For he was courteous, joyful, lovable, gentle, and in all these things he surpassed what nature had given him, because grace had added its own.
Celano, First Life of Saint Francis
Pietro di Bernardone had excellent commercial instincts, but contrary to his typical hagiographic depiction, he also had a romantic soul. When his wife Pica gave birth to their son in 1181 or 1182, Pietro was away in France, almost certainly in Provence, the warm, vine-wrapped heartland of the most electrifying cultural movement of the medieval world: the Troubadours. He brought back bolts of fine cloth, a smattering of Provençal, and, it seems, a great enthusiasm for the poetry and music and language that was reshaping the European imagination. He named his son Giovanni, but nicknamed him ‘Francesco’, the little Frenchman, and in doing so planted a seed in the boy that would flower in ways no cloth merchant could have foreseen. On a side note, it is high time we re-read the Pietro story in the Sources with a much more critical eye, and examined Pietro’s true motivations instead of the usual ‘selfish, money grabbing, materialistic, blocker of Francis’. I think, at least in relation to his son, whom he deeply loved, there is a little more to Pietro’s heart than these.
The Troubadour movement had emerged in southern France in the late eleventh century, with the first identifiable troubadour, William IX, Duke of Aquitaine (1071–1126), composing in Occitan lyrics of extraordinary sophistication, lyrical, sensuous, spiritually charged, full of longing and knightly honour. By the mid-twelfth century the movement had crossed the Alps into northern and central Italy, where it took root among courts and piazzas alike, generating the Italian sirventes and inspiring a generation of vernacular poets. This musical and literary movement flourished between 1100–1250. Francis of Assisi was born and grew up when this new, vibrant, challenging and creative cultural phenomenon was at its very apex.
The songs he heard in the streets and taverns of Assisi were not dour ecclesiastical plainsong. They were fervent, emotionally extravagant, melodically inventive, powerful love songs filled with exquisite form and powerful eroticism. They were the ‘pop’ music of the medieval world (though in texture and style more akin to the singers of the 40s and early 50s. Think Nat King Cole singing ‘Autumn Leaves’ or Sinatra, not a great singer, but he could phrase perfectly, singing ‘I’ll Never Fall in Love again’, or listen to the great female singers Ella Fitzgerald (‘Someone To Watch Over Me’), Billie Holiday (‘Good Morning, Heartache’) Dinah Washington (‘What A Difference A Day Makes’), Peggy Lee (‘Fever’), Rosemary Clooney (‘Tenderly’), Doris Day (‘Secret Love’). Wonderful arrangements, orchestration and unbelievable musicality e.g., Count Basie’s orchestral work, and Artie Shaw’s arrangement of ‘Begin the Beguine’ makes the angels put their harps and trumpets down!).
Thomas of Celano, Francis’ earliest biographer, tells us something remarkable: that when Francis wished ‘to sing about his Lord’, he sang in French. Not Latin. Not the Umbrian dialect of his daily life. French, the language of love, the language of the Troubadours, the language of chivalric romance and courtly lyric. This is not a trivial detail. It tells us that for Francis, the emotional register appropriate to speaking of God was the same register he associated with the great lyric tradition of the south. The sacred and the romantic were not separate categories in his imagination. They occupied the same chamber of the heart.
It is said that he spoke French well, though it may have been Provençal, the actual tongue of the Troubadour birthplace. Whether or not he did, he was immersed in a culture saturated with its forms: the alba (dawn song), the tenso (debate poem), the pastourelle, the canzo, structured verse forms built around complex rhyme schemes, refrains, and musical settings. Brother Pacificus, who would introduce the Friars Minor into France in 1217, joined the early fraternity and the Mirror of Perfection identifies him as ‘the king of verse’, a man who had received the poet’s laurel from the Emperor, brought with him into the Order the highest professional skills of the Troubadour tradition. Francis valued him enormously, and Bonaventure in the Major Life tells how he asked him to apply his not inconsiderable talent in helping with the music and rhythm for the Canticle, and to teach it to the friars. The fact that the greatest Italian poet of his day found the Franciscan fraternity a natural home tells us something profound about the aesthetic atmosphere Francis had created.
