  Francis of Marchia (a.k.a. de Appignano, de Pignano, de Esculo, de Ascoli, Franciscus Rubeus, and the Doctor Succinctus) was born ca. 1285–1290 in the village of Appignano del Tronto in the province of Ascoli Piceno, east of Rome and near the Adriatic (see especially Marchia 2008, xiii–xvii). He became a Franciscan and rose in the order’s educational hierarchy, probably studying theology at the University of Paris around 1310, then teaching at a Franciscan studium elsewhere, before returning to the Minorites’ Paris studium to lecture on the Sentences of Peter Lombard as bachelor of theology, a common career path for members of the mendicant orders at the time. Marchia’s Parisian lectures on the Sentences were delivered during the 1319–20 academic year. What little information we have suggests that Marchia remained in Paris at least until 1323, by which time he had most likely been promoted to master of theology. He did not attend the Franciscan General Chapter in Perugia in 1322, although in 1321 he may have visited the court of King Robert of Anjou, then residing in Avignon. A document of April 1328 places Marchia as lector at the Franciscan convent in Avignon (Nicolaus Minorita 1996, 189), the site of the papal court, but we have no solid evidence for his earlier presence there. (Marchia’s stay in Avignon is commonly thought to have begun by 1324, but this is based on an error: a reference to Marchia’s confrère Francis of Meyronnes in the Quodlibet of the Augustinian James of Pamiers was misinterpreted as citing Marchia. Without contemporary documentation, later writers claimed that Marchia was elected Franciscan provincial minister of his native area, Marchia, in 1327, but Roberto Lambertini has found evidence definitively refuting this assertion.)