍī. Names of geographic locations are generally given with both the orthography from the origin text, and the modern name, again with the exception of those that are very well-known; Cairo simply remains Cairo.

FIGURE 1. Locations of Franciscan martyrdoms in the Mediterranean, Middle East, Central Asia, and India. Map created by Cecilia Gaposchkin.

Introduction

For a man notorious for nepotism, Pope Sixtus IV (1471–84) spent a surprising amount of time thinking about selflessness and sacrifice. They were the premier virtues of the martyr, and Sixtus thought more about martyrs than any of his papal predecessors had for two hundred and twenty years. Sixtus canonized a group of five Franciscan martyrs in 1481, and considered canonizing another martyr in 1479; the last time a pope had recognized a martyr as a saint was in 1253. The five friars—Beraldo, Pietro, Otto, Accursio, and Adiuto—had died in 1220 in Marrakesh, executed by the Almohad caliph for insulting Islam. Not only were the Morocco Five the first Franciscan martyrs to be so honored, but they were also the first Christians to be papally recognized for dying at the hands of Saracens, as medieval texts called the followers of Islam. Considered for canonization but passed over by Sixtus was Simon of Trent, a two-year-old boy found dead on Easter Sunday (March 26)in 1475. The prince-bishop of Trent, Johannes Hinderbach, accused the Jewish community of torturing and killing Simon in order to use his blood to make matzoh for Passover. He arrested all the adult men of the small community, and executed seventeen of them; two more died in prison and only one adult man survived the tragedy. Such blood libel accusations had been leveled at Jewish communities as early as the twelfth century, and they grew more common in the early modern period.¹ Aided by mendicant preachers and humanists, Hinderbach promoted Simon as a martyr and petitioned the pope for his canonization. Sixtus sent Battista de’ Giudici, the Dominican bishop of Ventimiglia, as an apostolic commissioner to investigate the trial of the Jews in Trent. The commissioner came away disturbed by the treatment of the Jews and the excesses of the case. Sixtus summoned a commission to examine the affair; the appointed cardinals decided that the trial of the Jews was legitimate but conversely upheld the centuries-old ban on blood libel trials, preventing Simon’s promotion to sainthood.² The little martyr was eventually beatified in 1588 by Sixtus V (another Franciscan pope)—but his cult was suppressed in 1965 in the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

The would-be saints shared little in common other than their appearance at the court of Sixtus IV, separated as they were by centuries, geography, and their ages at the time of their deaths. What their stories did have in common was the potent appeal of a non-Christian persecutor. Though Christians often conflated Jews and Muslims (along with heretics) as fundamental threats to Christians, the Jewish and Muslim protagonists of the would-be martyrs’ stories were portrayed very differently and provoked surprisingly different responses from the pope, the public, and from the Franciscans. The appeal of the martyr sprang from the flexibility inherent in their stories. The martyr could be a surrogate for any Christian, and the persecutor could similarly represent anyone who oppressed or attacked the virtuous. Each martyrdom was in some way a reenactment of the first martyrdom, the passion of Jesus Christ. But it would be a mistake to see all martyrdoms as endless iterations of the same story; in each, the persons, their manner of dying, and their persecutors are shaped to address contemporary concerns. The account of the martyrs of Morocco was used to address Christian anxieties about Islamic victories over Christians, and also to address concerns more particular to the Franciscan order—the contentious place poverty occupied as a sign of Franciscan piety but increasingly also as a sign of Franciscan heresy. The story of Simon spoke to Christian anxieties about the intermingling of Christians and non-Christians in the domestic and civic spaces of Christian-ruled cities, and their anxieties over economic changes, for which Jews were a convenient scapegoat.

