“But I digress,” he apologized, and plumbing the depths of his erudition, Pagolo plunged back into the details concerning the execution of the unfortunate Michele, never slackening his pace in the process and all the while tugging the pliant young friar along with him through the streets. Finally, he concluded, “Fra Michele, saint or heretic—whichever you like—was executed in 1389, and Florence has not seen fit to burn another heretic since then.” He hesitated, again searching his prodigious memory, then added, “Well . . . with the possible exception of Giovanni Cani—John Dogs.”
This latter reflection was enough to prompt a flood of new information from the talkative, rambunctious little priest. “Technically, of course, he was condemned for heresy, but his real crime was sorcery, sorcery being a code word for the concoction of poisons, as you know. The so-called sorcerers are the apothecaries of the dark side, Rinuccio. Only a sorcerer has the courage to collect the ingredients, and they can be very daunting ingredients, necessary for the brewing of certain very effective poisons—disgusting, toxic toads, bugs, snakes, and the unmentionable things they cull from graveyards, battlefields, and hospitals. John Dogs went to the stake for heresy, but his real crime, according to trial testimony, which I have read, was supplying ‘hair from a werewolf’ to a band of conspirators who tried to poison Cosimo de’ Medici. Can you believe it? How do you like that?”
A panting, sweating Fra Pagolo concluded his learned discourse on that note, as the two Franciscan friars hurried toward the center of town. “What do you think, Rinuccio, history today! We’re going to see a little history in the making. A remarkable event! A singular event! A momentous occasion! We’re going to see the first real heretic to be burned in Florence in over a century. Heresy! I swear you get an eclipse of the sun more often than you get condemned heretics in this city! Hurry, now, or we won’t get close enough to see anything.”
Dawn was breaking. And around Florence, many people were surprised that a bright May sun was edging up over the horizon. It had rained violently throughout the night. The thunder and lightning had been terrifying, and a sunny day had not seemed likely.
Many others, more fearful, were shocked that almighty God would permit the sun to shine on such a black and evil day. They said there had been signs, evil signs portending terrible calamity. In Via della Croce, only yesterday, a baby had been born with the feet of a goat. In the church of Santa Maria Novella, a statue of the Madonna had begun to weep. Several people had seen it. Real tears had streamed from her eyes down her stone face. A huge, black dog, almost the size of a horse and rabid had been seen prowling through the darkened streets and piazze late at night. What was going to happen? Would the authorities go through with their insane, unholy plans? Would they really try to burn this saintly man? Surely God would not permit it. Surely He would strike these blasphemers in His anger and rescue His beloved from the flames. Yes, some sudden act of God would save him from this abomination. And save our city too, for if we put him to death, the burden of guilt will be with us for all eternity. Marked like Cain, accursed among cities, plagues and famine would be sure to follow. Floods and great destruction.
A palpable fear had settled in the hearts of the citizens of Florence. Fear and trepidation. And many, thinking now about this strange monk who was to be put to death for heresy, remembered only the fire in his eyes when he spoke. A fire that had touched them, seared their souls, a fire of frightening intensity. They asked themselves how this man who was made of fire could ever be consumed in earthly flames. The folly! Light your fires! He will defy them! The fire will not touch him. You cannot harm him!
The authorities charged with the execution, too, were apprehensive. It was not so much the specter of divine intervention that frightened them, but the more down-to-earth possibility of a popular uprising. In order to guard against that eventuality, or to contain it if violence should break out, they had stationed legions of armed guards everywhere throughout the city.
In normal times, a carnival atmosphere reigned in the city on the day marked for an execution. All work was suspended, and by dawn, when the bells pealed and the gates of the city were thrown open, crowds of farmers and other curiosity-seekers from the countryside had already gathered outside. Pushing and shoving their way through the narrow streets, they competed for vantage points that would allow them the best possible view of what was going to take place. The better families had elegant logge erected around the piazza, from which they could observe the proceedings in comfort without being rubbed in any unwholesome way by the smelly, unpleasant mob.
