Writing Polemic as History: The Apocalyptic Implications of Elias of Cortona, Hugh of Digne, and Gerardo Segarelli in Salimbene's Cronica

Abstract

Writing in 1284, the Franciscan chronicler Salimbene of Parma said of his Order’s former General Minister, Elias of Cortona, that one of Elias’s several faults was “that he accepted many useless men into the Order. I lived in the convent of Siena for two years, for example, and I saw twentyfive lay brothers there.”2 For Salimbene, to be a layman in religious life was also to be useless.3 The Franciscan movement at its inception was a lay phenomenon, yet its founder’s immense popularity attracted large