The wolf of Gubbio
Francis and the legend of the wolf
The Little Flowers of Saint Francis — a collection of legends compiled a century after his death — tells this story. The town of Gubbio is being terrorized by a wolf. Not a natural wolf afraid of people — a wolf that has killed men, that the townspeople cannot drive away, that keeps them barricaded inside their walls.
Francis goes out to meet it.
The account in the Little Flowers of Saint Francis — written a century after his death and clearly legendary in form if not entirely in substance — describes Francis making the sign of the cross, calling the wolf Brother Wolf, and inviting it into a negotiation. You have done great evil, Francis says, but I want to make peace between you and the people of Gubbio.
The wolf, the story says, bowed its head. It laid its paw in Francis's hand as if making a pledge. It agreed — if the townspeople would feed it — to stop killing them.
Francis brokered the deal. The wolf kept it. When the wolf died of old age, years later, the townspeople mourned it.
The story is legend. What it encodes is real: Francis's conviction that the violence between creatures — whether wolf and human, or human and human — is not inevitable, that it can be met with something other than counter-violence, that the peacemaker who walks toward the teeth has more power than the townspeople behind their walls.
He called it Brother Wolf. That is where the peace begins — in the naming.
“Brother Wolf, I want to make peace between you and the people of Gubbio, so that they may no longer be harmed by you.”
— Francis of Assisi, Little Flowers of Saint Francis, c. 13th century
“The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them.”
Francis called the wolf Brother. That single act of naming — treating the threat as kin rather than enemy, as a creature with a nature and a hunger rather than as pure evil — is the pivot of the story.
The townspeople were not wrong to be afraid of the wolf. It had killed people. Their fear was rational. Their response — barricading themselves inside — was understandable.
But it was Francis who walked out, and Francis who made peace.
The peacemaker has to walk toward what everyone else is barricading against. Has to find the name for it that makes negotiation possible. Has to believe that the thing threatening the community has a nature that can, in some circumstances, be redirected.
What wolf is your community barricading against? And is there someone willing to walk out and name it Brother?