Bakers, beer makers, and peddlers of rough wine set up their stands so that by ten o’clock most of the throng was happily reeling in the streets. The bells continued to peal all morning long to add background music to the excited confusion. Crowds gathered around street musicians who sang lewd songs and ballads, much to the onlookers’ delight. Jugglers and contortionists plied their trades, as did pickpockets, pimps, and thieves. Dancing dogs entertained groups of fat peasants and drunken, cursing tradesmen. Gypsies told fortunes with their tarot cards and read palms. Just before noon, when the noise and the excitement were reaching a fever pitch, the condemned was brought out of the Bargello and paraded through the streets in a small cart stuffed with straw and drawn by a donkey. Quite often the preparations for these processions were elaborate. As with the great outdoor religious pageants that mark the holy days, craftsmen, carpenters, and theatre people were engaged. Thirteen sets were built at various places around the city, and a comic reenactment of the stations of the cross was staged. Clowns and actors with heavily painted faces or exaggerated masks performed burlesques. The crowds would squeal when an obscene Veronica wiped not the face but the genitals of the condemned and upon examining her famous veil found there the imprint of a huge penis! As the procession wound its way from the Piazza del Podesta to the Piazza della Signoria, it was greeted with shouts of glee and derision. Boys hooted and rained stones down on the unfortunate victim of justice, and buckets of slop were dumped unceremoniously from windows and balconies, accompanied by insults and jeers.
But today was different. The prisoner would not be led disgracefully through the streets and exposed to the mockery of the populace. Instead he would be escorted under heavy guard down a narrow runway built well above street level and running from the Palazzo della Signoria directly to the middle of the square, where the gallows had been constructed. The authorities were taking no chances. And although there were more people that anyone can ever remember jammed into the Piazza della Signoria and spilling into the side streets, there was not a sound. Not a bell pealing or a dog barking. No shouts, no singing, no merchants hawking their wares. The beer and wine sellers were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps miraculously, there were no flies in the great central square that day, and it seemed that even the birds in the countryside had lost their voices. Although it was almost noon and the sun was bright, an unearthly silence hung in the air like the solemn quiet of a great cathedral in the dead of night—a silence so deep and so profound that, when the heavy doors to the Palazzo della Signoria swung reluctantly open on their rusted hinges, they let out a groan that could be heard across the city, as if even the doors were in terror of what was about to take place.
One person who was suffering perhaps less from holy dread than most of the others was Fra Pagolo Pulci. Still lecturing his young charge on the relatively liberal attitudes of the Florentine republic with regard to heretics, he stopped in midsentence when they rounded the corner of the Via Larga and stepped into the broad open space that was the Piazza della Signoria. It was just after dawn, and although the streets leading down here had been fairly empty, the piazza itself was already packed to capacity. Many of the condemned man’s followers had been there all night, despite the torrential rains, keeping a silent vigil and praying. All of this devotion and display of piety was too much for Fra Pagolo.
“By the blood of Christ, I don’t believe it, Rinuccio. What are they doing? This is a holid
ay! Where in God’s name are the vendors? The vendors are always here when we have an execution. I need a drink. And already I’m famished. I should never have given you any of that salami, my salami. That would have taught you a lesson. Now, by Christ, I’m not going to get anything to eat all day, maybe not until . . .”
But the cynical friar trailed off, and his booming voice became softer and softer, until he was speaking almost in a whisper. It was as if the hushed silence that hung in the air over the piazza were contagious, capable of penetrating for a moment even the heart of this profoundly disrespectful little man.
Presently, Pagolo recovered. “You know what the only good thing about these executions is? I mean now that the vendors and the entertainers aren’t here? It’s the suspension of that absolutely absurd law that bars prostitutes from coming into this venerable piazza. After all, this is where our serious and incorruptible public officials gather to discuss matters of grave importance. No prostitutes allowed! Not within one hundred feet, that’s what the law says. But on days when they choose to make an example of some poor sinner, then they let them in. Bring on the whores! Let them get a good look. Teach them a lesson. Put the fear of the Lord into them.”
