FRANCISCAN HISTORY AND THE SPIRITUAL TRADITION

EVER since Sabatier published his delightful and profound biography of St Francis, the lives and fortunes of the saint and his followers have been a favourite study of historians, and both Roman Catholic and Protestant scholars have contributed in no small measure to our knowledge of them. The main sources have been critically edited; many problems connected with them have been satisfactorily elucidated; and the results of detailed investigations have been fitted together to form a general picture of the Order's development. Like all students of Franciscan origins, I owe a great debt to previous scholars who have prepared the field so thoroughly and smoothed away so many of die difficulties. But the possibilities of the subject have not been exhausted. The justification for my book is that parts of the story, especially the early part, down to 1239, are in need of considerable reinterpretation; while some of the documents, especially for the years immediately after 1239, have never been thoroughly analysed.

The starting-point of my investigations has been the career of brother Elias, which is of crucial importance for the understanding of the early history of the Order, and which has been left too much at the mercy of prejudices and preconceptions. His worldliness and his apostasy, and the conflicts that disrupted the Order not long after his death, combined to turn him into a legendary and sinister figure, removed and isolated from his true context. Within the first decades of its existence the Order had experienced a radical transformation, remarkable alike for its scope, its thoroughness, and the rapidity of its completion.

IN 1892 Ehrle published the results of his researches into early Franciscan constitutional history. He had collected evidence from the chronicles and histories of the Order, the decisions and decrees of Ministers General and of General Chapters, and from Papal documents, and from these sources he was able to reconstruct a narrative of the Order's constitutional evolution and to analyse the nature of its organisation at the various stages of its development. The treatment accorded to each aspect and period was necessarily conditioned by the quality and quantity of the available material, and at some points was much fuller and more complete than at others. The work of the General Chapter of Narbonne in 1260 was illuminated by the publication of a full text of the constitutions then promulgated; but on the work of the 1239 Chapter his findings were meagre. He noted decisions to reduce the powers of the Ministers and increase those of the General and Provincial Chapters, to hold an experimental Chapter of dimnitors, and to fix the number of provinces at thirty-two; and concluded: ‘That is all that I can discover of the “great multitude of constitutions” which according to Salimbene should already have been promulgated at the one single General Chapter meeting at Rome in 1239.’ Since the appearance of his article our knowledge of those earlier constitutions has increased very little. When Father Bihl re-edited the Constitutions of Narbonne in 1941 he contented himself with remarking that very few of the constitutions prior to 1260 had survived, and that Ehrle's study of them was by far the best.

It is recorded in the Verba S. Francisci (c. 5) that Cardinal Hugolino was present at a General Chapter at Assisi, ‘et dictum est capitulum sextoriorum, et fuerunt ibi quinque milia fratres… ’ and that it was on this occasion that he tried to make St Francis and his brothers accept an existing monastic rule. It is clear that this incident took place after the meeting of Francis and Hugolino at Florence (see above, p. 62), and it seems likely prima facie that Hugolino was already Cardinal Protector. Since this Chapter –traditionally called the Chapter of Mats, on the basis of this and related texts–has sometimes been dated as early as 1218, it has become entangled with the problem of the chronology of St Francis' relations with the cardinal. It is the purpose of this appendix to separate the threads: to show that the meeting at Florence can be dated to 1217 or 1218, and that the Chapter of Mats was a distinctly later event.

The terminus a quo for St Francis' meeting with Hugolino at Florence (1 Cel. 74, cf. above, pp. 61 fF.) is provided by Celano's information that Hugolino was then legate in Tuscany. He held that office on three occasions, in 1217, in 1218–19 and in 1221. Celano says that the meeting took place after a Whitsun Chapter, when St Francis was on his way to France. In 1219 Francis set out, not for France, but for the East; in 1220 he was still in the East at Whitsun and Hugolino was not legate; and by Whitsun 1221 Francis had obtained from Honorius III the appointment of Hugolino as official Protector (above, pp. 64–6).