Clare of Assisi takes the Franciscan veil

1210

An eighteen-year-old noblewoman of Assisi slipped out of her father's house on Palm Sunday night and accepted the tonsure from Francis himself. Her Poor Clares, an enclosed order of women living in radical poverty, would spread across Europe within her lifetime. She fought the papacy for decades to preserve her order's right to own nothing at all, a privilege no pope wished to grant.