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It is difficult, when writing about the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, to avoid writing about a stereotype. His very name brings to mind sermons to birds, tamed wolves, simplicity of life, genial friars padding about flower-filled cloisters, and swallows unfailingly returning to the picturesque mission of San Juan Capistrano.

That image, largely inherited from nineteenth-century romanticism, derives from a certain verifiable tradition about Francis. Like all stereotypes, however, it flattens out or erases other aspects of his personality. It is difficult to think of the "Little Poor Man of Assisi" as a center of bitter contention, the source of radical social impulses, or the inspiration for a fierce and unyielding asceticism.

Yet, for many, Francis was one or all of those things in his lifetime and after his death. In fact, beyond the romantic cliches about Saint Francis one discovers a person who, for all of his transparent attractiveness, is complex to the point of enigma.

Francis was born Giovanni Bernardone in either 1181 or 1182 in the Italian hill town of Assisi. His parents, Pietro and Pica, were members of the rather well-to-do merchant class of the town. Pietro Bernardone was away in France when his son was born. On his return, he had the boy's name changed from Giovanni to Francesco ("The Little Frenchman"—perhaps a tribute to France, a country he loved and from which his wife's family came).

Of the youth of Francis we know very little. He probably received a bit of rudimentary schooling from the priests of his parish church of San Giorgio. He spoke and sang in French, a language he probably learned at home.

Accounts of his life emphasized his recklessness and frivolity as a youth. "Until he was nearly 25, he squandered his time terribly. Indeed, he outshone all his friends in trivialities, suggested various evils, and was eager for foolishness of every kind," wrote his first biographer, Thomas of Celano. This is plausible, given his position as the spoiled son of a wealthy mercantile family.

In 1202 Francis marched with the gentlemen soldiers of Assisi to engage the army of the city of Perugia. It was probably one of those bloody skirmishes that the medievals loved to call a war. At any rate, Francis was captured in battle and imprisoned in Perugia. He spent a year there until his father could negotiate the price of his ransom.

For Francis, as it has been for many, incarceration proved to be a turning point. We don't know what his prison routine was like or how he reacted to it, but when he returned to Assisi he spent a year in convalescence.

Francis also began to change as a person. By 1205 he had left his home to take up a life of solitude. He gradually adopted the traditional garb of a hermit (thick shoes, a tunic with a belt) and lived near a tumbledown and nearly abandoned church at the edge of Assisi called San Damiano. In obedience to voices he heard in the church, he began literally to "rebuild the church." With his own hands, he began to repair the ruined walls of San Damiano.

Between 1206 and 1208, Francis continued to live this marginal existence. The period was also marked by quarrels with his father. Pietro may have been indulgent of Francis's adolescent high jinks, but he was absolutely livid about this new kind of life. Outraged by the squalor of his life and his prodigal generosity to the poor, his father even tried to imprison him in the cellar of the family home. It was, after all, Pietro's hard-earned money that Francis was giving to the poor and leprous.

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