Giovanni,
companion of Egidio, mentioned in the prologue of the Legend of the
Three Companions.[19]

His chronicle, therefore, forms as it were the continuation of that
legend. The members of the little circle of Greccio are they who
recommend it to us; it has also their inspiration.

But writing long years after the death of these Brothers, Clareno feels
the need of supporting himself also on written testimony; he repeatedly
refers to the four legends from which he borrows a part of his
narrative; they are those of Giovanni di Ceperano, Thomas of Celano,
Bonaventura, and Brother Leo.[20] Bonaventura's work is mentioned only
by way of reference; Clareno borrows nothing from him, while he cites
long passages from Giovanni di Ceperano,[21] Thomas of Celano[22] and
Brother Leo.[23]

Clareno takes from these writers narratives containing several new and
extremely curious facts.[24]

I have dwelt particularly upon this document because its value appears
to me not yet to have been properly appreciated. It is indeed partisan;
the documents of which we must be most wary are not those whose tendency
is manifest, but those where it is skilfully concealed.

The life of St. Francis and a great part of the religious history of the
thirteenth century will surely appear to us in an entirely different
light when we are able to fill out the documents of the victorious party
by those of the party of the vanquished. Just as Thomas of Celano's
first legend is dominated by the desire to associate closely St.
Francis, Gregory IX., and Brother Elias, so the Chronicle of the
Tribulations is inspired from beginning to end with the thought that the
troubles of the Order--to say the word, the apostasy--began so early as
1219. This contention finds a striking confirmation in the Chronicle of
Giordano di Giano.

V. THE FIORETTI[25]

With the Fioretti we enter definitively the domain of legend. This
literary gem relates the life of Francis, his companions and disciples,
as it appeared to the popular imagination at the beginning of the
fourteenth century. We have not to discuss the literary value of this
document, one of the most exquisite religious works of the Middle Ages,
but it may well be said that from the historic point of view it does not
deserve the neglect to which it has been left.

Most authors have failed in courage to revise the sentence lightly
uttered against it by the successors of Bollandus. Why make anything of
a book