Reactions to Simon and the martyrs of Morocco were decidedly different, in large part due to the perception of their persecutors. Enthusiasm for the child-martyr spread quickly from Trent, driven by the archbishop’s eagerness for a new saint and the widespread anti-Semitism to which the story appealed. Just three weeks after Simon’s death, news of the happenings in Trent had been noted in the diary of Corradino Palazzo, who lived more than eighty miles away in Brescia.³ Within months, a variety of texts—often published by newly established print shops eager to produce quick-selling materials—were circulating in northern Italy and Germany. Poems, miracle stories, and woodcut images were swiftly produced, including a full passio composed a startling three weeks after the child’s death.⁴ By the end of the century, there were more than thirty separate accounts.⁵ The army of texts rode on the back of a widespread and rabid hatred of the Jews. The blood libel accusation itself trafficked in assumptions about Jewish bloodlust for innocent Christians, and the many texts written to promote the little saint were vituperative; the Venetian humanist and poet laurate Raffaele Zonvenzoni called upon bishops and princes to unsheathe your flashing swords; wipe out the nefarious name of the Jews, and drive them out of the whole earth!⁶

The pope, in contrast, reacted with considerable suspicion to both the accusations against the Jewish community of Trent and the authenticity of Simon as a martyr. Both Sixtus and Sigismund, the archduke of Tirol and the secular overlord of the prince-bishop of Trent, suspended the interrogation and torture of the Trentine Jews for a time, and Venice forbade preaching about Simon or attacking Jewish communities in their territory; violence seemed to be an understood result of such preaching. Furthermore, Sixtus forbade the production of images of Simon; nevertheless, we have several woodcuts from the period that depict Simon’s torture and murder. His apostolic commissioner, though known beforehand to be no friend of the Jews, was appalled at the treatment of the Jewish community, and communicated that directly to Sixtus.⁷ He wrote a detailed response to Hinderbach’s presentation to the commission of cardinals, detailing his objections to the trial.⁸

The martyrs of Morocco inspired no such enthusiasm. The first passio describing their execution was not written until more than one hundred years after their deaths; miracle stories appeared another fifty years after that. It is a sharp contrast to the mere weeks it took for a narrative to be produced for Simon. And while the Jews were imagined to have sought Christian blood to enact nefarious rituals, the caliph who executed the Franciscans acted in a straightforward manner. Insulting the prophet Muhammad and Islam were forbidden by law, and when the friars broke that law, they were punished. The motivation of the Almohad ruler was consonant with historical understanding; Christians were indeed executed for such insults. Why was little Simon (and the fantasy of Jewish bloodlust) so much more popular than the Morocco Five and their persecutor? And given this contrast, why were the Franciscans canonized but the sacrificed child was not? Sixtus’s own status as a Franciscan very likely played some role in this decision; he also canonized the order’s former minister-general Bonaventure, in 1482.⁹ In the other direction, the pope’s distaste for the treatment of the Jewish community in Trent by the prince-bishop against his expressed prohibition undermined the petition to recognize Simon’s death, as did the extremes of devotion that Simon’s supporters were expressing about him. De’ Giudici reported that the people of Trent adored their blessed one as a second Christ and as a second Messiah.¹⁰ But perhaps what tipped Sixtus’s hand was what was happening at the other end of the Italian peninsula from Trent: the conquest of the Apulian town of Otranto by the Ottomans on 11 August 1480.

From Morocco to Otranto, 1220–1481

The conquest of Otranto came as a shock to Italy. While the capture of Constantinople (1453), Venetian-ruled Negroponte (1470),¹¹ and other cities of Greece had made the military aggressiveness and expansion of the Ottomans painfully apparent, the siege of Otranto put Ottoman troops on Italian soil, on land the papacy claimed as its patrimony. Furthermore, the conquest of Otranto indicated the direction the Ottomans were expanding: having captured New Rome (Constantinople), Mehmet the Conqueror had set his sights on Old Rome. The horror of the situation was heightened by the reported brutality of the Ottoman troops; rumors circulated describing the murder of the bishop in his cathedral, and the massacre of some of the town’s citizens outside the city walls.¹² The papacy responded in a panic. Sixtus IV quickly negotiated an end to the ongoing war among the Italian city-states that had followed the Pazzi conspiracy against the Medici in Florence,¹³ and turned his attention toward uniting Christendom against the Turks. Divine aid was marshaled alongside the military forces of Italy and beyond; Sixtus issued a call for crusade, and a Mass was composed, which Penny Cole has called a moving and poignant cry to God to assist his beleaguered faithful to victory over the Turks.¹⁴ The liturgy evoked the dead of Otranto: Avenge the blood of your faithful servants which has been shed.¹⁵

