The people, who until now had wept bitterly, began to sing again as the procession went on its way up the hill towards the Porta Mojano. The trumpets sounded louder than ever, and "with jubilation and great exultation" the sacred body was brought to the church of San Giorgio, where it was carefully laid in a marble urn covered with an iron grating, and guarded day and night from the prying eyes of the Perugians. If Francis had worked miracles during his life, those chronicled at his tomb are even more marvellous; in recounting some which read like fairy tales, a biographer recounts with pride that, "even from heaven, the Saint showed his courtesy to all."
Devotion to St. Francis was not confined to Umbria or even to Italy, for we read how his fame spread throughout France, and how the King and Queen with all the barons of the land, came to Paris to kiss one of his relics. "People journeyed from the east and from the west," enthusiastically exclaims Celano with a total disregard of detail, "they came from the north and from the south, even the learned and the lettered who abounded in Paris at that time."
But while France was being stirred by the news of perpetual miracles and prodigies wrought through the intercession of the saint, and Assisi in consequence was fast growing into a place of great importance in the world, Pope Gregory IX, who had been lately elected upon the death of Honorius III, spent many hours in the Cannonica at Perugia wrestling with his doubts concerning the truth of the greatest miracle of all, the miracle of the Stigmata. While in this state of uncertainty and perplexity St. Francis, the _Fioretti_ relates, appeared to him one night, and showed him the five wounds inflicted by the Seraph upon his hands, feet and side. The vision, it seems, dispelled all doubt from the mind of Pope Gregory, for in conclave with the cardinals he proclaimed the sanctity of his friend, the Poverello d'Assisi, and determined to set the final seal of the church upon his miracles and fame.
This vision was the prelude of a great ceremony held a few days later in San Giorgio for the canonisation of Francis, at which all Umbria seems to have been present. Pope Gregory, clothed in vestments of cloth of gold embroidered with precious stones, his tiara "almost as an aureole of sanctity about his head," sat stiffly on his pontifical throne like some carved image, surrounded by cardinals in crimson garments and bishops in white stoles. All eyes were fixed upon this splendid group, and it is not improbable that among the spectators stood Pietro Bernardone and Madonna Pica, and many who had reviled Francis in his early days of sanctity, and now, within two years of his death, witnessed him placed among the greatest of the saints. Gregory had prepared an eloquent address, which he delivered in a sonorous voice occasionally broken by sobs of emotion. Becoming more and more enthusiastic as he proceeded, he compared Francis to a full moon, a refulgent sun, a star rising above the morning mists, and when he had finished the pious homily, a sub-deacon read out a list of the saint's miracles, and a learned cardinal, "not without copious weeping," discoursed thereon, while the Pope listened, shedding "rivers of tears," and breaking forth every now and then into deep-drawn sighs. The prelates wept so devoutly that their vestments were in great part wet, and the ground was drenched with their tears. The ceremony ended when the Pope rose to bless the people, and intoned the _Te Deum_, in which all joined with such good will that the "earth resounded in great jubilee."