Francis of Assisi

Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone

Lived

c. 1181–1226

Era

Medieval

Where

Assisi, Italy

Tradition

Roman Catholic

Poverty taken literally

The son of a wealthy cloth merchant who renounced his inheritance in the town square, handing back even his clothes, and gathered a brotherhood committed to owning nothing at all.

Why it matters

The orders he founded, with Clare, grew faster than any before them and forced the church to find room for a poverty that implicitly rebuked its own wealth — an accommodation that was still being argued a century later. He walked into the sultan's camp at Damietta during the Fifth Crusade to preach, and was received and sent back unharmed, which is not how that period usually went. The Canticle of the Creatures is among the earliest poems in Italian.

All the figures, from the apostolic age to the present, or the timeline they stand in.