Leaving Assisi by Night

Clare was born in 1194 to a noble family of Assisi and was already known locally for private acts of asceticism and charity as a teenager. She had heard Francis preach in the city's piazzas and streets, and around Palm Sunday of 1211 or 1212 she left her family's house secretly at night, met Francis and his companions at the small church of the Porziuncola outside the walls, and had her hair cut and her fine clothes exchanged for a plain habit in a ceremony that amounted to Francis receiving her into his way of life, though no formal women's order yet existed to receive her into. Her family attempted to physically remove her within days; she resisted by clinging to the altar of the church where Francis had placed her and displaying her newly shorn head, and they gave up.

Francis placed her first at a Benedictine convent and then established her, joined within weeks by her younger sister Agnes and later by other women including, eventually, her own mother, at the church of San Damiano just outside Assisi, the same building Francis had personally repaired early in his own conversion. Clare remained there as abbess for the rest of her life, some forty-two years, mostly confined by illness for the second half of it.