The word fraternity itself, so central to Francis’ vision, draws as deeply from chivalric culture as from the New Testament. The fraternitas of knights, the sworn brotherhood of arms, the companionship of the chevalerie, was the dominant social ideal of the age. The brotherhood of the Round Table, the brotherhood forged in shared danger and mutual loyalty, was the highest form of human bonding that chivalric literature knew how to imagine. Francis did not simply borrow from the Gospel the idea of brothers; he fused it with this living ideal. When he called his companions fratres, brothers, every listener in 1209 heard both the evangelical echo and the chivalric one.
Nowhere is this fusion more vivid than in the Chanson de Roland, the great Old French epic crystallised into written form around 1100 and widely known by Francis’ day. Roland is the ideal Christian knight: fierce, loyal, willing to die rather than dishonour his lord, capable of extraordinary tenderness toward his companions, his final prayer on the battlefield a masterpiece of spiritual surrender. Roland does not die for an abstraction. He dies for Charlemagne, for France, for God, in that order, and the three are barely distinguishable. This is precisely the chivalric ideal that Francis internalises and transforms: total, personal, costly loyalty to the Great King, expressed not through the sword but through poverty, humility, and joy.
The young Francis dreamed explicitly in chivalric terms. Celano tells us of the vision that arrested his military ambitions near Spoleto around 1205: he saw a great hall hung with shields and armour, and heard a voice promising him these weapons if he returned to Assisi and awaited further instruction. His immediate interpretation was worldly, he would be the greatest knight of all, greater than his lord Walter of Brienne whom he had set out to join. Only gradually did the vision reframe itself: the armour was spiritual, the great hall was the Church, and the lord to whom he owed total allegiance was not a Neapolitan baron but Christ himself. This is not an abandonment of the chivalric framework. It is its transfiguration.
The Troubadour poets had developed the doctrine of fin’amor, courtly love, into a complete spiritual and aesthetic system. The beloved lady of the Troubadour lyric is simultaneously a real woman, an ideal, and a spiritual force. She is unattainable, or barely attainable. She demands of her knight total service, complete sacrifice of self-interest, and a kind of joyful, ennobling suffering. The knight’s love refines him; it elevates his soul precisely through its difficulty. Bernart de Ventadorn (c. 1135–1194), one of the greatest of all Troubadours, writes of love as a discipline of absolute surrender: ‘I have given myself so completely to love that I do not know how to belong to myself.’
Francis knew this emotional and conceptual grammar intimately. When he wished to explain his relationship to poverty, he reached instinctively for it. The Sacrum Commercium, the Sacred Exchange, probably composed within a decade of Francis’ death and almost certainly reflecting his own language and imagery, describes Poverty as a noble lady, a queen, a bride. Francis woos her. He seeks her out in her remote dwelling, finds her enthroned in humility, and receives her as his bride. This is not simply a pious allegory accidentally borrowing from romance. It is a deliberate, sustained, emotionally intelligent translation of the courtly love ideal into the spiritual life. Lady Poverty is the most perfect lady because she asks for everything and gives everything; the love she demands is the only love that fully ennobles its bearer.
The vision of marrying ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’, which Celano reports Francis describing in his early days of conversion, takes on its full resonance here. This was not a metaphor Francis found in a theological treatise. It was a metaphor he found in the living poetic culture around him, and he made it his own with the conviction of a man who had genuinely fallen in love.
Francis’ poetic temperament is evident not only in his imagery but in the formal properties of his writing. His ‘Praises of God’, the ‘Canticle of the Creatures’, his ‘Letter to the Faithful’, the ‘Office of the Passion’, the ‘Salutation to the Virtues’ are not the functional prose of a religious administrator. They are the work of someone who has deeply absorbed the principles of poetic composition: structured form, rhythmic parallelism, controlled repetition, alliteration, accumulated intensity.
The Canticle of the Creatures, composed at San Damiano around 1225 when Francis was nearly blind and in great physical suffering, is the oldest surviving poem in the Italian vernacular of any significant literary ambition. Its structure is architectural: each verse a strophe of praise, each strophe introducing a new creature or created reality with the refrain ‘Laudato si’, ‘Praised be you’. The anaphora, the repeated structural opening, is not a liturgical formula borrowed lazily from the Psalms. It is a compositional technique Francis deploys with the discipline of an intuitive poet, building each new strophe on the rhythmic foundation laid by the last, creating a cumulative emotional effect that is genuinely musical.
