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Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226), baptized Giovanni Bernardone, was the founder of the Franciscan Order. The son of a wealthy cloth merchant, Peter Bernardone, and his French wife, Pica, Francis experienced the kind of wild youth appropriate for a later saint. After participating in a war between his hometown Assisi and Perugia in 1202 and being held captive for a year, and after a lengthy illness, he underwent a conversion (§1) during the years 1204–7, the details of which are difficult to unde…