Savonarola’s Holy Republic

More revolutionary than the size and powers of the Great Council was the religious ideology that sustained it. Mixing religion and politics in Florence was not new. The republic had always and increasingly wrapped itself in the sacrality associated with saints, relics, images, processions, and the patronage of ecclesiastical communities and churches. No compilation of statutes, whether of guilds or commune, ever lacked a dedication to the “honor and reverence” of the Virgin and the saints. Religious ceremonies accompanied scrutinies and the installation of each new Signoria. Electoral pouches were stored at Santa Croce, and Franciscan friars oversaw and protected the integrity and honor of the sortition process. Natural disasters and political crises prompted religious processions and heightened devotion to sacred objects and images.565 The Medici were assiduous patrons of monasteries, convents, and churches, and perhaps nowhere more than at the Dominican convent of San Marco was Medici power inscribed in religious and ecclesiastical frames. Cosimo brought the Observant Dominicans from Fiesole to San Marco and rebuilt the entire convent. Lorenzo revived its fortunes and made it a prestigious center of Dominican learning.566

Savonarola, a native of Ferrara, was originally assigned to San Marco by his order in 1482. His early sermons attracted little attention and he was soon transferred elsewhere, but he gained the admiration and friendship of the philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who later urged Lorenzo to bring Savonarola back to oversee San Marco’s reform. In the meantime Savonarola had found his prophetic voice and vocation, and when he returned to Florence in 1490 his public sermons were filled with polemics against a culture he saw as excessively profane and only superficially Christian. But he did not overtly criticize the regime or Lorenzo, who actually protected him.567 The famous story according to which he withheld absolution from the dying Lorenzo for denying the Florentines their liberty is certainly apocryphal. Despite his criticism of Florentine culture and conspicuous wealth, Savonarola’s learning and administrative skills earned him Lorenzo’s favor. Savonarola also knew what happened in 1488 to the Franciscan demagogue, Bernardino da Feltre, whose inflammatory denunciations in Lenten sermons of usury and Jewish moneylenders provoked a crowd of hotheaded youths to attack a Jew and destroy his shop. The Otto di Guardia stopped the violence by threatening the boys’ fathers with banishment and prohibited Bernardino from preaching in Florence.568 The episode revealed the regime’s nervousness over, and readiness to silence, dangerous preachers. Purveyors of prophecy found eager audiences in these years, both in sermons and increasingly in the new print medium. As early as 1479 a prominent Florentine print shop run by Dominican nuns was publishing traditional prophetic texts for booksellers and public singers, and “until the end of the fifteenth century, Florence was undoubtedly the most important center for the distribution of popular print publications on prophecy.”569 Parenti’s description of Domenico da Ponzo’s preaching in April 1492, just after Lorenzo’s death, emphasizes its prophetic tenor: if people did not correct their ways, “horrible scandals” would afflict the city and “blood would run in the streets.” Warnings from a worried regime persuaded him to soften his predictions. A year later, when he and the infamous Bernardino da Feltre returned for a meeting of the Chapter General of the Observant Franciscans and asked the government’s permission to preach, the Otto authorized Domenico and were about to give permission to Bernardino as well, but, “fearing the great numbers of people” who might attend his sermons and the unpredictable consequences, they changed their minds and denied him the pulpit. An already assembled crowd went away with “sorrow and displeasure,” grumbling and denouncing the government. Domenico went to Piero de’ Medici to get the decision reversed, and Bernardino, agreeing to say nothing about pawnshops or Jews, did finally preach before a crowd of ten thousand, says Parenti, who considered it “a most evident sign of the government’s weakness.”570

