When his prior sent him to preach in Lombardy (1486), Savonarola abandoned his youthful pedagogic style, and cast his sermons into the form of denunciations of immorality, prophecies of doom, and calls to repentance. Thousands of people who could not have followed his earlier arguments listened with awe to the newly impassioned eloquence of a man who seemed to be speaking with authority. Pico della Mirandola heard of the friar’s success; he asked Lorenzo to suggest to the prior that Savonarola should be brought back to Florence. Savonarola returned (1489); two years later he was chosen prior of San Marco; and Lorenzo found in him an enemy more forthright and powerful than any that had ever crossed his path.
Florence was surprised to discover that the swarthy preacher who a decade before had chilled them with argument, could now awe them with apocalyptic fantasies, thrill them with vivid descriptions of the paganism, corruption, and immorality of their neighbors, lift up their souls to repentance and hope, and renew in them the full intensity of the faith that had inspired and terrified their youth.
Ye women, who glory in your ornaments, your hair, your hands, I tell you you are all ugly. Would you see true beauty? Look at the pious man or woman in whom spirit dominates matter; watch him when he prays, when a ray of the divine beauty glows upon him when his prayer is ended; you will see the beauty of God shining in his face, you will behold it as it were the face of an angel.5
Men marveled at his courage, for he flayed the clergy and the papacy more than the laity, the princes more than the people; and a note of political radicalism warmed the hearts of the poor:
In these days there is no grace, no gift of the Holy Spirit, that may not be bought or sold. On the other hand, the poor are oppressed by grievous burdens; and when they are called to pay sums beyond their means the rich cry unto them, “Give me the rest.” There be some who, having an income of fifty [florins per year], pay a tax on one hundred, while the rich pay little, since the taxes are regulated at their pleasure. Bethink ye well, O ye rich, for affliction shall smite ye. This city shall no more be called Florence but a den of thieves, of baseness and bloodshed. Then shall ye all be povertystricken… and your name, O priests, shall be changed into a terror.6
After the priests the bankers:
You have found many ways of making money, and many exchanges which you call lawful but which are most unjust; and you have corrupted the offices and magistrates of the city. No one can persuade you that usury [interest] is sinful; you defend it at the peril of your souls. No one is ashamed of lending at usury; nay, those who do otherwise pass for fools…. Your brow is that of a whore, and you will not blush. You say, a good and glad life lies in gain; and Christ says, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall inherit heaven.7
And a word for Lorenzo:
Tyrants are incorrigible because they are proud, because they love flattery, and will not restore ill-gotten gains…. They hearken not unto the poor, and neither do they condemn the rich…. They corrupt voters, and farm out taxes to aggravate the burdens of the people8…. The tyrant is wont to occupy the people with shows and festivals, in order that they may think of their own pastimes and not of his designs, and, growing unused to the conduct of the commonwealth, may leave the reins of government in his hands.9
Nor shall that dictatorship be excused on the ground that it finances literature and art. The literature and art, said Savonarola, are pagan; the humanists merely pretend to be Christians; those ancient authors whom they so sedulously exhume and edit and praise are strangers to Christ and the Christian virtues, and their art is an idolatry of heathen gods, or a shameless display of naked women and men.
Lorenzo was disturbed. His grandfather had founded and enriched the monastery of San Marco; he himself had given to it lavishly; it seemed to him unreasonable that a friar who could know little of the difficulties of government, and who idealized a liberty that had been merely the right of the strong to use the weak without hindrance by law, should now undermine, from a Medici shrine, that public support upon which the political power of his family had been built. He tried to appease the friar; he went to Mass in San Marco’s, and sent the convent rich gifts. Savonarola scorned them, and remarked in a subsequent sermon that a faithful dog does not leave off barking in his master’s defense because a bone is thrown to him. When he found an unusually large sum, in gold, in the alms box, he suspected that it came from Lorenzo, and gave it to another monastery, saying that silver sufficed the needs of his brethren. Lorenzo sent five leading citizens to argue with him that his inflammatory sermons would lead to useless violence, and were unsettling the order and peace of Florence; Savonarola answered by telling them to bid Lorenzo do penance for his sins. A Franciscan friar famous for eloquence was encouraged to preach popular sermons with a view to drawing the Dominican’s audience away; the Franciscan failed. Greater throngs than ever before came to San Marco, until its church could no longer hold them. For his Lenten sermons of 1491 Savonarola moved his pulpit into the cathedral; and though that edifice had been designed to contain a city, it was crowded whenever the friar was scheduled to speak. The ailing Lorenzo made no further effort to interfere with his preaching.
