see Francis fighting on the side of the oppressed, earning the title of
_Patriarch of religious democracy_ which has been accorded him by one of
his compatriots.[35]

The agreement being made the prisoners detained at Perugia were
released, and Francis returned to Assisi. He was twenty-two years old.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] Eleven hundred and one metres above the level of the sea;
the plain around Assisi has an average of two hundred, and the
town of two hundred and fifty, metres above.

[2] As in the majority of Tuscan cities the dimensions of the
houses were formerly fixed by law.

[3] The biographies say that he died (October 3, 1226) in his
forty-fifth year. But the terms are not precise enough to make
the date 1181 improbable. For that matter the question is of
small importance. A Franciscan of Erfurt, about the middle of
the thirteenth century, fixes the date at 1182. Pertz, vol.
xxiv., p. 193.

[4] A number of different genealogies have been fabricated for
Francis; they prove only one thing, the wreck of the Franciscan
idea. How little they understood their hero, who thought to
magnify and glorify him by making him spring from a noble
family! "_Quæ rero_," says Father Suysken, S. J., "_de ejus
gentilitio insigni disserit Waddingus, non lubet mihi attingere.