Wild medieval saints

The Vatican’s eco-friendly farm, recently inaugurated by the first ever Augustinian pope, echoes his order’s forgotten early history, Dr Krisztina Ilko argues. Her new book, The Sons of St Augustine, challenges major assumptions about the medieval Catholic Church and early Renaissance.

A scorched cherry twig miraculously sprouting; a diseased swamp restored to ‘peak fertility’; healing the broken leg of an ox; and multiplying cabbages.

These are just some of the forgotten medieval miracles which Dr Ilko brings to light.

“Bleeding hosts and stigmatisations are the best-known medieval miracles,” Dr Ilko says. “The Augustinians get very little credit for miraculously making land fertile, healing livestock and bringing fruit trees back to life.”

“With Leo XIV becoming the first Augustinian Pope, it’s the perfect time to make the order’s astonishing history better known. There has been so much focus on Italian cities, we’ve lost sight of how important the countryside was to the Church and to the Renaissance.”

Dragons and fertility miracles

Saint George, the most famous Christian dragon slayer, appears in countless paintings as a lance-wielding military saint. Far less famous is the twelfth-century hermit Guglielmo of Malavalle who was venerated by the Augustinians for killing a dragon with a humble wooden staff shaped like a pitchfork.

In medieval Europe, disease suffered by livestock, crops and people was often blamed on dragons, and more specifically on their toxic breath which, it was thought, suffocated the countryside and those who lived there. Dragons were particularly associated with swampy areas.

After hearing a voice from the sky, Guglielmo settled in Malavalle, ‘the bad valley’, in Tuscany’s swampy Maremma region. Toxic air and terrible storms were thought to have left the valley barren, so ‘dark, and terrible’ that not even hunters dared to enter.

Ilko, a medieval historian from Queens’ College, argues that Guglielmo was venerated for ‘defeating the dragon’ because he purified the putrid air and restored the valley to ‘peak fertility’.

“These achievements weren’t symbolic, Guglielmo provided a crucial public service, he helped country people survive in a really harsh natural environment,” Dr Ilko says.

“Guglielmo was a pitchfork-wielding dragon slayer and divine gardener all at once. Commanding the weather, securing a good harvest, and restoring the health of livestock must have seemed the most desirable divine interventions in the late medieval countryside. They were matters of life and death.”

Miraculous discoveries

A decade of research took Dr Ilko to two dozen archives and she trekked to more than sixty Augustinian sites, including some of the most inaccessible ruins. She made discoveries in frescoes, illuminated manuscripts, hagiographies and letters. Some of the ancient documents she studied had been misdated and wrongly attributed, further denying the Augustinians of miraculous limelight.

The earliest collection of Augustinian life stories Dr Ilko studied was written by a Florentine friar in the 1320s and has been largely overlooked until now because, she believes, scholars deemed its miracles too rural. Housed in Florence’s Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, the manuscript opens with the life of Giovanni of Florence who built the Augustinian hermitage of Santa Lucia in Larniano with the help of local farmers.

One of his greatest miracles was healing the broken leg of an ox. Another life story describes Jacopo of Rosia commanding an unreliable apple tree to produce fruit every year, as well as him multiplying cabbages.

"When people think about religious orders and their massive role in the Renaissance, they usually turn their attention to cities like Rome, Florence and Siena,” Dr Ilko says.

“The Franciscans and Dominicans, in particular, are credited for Italy’s rapid urban renewal from the 1200s onwards. Not many people realise that the Augustinians drew most of their power from the countryside. Their miracles were very green-fingered, agricultural.”

“St Francis of Assisi remains the most famous ‘nature saint’, best known for preaching to birds. In a more eco-conscious world, the Augustinians deserve much more attention.”

Augustinian survival strategy

Dr Ilko argues that positioning themselves in forests or by the sea was crucial to the survival of the Augustinians as a religious group.

The Order of the Hermits of St Augustine was founded by the papacy as a mendicant order through the amalgamation of various central Italian hermit groups in 1256. Then, in 1274, the Roman Catholic Church put the Augustinians on notice because they were founded after 1215 and lacked continuous existence since the late antiquity. The papacy only re-confirmed their Order’s existence in 1298. During this 25-year period of uncertainty, the Augustinian friars worked hard to prove their legitimacy.  

Lacking a single, charismatic founding father, the friars developed a compelling origin story in which they claimed to have been founded directly by St Augustine. But, Dr Ilko argues, the Augustinians also drew heavily on their wild power-bases – forests, mountains and the sea – to prove their antiquity and authority.

“Direct contact with nature gave the friars legitimacy, special spiritual powers and access to valuable natural resources including timber, crops and wild animals,” Dr Ilko says.

The Augustinians went on to found urban convents but carefully selected locations that bordered the countryside. In Rome, they founded the convent of Santa Maria del Popolo at one of the major entrances to the city, framed by trees and gardens on one side.

The Franciscans had earlier rejected the spot because it was too remote and difficult ‘to sustain the body’ there. The site had been a sinister place: an ancient walnut tree plagued with demons towered over the supposed burial site of the Emperor Nero until Pope Paschall II had them removed in 1099.

In addition to raising public awareness about the Augustinians, Dr Ilko argues that the ruins of their hermitages should be better cared for and access improved so that that more people can visit them.

Reference

Krisztina Ilko, The Sons of St Augustine: Art and Memory in the Augustinian Churches of Central Italy, 1256–1370 (OUP, 2025). ISBN: 9780198948827