Feast Day: February 8 Beatified: Equivalent beatification through centuries of uninterrupted Franciscan cultus; officially affirmed in the Franciscan calendar Order / Vocation: Third Order of Saint Francis (Secular Franciscan) Patron of: Franciscan tertiaries · Widows who serve the Church · Friends of the poor
"Go, visit your father, blessed Francis, without delay and hurry — because if you delay long you will not find him alive." — Interior voice heard by Jacoba, as she later recounted it
The Woman He Called Brother
Francis of Assisi called her "Brother Jacoba" and meant it entirely. Not with condescension, not with sentimentality, but with the specific recognition that she had the qualities — the courage, the constancy, the frank directness — that he associated with a good friar. She was also, it must be said, the woman who made him the almond sweets he loved.
This is the texture of the friendship between the Poverello and the Roman noblewoman Jacoba dei Settesoli, and it is unlike almost any other friendship in the hagiographic record. It was not a spiritual director and directee. It was not a patron and her beneficiary. It was something more equalizing than either — a man who had given up all property relying on the generosity of a woman who had chosen not to, and a woman who had heard the Gospel in his preaching and made of her lay life something that the Gospel required.
She was not a nun. She did not follow Francis into radical poverty or cloister herself away from the world. She raised two sons, managed an extensive Roman estate, maneuvered through the politics of a powerful noble family, and gave away what she could without destroying the foundation her sons would need. She did what Francis told her to do: she stayed in her life and tried to live the Gospel in it. That she succeeded so fully that he called her to his deathbed ahead of everyone except his closest brothers is the whole of her beatitude.
The Frangipani and Their World
Jacoba dei Settesoli was born around 1190, probably at Torre Astura, a fortified island estate off the coast of Latium that had been in the Frangipani family for generations. The Frangipani were one of the great Roman noble families — their towers still stand embedded in the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus, their fortified enclosures scattered through the medieval city. They were powerful, sometimes brutal, always politically involved. The name Settesoli — seven suns — referred to a property and became attached to Jacoba as a kind of territorial designation.
She was married around 1210 to Graziano Frangipane, a nobleman of her own class. They had two sons, Giacomo and Giovanni, who would both eventually become senators of Rome. By 1217, Graziano was dead — she was a widow at approximately twenty-seven, with two sons to raise, multiple castles and rural estates to administer, and the full weight of managing a significant Roman inheritance. She was not a sheltered woman. She was an intelligent, resilient woman who had been given responsibility by death before she might otherwise have chosen it.
Rome in the early thirteenth century was a fierce place — the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor in constant conflict, noble families with private armies fighting for control of city districts, the Crusades still drawing men and resources east, plague and famine moving through the population in episodic waves. Jacoba managed her household in this environment, and she managed it well.
The Meeting and the Friendship
She first encountered Francis of Assisi when he came to Rome to seek papal approval for his fledgling Order of Friars Minor. The date was probably around 1212. She heard him preach. The preaching was unlike anything she had encountered in the official Church — not scholarly, not rhetorical in the cultivated sense, but immediate, physical, joyful, and absolutely serious about the cost of following Jesus. She sought him out and asked him directly: how should she live? How should she be charitable?
Francis's answer was not what a certain kind of pious adviser might have given. He did not tell her to enter a convent, distribute all her property, or abandon her sons. He said: stay in your life. Poverty is everywhere. Charity is everywhere. A perfect life can be lived anywhere. He enrolled her in the Third Order of Saint Francis — the lay community of people who sought to live Franciscan values in the world, without vows of poverty or the friars' radical homelessness.
What followed was a friendship that lasted until Francis's death and beyond. When Francis came to Rome, he stayed at her house in Trastevere. She provided him and his brothers with hospitality — food, shelter, and the practical care that allowed itinerant mendicants to continue moving. She donated land in Trastevere that Francis and his brothers used as a hospice for lepers. She gave money and resources to support the construction of the basilica at Assisi.
Francis called her "Brother Jacoba" — Frate Iacopa in the Umbrian vernacular — as a term of the highest personal regard. He meant it as a description of her character: strong, direct, reliable, unconcerned with the conventions that might have softened or deflected a lesser person. She was his friend in the full sense of the word — someone who knew him, helped him, argued with him when necessary, and loved him without sentimentality.
He presented her, according to tradition, with a small lamb — a gift that itself expressed the Franciscan world he moved in, in which animals were brothers and sisters. The lamb, according to Saint Bonaventure, followed Jacoba around her Roman household and woke her for prayer in the morning, having apparently absorbed something of the life of the saint who gave it.