“Do you think he’s guilty, Pagolo?” said Rinuccio.
“Guilty? Hell, yes! Guilty of being a goddamn public nuisance.”
“Seriously, Pagolo, what do you think?”
“Seriously, I think he’s guilty of being a nuisance, a pain in the ass, and a Dominican. Now tell me Rinuccio, whom do we Franciscans hate more than anybody in the world except for Turks, pagans, and Pisans? Why the Dominicans, of course. Arch-fiends, arch-enemies, and arch-rivals.”
“I know all that,” said Rinuccio, “But do you think he’s really a heretic?”
“It’s hard to say in this day and age what a heretic is, my boy. But this man claimed to have visions from God. Directly from God.”
“That’s just what I mean,” said the younger man. “They’re going to burn him alive because he claimed he had these visions from God. He predicted that a great flood would sweep through Florence. And it did! Then, he predicted that Lorenzo de’ Medici—Lorenzo the Magnificent—would die suddenly. And he did! And finally, he predicted that the king of France would sweep across the Alps into Italy at the head of a savage and invincible army. And, my God, he did! Everything the monk predicted happened just the way he said it would! How can that be heresy?”
Pagolo was about to respond, but it was at that precise moment that the massive wooden doors, ringed and studded with iron, swung open with a mighty groan. It was just as well, because for once, Fra Pagolo did not have an answer.
The use of torture enormously simplifies legal proceedings, and so, just three days after his arrest, Girolamo Savonarola was led out into the sunlight of the Piazza della Signoria, where he was to be hung in chains and burned.
The condemned man’s right arm hung useless at his side. With the skill of a perverse surgeon, Gaburra Zolferino, the ex-butcher, for two long days had methodically crushed every one of his bones from shoulder to fingertip. The dispassionate torturer had then resorted to hot iron and molten metal, applied with scientific precision. He went about scorching the already-destroyed limb so that, in the end, it looked more like a charred branch pulled from a fire than a man’s arm.
When the tortured man finally agreed to sign the confession they had extracted from him, he had to do it with his left hand, so the signature they obtained was awkward and unsure, like that of a child just learning to write.
For nine years, the preacher had held the city captive with his fiery eloquence. It was he who defied the antichrist Borgia Pope Alexander VI, and he who was idolized by the people. He had saved Florence from the brutal armies of France and had finally driven the corrupt Medici from the city and brought freedom back to the Florentine republic. Today they were going to repay him. But they were afraid.
Nowhere was the fear more apparent than on the faces of the guards closest to him. Despite their heavy armor and the iron and leather gauntlets they wore, they dared not touch him. Savonarola appeared in the darkened doorway of the Signoria, almost naked, with only a filthy cloth wrapped around his waist. He was scarcely able to walk, and yet no one dared help him. They were afraid.
Only Gaburra the torturer did not shrink from the condemned man. He had volunteered to carry out the death sentence two days ago, when the commune’s executioner, Giacopo Nero, fearing for his immortal soul, had suddenly disappeared. Gaburra had no illusions as to the destiny of his own soul. And so when he emerged, laden with the heavy chains that he would use to bind the prisoner, he was prepared to go about his business with his usual thoroughness and lack of emotion.
The chains were a new feature. Normally, the condemned was bound with a rope, but there was nothing normal about this execution. The scaffolding and the gallows had to be built by craftsmen brought in from Arezzo. Members of the Florentine carpenters’ guild had refused to do the work. The structure they had erected was enormous. The foot of the platform was well above the top of the tallest man’s head. Fixed in the middle of the platform was a thick pole twenty feet high. Extending to the top of this grim mast was a ladder, which the executioner would mount when everything else was in place. From this perch far above the crowd, he would be able to hoist Girolamo Savonarola to the very top of the pole, where he would be seen as far away as Fiesole. This is the way they planned it. They wanted everyone to see what happened to heretics.
