Episode Details

The gentle garden-statue image of Francis of Assisi hides a far more radical story. Born around 1181 to a wealthy silk merchant, Francis was a fashion-obsessed party boy who loved shrimp pie, survived a year as a prisoner of war after the battle against Perugia, and later stripped naked in front of his father and the bishop to renounce his inheritance.

This episode traces his conversion from the beggar incident and the voice at San Damiano to the founding of the Order of Friars Minor, Pope Innocent III's approval, and the communities he built with Clare. We also explore his walk across battle lines to meet Sultan al-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade, his final illnesses, the stigmata debate, and his legacy as patron saint of ecology.

• How a year in a Perugian dungeon began to break his old way of life
• Why stealing his father's cloth to rebuild a chapel led to a public trial
• Why Pope Innocent III approved a poverty movement instead of condemning it
• The meeting with Sultan al-Kamil and its lasting effect on Franciscans in the Holy Land
• Busting the vegetarian myth and the meaning of the Canticle of the Sun