Savonarola returned to this explosive religious environment in 1490 and hammered away at what he saw as a widening abyss between the superficial observance of religious ceremonies and the true evangelical Christianity of the gospels, lamenting the incompatibility of genuine Christian faith with great wealth and the unjustifiable gap between rich and poor and thus gaining a reputation as the “preacher of the hopeless.” This social critique, especially in the thunderous Lenten sermons of 1491 later characterized as the terrifica praedicatio, was directed not at the Medici but at the entire elite’s arrogance, wealth, exploitation of the poor, and abuse of the church for careers and advancement. But when he denounced “tyrants” who listened to flatterers, imposed unfair taxes, exploited the poor, bought votes, and elected corrupt officials, it is inconceivable that the regime’s leaders, perhaps even his patron Lorenzo, would not have suspected that such condemnations implicated them. What could Lorenzo think when Savonarola excoriated those who made their young sons prelates of the church out of family pride and ambition? In 1492, a delegation consisting of Domenico Bonsi, Guidantonio Vespucci, Francesco Valori, Paolantonio Soderini, and Bernardo Rucellai cautioned Savonarola not to go too far with his denunciations and dire warnings of imminent punishments. Savonarola later said he was sure, despite their denials, that they had been sent by Lorenzo. This too may be an invention of his early and adoring biographers, but that Savonarola thought reprisals from the regime at least a possibility is suggested by a 1491 letter to a friend in which he reports that “many have feared and still fear that what happened to Fra Bernardino might happen to me.”571

The regime’s fall unleashed the energy of Florence’s volatile religious culture and catapulted Savonarola into the role of mediating between political and religious spheres both in search of new moorings and destined to find them in each other. Church reform and renewal of Christendom were the unifying themes of his evangelical and prophetic message. But whereas before 1494 he framed the renewal as a turning away from the world and its temptations and thus as a traditional message of repentance and renunciation of wealth and worldly ambition, at the end of 1494 Savonarola began identifying Florence as the specific vessel of this renewal, as the chosen city and new Jerusalem in which the reform of Christian society would begin. In order to fulfill this divinely appointed task, Florence had to purify itself by expelling the tyrants, recovering liberty, and protecting the new republic whose heart was the Great Council. Thus the revived republic became a moral cause, a central chapter of sacred history and of the Almighty’s plan for His people. Politics and religion became indistinguishable as Savonarola persuaded large numbers of Florentines that God was unfolding a design for salvation through their republic: a momentous conjunction through which his followers infused both their politics and their religion with exhilarating new meanings and goals. Amorphous religious yearnings, the hunger for something new underlying the fascination with prophecy, speculation about the last days and the establishment of a different order of things all found their calling. Republican traditions debilitated by sixty years of Medici rule were now revived by the conviction that the moral life or death of Christian society depended on them.

In this new and specifically Florentine version of his prophetic message, Savonarola told the Florentines what was both expected of them as God’s elect and promised to them if they successfully carried out this work. On December 21, the day before the council was created, he urged them to take to heart five overriding principles and goals: fear of God; the common good and a limited desire for personal wealth; universal peace among themselves (including amnesty for supporters of the defunct Medici regime); political reform to institute a “new and holy government,” based, he says again, on the Venetian constitution, and whose “seed” is the new council; and the conviction that “God’s will is that Florence change its way of living.” Repeatedly exhorting them to this combination of moral, political, and social reforms, he said that God’s reward to Florence would be (and this was another new element in his preaching) wealth, glory, and power in measures they had never before enjoyed: “If you do this, your city will be glorious, because in this way it will be reformed with regard to both the spiritual and the temporal. And Florence will become richer and more powerful than ever and will extend its power [imperio] in many places.”572 Early in 1498, as he defended himself against multiplying enemies, Savonarola summed up this optimistic vision of Florence’s destiny in his Treatise on the Government of Florence. Four “virtues” were needed to sustain the perfection of the new government: fear of God, love of the common good, love of one another, and justice, which “purges the city of bad men.” Divine rewards awaited the purified city: “God, for justice also, will increase the city’s empire, as he did that of the Romans.” A government of men illuminated by these virtues will be “given by God” and “they will create on earth a government like that of heaven. They will be blessed with many spiritual and temporal blessings” and will enjoy true liberty and three kinds of happiness: earthly, spiritual, and eternal. Liberty, equated with freedom from tyrants, will allow the Florentines to be “safe in their city, caring with joy and peace of mind for their own households and for making an honest profit in business. When God increases their property or their status, they will not be afraid of someone taking these away.” Under the promise of spiritual happiness, in which “everyone will be able to dedicate himself to the good Christian life,” no one “will be forced by poverty to enter into bad contracts, because, since there is good government in the city, it will abound with riches and there will be work for everyone and the poor will earn a living.” The city “in a short time will be restored to such religion that it will be like a paradise on earth,” in which children will be given a healthy upbringing, good laws will protect the honor of women and boys, and the clergy will be reformed. The greatest rewards in heaven await those who “govern their cities well.” Good government brings about so many beneficial consequences that it cannot fail to please God. Moreover, “since he who governs is more similar to God than he who is governed, it is obvious that, if he governs with justice, he is more loved and rewarded by God than he is for his private actions when he is not governing.”573 While the constitution of 1494 was not Savonarola’s invention, its identification with sacred history and with divine will was indeed his, and of momentous consequence.

