siege as well. Latin Constantinople had survived: as it proved, for another
generation.^175 John swiftly dispatched his new son-in-law, Baldwin, to
the West to plead for further aid and support, and John’s own‘very
young sons’went with him.^176 John would never see them again.
John’s last months witnessed the culmination of his relationship with
one of the newest and most dynamic forces within the Church: that is,
the Franciscan Order. Indeed, the name of Brienne may have meant
something to Francesco Bernadone himself even before he found his
religious vocation. The young Francis could well have accompanied his
father on trips to Champagne to buy cloth. Moreover, in 1204 or 1205,
Francis began a journey to southern Italy to join the hosts that were
fighting there for the Church, ultimately under the command of John’s
brother, Walter III. Shortly before leaving his home town, though,
Francis experienced the earliest in a series of visions that would trans-
form his life.^177 Thefirst Franciscans came out to the kingdom of
Jerusalem during King John’s reign there, and 1217 marked the formal
establishment of the Order’s ecclesiastical province of ‘the Holy
Land’.^178 Francis may well have met John when the future saint visited
Egypt in the summer of 1219: a trip that climaxed in his famous mission-
ary journey to try to convert the sultan.^179 Just under a decade later, John
accompanied Gregory IX when the pope went to Assisi to canonize his
old friend Francis, who had died two years earlier, and to lay the foun-
dation stone for a great new church to house his relics. By the time that
he became Latin emperor, John was an ardent support of the mendicant
way of life. Although the Dominicansfirst established themselves in
Constantinople during John’s reign there, the emperor’s personal affec-
tions remained specially reserved for the Franciscans. He may well have
had a Franciscan as his private confessor. Shortly before he died, John
brought all this to its logical conclusion, and became a Franciscan
himself. As emperor, he was thefirst crowned head, and, in fact, the
highest-rankingfigure ever to join the Order. John died in March 1237,
perhaps of the plague that so often follows in the wake of long sieges, and
his empress, Berengaria, does not seem to have survived him for very
long. John may have been buried in the great new church of St Francis,
(^175) For the‘war of the three Johns’in context, seeibid., 174–7.
(^176) William of Nangis,Chronicon,inRHGF, xx, 550; and Perry,John, 164.
(^177) See M. Robson,St. Francis of Assisi: The Legend and the Life(London, 1999), p. xx,
9 – 18.
(^178) See the summary in J. Moorman,A History of the Franciscan Order, from Its Origins to the
179 Year 1517(Oxford, 1968), 227.
See J. Tolan,Saint Francis and the Sultan: The Curious History of a Christian–Muslim
Encounter(Oxford, 2009).
The Lure of Constantinople 73