The Turkish occupation of Otranto lasted a year. Mehmet II, the terror of the Christian world, died on 3 May 1481, just as the countersiege of Otranto began, led by Neapolitan forces with aid from the Hungarians. A negotiated surrender returned the city to the control of the Kingdom of Naples at the end of the summer (10 September), and the bodies of the murdered citizens of the city were discovered outside the city walls, still unburied.¹⁶

The canonization of the martyrs of Morocco was a defiant response to the Ottoman conquest of Otranto. Martyrdom at its heart is about resistance; the acclamation of a martyr is an audacious shout declaiming that torture and death do not stop the righteous; indeed, it only makes them stronger. Yet a close reading of the passio of the Moroccan martyrs reveals a set of contrasts between the Islamic and Christian realms which contradicted the triumph that Sixtus’s crusade hoped for.¹⁷ The martyrs, of course, were not warriors; they did not defeat Islam through earthly triumph. But in this case, they offered few other forms of victory. The five martyrs converted no Muslims in the course of their time in al-Andalus and Morocco, though several Muslims expressed sympathy for them; one of the caliph’s princes even loved Christians.¹⁸ Nor did the martyrs display the awesome power of the divine as was common in other martyr accounts from the fourth century onward. Such displays made clear to the audience both within the narrative and to those reading it that behind the seemingly defenseless Christians loomed the awesome power of an almighty God. But the friars, living or dead, performed few miracles in Muslim lands. Their relics only began to heal once they were returned to Christian territory.

Curiously, the one miracle that the martyrs did perform in front of Muslims only served to strengthen the sultan’s military power.¹⁹ The martyrs had accompanied the Almohad army under the command of a Christian mercenary on an attack on a rebellious Muslim lord, and on their return to Marrakesh, the army was stranded in the desert without sufficient water. One of the friars miraculously provided a spring to assuage the thirst of the soldiers and their beasts of burden, saving the caliph’s army from a painful death. This could hardly be what Sixtus was hoping for in the case of the Ottomans. Perhaps the pope could take solace from the divine punishment meted out to the caliph after the death of the martyrs: he was struck with partial paralysis, and his land suffered a three-year drought.²⁰ The caliph nevertheless recovered, and the drought ended—hardly the sort of victory that God had marshaled for his people in the past.²¹

What the martyrs were effective in achieving was the separation of Muslim from Christian. A central figure in the story was the infante Pedro, brother of Afonso II of Portugal. Pedro was living in exile at the caliph’s court, and was given the responsibility of minding the friars; hence they accompanied him and the sultan’s army on campaign. A key part of the narrative was the return of Pedro to Portugal; just like the martyrs’ own bodies, the infante could not be left in Muslim hands. What the passio offered was not triumph over Islam, but separation from it—and perhaps the reality of Ottoman troops on Italian soil made that appealing enough.²²

The story of the martyrs of Morocco was convenient to the pope in another way: not only could the Almohad caliph be read as the Ottoman sultan (who was also a caliph), but the martyrs themselves were proxies for another group of martyred dead—the massacred citizens of Otranto (including six Franciscans). They shared much in common. Both groups died at the hands of Muslims, who were seen from the twelfth century on as western Christendom’s greatest rival and a threat to its very existence. While both groups of martyrs were eventually canonized, each had to wait hundreds of years for recognition.²³ The Morocco Five may have been canonized in part to avoid acknowledging those killed by the Ottomans in Otranto.²⁴ The cult of the Otrantines was not authorized until their beatification in 1771, and they achieved full sainthood only on 12 May 2013—their ascension to glory was overshadowed by Benedict XVI’s simultaneous announcement that he would resign as pope, only the second in history to do so.²⁵

If we return again to the court of Sixtus IV, we find that in reality he had three groups of potential martyrs, not just two: the Morocco Five, the citizens of Otranto, and little Simon of Trent. But not all martyrs are equal. Simon was presented as another Christ child: his death came at the same time of the year as did Christ’s (Passover), and his murder was understood to be an expression of the same age-old hatred of what was virtuous and good that drove the Jews of Jerusalem to murder Christ centuries before. The association with Passover connected Simon to the sacrificial lamb, implicitly linking his death to the forgiveness of sins. Simon thus embodied an image of Christians as innocent victims of the hatred of others, hatred that simmered within the boundaries of Christendom itself.

