Francis, born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone to a wealthy cloth merchant, died at age 44 having built one of the most influential religious movements in Christian history from a vow of radical poverty. He was canonized just two years later by Pope Gregory IX. His feast day, October 4, is observed the day after this traditional date of death, and he remains the namesake of Pope Francis and patron saint of animals and ecology.
Francis had spent his final years nearly blind and in physical agony, his body marked by what followers described as stigmata received two years earlier on Mount La Verna. Knowing death was near, he asked to be carried to the Porziuncola, the small chapel near Assisi where his religious movement had effectively begun, and to be laid naked on the ground in imitation of Christ's poverty.
His order had already grown, within his own lifetime, from a handful of barefoot followers begging in Umbrian streets to a movement with thousands of friars across Europe, a growth so rapid it troubled Francis himself, who worried wealth and structure would corrupt his ideal of absolute simplicity. He composed the Canticle of the Sun, one of the earliest works of Italian vernacular literature, praising creation itself as kin, brother sun and sister moon.
His death, traditionally dated to the evening of October 3, 1226, made him one of the fastest-canonized saints in Church history. Giotto's frescoes at Assisi and the enduring popularity of nativity scenes, which Francis is credited with popularizing in 1223, both trace back to this one emaciated, joyful mystic who asked for nothing but a bare floor to die on.