Death in Florence: the Medici, Savonarola and the Battle for the Soul of the Renaissance City

by Paul Strathern

the partisans, intoxicated by the fumes of blood, fought a veritable war of extermination. The wives and daughters of the leaders of the opposing factions were dragged from their homes to be publicly dishonoured by the lowest plebs. People were pitched from the roofs of their houses where they had fled for refuge to be hacked to pieces in the streets below. Dwellings were set on fire and the inhabitants, prevented from coming out by their beleaguerers, perished in the smoke and flames.13

  The mob supporting Ercole eventually prevailed; yet according to one source, the aftermath was almost as bad: ‘Caleffini reports that the bodies of two hundred of the leading citizens, after being stripped and mutilated, were nailed to the eaves of the ducal palace.’14 The young and impressionable Savonarola could hardly have avoided this grotesque sight, which was less than half a mile down the road from his house and the nearby university.

  Soon after this, Savonarola obtained his Master of Arts degree and began to study medicine. The intimate involvement with the flesh required of such studies must soon have begun to repel him, awakening in him an intense spiritual yearning. He was disgusted by all he saw around him, and abhorred the sordid world in which he found himself. As he would write in a poem entitled ‘On the Ruin of the World’:

  Now those who live from theft are all content,15

  And those who feed the most on others’ blood …

  He goes on to rail against those who mock Our Lord in Heaven, and how Rome is so filled with vice that it can never return to the days of its great past, and how ‘usury is now called philosophy’.

  Amidst all his castigating it is possible to detect a growing sense of the injustice of it all. The rich clambered over the poor in an attempt to gain more riches; instead of compassion and theology, men concentrated their minds on making money. Instead of discovering God, they discovered how to make a fortune by means of usury. It is difficult to avoid seeing his father’s role in all this: prompted by avarice, Niccolò had lost the family fortune by resorting to usury. And because of this, Savonarola had been forced to go against all his inclinations and study medicine – until early in 1474 things finally came to a crisis. To celebrate the May holiday, Savonarola walked the forty miles to Faenza. Away from his Bible and his medical books, crossing the humid terrain of the Po delta, pacing along the road between the flat green fields, he was alone with his nagging thoughts. Having reached Faenza, he explored the streets amidst the throng of the May Day crowds. But the sight of such blatant godless enjoyment amidst the market stalls, street hawkers and puppet booths drove him to seek sanctuary in the Church of Santo Agostino, where a friar was delivering the day’s sermon, his distant voice echoing through the dim stillness. His text was taken from Genesis, where God speaks to Abraham, telling him: ‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house …’16 As Savonarola would later recount in his own sermons, he at once recognised that this was the voice of God speaking directly to him. From that day on he knew that he would have to leave his home, abandon his family and forsake everything to follow God. He returned to Ferrara firm in the conviction that he would renounce the world and become a priest.

  Yet it would be almost a year before Savonarola could bring himself to act upon this resolution. He had no wish to provoke a hysterical scene, in which he would have been confronted by the tears and entreaties of the various members of his family, for ‘truly this would have broken my heart, and I should have renounced my purpose’.17 Instead, he waited until 24 April the following year, choosing to slip away from his home whilst the family were in the midst of the St George’s Day celebrations. Hastily he set off to walk the thirty miles to Bologna, where he made his way to the Dominican monastery, rapped on the door and asked to be taken in as a novitiate monk. The following day the twenty-three-year-old wrote a long letter addressed ‘To the noble and illustrious man Niccolò Savonarola, a most excellent parent’. In this he attempted to comfort his family, who were ‘doubtless suffering greatly because of my departure, and especially because I departed secretly from you’. He went on:

  I thus beg you, my dear father, to put an end to your weeping and spare me any further sadness and pain than I suffer already. However, you must understand that I do not suffer because of regret at what I have done, for I would not undo this even if such a choice would make me greater than Caesar himself, but instead my suffering is because I too am flesh and blood, just like you, and our senses quarrel with our reason. I must constantly battle to prevent the Devil from leaping onto my shoulders, and all the more so when I feel for you.

  And why had he chosen such a life? After cataloguing ‘the great wretchedness of the world, the evil of men, rapes, adulteries’ and so on, he sums up his reason for taking holy orders: ‘I did this because of the blind wickedness of the people of Italy.’

  Either Savonarola had fled from this ‘blind wickedness’, or his intention was to do something about it. Despite fleeing from his family, the former course of action ran contrary to his nature. Thus from the very outset it would seem that his aim was more than merely the saving of his own soul. Indeed, in a second letter, addressed to his family (the first had been very badly received by his father), he ends by haughtily informing them that they should ‘rejoice that God made me a doctor of souls, rather than a doctor of bodies’.18 He would cure the spiritual ills of the world rather than its physical ailments.

