That physical courage is not at all on the minds of people who think of Francis indicates how little people actually know his life. He’d been a fierce warrior as a young man. He survived fighting in two wars (we would call them battles today), one that saw the slaughter of his town Assisi in a battle so brutal it turned the Tiber River red. There were a total of nine crusades waged by Christians in the west to try to take back land that had been seized by the Saracens, as Muslims were called at the time. Living in the late-twelfth and early-thirteenth centuries, Francis lived in the middle of this period. When Pope Innocent III dispatched the fifth crusade, Francis jumped at the chance.

So off he went with a few of his brothers, setting sail from the shores of Italy across the Mediterranean to Damietta, Egypt near the Nile delta. That’s where the fiercest battle was going on, in that critical port city. The Christians were fighting valorously and were being slaughtered. Francis went to the man leading the Christian forces and asked him permission to go into the Saracen camp to meet the Sultan. The commander summarily denied his request. Francis received that denial and went anyway, his brother Illuminato going with him. They walked straight into the Muslim camp.

As they drew near the Saracen perimeter, Francis repeatedly called out, Sultan! Sultan! Sultan! and because he was calling specifically for the Sultan the guards didn’t kill him on the spot. They thought the Christian wanted to convert and weren’t willing to deny the Sultan such a conquest.

The Sultan’s name was Melek-el-Kemel, and he received the Christian graciously. Have you come to convert? It was the first thing the Sultan said. No, Francis demurred. I’m not here to become a Muslim. I’ve come to implore you to convert to the Lord Jesus Christ.

This stunned the Sultan. Flabbergasted, he summoned his sages. This is what they told him, “The law forbids giving a hearing to infidel preachers. And if there be someone who wishes to speak or preach against our Law, the Law commands that his head be cut off.”

The Sultan knew the law, knew that it bound him to cut off the heads of these two men. But the Sultan said, “I am deciding to act against my own law, because it would be an even reward for me to bestow on one who conscientiously risked death in order to save my soul for God.”

Disarmed by the physical courage of Francis, Melek-el-Kemel asked Francis to stay for a while. I imagine Melek offering my church’s patron saint some tea. Francis declined. The Sultan said, “At least let me send you back with gold and silver and silks and other treasures.” No, Francis declined again, disappointed. There was only one treasure Francis came there looking for and that was the Sultan’s soul; if he couldn’t offer that to God he’d just as soon return home empty-handed. He was hungry, though. He said that he wouldn’t mind a little food. So the Sultan gave him all the food he could possibly need, and gave him a military escort back to the Christian camp. I’m not making any of this up.

On the tombstone of one of the Sultan’s sages who was present at this meeting of Francis and Melek-el-Kemel there’s this cryptic remark. “The things that befell Melek-el-Kamel owing to the monk are very well known.” Ten years after this meeting between Francis and the Sultan, in 1229 Melek-el-Kamel freely remitted Jerusalem to the Christians. Not a drop of blood was shed in this transfer. Francis didn’t live to see that. He had been dead three years.

One of my great lights at Yale, the preeminent historical theologian Jaroslav Pelikan, in his Jesus Through the Centuries, wrote:

If a public opinion poll were to ask a representative group of informed and thoughtful people, “Which historical figure of the past two thousand years has most fully embodied the life and teaching of Jesus Christ?” the person mentioned most often would certainly be Francis of Assisi. That answer might, if anything, be even more frequent if the people polled were not affiliated with any church. And it is probably also the answer that many of his own contemporaries would have given to such a question — or at any rate, those who lived within a century or so after him. For in Francis of Assisi the imitation of the life of Jesus and the obedience to his teachings (which were, at least in principle, binding on every believer) attained such a level of fidelity as to earn for him the designation, eventually made official by Pope Pius XI, of “the second Christ [alter Christus].”