From the papal perspective, Simon was no martyr at all. Even putting aside Sixtus’s doubts about whether Simon had actually been killed by a cabal of Jews thirsting for Christian blood, the pope and others at his court believed that one must willingly accept death to be a martyr—and being only two years old, Simon could not have known what that choice was.²⁶ While the Moroccan martyrs also died at the hands of a group who were believed to hate Christians (Muslims), they died outside the boundaries of Christendom, and went willingly to their deaths, imitating Christ in a different manner than Simon the boy. And why did the dead of Otranto go ignored? The bodies of the dead Otrantines were not recovered until a month after Sixtus canonized the Morocco martyrs; the pope may not have been certain that they were willing to die.²⁷ Some accounts related that the citizens were offered the choice to convert or die, and that the archbishop had miraculously remained on his feet after his beheading, toppling over only after the last of the Otrantines had been executed. The earliest accounts, however, suggested that an indeterminate number of people had been killed as part of the sack of the city, not for failing to convert, and that the archbishop had died of fear and was not killed by the Turks.²⁸ The pope’s own Franciscan background, when added to the well-established story of their martyrdom, may have led him to choose the Morocco Five rather than wait to establish the sanctity of the victims of the Turks. In the years that followed, Sixtus and his successors also may have feared that promoting the Otrantines would accrue more glory to the rulers of Naples than to the papacy.

It is perhaps not surprising to find that the rhetoric of martyrdom still wielded such power amid the struggles for power in Quattrocento Italy, centuries after the putative age of martyrdom had ended. What is surprising is the refusal of various groups to acknowledge where that power lay. Stories about Muslim persecutors of innocent Christians turned out not to be very popular in the medieval period. With the exception of a localized cult in Coimbra, none of the dozens of friars in the Franciscan order claimed as martyrs developed a cult in the medieval period. The relics of the martyrs of Otranto received a little more attention; they were installed at Otranto as well as in Naples, and gradually spread out to other southern Italian churches. By the eighteenth century, the martyrs were even credited with converting their Muslim executioner.²⁹ By far the most popular of the three was Simon of Trent. The rapid spread of his cult and the number of sermons, pamphlets, and shrines dedicated to him in just a few years far exceeded anything produced for the martyrs of Morocco over more than two centuries. Of course, Simon had the advantage of dying during the early age of print, and the new technology helped swiftly spread his story. But even more important is the ugly truth that lay behind Simon’s cult: many Christians believed that a fictional conspiracy of their Jewish neighbors to torture and kill a Christian boy for nefarious rituals was a greater threat than that of a caliph killing friars in lands across the sea. Yet Franciscan sources never featured a Jew killing a friar, though the story of Simon demonstrates how easy such a story was to manufacture. The contrast also points out the gap between papal notions of martyrdom and popular ones. Simon of Trent exemplified the innocent attacked that generated popular enthusiasm. The papacy instead was keen to promote martyrs of just the opposite character, preferring obedient sons of the church who died in her service.³⁰

Thinking with Saracens

Yet the Franciscans clung to narratives about friars dying at the hands of Muslims; indeed, in Franciscan discourse, death by Saracen came to rival or even surpass other definitions of what made a martyr. Of the roughly fifty martyrs commemorated in the late fourteenth-century Franciscan account of the order, the Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Ministers-General of the Franciscan Order (Chronica XXIV generalium ministrorum ordinis fratrum minorum), two-thirds of them were killed by Muslims. The centrality of Islam to Franciscan conceptions of martyrdom becomes even more apparent when we realize that many of the martyr narratives were largely invented; Franciscan authors were free to choose the antagonist they wanted—and Franciscans almost always chose Muslims.

