who held cures,
had been transferred, often to a distance of several months' journey,
from one end of Europe to the other. It is not, then, surprising that he
was often prayed to commit his memories to writing. He dictated them to
Brother Baldwin of Brandenburg in the spring of 1262. He must have done
it with joy, having long before prepared himself for the task. He
relates with artless simplicity how in 1221, at the chapter-general of
Portiuncula, he went from group to group questioning as to their names
and country the Brothers who were going to set out on distant missions,
that he might be able to say later, especially if they came to suffer
martyrdom: "I knew them myself!"[2]

His chronicle bears the imprint of this tendency. What he desires to
describe is the introduction of the Order into Germany and its early
developments there, and he does it by enumerating, with a complacency
which has its own coquetry, the names of a multitude of friars[3] and
by carefully dating the events. These details, tedious for the ordinary
reader, are precious to the historian; he sees there the diverse
conditions from which the friars were recruited, and the rapidity with
which a handful of missionaries thrown into an unknown country were able
to branch out, found new stations, and in five years cover with a
network of monasteries, the Tyrol, Saxony, Bavaria, Alsace, and the
neighboring provinces.

It is needless to say that it is worth while to test Giordano's
chronology, for he begins by praying the reader to forgive the errors
which may have escaped him on this head; but a man who thus marks in his
memory what he desires later to tell or to write is not an ordinary
witness.

Reading his chronicle, it seems as if we were listening to the
recollections of an old soldier, who grasps certain worthless details
and presents them with an extraordinary power of relief, who knows not
how to resist the temptation to bring himself forward, at the risk
sometimes of slightly embellishing the dry reality.[4]

In fact this chronicle swarms with anecdotes somewhat personal, but very
artless and welcome, and which on the whole carry in themselves the
testimony to their authenticity. The perfume of the Fioretti already
exhales from these pages so full of candor and manliness; we can follow
the missionaries stage by stage, then when they are settled, open the
door of the monastery and read in the very hearts of these men, many of
whom are as bra