Over the next few years Florence was riven by factions and parties defined, for the first time, chiefly neither by patronage ties nor by class interests. Although class and faction continued to divide Florentines, ideology, religion, and Savonarola himself now did so at least as much, as the city was passionately divided between believers and enemies of his theological and millenarian defense of republican liberty and social reform. A large and vocal Savonarolan party, the frateschi, or, as their enemies derisively called them, the weepers (piagnoni), emerged in the council across class lines. Its leadership included prominent ottimati (Paolantonio Soderini, Giovanbattista Ridolfi, Francesco Valori, Jacopo Salviati, and Francesco Gualterotti) and many from the boundary between the elite and popolo (like Domenico Bonsi). Guicciardini gives a long list of prominent frateschi, and, ever cautious, says that his father Piero, although counted among them, conducted himself so “moderately” that he was not “completely ranked with them.” With these leaders was the “universale del popolo, many of whom were drawn to these things.” So deep were the “great conflicts and mortal hatred among citizens over the matter of the friar that dissension separated brother from brother and fathers from their sons.”574 A list of 500 signatories to a petition sent on Savonarola’s behalf to Pope Alexander VI in 1497 indicates the depth of his support (despite the many enemies, among them the pope, he had by then) from members of elite families (including the Albizzi, Aldobrandini, Corsini, Guasconi, Orlandini, Pitti, Ridolfi, Rucellai, Salviati, Strozzi, and Tosinghi), successful families of the popolo (like the Cambini, Gondi, and Pucci), and many more, both major and minor guildsmen.575 Much of the cultural elite was also on his side. Marsilio Ficino was an early supporter who, however, quickly changed his mind. But many of the younger intellectuals who had once moved in Ficino’s orbit gravitated toward the friar: Giovanni Pico (who died in November 1494); his nephew Gianfrancesco Pico, who wrote an influential biography of Savonarola; Giovanni Nesi, who defended his prophecies; and Girolamo Benivieni, who embraced Savonarola’s vision of Florence’s mission to preserve holy liberty. Even poets, despite the severe limitations Savonarola imposed on “Christian” poetry, came under his sway, particularly Ugolino Verino.576

For three years the Savonarolans pushed forward an agenda of moral and social reform to purify the republic and prepare it for the momentous political and sacred role the friar had assigned it. His powerful preaching became a political program through a large party of devoted followers who threatened sinners and a sinful city with dire punishments. And, perhaps for this reason, their moral reforms, while significant in the short term, failed to produce deep or durable changes in Florentine society. Their first objective was renewed severity against sodomy. In December 1494, Savonarola called for the stoning and burning of sodomites, and the councils quickly replaced fines with corporal punishments for convicted sodomites and the death penalty for a third conviction. In 1496 self-accusers were deprived of the immunity from prosecution they had previously enjoyed. Brigades of boys who renounced the vice and actively hunted down and intimidated sodomites produced a predictable backlash of opposing youth gangs that taunted the pious Savonarolans. Despite an increase in anonymous accusations (over 700 between late 1495 and 1497), the Night Officials prosecuted relatively few of the accused, and, although they convicted almost half of those they prosecuted, they and the Eight issued only three death sentences and commuted two of these to monetary penalties. Savonarola had to admit failure: “If you don’t want to kill them,” he conceded in a sermon of March 1496, “at least drive them out of your territory.”577