Franciscans recounted stories of their martyred dead for a variety of reasons, but the effect of their narratives has been threefold: to further push apart Muslims and Christians by promoting narratives that essentialized Christian salvation and Muslim damnation; to articulate a new Franciscan piety built on the humility of the martyr rather than the poverty of the friar; and to recast Christian understanding of martyrdom, taking what had been primarily understood as a conduit of divine blessing and power to the human world, and making it instead a gesture that offered little hope of divine intervention. These three effects were linked; in denying the possibility of the salvation of Muslims and downplaying the role of miracles in martyrdoms at their hands, Franciscans aligned Islam with the world of suffering and desire, and Christianity (particularly as expressed through Franciscan virtue) with the divine realm of salvation.

This, of course, was an ancient dichotomy, fundamental to Christian cosmology and essential to the monastic and ascetic values that underpinned the Franciscan enterprise. But it was also a rebuttal of an enduring belief in Christian triumphalism, which allowed Christians to believe that God—through the martyrs, saints, and the Virgin Mary—protected God’s adopted children, cured them of illnesses, defended their homes from attack, and smote their enemies on the battlefield. Martyrdom as told by the Franciscans stood in implicit contrast to crusade and its central hope: that Christians might be worthy of victory in a holy war against Islam and recapture Jerusalem and the Holy Land. The logic of Franciscan martyrdom in effect responded to that endeavor: Christians should seek their true homeland in heaven, not in an earthly city where the temporal power of Islam appropriately dominated. Partes infidelium, as late medieval sources frequently called Islamic lands, would remain separated from partes fidelium until the Final Judgment. Franciscans nevertheless were eager partisans of crusading endeavors, serving as preachers, collectors of funds, and authors of proposals for new crusades. The contrast makes the Franciscan martyrdoms all the more startling: Why deny in one context what you are fighting vigorously for in another?

But the greatest significance of the martyrdoms was for the friars themselves. The Franciscans are often presented in both popular and scholarly imagination as intrepid evangelists, venturing beyond the boundaries of the known world to preach the word of God. But the martyr narratives did little to bolster this image; the martyr-friars preached, to be sure, but they generally failed to convert anyone. Instead, the narratives served to reassure friars anxious in an age when the order faced challenges on many sides: accusations that they failed to follow Francis’s vision of evangelical poverty faithfully, or conversely, that some followed it so assiduously that it led them into heresy. Martyrdom stories thus functioned primarily to supplant poverty as the emblem of Franciscan piety. The values the martyrs represented were uncontroversial, and could appeal to different factions within the order, namely the rigorists, who advocated for the centrality of poverty to Franciscan practice, and conventuals, who argued that the friars ought to be bound primarily by their vow of obedience. The rigorists (also called spirituals) could see in the martyrs those who died out of their commitment to poverty, and for the conventuals the same martyrs could represent devoted obedience to God.

Franciscans were associated with martyrdom from the foundation of the order. The desire for martyrdom was one of the characteristics which made it evident to readers of Francis of Assisi’s hagiography that he was indeed a saint. By the fourteenth century, one Franciscan bishop could boast There is no kingdom, no language, no nation where the Friars Minor are not, or have not been, preaching the faith of Holy Mother Church. And their blood has been spilled everywhere, beginning in Morocco all the way to India.³¹

The Franciscan order emerged in the early thirteenth century as part of a burst of new religious communities in an era of religious, cultural, economic, and political expansion. The order began as a small informal community of men gathered around Giovanni di Bernadone, the son of a cloth merchant in Assisi, who earned the nickname of Francesco as a result of his father’s business trips to France. Francis and his followers were mendicants, vowed to individual poverty like generations of ascetics before them, but also distinctively vowed to communal poverty. They aspired to the austere life that Christ and his apostles had lived, carrying on their journey neither purse nor pouch nor bread, nor money in their belts (Luke 9:3). After meeting Francis and his followers, Jacques de Vitry rejoiced that in addition to monks, hermits, and canons, the Lord in these days has added a fourth form of religious life, the embellishment of a new order, and the holiness of a new rule—the friars.³² Praising their simplicity, love of poverty, and contempt of worldly vanity, Jacques expressed his delight that even the Saracens and people in the darkness [of unbelief] admire their humility and virtue.³³ Like monks, the friars made vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, but unlike monks, they did not live in cloisters, but roved from place to place, urging penitence in vivid sermons, first in Umbria, but then spreading throughout western Christendom and beyond.³⁴