After Lorenzo’s death the weakness of his son Piero made Savonarola the greatest power in Florence. With the reluctant consent of the new pope, Alexander VI, he separated his convent from the Lombard Congregation (of Dominican monasteries) of which it had been a part, and made himself in practice the independent head of his monastic community. He reformed its regulations, and raised the moral and intellectual level of the friars under his rule. New recruits joined his flock, and most of its 250 members developed for him a love and fidelity that upheld him in all but his final ordeal. He became bolder in his criticism of the laic and clerical immorality of the time. Inheriting, however unwittingly, the anticlerical views of the Waldensian and Patarine heretics who still lurked here and there in northern Italy and central Europe, he condemned the worldly wealth of the clergy, the pomp of ecclesiastical ceremony, “the great prelates with splendid miters of gold and precious stones on their heads… with fine copes and stoles of brocade”; he contrasted this affluence with the simplicity of the priests in the early Church; these “had fewer gold miters and fewer chalices, for what few they possessed were broken up to relieve the needs of the poor; whereas our prelates, for the sake of obtaining chalices, will rob the poor of their sole means of support.”10 To these denunciations he added prophecies of doom. He had predicted that Lorenzo and Innocent VIII would die in 1492; they did. Now he predicted that presently the sins of Italy, of her despots and her clergy, would he avenged by a dire disaster; that thereafter Christ would lead the nation in a glorious reform; and that he himself, Savonarola, would die a violent death. Early in 1494 he foretold that Charles VIII would invade Italy, and he welcomed the invasion as the chastening hand of God. His sermons at this time, says a contemporary, were “so full of terrors and alarms, cries and lamentations, that everyone went about the city bewildered, speechless, and, as it were, half dead.”11
In September, 1494, Charles VIII crossed the Apennines into Italy, resolved to add the Kingdom of Naples to the French crown. In October he entered Florentine territory and besieged the fortress of Sarzana. Piero thought he could save Florence from France as his father had saved it from Naples, by going in person to the enemy. He met Charles at Sarzana, and yielded to all demands: Pisa, Leghorn, and every bastion of Florence in the west were surrendered to the French for the duration of the war, and Florence was to advance 200,000 florins ($5,000,000) to help finance Charles’s campaign.12 When news of these concessions reached Florence the Signory and the Council were shocked; contrary to Lorenzo’s precedents, they had not been consulted in these negotiations. Led by the Medici opponents of Piero, the Signory decided to depose him and restore the old republic. When Piero returned from Sarzana he found the gates of the Palazzo Vecchio closed in his face. As he rode to his home the people jeered him, and urchins pelted him with stones. Fearing for his life, he
fled from the city with his family and his brothers. The populace sacked the Medici palace and gardens, and the homes of Piero’s financial agents; the art collection gathered by four generations of Medici was plundered and scattered, and its remains were sold at auction by the government. The Signory offered a reward of five thousand florins for the delivery of Piero and Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici alive, two thousand for their delivery dead. It sent five men, including Savonarola, to Charles at Pisa to ask for better terms; Charles met them with noncommittal courtesy. When the delegation had left, the Pisans tore the lion and lilies of Florence from their buildings, and declared their independence. Charles entered Florence, consented to some slight modification of his demands, and, eager to get to Naples, led his army to the south. Florence addressed itself now to one of history’s most spectacular experiments in democracy.
II. THE STATESMAN
On December 2, 1494 the citizens were summoned to a parlamento by the great bell in the Palazzo Vecchio tower. The Signory asked and received the power to name twenty men who would appoint a new Signory and new magistrates for a year, after which all offices were to be filled by lot from a register of the approximately three thousand enfranchised males. The Twenty dismissed the councils and agencies which under the Medici had considered and administered public affairs, and divided the diverse functions among themselves. They were inadequately experienced for these tasks, and were torn by family factions; the new governmental machinery broke down, and chaos was imminent; commerce and industry hesitated, men were thrown out of work, and angry crowds gathered in the streets. Piero Capponi persuaded the Twenty that order could be saved only by inviting Savonarola into their councils.
