Saint Hugh Canefri
The Saint and the Lionheart
Join me today to meet a Saint who fought beside Richard the Lionheart.
Name: Ugo or Hugh Canefri
Life: c. 1168 - 1233 AD
Status: Saint
Feast: October 8th
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The little ship was sailing into Genoa, on the Northwest coast of modern Italy, but the storm hit before the ship could reach the dock. Maybe the storm came in too fast. Or maybe the sailors had hoped to run before the rising winds. Whatever it was, they had left their sail up too long, and the wind had snapped off their mast. Now they were tossing on the waves, unable to control their boat. The only question was whether they would be smashed against the shore before they drowned.
But through the lashing rain they saw a man on the edge of the peer. He was an ordinary looking man, not tall or broad, although he had an obvious wiry strength. The man was praying, and then he lifted his hands to bless the ocean itself. And that was the moment, the sailors later said, when the wind died down and the water became calm. They sailed into Genoa without trouble. And when they told their story, they learned that they had met one of the city’s strange figures: the mysterious Commander of the local detachment of the Knights Hospitaller, Brother Hugh Canefri.
Canefri was Hugh’s family name. All the Brother Knights of the Order were nobles, and Hugh had been born to the noble Canefri family a little North of Genoa in the city of Alessandria. One reason that the Hospitaller Order only recruited from among nobles was that noble young men began to train for war early. They learned strategy, tactics, and martial arts, so that even a handful of trained knights could be enough to turn the tide on a medieval battlefield. Probably Hugh had older brothers to carry on the family name. But if Hugh was wondering what to do with his life, he did not have to wonder long. While he was still in his late teens, the answer came in the form of one of Christendom’s greatest disasters.
The disaster took place in the Holy Land in the year 1187. Some time before, a man named Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, or as we remember him, Saladin, had clawed his way to power in Egypt. Saladin was a master of war, and as his power grew, Guy, the Christian king of Jerusalem came to think that conflict was inevitable. Guy summoned his lords to prepare to fight. And with them came the military orders of the Templars and the Hospitallers. They would face Saladin in the summer of that year.
The military orders had emerged some decades earlier among young nobles who had come to the Holy Land to fight for Christendom in a physical as well as a spiritual way. Some young knights had taken to riding with pilgrims, keeping them safe on their journey to the holy places. In time, this group would name themselves the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, the Templars, and become friars bound by vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. As they grew, their mission to accompany pilgrims grew in scope, until they managed a vast network that helped arrange every aspect of pilgrimage from sea travel to banking.
Almost as old was another group of young men who had begun to work at an ancient place of healing they called the Hospital of Saint John in Jerusalem. The Hospitallers, as they came to be called, had the dual mission of fighting and healing. In peacetime, the knights worked with the sick, treating them as images of Christ, calling them “their lords”. But this was wartime, and so the Grandmaster of the Hospital summoned his knights to come to the assistance of King Guy.
King Guy could not match Saladin in strategy. In the terrible year of 1187, Saladin managed to lure the Christian army out into a waterless plain, between the peaks of a dormant volcano, known as the Horns of Hattin. The night before the battle, the Christians had nothing to drink. Saladin’s army burned grass to create thick smoke that would make the Christians even thirstier. In the morning, under the Horns of Hattin, the exhausted army was annihilated. The Grandmaster of the Hospital died in the fighting, along with dozens of his men. Saladin captured many Templars and Hospitallers, and executed them. The military orders that had held the Holy Land were all but wiped out, and Saladin swept through the land, capturing Jerusalem before the year was over.
In Europe, Christians learned of what had happened with horror. Pope Gregory VIII led the Church in a fast, praying for the Holy Land. And across Europe, nobles like Hugh Canefri as well as commoners like the young Gerard of Villamagna responded. Hugh joined the Hospitallers, and was deployed East. He was going to the events that would be remembered as the Third Crusade.
Oddly enough, the man whose determination launched the Third Crusade was Guy, the fallen King of Jerusalem who had led the Christians to disaster at the Horns of Hattin. Guy had survived. And he had gathered up a tiny, insignificant army, and marched off to besiege one of the lost Christian fortress cities: Acre, modern Akko, a little North of the modern port of Haifa. King Guy’s army was so small that it was in danger of being destroyed by the defenders of the city. But he dug in and stuck to his plan. And gradually, the lords of Christendom began to come to his aid.
Christians arrived at the siege of Acre in waves. Probably Hugh Canefri travelled there with a Genoese contingent, bringing men and naval support. By then the besiegers had already been starving through the winters and getting battered through summers. Their hopes had been raised by news of a vast German army marching South overland, and then just as that army was getting close, the emperor had died in a freak swimming accident and the army had broken apart. But things began to change with the arrival of a warrior who could match Saladin’s strategic mind: Richard, called the Lionheart, King of England.
