(Re)Introducing St. Francis of Assisi

To save myself work, and keep Andalusada canny, I'm allowing myself a rolling century of grace. There can be some small changes to what's going on anywhere beforehand, but that doesn't count for a hell of a lot - but after the ripples of that one stone in the stream of history impact into the history of a given area, there's a one-century countdown before anybody recognizable stops being born. And even within that timeframe, their lives and careers will be increasingly impacted by the drift of the world.

I realize that this is kinda vague, so I'm going to demonstrate what I mean by this with a rather important example. But before I do that, I'd to take a moment and ask the forgiveness of God.

Because I'm going to grimdark Saint Francis of fucking Assisi.

In the grim darkness of the far distant past, there was only war.

One of the things that usually gets glossed over in Franciscan hagiography is that Saint Francis had a lot to repent for. Oh, they talk about the nice character weaknesses quite a bit: that he was an upper class twit, had loose pockets and all that. But nobody ever really dwells on the fact that when holiness was the last thing on his small mind, young Francesco was involved in a war.

Specifically, a turn-of-the-century live-steel dickwaving contest between the little town of Perugia and the even littler town of Assisi, in the Umbrian Papal States. It was a little war. (A guerilla, if you will.) Perugia and Assisi had them all the time, and eventually Perugia won; it's why it's the population center today, while Assisi is the tourist trap.

It was the first that young Giovanni Francesco was involved in, and the first in the series of crises that eventually led him to the sainthood we recognize and love. (That, and getting caught and spending a year as a Perugian prisoner of war, and getting really sick after he was free, and eventually bailing out after he signs up to fight in another war.)

For the sake of similarity, I'm thinking that Francesco is still involved in a war before he's involved in the uncanny imitatio Christi. And that's where things get really grimdark. Because this isn't a live-steel dickwaving contest in the pope's backyard. The first time young Giovanni Francesco takes up the cross and attempts holiness, he does it in a rather less socially acceptable way.

Because he remembers to pack his sword when he goes crusading.

Fools on Crusade

Now, see that "work in progress" tag? That's going to stay here for a long time, because I'm running into big issues with this. The biggest one is that I guarantee that the Crusades are going to play out rather differently. On smaller scales, because France's attention is less solidly turned towards the Levant, because the surviving Moorish civilization (Almohads, by the time the Third Crusade rolls around), and that's going to influence who fights which battles, because without the miracle of bilocation you can't really fight on two fronts at once. On bigger scales, because I'm not sure how either Holy Roman or late Abbasid politics play out exactly, and a few minor incidents aren't necessarily foreordained, which could change things substantially. (Most notably the sequences and consequences of all later Crusades.)

So in the timeframe that Francesco goes crusading, I'm not sure which crusade he joins. And therefore I have no idea what he does on crusade. Those are slightly different statements, though, because I don't know which Crusade he joins - but I do know that nothing is known about his Crusading career.

Doubtless the hagiographical literature has some pious legends about this. Even more doubtless, they're obviously legends. The simple fact of the matter is that in-verse, there's precious little accounting about the details of Francesco's military career. The man himself simply refused to talk about it on returning home, and while there are certain echoes of things, and events that imply prior experience when next he returns to the Holy Land, the exact details have been smothered under the mythmakers.

I will say, though, that the Third Crusade, while less outright malicious than the Fourth, still saw a lot of Frankish-Latin damage done to the Greeks. And if the Fourth doesn't play out the same way, that's going to smart a lot more.

So what does it all mean?

One night, in a crumbling chapel, Francesco's going to hear Jesus talking to him from atop the Cross of San Damiano, giving him an order: "Rebuild my church, which as you have seen, is fallen into ruins." Critical historians are going to argue that it's extraordinarily important that he heard this not from a crucifix, but from an icon cross.

Many centuries later, people are going to try to figure out what the hell was wrong with St. Francis of Assisi. Try to explain the exact combination of diseases that could cause his stigmata. Atop all the other diagnoses, the world's going to lay one final diagnosis, that the St. Francis of Andalusada does not share with the St. Francis of IRL: Stockholm syndrome.

I'm going to leave what I'm hinting at for you to figure out yourself. But I think you can guess.