to La Verna for an extended period of meditation. He
used that time to write the Arbor vite, although he can
hardly have composed the whole artful and almost inter-
minable work, as he avows, in three months and seven
days in 1305, without premeditation and with the aid
of just a few books. Perhaps he was referring only to
the nucleus of this vast work—a conjecture that might
explain how Angelo Clareno could have described it as
a “small” book. In any case, the more extreme opinions
in the work were evidently not known to Ubertino’s en-
emies among the Friars Minor for a long time, for they
attacked only his defense of Olivi and were unable to
keep Ubertino from exerting considerable infl uence in
high ecclesiastical circles.
Ubertino also became the confi dant and servant of
a prominent cardinal, Napoleone Orsini, who looked
kindly on the Spiritual faction of the Franciscans. Uber-
tino was appointed Orsini’s chaplain in 1306 (though
their connection seems to have begun earlier) and as
late as 1324 was still doing important diplomatic work
for him, helping conduct negotiations between Pisa and
Aragon. In 1307, Ubertino was in Tuscany trying to
further efforts on behalf of the Florentine exiles and was
also undertaking juridical activity against the heretics of
the Free Spirit. At about this time, he was also becom-
ing increasingly involved in defending the interests of
the Spiritual Franciscans; he served as procurator for
various Spiritual groups, carrying their cases as far as
Avignon.
Orsini’s protection, and perhaps that of Cardinal
James Colonna as well, must have been vital to Ubertino
during the many years when he was able to frustrate the
designs of the Franciscan leaders against him. He also
seems to have elicited some sympathy from the popes
to whom these leaders complained about him—Clem-
ent V and John XXII. At the time of the Council of
Vienne (1310–1312), Ubertino wrote polemical treatises
defending Olivi, advocating the doctrine of “poor use”
for the Franciscan order, and pleading that at the very
least the Spirituals should be allowed to follow the will
of Francis and be free from persecution by the order.
These writings were refl ected to some extent in the bulls
of Clement V, although in the end Clement refused to
grant the Spirituals exemption from their superiors. The
Spirituals fared worse under John XXII, but after their
downfall Ubertino was not turned over to the authorities
of the order. Instead, he secured from John a bull (20
October 1317) permitting him to enter the Benedictine
house of Gembloux in the diocese of Liège, though there
is no record that he ever set foot there. Ubertino was
still in Avignon in 1322, when John asked him and a
number of cardinals, bishops, Franciscans, Dominicans,
and other clerics for their opinion on whether, as the
Franciscans asserted, Christ and his apostles had owned
nothing either individually or in common. The pope
eventually issued a bull condemning the Franciscans’
claim that only their order, which professed corporate
as well as individual poverty, fully imitated the life of
Christ and his apostles; in this bull, John came very close
to quoting some of Ubertino’s earlier arguments against
the practices of the Franciscan community.
But Ubertino’s longtime defense of Olivi fi nally made
it possible for the Franciscan community to bring him
down. In 1325, in a bull directed to the Franciscans, John
described Ubertino as a fugitive—Ubertino having fl ed
from Avignon in fear of imminent condemnation—and
ordered his arrest. Ubertino may have escaped to the
court of Lewis of Bavaria, and he may have helped in
the writing of some of Lewis’s attacks on John XXII;
this hypothesis rests mainly on Albertino Mussato’s
testimony that Ubertino and Marsilius of Padua accom-
panied Ludwig to Rome in 1328. There is contemporary
testimony that Ubertino preached on behalf of Ludwig’s
Franciscan antipope Peter Corbara.
The date and manner of Ubertino’s death are un-
known, though a later tradition of the Fraticelli (a Spiri-
tual Franciscan group) held that it was violent.
Ubertino was an interesting combination of ascetic,
polemicist, and diplomat. He was a gifted rhetorician and,
particularly in his polemical works, a brilliant satirist.
He poured into the Arbor vite his often moving medita-
tions on Christ’s life and the similarities between Christ
and Saint Francis. This work, obviously constructed in
large part from Ubertino’s earlier sermons and treatises,
also contains a multitude of long and short extracts
from various authorities: the church fathers; Bernard,
Bonaventure, Olivi, and other Franciscan writers; and
Thomas Aquinas. There are surely also many sources
that have not yet been identifi ed. The fi fth book of the
Arbor vite, containing Ubertino’s views on ecclesiastical
history, is mainly based, as Manselli (1965, 1977) has
shown, on Olivi’s Postilla in Apocalypsim. Ubertino’s
polemical treatises are vivid, supple, and remarkably
readable, despite the technicality of their arguments. In
these works, the historical dimension disappears, and
“poor use” is emphasized much more than corporate
expropriation. In 1322, the pope commanded Ubertino
to enlarge his oral opinion on whether Christ and the
apostles had possessed nothing, either individually or in
common. Ubertino did so in the unpublished treatise De
altissima paupertate (Treatise on the Highest Poverty),
largely copied—although with signifi cant omissions,
additions, and modifi cations—from Olivi’s question
8, De altissima paupertate, in the series of questions
called De perfectione evangelica. Ubertino’s summary
of that treatise, Reducendo igitur ad brevitatem, was
included in a famous collection of opinions on the ques-
tion, in manuscript Vatican Latinus 3740, and attracted
a marginal note in the pope’s own hand. This summary
drew a number of its arguments from Olivi’s question 9,UBERTINO DA CASALE