Savonarola’s attempt to organize Florentine children was similarly contested. Besides enlisting boys to police morals, in 1496 he instituted the first Florentine religious processions consisting entirely of boys, an innovation that provoked astonishment in some and fear in others. The frateschi tried repeatedly to pass laws that would have formally authorized youth groups to search out and denounce sodomites, gamblers, and other offenders. But the council regularly rejected them and in the end gave Savonarola nothing more than a sumptuary law regulating children’s dress.578 His remarkable proposal for women’s selfgovernance was likewise a controversial failure. In the first known suggestion that political representation be applied to Florence’s women, he urged that women’s committees representing the quarters meet to discuss and decide their own collective reform. Protests erupted and Savonarola had to rescind the idea, even as one woman scolded him for yielding to those who feared putting women’s issues in women’s hands.579 A third policy that stirred tensions was the call for expelling Jews and instituting a state lending institution, or Monte di Pieta, to replace Jewish moneylenders. Preaching against usury, Savonarola exhorted charity to the poor and recommended that public banks make loans against pawns for nominal fees. But there were more virulent anti-Jewish voices, especially that of Marco di Matteo Strozzi, a cleric who in August 1495 harangued crowds in piazza Signoria with arguments about why “these enemies of the cross of Christ,” with “their old synagogue, their rites and their usury,” should be removed from the city. In December 1495 the council approved the Monte di Pieta, which began operations the next year, and the expulsion of Jews. Although some Jews left the city, the order of expulsion was not enforced and was actually rescinded in November 1496, apparently at the urging of Savonarola himself.580 Some of his own supporters reproached him.

Savonarola’s enemies were as passionate as his followers: indeed, anti-Savonarolans were called the arrabbiati (the enraged). Among their elite leaders Guicciardini mentions Piero Capponi, Tanai de’ Nerli, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, Guidantonio Vespucci, Bernardo Rucellai, Piero Alberti, and the Pazzi. Some less prestigious families (Martelli, Giugni, Canacci, Da Diacceto “and many others like them”) joined them, but the anti-Savonarolans never had the same popular following that the frateschi enjoyed. According to Guicciardini, no single motive unified the arrabbiati in their antipathy to the friar: some were alienated by his religious ideology, others by the popular government he supported, still others by the campaigns against sodomy and gambling, or by the frateschi’s stubbornly pro-French foreign policy. Savonarola had no more dangerous enemy than Pope Alexander VI, whom he repeatedly denounced as the embodiment of a corrupt and fallen church. Constant criticism of the hierarchy and papacy brought the inevitable reaction. A first papal order to cease preaching came in October 1495, but a sympathetic Signoria urged Savonarola to resume during the Lenten season of 1496. In June 1497 Alexander excommunicated and silenced Savonarola for the rest of the year. Growing pressure from Rome, and the threat of interdicts and reprisals against Florentine banking interests, caused many Florentines, not his loyal followers but those in the middle who had given him the benefit of their doubts, to waver and then abandon him.

Complicating divisions between Savonarola’s supporters and opponents was the Medici question. Since, at least nominally, everyone had been Medicean until the regime’s collapse, former Mediceans were found among both frateschi and arrabbiati. But both parties also contained anti-Mediceans and were thus divided over the question of whether to prosecute key figures of the defunct regime. Savonarola initially won the favor of many former Mediceans with insistent pleas for amnesty and promotion of a law of March 1495 granting amnesty, except to those guilty of homicide or embezzlement, and allowing anyone sentenced to death to appeal to the council.581 But in 1497 his reaction to a conspiracy to reinstate the Medici eroded Savonarola’s standing with both Mediceans and others. In April, while the former Medicean Bernardo del Nero was Standardbearer of Justice, Piero de’ Medici appeared with troops at the city gates awaiting word from allies within to launch an assault. The government reacted quickly and Piero departed. In May opposition to the frateschi emerged as anti-Savonarolan youth gangs, the compagnacci, violently disrupted his Ascension Day sermon. To calm the city, twelve “peacemakers” were appointed representing all factions.582 The papal excommunication came in June, followed by another committee of “peacemakers” in July and a swelling dispute in August over elections in the council. In this tense situation Lamberto dell’Antella, who had been exiled for illegal contacts with Piero de’ Medici, revealed that Piero’s arrival in April had been part of a larger conspiracy whose alleged leaders were Bernardo del Nero, Niccolo Ridolfi (both among the July “peacemakers”), Lorenzo Tornabuoni, Giannozzo Pucci, and Giovanni Cambi. Also suspected of complicity was Lucrezia de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s daughter and wife of Jacopo Salviati. She fled the city but was later exonerated. A large pratica of two hundred found the five guilty and recommended the death penalty. But a huge debate erupted when they claimed their right of appeal to the Great Council. Although inclined to allow the appeal, the Signoria yielded to threats from its advisory colleges and reconvened the pratica,583 where an overwhelming majority insisted that the dangers of a popular uprising, of possible involvement by foreign powers in the conspiracy, and of worsening disunity should the council reverse the death sentences were all too great to allow the appeal.584 When the Signoria announced that it intended to reject the pratica’s recommendation and proceed with the appeal, Francesco Valori made a fiery speech full of threats and intimidation against those priors (including Guicciardini’s father Piero) favoring the appeal. That very day the five conspirators were executed. Savonarola, who had supported the law guaranteeing the right of appeal, did nothing to prevent his allies from denying it in this case. Cerretani even reports that “some said that brother Girolamo sent two friars to the Standardbearer of Justice to tell him that God wanted justice done.”585 Savonarola was severely criticized for the inconsistency and of course lost the support of the Mediceans. Now both Mediceans and non-Medicean arrabbiati saw him as more of a risk than he was worth and Francesco Valori as an outright danger.

