Oddlet: Saint Francis of Assisi · 1 min read
Sep 8, 2026
The Man Who Signed a Treaty With a Wolf
In 1220, when a wolf was eating the citizens of Gubbio, a barefoot friar walked out alone to negotiate terms.
Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone, born around 1181 to an Assisi cloth merchant, spent a year in a Perugian prison after the battle of Collestrada, then in 1206 stripped naked in the town square, handed his clothes back to his father, and founded the Order of Friars Minor with Pope Innocent III's verbal blessing in 1209.
He also considered fire his brother.
He considered the sun and moon his brother and sister as well, and treated this less as poetry than as a family tree with obligations. In winter he set out honey and wine for the bees so they would not die of cold. He picked worms off the road and moved them to the verge. When a swallow interrupted a sermon he asked her to be quiet and, in a detail the chroniclers record without comment, she was. When surgeons cauterised his face from ear to eyebrow with a red-hot iron, he addressed the iron first: Brother Fire, be courteous. He said he felt nothing.
So in 1220, when a wolf was eating the citizens of Gubbio, Francis walked out alone to negotiate. He called it Brother Wolf. He proposed terms: the wolf would stop killing, the town would feed it daily.
The wolf placed its right paw in his hand.
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- Britannica: St. Francis of Assisi — Encyclopedia biography covering birth (1181/82 in Assisi), family, death (Oct 3, 1226), canonization (July 16, 1228), and founding of the Franciscan order.
- Wikipedia: Francis of Assisi — Comprehensive biography with dates: birth c. 1181, war with Perugia 1202, San Damiano vision c. 1205, papal approval of Rule 1209/1210, meeting with Sultan al-Kamil 1219, Greccio nativity 1223, stigmata Sep 1224, death Oct 3 1226, canonization 1228, patron of ecology 1979.
- Wikipedia: Wolf of Gubbio — Details of the wolf story from the Fioretti (chapter XXI), Francis's dialogue with the wolf, the paw-in-hand pact, the wolf living two more years in Gubbio, and the 1872 discovery of a large wolf skeleton at the Church of Saint Francis of the Peace.
- Christian Classics Ethereal Library: Little Flowers of St. Francis (Fioretti) ch. XXI — Primary text (English translation of the Fioretti) containing the full wolf-of-Gubbio narrative and Francis's spoken words.
- Capuchin Franciscans: Stigmata of St. Francis at Mount La Verna — Describes the September 1224 stigmata event: 40-day fast, six-winged seraph vision, wounds in hands/feet and bleeding side wound; first documented case in Christian history.
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