Basilica of Saint Clare

**A noblewoman who fled her home to live in absolute poverty — and fought three popes to keep the right to own nothing.** ✅ **Who she was**: **Clare** (1194–1253), daughter of a **wealthy noble family** in Assisi. ⚠ **In 1212, aged eighteen, she left her house at night** and joined Francis and his companions — **who cut her hair and clothed her in rough cloth**; ⚠ **her family tried to take her back by force and she refused**. ✅ **What she founded**: a **women's order** later known as the **Poor Clares** — **an enclosed life of silence, prayer and work**, **and total poverty**. ⚠ **And here is the radicalism**: **women's convents were traditionally endowed with land and property** guaranteeing their survival; **Clare refused that** — **insisting her community own nothing at all**, living on daily alms, **exactly as the Franciscan men did**. ⚠ **The conflict**: **the Church saw this as dangerous for women in an enclosed house** — **and successive popes tried to impose a milder rule on her**, ✅ **and she resisted for decades**, **writing her own rule** — ⚠ **the first woman in the Church's history to write a monastic rule**; ✅ **approved two days before her death in 1253**.