At the end of 1497 Savonarola emerged from his silence and defied the pope’s orders. At Christmas, with his ally Paolantonio Soderini as Standardbearer of Justice, he celebrated Mass again, and, with another supporter, Giuliano Salviati, in the same office in February 1498, he resumed preaching at the beginning of Lent to huge crowds of men and women in the cathedral. The archbishop’s vicar, who was Alexander’s representative and also a distant Medici cousin, tried unsuccessfully to prohibit the clergy from attending. Alexander was furious and again threatened Florentine merchants with reprisals and the city with an interdict. Led by a prominent anti-Savonarolan, Piero Popoleschi, the Signoria of March-April held several pratiche on the question of whether to enforce Alexander’s new order prohibiting Savonarola from preaching. On March 14, at least thirty-two citizens spoke, many at great length in the friar’s defense, even in the face of papal anger.586 In the end the Signoria obeyed the papal demand, and Savonarola withdrew to San Marco with his followers. In the increasingly heated atmosphere that demanded a resolution, faith took a turn toward the hopelessly irrational. A Franciscan critic challenged Savonarola to prove the authenticity of his prophecies by means of a trial by fire, and, quite likely to Savonarola’s surprise and dismay, his loyal but naive lieutenant Fra Domenico da Pescia accepted and offered to undergo the ordeal in his superior’s place. Even some of Savonarola’s normally savvy political allies welcomed the test: emotional fatigue after almost four years of constant controversy was taking its toll. Guicciardini commented that “many citizens on both sides liked it because they were eager to see these divisions extinguished and an end to all these ambiguities.”587 The trial was scheduled for April 7, and, with the apparatus in place in piazza Signoria, the principals assembled in front of a large crowd. Last-minute squabbling over the “rules” and a sudden storm, and perhaps reluctance to go through with it, cancelled the ordeal. But Savonarola’s enemies would not be denied. The next day, Palm Sunday, a furious crowd, with many compagnacci, attacked San Marco and then shifted their anger toward the nearby home of Francesco Valori, where he and his wife were both murdered. Valori was killed by a Ridolfi and a Tornabuoni to avenge the executions of their relatives the previous August. As the mob was readying to do the same to frateschi leaders Paolantonio Soderini and Giovanbattista Ridolfi, the Signoria sent soldiers to stop the mayhem. Savonarola and his two closest associates were arrested and escorted to the palace of the priors. More pratiche discussed whether and how to examine the three, but the outcome was now foreordained. Savonarola was examined by a committee of citizens and tortured to elicit a confession that he had lied and was a false prophet. Papal emissaries interrogated and then condemned him as a heretic and schismatic, and on May 23, in piazza Signoria, he and his associates, Domenico da Pescia and Silvestro Maruffi, were hanged, their bodies burned and their ashes thrown into the Arno.588 For another halfcentury Florentines debated the meaning of Savonarola’s life and the way they ended it.