There were two distinct Francises of Assisi, and each shaped a part of the order in his image. One Francis was the itinerant preacher, who (again in the words of Jacques de Vitry) has not so much added a new way of living as renewed an old one, the form and condition of the primitive Church.³⁵ Following the model of the early apostles, this Francis aspired to bring sinning Christians back to the warm embrace of a forgiving God by preaching in Italian churches and piazzas. This Francis was of great use to the institutional church; Pope Innocent III quickly gave him permission to form a new community when Francis visited Rome with his eleven early companions in 1209. According to Francis’s hagiographer Thomas of Celano (writing at the end of the 1240s), Innocent had a dream the night before he met Francis, in which he saw a small, scorned man holding on his back the crumbling basilica of S. Giovanni in Laterano, the cathedral church of Rome and the seat of the papacy.³⁶ And indeed, the Franciscans proved immensely useful to the popes. In addition to encouraging pious behavior among the laity, Franciscans soon took on the role of confessors in many regions, as well as preachers of crusades, ambassadors, and even bishops and cardinals. The Franciscans who followed in the footsteps of this Francis helped support and expand the power of the church, and consequently came to have the wealth and prestige of the institution behind them. For these friars, poverty was a malleable quality that distinguished the order generally, but should not impede its ability to engage with the world.

The other Francis was not one of Jacques’s dynamic new apostles; he was a hermit. This was how Francis began his saintly life, and how he ended it. Once the order had been established and grew beyond a small fraternity of brothers who all knew each other, Francis preferred to live in quiet retreat in places like La Verna, a hermitage in the mountains north of Arezzo. This Francis avoided crowds and attention, and sought to separate himself from the material world of ambition, desire, and distraction so that he could focus on imitating Christ in all aspects of his life. Francis even wrote a rule for hermitages, and many of his earliest disciples followed him in living a greater part of their lives in seclusion. For Franciscans who followed this life, poverty was the primary virtue on which all others relied. But, of course, there were not two Francises, but one who seamlessly melded the two roles: as his hagiographer Thomas of Celano recalled, It was his custom to divide the time given him to merit grace and, as seemed best, to spend some of it to benefit his neighbors and use the rest in the blessed solitude of contemplation.³⁷ It was not easy for his friars to do the same, and few Franciscans beyond the first generation ever managed to combine both roles successfully.

Martyrdom was one of the strands of piety that both versions of Francis drew upon, and it was woven throughout the early history of the order. Francis the preacher desired to evangelize among the infidels, and made three trips to Muslim lands in an attempt to fulfill that desire. The stories of his journeys, and particularly of his visit to Egypt in the midst of the Fifth Crusade and his subsequent meeting with the Ayyubid sultan al-Kāmil, have become a central part of Francis’s image, re-created in frescoes and cited even today by popes as a model of interreligious dialogue. But his journeys, according to Thomas of Celano, were also driven by the desire for martyrdom.

However, Francis did not die under an infidel sword. Instead, he died years later at one of his beloved hermitages, surrounded by his little brothers. In his final years, he had been afflicted with painful illnesses, and his hagiographers believed he suffered from the added extra agony of the mystically induced stigmata, the wounds that Christ himself suffered at the Crucifixion. Thomas of Celano suggested that the stigmata were a superior form of martyrdom; instead of dying as Christ died, Francis was called to suffer as Christ suffered. If the preacher desired martyrdom, it was the hermit who received it (mystically). But it was more than the model of Francis (or of the five martyrs of Morocco) that made martyrdom so important to Franciscans; the values of martyrdom were woven into the fabric of the order. Above all else, the friar was to be humble, forswearing anything that might lead him to focus on the self. He was called to sacrifice his ambition, his desires, his physical comfort, and even his life out of love for God. Martyrs were the very first saints of the Christian tradition, and the fount from which the cult of the saints and their relics first emerged. The martyrs and their stories suffused western Christian culture and values; people were named after them, their deaths were commemorated daily, their aid cured the sick and gained forgiveness for the sinner. The Franciscans were therefore tapping into a set of cultural values and stories that resonated throughout institutions, communities, and families.

