I Am Francesco, once of Assisi, still a beggar, still a little brother. Death did not make me wise; it only made me quieter. What I tell you is what I remember with the eyes I have now.

I speak to you from a place where the Nile and the Tiber appear as only two thin threads of light, and where the dust of Damietta no longer clings to the hem of a habit.

In the year of Our Lord 1219, I journeyed to Egypt because I could no longer bear the sound of Christian steel taking lives, any lives. Having already seen the futulity and terrible sacrifice of battle. The Fifth Crusade lay before Damietta like a wound that would not close. I had no army and no banner. I took only Brother Illuminato with me, whose name already meant what I hoped we might become. We crossed the lines as two poor men, shouting “Soldan! Soldan!” so that the sentries would not kill us before they understood we had come to speak, not to spy.

They seized us. They handled us roughly, as soldiers do when they do not know whether they hold a messenger or a fool. I did not arrive with a ‘thirst for martyrdom’ as others wrote later. I saw little reasoning to die at the threshold before entering the house. I wrote later that each life subject to every human creature for God’s sake, without quarrel, could proclaim the Word if they see that it pleases God.

They brought us into the presence of Meledin, named al-Malik al-Kamil, Sultan of Egypt, nephew of the great Salah ad-Din, a man of my own years, grave and courteous, who sat among scholars and captains as if courtesy itself were a kind of armour.

He asked, as the chronicles later recorded, whether we had come to become Saracens or whether we carried a message. I answered that we would never abandon the Lord Jesus, but that we had come as His beggars, to place the Sultan’s soul before the Most High and to speak of the Gospel if he would hear it. I greeted him as I greet every creature: “May the Lord give you peace.” He received the greeting as one who already knew the meaning of the word salaam.

For some days he let me speak uninterrupted. I preached Christ crucified and risen, the poverty of the Son of God, the mercy that does not wait for victory. I did not pretend that our two ways were the same. His people named the One God with a name I had not heard or learned in Umbria; they honoured Jesus as a prophet of great purity but would not call Him Lord. They prayed with a discipline that shamed many of my own brothers. Five times the camp turned toward the same horizon, and the sound of that turning was like a great flock folding its wings. I saw men wash before they spoke to God. I saw hospitality offered even to an enemy who had come unarmed into their midst. These things I did not despise. A man who loves Lady Poverty learns to recognize her cousins wherever they appear and in whatever form they take.

Yet I remained what I was. I would not un-say the Cross. I could not pretend that the Word made flesh was only another messenger. Some later brothers, wishing to make the meeting more splendid, said I offered to walk through fire with their doctors present, so that God Himself might choose worthiness. Perhaps I did speak of fire; the heart is often hotter than the tongue remembers. What I know is this: the sultan would not permit it. He said his people would not endure such a spectacle, and he would not have a man of God testing the fire for proof of the almighty.

Jacques de Vitry, the Bishop of Acre, who was there amongst the crusaders and was not particularly favourable to my meeting with the Sultan, wrote that the sultan had asked me privately to pray that God would show him the religion most pleasing to Heaven.

I have carried that request across eight centuries since. I prayed then and I pray still. I do not know what God showed him. I know only that he returned us back to our camp with honour, fearing, the bishop wrote, that my words might steal soldiers from his ranks. Fear and courtesy sat together in that tent like iron and glass exploring their relationship with each other.

What did I think of their culture? I thought it was a temple built on a different foundation than mine, yet a temple in which men washed, prayed, gave bread to strangers, and named the One. I thought the courtesy they shared put many Christian lords to shame. I thought their laws overly severe and their devotion evident and real. I did not and could not become one of them. I did not ask them to become one of me. In the Rule I was writing even then I told my brothers that if they lived among Saracens they might be subject to every human creature for God’s sake, or they might proclaim the Word if they saw it was God’s will. Subjection or speech, not conquest.

From this side of Life after death, I see far more clearly as to what I only guessed then: that the same Mercy that stooped to a stable in Bethlehem also stoops to every sincere turning of the heart, even when the names we use for that turning create wounds upon one another. I cannot say the two faiths are One. I say the One is above all our lower disputes. The sultan and I did not end a war through our exchanges. Damietta still fell and blood still soaked the delta. But for a few days two men sat in a tent while the world outside chose death, and one of them asked the other to pray.

If you who listen are still at war, whether with a neighbour, with a race of men, a differing culture, or even with your own fear of what takes place in your world, remember the little brother who crossed a battlefield with nothing but a request to give a greeting of peace. Remember also, the Sultan of Egypt who chose not to take his head. And when you pray, pray as he asked me to pray: that God would show each of us the way that most pleases Him.

I, who now see the Face that both of us sought under different names, tell you only this: the Face holds greater wisdom than our deepest certainties, and greater strength of compassion than our combined armies.

Go in peace – for that is the Gift I give to you.