Richard had been commanding armies since he was 16 years old. Now he organized the siege of Acre, positioning vast siege engines that pounded the wall as priests prayed over them. As the city weakened, and Saladin attacked the Christians with all his might, a weird friendship emerged between Richard and Saladin, with the two men sending each other gifts and compliments even as they struggled for dominance. Soon Acre fell, and the Hospitallers surged into the city along with the others.
This was a good start. By now, King Richard was in sole command, and he led the army of the Third Crusade South, marching carefully, avoiding Saladin’s provocations that were meant to draw his men into a second trap like the Horns of Hattin. Finally, Richard brought the army to Jerusalem. And that was where he understood the strategic fact that would doom the Third Crusade.
Richard could not see a way to capture Jerusalem. That is, he could imagine capturing it, but he realized that as long as Saladin was strong in Egypt, there was no point in capturing Jerusalem. The city would be exposed and vulnerable unless Richard controlled Egypt as well. The only way to permanently retake Jerusalem was to begin his campaign there, and Richard began planning for his attack on Saladin’s home turf.
But then, disturbing news began to come from England. Crusaders like Richard came East on the understanding that they would still have their places at home when they returned. Now Richard was getting word that the king of France and Richard’s own brother were scheming against him.
Richard realized he needed to hurry back to England and set things right. After that he could come back East. The Hospitallers and the Templars and the lords of the East would just have to hold things together until he could get back. Richard secured a shaky peace with Saladin, just something to tide things over for a few years, and left with a few men.
Brother Hugh Canefri and the others watched Richard go. The momentum had gone out of the Third Crusade. But there was work to do. The Hospitallers helped to fortify Acre and other areas that had been recaptured. They worked in the hospitals. And they waited for the king’s return.
But king Richard’s ship had been blown off course. This shouldn’t have mattered, for crusaders were supposed to be allowed to travel freely through Europe. But the local ruler had a grudge against Richard, and the king ended up being held for ransom. The pope could have intervened - popes regularly excommunicated those who interfered with a crusade. This pope was too weak or ineffective to help. And so King Richard was made a prisoner, and only allowed to return home after he had paid a ransom that nearly bankrupted his kingdom. By then, King Richard’s idealism had soured. What was the point of helping Christendom when even the Church would undermine him? The Third Crusade was over. It had failed.
Brother Hugh and the other Hospitallers must have watched in disappointment as corruption and greed destroyed Christendom’s greatest warrior. Time passed. Muslims and Christians would push back and forth. Another crusade, the Fourth Crusade, would fail even more spectacularly, ending in an attack on the Christian city of Constantinople, and ruining any chance for speedy reconciliation between the Churches of East and West. In time, Saint Louis would attempt Richard’s strategy for securing Egypt, twice, but without success. By the time of Saint Louis was born, however, Brother Hugh was in his sixties. He had spent his life trying to hold things together as a Hospitaller, and at some point he was transferred back to Genoa, to take command of the hospital there.
This is the point in Brother Hugh’s life when he comes into focus for us. We might expect to encounter a rather cynical, worldly old man. But that is not what we find at all.
The new Commander arrived at the Hospital in Genoa without undue pomp. For his rooms he chose a spot in the corner of the basement, where he laid out a wooden board to sleep on. And then he went about the Hospitaller’s other business: helping his lords, the sick. Brother Hugh worked in the hospital, helping the sick, cleaning them, and notoriously giving away even the little spending money he received as a stipend. People began to say that this Commander didn’t just wear the crusader’s cross over his chest as part of his uniform. It was in his heart as well.
Brother Hugh was an ascetic. He fasted most of the year, and especially at Lent. But despite his own austere life, miracles of plenty tended to appear around him. A group of servants said that he had come across them lamenting the difficulty of bringing water to the place where they washed clothes, and when he prayed with them, a chunk of rock had crumbled away and a clear stream had begun to flow out of it. And after he died, when the city of Genoa began gathering stories of the man they suspected had been a saint among them, several people reported that when they had eaten with Brother Hugh, he had blessed the water at the table, and what they had tasted was fine wine.
Brother Hugh had joined the Hospitallers to save Jerusalem - and that had failed. Christendom had failed, stumbling into defeat when kings and popes were weak and greedy. The best days of the Christian holdings in the Holy Land were already behind them. It was a time that could make a cynic even out of Richard the Lionheart. But such hard times could also be the forge where Saints are made, and Brother Hugh had stepped into the fires of that forge to shape his life into something that was an imitation of Christ. And that is the context, I think, we need to understand my favourite story about the quiet Commander of the Hospital in Genoa.
A local man was possessed by a demon. It seems to have resisted attempts at exorcism. Someone suggested that they might bring Brother Hugh. Brother Hugh set out to help. But it turned out that this was simply not an encounter for which the demon was prepared. By the time Brother Hugh had arrived, the demon had left, complaining all the way, and the man was healed.
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I enjoyed that story, thanks