Franciscan chronicles recounted the stories of dozens of friars who had died in Islamic lands. Guglielmo de Castromaris, for example, died in the city of Gaza, in 1354. About him we know little else; how he came to be in Gaza, how old he was, whether tall or short, round as we imagine jolly friars in the style of Friar Tuck, or thin and spare like a tree branch. His name survives for one reason only: he died a martyr. Only one account preserves his name, written some twenty years after his death; it informs the reader that the friar was preaching the faith of Christ and denouncing the law of Machomet—Islam, which was the faith of most of the citizens of Gaza. An unnamed king took offense, and, alternating threats and bribes, urged Guilielmo to deny his faith and become a Muslim. Guilielmo resisted, and the king had him executed.³⁸

Guglielmo’s attack on Islam earned him this brief citation in a chronicle written in France some twenty years later, but little more.³⁹ As far as we know, Christians did not call upon him to intercede for them in heaven; no relics were preserved to foster his memory in Gaza or in Castromaris, a small town near Naples where Guglielmo was from; nor was he ever inscribed officially as a martyr recognized by the church. Those rolls were already full. Christian martyrs by the fourteenth century numbered in the tens of thousands, if not the hundreds of thousands; Jacques de Voragine claimed that there were five thousand saints for every day of the year (except, for some reason, January).⁴⁰ Remove his name, the date, and the place of his death, and Guilielmo’s story is interchangeable with many of the other Franciscan martyrs.

Guglielmo, his fellow friar-martyrs and the stories about them are a puzzle to us. Did Guglielmo even exist? Did he actually die in Gaza? Did anyone notice? Did he choose to die, and if so, why? We have no answers to these questions; Guglielmo and his brothers in martyrdom are fictional characters, even the few whom we can prove actually existed. In martyrdom it is the story that matters, not its historicity—the author, not the subject. Who cares enough to tell the story? And what need does the story fill? We do not even have access to the experience of the Franciscan martyrs for whom we have reliable historical evidence. A few letters survive from friars, but they were written before they knew they were going to die, and cast little light on whether they chose martyrdom, or why. No prison diary à la Perpetua has survived to tell us how the friars themselves understood their deaths. Furthermore, the history of martyrdom and martyrology has remained curiously unwritten for the high Middle Ages, so our understanding of the significance of martyrdom in this period is limited. Although the association between Franciscans and martyrdom is long-standing, it has not been the subject of a monograph; this book is the first to address it. It is also the first to take martyrdom in the late Middle Ages as its primary subject.

Stories recounted about martyrs not only give meaning to death suffered through religious persecution, but also give meaning to the world around the martyrs—that is, for the community who preserved their memory. The acts of testifying, suffering, and dying become a passio (a narrative account of the martyrdom) only through a series of interpretive choices by a narrator, who casts the actors, constructs the scenery, and provides a script.⁴¹ Franciscans wrote that script in a number of ways, but generally they chose one that was at odds with the dominant narrative in medieval martyr-writing. Since the fourth century, Christians had depicted the martyr in death as a victor who demonstrated the superiority of heaven over earth, Christians over infidels, and virtue over vice. Furthermore, that victory was made manifest on earth by the conversion of onlookers, by the spectacular miracles that accompanied the martyr’s death and appeared at the tomb afterward, and by the flocks of the faithful expressing their devotion there.

Franciscan stories of martyrdom defied that tradition in a number of ways, as we have already seen in the passio of the Moroccan martyrs. The martyrs generally failed to convert anyone, either through their teaching or through the example of their patient suffering. While some miracles accompanied the friars’ suffering and death, they were the kind that indicated divine approbation for their sacrifice. Miracles which demonstrated that the martyrs were conduits of divine power—healing miracles, miracles of punishment—were few and far between. Their martyrdoms failed to have the transformative effects that make martyrdoms more than just executions. Hagiography has been described as a narrative linguistic practice that recounts the lives of the saints so that the reader or hearer can experience their imperative power.⁴² But the Franciscan martyrs displayed few of the miracles or healing power that Christians expected of their saints. Rather than being a tool of conversion, Franciscan martyrdom, at least in the narratives preserved within the order, achieved the opposite—it emphasized the separation of Christian from Muslim, rejected the possibility of transforming one into other, and presented Islam and its political authority as a permanent feature of the present world. The notable exception was the four Franciscans