Burning was the penalty usually prescribed for heresy, and burning at the stake was the almost-universal method of actually administering the punishment. But they had said the stake would not provide a sufficiently edifying spectacle. When the stake is used, the prisoner is lashed to a stout pole, and bundles of faggots are piled high around him. The prisoner is surrounded on all sides by piles of kindling by the time the fire is lit. Often the quantity of wood necessary to accomplish the task is so great that the body of the heretic or witch is completely hidden from view. Furthermore, inside the roaring inferno created by the wall of wood, the victim usually suffocates quickly, and indeed, almost mercifully. And by the time the wall of sticks and flames has burned through enough to get a glimpse of what lies within, the victim is long since dead, the body almost entirely consumed.
Savonarola’s enemies wanted to see him squirm and twitch in death. They intended to rob him of every shred of dignity. They wanted to show their power over life and death, and they wanted to do it in dramatic fashion. They wanted to demonstrate to these gullible people that their prophet was, after all, only a man, that he felt pain and fear as they did and that, like them, he was quite capable of dying an ignominious death.
The ingenious scaffolding now towering high above the piazza was designed to demonstrate these simple realities in such a way that no man would ever dare question them again. Instead of suffocating, hidden in a hollow tower of flames, Girolamo Savonarola, the enemy of Florence, was going to be lifted some twenty feet above the base of the gallows, swinging in chains, and slowly roasted to death.
Every eye in the crowded square was riveted now on the pale, helpless figure that stepped, half stumbled, out of the doorway of the Palazzo della Signoria. Even Fra Pagolo had forgotten all about his whores and his appetites and had fixed his attention on the condemned prophet. He had seen him preach many times, but he had never seen him like this before. Had they really defeated him? Broken his spirit? Where was the fire now? The strength? The surging power that drove this man?
Gaburra had set down the heavy chains at the end of the platform and motioned to the guards to bring the condemned man down along the runway. Guards were stationed under the runway at street level, to prevent anyone in the crowd from getting too close. Mothers crowded around, weeping, holding up their babies and imploring the prophet to bless them one last time. The guards had to keep pushing them back with the shafts of their long lances.
Fra Pagolo, who had managed to work his way fairly close to the
gallows, was puzzled by what he saw. At first, Savonarola had seemed only a broken, exhausted man. He had been squinting when they brought him out into the bright sunlight and had stumbled once or twice. After a minute, though, he had steadied himself, allowed his eyes to adjust to the light, and was proceeding down the long, narrow walkway to the place appointed for his death.
There was something in his eyes, but what was it? Not the extraordinary fire that would leap out when he preached. Not defiance, but not a look for resignation, either. Fear, it must be fear. “I’d be shitting myself with fear if I were him,” thought Pagolo. “But it’s not that, either. What you think he’d be doing is staring at those chains, at that pole, frozen with fright. Eyes glazed with terror. But he isn’t even paying any attention to those bloodcurdling things.
“He’s nervous. That’s what it is. Nerves. Anxiety. But not because he’s afraid to die. It’s something else. Wait, now he’s looking around. He’s looking for something! Searching the crowd. That’s it! He’s got his men in place. There’s going to be an escape. Oh, this is going to be a glorious day after all!”
Pagolo, too, began scanning the crowd for signs of the armed men who would suddenly reveal themselves, cut valiantly through the troops surrounding the gallows and ride off in triumph with their leader. But nothing happened.
Gaburra began to fasten the chains in place. First, one around the ankles; another around the knees. “If they’re going to make their move,” thought Pagolo, “they better do it soon.” The hangman looped a length of chain under Savonarola’s arms and made a kind of harness. Then, by wrapping a long chain around him several times, he bound his arms tightly against his body, behind his back. The clinking of the heavy chains was the only sound that could be heard.
“What the hell are they waiting for?” thought Pagolo. “To the rescue!” Still, nothing happened.
Machiavelli: The Novel Page 3