We can understand without difficulty that documents emanating from such
different quarters must bear the impress of their origin. The men who
are to bring us their testimony are combatants in the struggle over the
question of poverty, a struggle which for two centuries agitated the
Church, aroused all consciences, and which had its monsters and its
martyrs.

To determine the value of these witnesses we must first of all discover
their origin. It is evident that the narratives of the no-compromise
party of the right or the left can have but slender value where
controverted points are concerned; whence the conclusion that the
authority of a narrator may vary from page to page, or even from line to
line.

These considerations, so simple that one almost needs to beg pardon for
uttering them, have not, however, guided those who have studied St.
Francis's life. The most learned, like Wadding and Papini, have brought
together the narratives of different biographers, here and there pruning
those that are too contradictory; but they have done this at random,
with neither rule nor method, guided by the impression of the moment.

The long work of the Bollandist Suysken is vitiated by an analogous
fault; fixed in his principle that the oldest documents are always the
best,[2] he takes his stand upon the first Life of Thomas of Celano as
upon an impregnable rock, and judges all other legends by that one.[3]

When we connect the documents with the disturbed circumstances which
brought them into being, some of them lose a little of their authority,
others which have been neglected, as being in contradiction with
witnesses who have become so to say official, suddenly recover credit,
and in fact all gain a new life which doubles their interest.

This altered point of view in the valuation of the sources, this
criticism which I am inclined to call reciprocal and organic, brings
about profound alterations in the biography of St. Francis. By a
phenomenon which may appear strange we end by sketching a portrait of
him much more like that which exists in the popular imagination of Italy
than that made by the learned historians above mentioned.

When Francis died (1226) the parties which divided the Order had already
entered into conflict. That event precipitated the crisis: Brother Elias
had been for five years exercising the functions of minister-general
with the title of vicar. He displayed an amazing activity. Intrenched in
the conf