The Deathbed: The Breaking of the Rule
In October 1226, Francis was dying at the Portiuncula outside Assisi. His body had been destroyed by his years of asceticism and his stigmata — the wounds of Christ that had appeared on his hands, feet, and side two years earlier at La Verna. He was nearly blind, barely able to eat, at the end. He asked that a letter be sent to "the beloved Lady Jacoba of Settesoli" in Rome — a letter telling her he was dying and asking her to bring with her a hair-cloth shroud for his body, wax for the burial, and — he added this with full knowledge of how it would read — some of the almond treats she had made for him when he was ill in Rome.
Before the letter was sealed, Francis stopped. He said: do not write more. There was no longer any need.
At that moment, outside the friary, there was a loud knocking. A porter went to the gate and opened it. There stood Jacoba dei Settesoli with her two sons, both senators, and a large company of knights and retainers — she had already come, already prepared, already carrying the shroud and the wax and a jar of the almond sweets. She had set out from Rome before the letter was written because a voice within her had told her to come without delay.
This is the moment the tradition preserves most carefully. Francis had heard the voice before it reached her; she had responded before he spoke. The Franciscan sources understand this as a mutual spiritual awareness born of deep friendship and prayer — not a literary device, but something the people present understood as having happened.
There was a difficulty: women were not permitted to enter the friary. Francis overruled the rule. He called for Jacoba by name — and added, in the account of one source, that for Jacoba the restriction did not apply, because her faith and her devotion had earned a different standing. She came in. She stayed. She was with Francis when he died on the evening of October 3, 1226, surrounded by his brothers and by this woman he had called Brother.
The Years After
She returned to Rome after the funeral and resumed her life of charitable work and Franciscan practice. She was instrumental in having the Benedictines in Trastevere transfer to the Franciscans the hospice of Saint Blaise, which became the friars' first residence in Rome — the church now known as San Francesco a Ripa Grande. She continued to fund the construction of the basilica at Assisi.
In the 1230s she moved permanently to Assisi. She wanted to be in the city where Francis had lived and where his body rested, near the people who had known him, in the community that had formed around his memory. She spent the last years of her life there, in prayer and charitable work, among the friars and Poor Clares whose vocations she had supported for two decades.
She died on February 8 — the year is debated between approximately 1239 and as late as 1273, depending on which sources one follows. The most probable opinion places her death in 1239, which would make her roughly forty-nine years old, though some historians believe she lived into her eighties.
She was buried in the Lower Church of the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi. In 1932 her remains were moved to the crypt near the tomb of Francis himself and the closest of his friars — Leo, Rufino, Masseo, and Angelo. A marble slab marks her burial place with the words: Hic requiescit Jacopa sancta nobilisque romana — Here rests Jacoba, holy and noble Roman woman.
The Legacy and Patronage
Her patronage of Franciscan tertiaries is self-evident: she is, in the tradition, the prototype of the lay Franciscan — not the founder, exactly, but the living demonstration of what the Third Order was for. A woman who could have entered religious life (she might have, her biographers suggest, had her sons not needed her) but was told by Francis himself to stay in the world and live the Gospel in it.
Her patronage of widows who serve the Church follows directly from the circumstances of her life: a young widow with property, sons, and social obligations who turned those resources toward the Church's poorest rather than toward her own comfort or advancement.
A tradition among some Franciscan communities distributes small almond sweets on her feast day, February 8, in memory of the mostaccioli she brought to Francis's deathbed — a confection he had loved, prepared by her hands, present at the moment of his death. This is not a pious legend. It is a detail preserved in the earliest Franciscan sources, and it captures something true about both of them: the joy they shared in small pleasures, the embodied love that was as much a part of their friendship as the spiritual gravity.
| Born | c. 1190, Rome (Torre Astura), Italy |
| Died | c. February 8, 1239, Assisi, Italy — natural causes |
| Feast Day | February 8 |
| Order / Vocation | Third Order of Saint Francis (Secular Franciscan) |
| Beatified | Cultus confirmed through centuries of Franciscan veneration |
| Body | Crypt of the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi, Assisi — near the tomb of Saint Francis |
| Patron of | Franciscan tertiaries · Widows who serve the Church · Friends of the poor |
| Known as | Brother Jacoba; Frate Iacopa; Lady Jacoba of Settesoli |
| Their words | "If you delay long you will not find him alive." |
Prayer
O God, who gavest to Blessed Jacoba the grace of deep friendship with Saint Francis and the courage to live the Gospel in the midst of her worldly responsibilities, grant us by her intercession the wisdom to serve Thee in whatever state Thou hast placed us, through Christ our Lord. Amen.
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| Tomb of Jacoba of Settesoli. |
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