  Other evidence tends to contradict this somewhat exalted view of himself. When he first entered the monastery he is said to have done so not with the intention of becoming a priest, but instead to serve out a penance for his sins. He wished to be assigned only the humblest tasks: to become the monastery drudge, sewing the brothers’ clothes, digging the garden, working in humility and peace. As he put it, he had no intention of ‘exchanging the Aristotelianism of the world for that of the monastery’. Yet it is not necessary to choose between such contradictory evidence. Far from it. Such contradictions hint at the deep conflicts that remained unresolved in his complex and driven character. Only intense pride craves such extreme humiliation; only an intellectual dreams of losing himself in mindless drudgery. Such a drudge would have been regarded as an almost subhuman serf; worse still, sewing was considered women’s work. A monk, for all his chastity, remained nonetheless a man in the Italy of this period, and was proud to be regarded as such. In his letter to his father, Savonarola specifically contrasted ‘a strong man who spurns transitory things to follow truth’19 with the ‘passion of a simple woman’. In view of his constant strictures against women, it is worth bearing in mind that Savonarola’s view of the female sex was for the most part informed by the passionate and angry misogyny of the Old Testament prophets, as well as the prejudices of his time and his country – along with his experiences of Laodamia and of his mother Elena, of whom little is known during this period beyond one salient, undermining fact. On the night before he fled the family home, his mother heard him strumming on his lute, whose melancholy tones caused her to pause from what she was doing. In a flash of intuition she realised what was going to happen and said to him: ‘My son, what you are playing today is a sign that you are parting from us.’20 It had been a ‘simple woman’ who had seen through him.

  In fact, we know little of Savonarola’s early life in the monastery; as his biographer Roberto Ridolfi put it, ‘the silence which enveloped him through these seven long years seems symbolic of the silence in which as a young man he entered the cloister, intent upon building, in humility and contemplation, his new life’.21 The Dominican order had been founded in 1216 by St Dominic, a scholarly Spanish monk who gave up his possessions to aid the poor. He established the Dominicans as a preaching order of mendicant friars, who took a vow of poverty and depended upon charity for their livelihood. Much like its founder, the order tended to attract men of high intellectual calibre who sought to preach and alleviate the sufferings of the poor. It also produced many lecturers in the universities, and was later put in charge of the Inquisition (which accounts for
why the inquisitors were known as ‘Hounds of God’: in Latin domini canes). However, more generally they were known as the ‘Black Friars’, on account of the distinctive hooded black cloaks, which they wore over their white woollen habits.

  Savonarola would later look back on his novitiate year in the Dominican monastery at Bologna as the happiest in his life, ‘where I found liberty, and did all that I wanted, because I wanted nothing else, desired nothing else, than to do all that I was told or commanded to do’.22 He welcomed the self-denial that was required of the monks, and rejoiced in the further abstinence he was able to impose upon himself. From the outset, Savonarola was excused the usual lessons in Latin because he had already learned this at university. Instead, he spent much of his time studying the great medieval philosopher St Thomas Aquinas, whose interpretations of Aristotelian thought had by now become his favourite reading. Savonarola probably took his vows in May 1476, and thereupon immersed himself in the monastic life. His zeal for abstinence and self-denial soon became apparent to all. So too did his enthusiasm for the customary course of theological studies at the celebrated Dominican Studium generale in Bologna. This was one of the most distinguished theological colleges in Italy, with many eminent scholars amongst its teaching staff. Savonarola soon began to shine amongst his fellow pupils. Indeed, such was his exemplary aptitude for both the ascetic and the theological aspects of monastic life that within a few years he was considered ready for a teaching post. In 1479, just four years after leaving home, the twenty-seven-year-old Savonarola returned to Ferrara, where he took up a post as teaching master for the novices at the local Dominican monastery. By now his father had been forced to sell their home to the next-door Strozzi, and the young priest is said to have seen little of his family during this time.

