The Story of Assisi

by Lina Duff Gordon

The Carceri, Rivo-Torto and Life at the Portiuncula

"O beata solitudo,

O sola beatudine."

These three places near Assisi, so intimately associated with St. Francis, were in a way emblematic of the various stages in the rise and growth of his young community, and we shall see that the saint went from one to the other, not by chance, but with a settled purpose in his mind. The Carceri he kept as a something apart from, and outside his daily life; it was a hermitage in the strict sense of the word, where, far from the sound of any human voice, he could come and live a short time in isolated communion with God. As his followers increased, and the Order he had founded with but a few brethren developed even in its first years into a great army, we can easily understand the longing for solitude which at times became too strong to be resisted, for his nature was well fitted for the hermit's life, and it called him with such persistence to the woods among the flowers and the birds he loved, that had he been less tender for the sufferings of others, more blind to the ills of the Church, it is possible that the whole course of events might have been altered. Giotto would not have been called to Assisi, or if he had been, the legends told to him by the friars might not have inspired him to paint such master-pieces as he has left us in the Franciscan Basilica; and we should now be the poorer because St. Francis had chosen seven hundred years ago to live in an Etruscan tomb at Orte, or in a grotto on Mount Subasio. So much depended, not only upon what St. Francis achieved, but on the way in which he chose to work. Who therefore can tell how much we owe to the little mountain retreat of the Carceri, where, spending such hours of wondrous peace surrounded by all that he most cherished in nature, the saint could refresh himself and gain new strength for long periods of arduous labour among men.

HERMITAGE OF THE CARCERI

The Carceri came into the possession of St. Francis through the generosity of the Benedictines who, until his advent, had held unlimited sway in Umbria. Many churches, and we may say, almost all the hermitages of the surrounding country belonged to them. But their principal stronghold, built in the eleventh century, stood on the higher slopes of Mount Subasio, while the Carceri, lying a little to the west, was used by them probably as a place of retreat when wearied of monastic life. Both monastery and hermitage seem to have been quiet enough, and we only occasionally hear of the Benedictine monks starting off on a visit to some hermit of renowned sanctity, or going upon some errand of mercy among the peasants in the valley, whom they often surprised by marvellous though somewhat aimless miracles wrought for their edification. Then early in the fourteenth century these hermit monks of Mount Subasio suddenly found themselves in the midst of the fighting of a mediæval populace, for the Assisans, not slow to discover the great military importance of the Benedictine Abbey, wished to possess it. When the struggle between Guelph and Ghibelline was at its height, the monks were driven to take refuge in the town, while their home was taken possession of by the exiled party who used it as a fortress whence they could sally forth and harass the eastern approach to Assisi. Perpetual skirmishes took place beneath its walls until the roving adventurer Broglia di Trino, who had made himself master of the town in 1399, in a solemn council held at the Rocca Maggiore issued an edict that the Monastery of St. Benedict was to be razed to the ground, determining thus to deprive the turbulent nobles and their party of so sure a refuge in times of civil war.

The solid walls and fine byzantine columns of what once was the most celebrated abbey in Umbria now remain much as in the mediæval days of their wreckage, and, until a few years ago when some repairs were made, the church was open for the mountain birds to nest in, and wild animals used it as their lair.

But both church and monastery stood proudly upon the mountain height above the plain when St. Francis, then the young mendicant looked upon by many as a madman, would knock at the gates, and the abbot followed by his monks, came out to listen to the humble requests he so often had to make. These prosperous religious most generously patronised St. Francis in the time of his obscurity, giving him the chapel of the Portiuncula, and later (the date is uncertain but some say in 1215) they allowed him to take possession of the still humbler chapel and huts of the Carceri. Even to call such shelters huts is giving them too grand a name, for they were but caverns excavated in the rock, scattered here and there in a deep mountain gorge. They can still be seen, unchanged since the days of St. Francis save for the tresses of ivy growing thick, like a curtain, across the entrance, for now there are none to pass in and out to pray there.