The friar summoned them to his monastery, and expounded to them an ambitious program of political, economic, and moral legislation. Under his leadership and that of Pietro Soderini, the Twenty devised a new constitution, partly modeled on that which was so successfully maintaining stability in Venice. A Maggior Consiglio or Great Council was to be formed of men who—or their ancestors in the preceding three generations—had held a major office in the state; and these initial members were to choose twenty-eight additional councilors in each year. The executive organs of the government were to remain essentially as under the Medici: a Signory of eight priors and a gonfalonier, chosen by the Council for a term of two months, and various committees—The Twelve, The Sixteen, The Ten, The Eight—to carry on administration, taxation, and war. Complete democracy was postponed as impractical in a society still largely illiterate and subject to waves of passion; but the Great Council, numbering almost three thousand members, was considered to be a representative body. Since no room in the Palazzo Vecchio could house so large an assemblage, Simone Pollaiuolo—II Cronaca—was engaged to redesign part of the interior into a Sala dei Cinquecento, or Hall of the Five Hundred, where the Council could meet in sections; here, eight years later, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo would be commissioned to paint opposed walls in a famous rivalry. Through Savonarola’s influence and eloquence the proposed constitution received public acclaim, and the new Republic came into operation on June 10, 1495.
It began amiably by issuing amnesty to all supporters of the deposed Medici regime. With self-respecting generosity it abolished all taxes except a ten-per-cent levy on income from real property; the merchants who dominated the Council thus exempted commerce from taxation, and laid the whole burden on the landowning aristocracy and the land-using poor. At Savonarola’s urging the government established a monte di pietà, or state loan office, which lent money at five to seven per cent, and freed the poor from dependence on private moneylenders, who had charged up to thirty per cent. Again at the friar’s prompting, the Council attempted to reform morals with laws: it forbade horse races, gross carnival songs, profanity, and gambling; servants were encouraged to inform against masters who gambled, and convicted offenders were punished with torture; blasphemers had their tongues pierced, and homosexuals were degraded with merciless penalties. To aid in the enforcement of these reforms Savonarola organized the boys of his congregation into a moral police. They pledged themselves to attend church regularly, to avoid races, pageants, acrobatic displays, loose company, obscene literature, dancing, and music schools, and to wear their hair short. These “bands of hope” roamed the streets soliciting alms for the Church; they dispersed groups that had gathered to gamble, and tore from the bodies of women what they judged to be indecent dress.
For a time the city accepted these reforms; many women gave them enthusiastic support, behaved modestly, dressed plainly, and put aside their jewelry. A moral revolution transformed what had been the gay Florence of the Medici. People sang hymns, not Bacchic lyrics, in the streets. Churches were filled, and alms were given in unprecedented quantity. Some bankers and merchants restored illegal gains.13 Savonarola called upon all the population, rich and poor, to shun idleness and luxury, to work assiduously, and to give a good example with their lives. “Your reform,” he said, “must begin with the things of the spirit… your temporal good must serve your moral and religious welfare, on which it depends. And if you have heard it said that ‘states are not ruled by paternosters,’ remember that this is the rule of tyrants… a rule for oppressing, not for liberating, a city. If you desire a good government you must restore it to God.”14 He proposed that Florence should think of its government as having an invisible king—Christ Himself; and under this theocracy he predicted Utopia: “O Florence! then wilt thou be rich with spiritual and temporal wealth; thou wilt achieve the reformation of Rome, of Italy, of all countries; the wings of thy greatness shall spread over the world.”15 And in truth Florence had seldom been so happy before. It was a bright moment in the hectic history of virtue.