Celano describes him playing an imaginary instrument: placing a stick across his arm and drawing another across it as though playing a viola, but it is almost certainly the rebec, the bowed instrument recently arrived in Italy from the Arab world, used extensively by Troubadours in their performances (there is some excellent work being done at the moment on the influence and impact of Arabic compositional forms on medieval music and instruments). The gesture reveals a man who had watched Troubadour performers carefully, who had absorbed their physical relationship to music, who associated the making of sacred song with the same bodily expressiveness as secular lyric performance. He was not imitating liturgical psalmody. He was doing something new.
The Canticle was composed at one of the lowest points of Francis’ life: his eyesight failing, his relationship with the Order he had founded under enormous strain, his body ravaged by the stigmata and by disease. And yet the explosion of joy with which he greeted the composition—Celano tells us he leapt up, called the brothers together, and sang it to them with abandon—bears every hallmark of the Troubadour experience of creative joi. The Troubadours were not writing pretty verses about pleasant things. The finest of them, Guilhem de Peitieu (1086–1126), Marcabru (c. 1110–1150), Raimbaut d’Aurenga (c. 1144–1173), the great Guiraut de Bornelh (c. 1138–1215), were working in a tradition that understood joy as a discipline, a conquest, something wrested from difficulty by the sheer force of love. Joi was not happiness. It was the fierce, luminous state produced by total alignment with what one loves most.
Francis knew this joi. He had known it since his conversion, but the Canticle gives it its purest expression. Here is a man composing a song of cosmic praise while in physical agony, using vernacular poetic forms, probably setting it to a melody he had invented or borrowed from Troubadour sources, teaching it to his brothers to sing publicly in the streets. This is not the behaviour of a monk. It is the behaviour of a Troubadour, one who has found, in the whole of creation, a lady more beautiful than any Bernart de Ventadorn ever praised, and a lord more worthy of total fealty than Roland ever served.
The creativity Francis unleashed did not die with him. It runs through the Franciscan tradition like a bright thread: in the Laude of Jacopone da Todi (1230–1306), in the philosophy and poetry of Ramon Llull (1232–1316), in the mystical writing of Angela of Foligno, in the Renaissance art patronised and shaped by the Franciscan aesthetic, and in the extraordinary range of Franciscan artists, poets, musicians, artists, sculptors, and writers working today. There is something in the Franciscan charism that keeps generating beauty, not as a luxury annexed to the spiritual life, but as an expression of it.
This is why the label ‘God’s Fool’, however affectionately meant, misrepresents Francis. It positions him as eccentric, marginal, unworldly in a pejorative sense. ‘Herald of the Great King’ is closer, but still situates him primarily as a messenger, a functionary of the divine court. What the evidence most consistently shows is something richer and more precise: ‘God’s Troubadour’: A man of deep poetic formation, chivalric ideals, musical instinct, and romantic temperament, who heard in the Gospel not a summons to joyless renunciation but the most demanding and most beautiful love song ever composed, and who spent his life learning to sing it back, in whatever language love required.
The Troubadour spirit has not fallen silent. In the twenty-first century, Franciscan brothers and sisters continue to discover that the Gospel is not primarily a doctrine to be argued but a love song to be sung — and they are singing it in the languages their age understands. Franciscan poets publish verse that carries the scent of San Damiano into urban parishes and university common rooms. Franciscan musicians compose in genres from folk to jazz to electronica, finding in contemporary sound the same conviction Francis found in Troubadour melody: that beauty is not an ornament of faith but its most honest expression. Franciscan visual artists work in digital media, photography, and installation, making visible the sacred in the ordinary with the same instinct that moved Francis to praise Brother Sun and Sister Water.
Podcasters, film-makers, and social media creators (especially on Tik Tok) shaped by the Franciscan tradition reach communities no pulpit could, carrying the Good News into the scrolling, fractured, luminous spaces where people now live most of their interior lives. The platforms change. The algorithms shift. The technologies that once seemed permanent become obsolete within a generation. But none of this need unsettle a tradition born from a man who took off his clothes in the public square of Assisi and sang love songs in the street. Francis was always at home in the vernacular, always drawn toward the new form, always certain that the heart of the Gospel — that we are loved without condition and summoned to love without limit — is inexhaustible enough to fill every vessel a human age can devise. The historical moment may change. The language of love never does. Contemporary Franciscan artists, poets, and musicians are not departing from the charism of their founder. They are, in the deepest sense, obeying it: taking the most beautiful love song ever composed, the Gospel, and learning, in their own tongue, to sing it back.