Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T04:59:12.655Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - The Siena Connection: A Franciscan Provincial Minister between Tuscany and Assisi at the Dawn of the Trecento

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2022

Donal Cooper
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Beth Williamson
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
Get access

Summary

During the febrile summer of 1311 the long-standing tensions within the Franciscan movement over the correct observance of poverty exploded into open polemic. In 1309 Pope Clement V had invited the Order to address accusations that the observance of the Franciscan rule, and its central tenet of poverty, had collapsed. The Pope hoped to prepare the ground for a resolution of the Order’s internal divisions at the Church Council he had called at Vienne, but the debate became increasingly acrimonious as both sides – the rigorist faction or so-called ‘Spirituals’ on the one hand, and the establishment or ‘Community’ on the other – dug in and traded accusations. For Ubertino da Casale, the leading voice amongst the Spirituals, some of the most notorious abuses lay in the Order’s architecture. In his Declaratio, composed in Avignon probably in August 1311, Ubertino castigated the friars of the Tuscan province with characteristic fury and sarcasm:

For there are very few houses in the Order where there are not such excesses, and they know [this] very well, those who are promoters of such excesses, and who call themselves promoters and patrons of the Order and who debase the Order’s rules through such things. And since no buildings may be erected without the authority of the Provincial Ministers, [and] since there is no province in the Order in which there are not multiple excesses in buildings, they put forward a single minister to be properly punished for such things, because if we know of nothing in the Order, still we know well that those corrupt in these things are praised. And although the case of [the Tuscan Provincial Minister] Fra Jacobo de Tundo may be cited, who was punished like this on account of [his] excesses, still [he was] not properly but [only] superficially punished by the Minister General, and instead was made Provincial Minister for the [Umbrian] province of Saint Francis by its chapter, even though someone may be greatly lax in life and not above censure, as explained in the Rotulus. So too Fra Manfredo Bonfi, Fra Giovanni of Siena, Fra Andrea de’ Tolomei, Fra Illuminato of Florence and many others in the same province [of Tuscany] and in many other provinces could be cited as examples, into which [provinces] the doers of such things are sent out by the Minister General himself to be lords of the provinces and patrons of the houses, which are therefore built excessively.

Type
Chapter
Information
Late Medieval Italian Art and its Contexts
Essays in Honour of Professor Joanna Cannon
, pp. 89 - 110
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×