But human nature remained. Men are not naturally virtuous, and social order maintains itself precariously amid the open or secret conflict of egos, families, classes, races, and creeds. A powerful element in the Florentine community itched for taverns, brothels, and gambling halls as outlets for instincts or as sources of gain. The Pazzi, the Nerli, the Capponi, the younger branch of the Medici, and other aristocrats who had effected the explusion of Piero were furious at seeing the government fall into the hands of a friar. Remnants of Piero’s party survived, and watched for a chance to restore him and their fortunes. The Franciscan friars worked with religious zeal against the Dominican Savonarola, and a small group of skeptics called for a plague on both their houses. These diverse enemies of the new order agreed in satirizing its supporters as Piagnoni or weepers (for many wept at Savonarola’s sermons), Collitorti or wry-necks, Stropiccioni or hypocrites, Masticapaternostri or prayer-munchers; and the recipients of these titles denominated their opponents, from the virulence of their hostility, Arrabiati, mad dogs. Early in 1496 the Arrabiati succeeded in electing their candidate for gonfalonier, Filippo Corbizzi. Having assembled in the Palazzo Vecchio a council of ecclesiastics, he summoned Savonarola before it, and accused him of political activities improper in a friar; and several churchmen, including one of his own Dominican order, joined in the charge. He replied: “Now the words of the Lord are fulfilled: ‘The sons of my mother have fought against me.’… To be concerned with the affairs of this world… is no crime in a monk unless he should mix in them without any higher aim, and without seeking to promote the cause of religion.”16 They challenged him to say whether his sermons were inspired by God, but he refused to answer. He returned to his cell a sadder man.
He might have overcome his enemies had foreign affairs favored him. The Florentines, who praised liberty, were furious at Pisa for demanding and securing it. Even Savonarola dared not defend the rebellious city; and a cathedral canon who remarked that the Pisans too had a right to be free was severely punished by a Piagnone Signory. Savonarola promised to restore Pisa to Florence, and rashly claimed that he held Pisa in the hollow of his hand; but he was, as Machiavelli scornfully said, a prophet without arms. When Charles VIII was chased from Italy, Pisa consolidated its independenc
e by an alliance with Milan and Venice; and the Florentines mourned that Savonarola had tied them to Charles’s falling star, and that they alone had not shared in the glorious expulsion of the French from Italy.17 Before abandoning the lately Florentine fortresses of Sarzana and Pietra Santa, their French commandants had sold one to Genoa and the other to Lucca. Montepulciano, Arezzo, Volterra, and other Florentine dependencies were agitated by movements for liberation; the once proud and powerful city seemed on the verge of losing nearly all its outlying possessions, and all its trade outlets by the Arno, the Adriatic, and the roads to Milan and Rome. Trade suffered, tax revenues fell. The Council tried to finance the war against Pisa by forced loans from rich citizens, offering them government bonds in return; but as bankruptcy neared these bonds declined to eighty to fifty to ten per cent of their face value. In 1496 the treasury was exhausted, and the government imitated Lorenzo by borrowing money from a fund confided to the state to provide dowries for poor brides. In the administration of government funds, whether by Arrabiati or Piagnoni, corruption and incompetence rose and spread. Francesco Valori, made gonfalonier (January, 1497) by a Piagnone majority in the Council, maddened the Mad Dogs by excluding them from all magistracies, denying them membership in the Council if they were delinquent in taxes, allowing none but Piagnoni to address the Council, and expelling from Florence any Franciscan friar who preached against Savonarola. For eleven months in 1496 rain fell almost daily, ruining the crops of the narrowed hinterland; in 1497 people dropped dead of hunger in the streets. The government opened relief stations to provide grain for the poor; women were crushed to death in the multitudes that applied. The Medicean party plotted to restore Piero; five leaders were detected and were condemned to death (1497); appeal to the Council, guaranteed by the constitution, was refused them; they were executed within a few hours of their condemnation; and many Florentines contrasted the faction, violence, and severity of the Republic with the order and peace of Lorenzo’s time. Hostile crowds repeatedly demonstrated before Savonarola’s monastery; Piagnoni and Arrabiati stoned each other in the streets. When the friar preached on Ascension Day of 1497 his sermon was interrupted by a riot in which his enemies tried to seize him and were repulsed by his friends. A gonfalonier proposed to the Signory that he should be banished as a means of quieting the city, and the proposal was lost by a single vote. Amid this bitter collapse of his dream Savonarola faced and defied the strongest power in Italy.