  Meanwhile, Italy had entered yet another volatile political period. Three years previously, in 1476, Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan had been assassinated in church. In the same year, Niccolò d’Este led an armed invasion of Ferrara in another attempt to wrest the dukedom from his uncle, but this was defeated and Niccolò was beheaded (before his head was sewn on again and he was buried in the family vault). Just two years later, news of the Pazzi family’s attempted assassination of Lorenzo de’ Medici, backed by Sixtus IV and King Ferrante of Naples, rocked Italy. The fact that his would-be assassin was a priest, and the murder was backed by the pope himself, merely gave public confirmation to what so many had privately known: the Church hierarchy, especially in its upper echelons, had become all but irredeemably corrupt. In his poem ‘On the Ruin of the World’ Savonarola had written despairingly:

  The sceptre has fallen into the hands of a pirate;23

  Saint Peter is overthrown;

  Here lust and greed are everywhere …fn4

  Even so, Savonarola remained unwavering in his faith – as, for the most part, did the pope’s flock throughout Christendom. The new Duke Ercole of Ferrara was particularly renowned for his church-going, unfailingly attending Mass and Vespers every day. He also lavished considerable sums on the building of churches and religious institutions in Ferrara, making the Renaissance a golden age for the city. The great historian Jacob Burckhardt was in no doubt as to Ferrara’s eminence:

  If the rapid increase of the population be a measure of prosperity actually attained, it is certainly a fact of importance that in the year 1497, notwithstanding the wonderful extension of the capital, no houses were to be let. Ferrara is the first really modern city in Europe; large and well-built quarters sprang up at the bidding of the ruler: here, by the concentration of the official classes and the active promotion of trade, was formed for the first time a true capital.24

  The population of Ferrara rose to around 25,000 during this period; by comparison the population of London was around 50,000, and that of Florence probably around 90,000. Even so, the architecture of Ferrara certainly rivalled that of its Tuscan counterpart – when Savonarola first arrived in Florence he would be no overawed provincial, despite being regarded as such by many Florentines.fn5

  But in 1482 Ferrara was once again directly disturbed by the volatility of the Italian political scene. In the aftermath of the failed Pazzi conspiracy, and Lorenzo’s courageous dash to Naples, which had secured a peace treaty with King Ferrante, Sixtus IV had been forced to join this treaty. This new alliance, and Christianity as a whole, now faced peril. The threat came from the distant East. Since taking Constantinople in 1453, Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror had gradually expanded the Ottoman Empire across Greece and the Balkans, eventually reaching the Adriatic shore opposite Italy. In August 1480, Ottoman forces had landed in the heel of Italy, taking the port of Otranto. 12,000 of the inhabitants were slaughtered, a similar number shipped into slavery; 800 remaining inhabitants were then beheaded for refusing to convert to Islam, their skulls piled into a pyramid. Christendom itself had stood in danger, and Sixtus IV had rallied Italy for the defence of the faith. Then in May 1481 Mehmet the Conqueror had died, most of the Ottoman forces had been withdrawn and Otranto was retaken.

  With the passing of the Ottoman threat, Sixtus IV thought better of launching another attack on Florence, which would only have brought Ferrante I of Naples into the field against him. Instead, he decided to move against Ferrara, which had long been claimed as a papal possession. Venice had supported Ercole d’Este in his claim to the dukedom, and Ferrara continued to rely for its protection on its powerful northern neighbour. But Sixtus IV now secretly induced Venice to switch to an alliegance with the papacy, promising the Venetians the valuable Ferrarese salt-pans of the Po delta if they aided his ‘nephew’ Girolamo Riario in taking Ferrara. Sixtus IV intended that Ferrara should be added to the papal territory already ruled by Riario. Consequently, in the spring of 1482 Ferrara found itself under threat, with Venetian forces poised to cross the Po and mount an invasion.

  At the time, Savonarola was not in fact present in Ferrara. He had been selected as representative for Ferrara at the Chapter General of the Dominicans of Lombardy – an indication of his growing regard within the order. The Chapter General was the annual congress that debated the theological policy of the order, and was being held at Reggio, sixty miles west of Ferrara, attracting clerical and lay delegates from far and wide, as well as a number of leading philosophical and literary figures. Here Savonarola listened to the debates conducted by distinguished Dominican theologians. As part of these debates, Savonarola himself delivered a passionate attack on the corruption of the Church, which was heard by the precocious nineteen-year-old philosopher Pico della Mirandola, who was so impressed by Savonarola’s evident intellectual powers and deep theological learning that he sought him out afterwards. The two established a rapport that was as immediate as it was unlikely.

  Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, to give him his full title, was a prodigy of impeccable aristocratic descent, with links to the d’Este family, the Sforzas of Milan and the distinguished House of Gonzaga, which ruled nearby Mantua. Pico had spent his early years in the tiny independent city state of Mirandola, which was ruled by his family and was under the protection of Ferrara, whose capital city lay just thirty miles to the east. Pico’s appearance was very much the polar opposite of the raw-featured Savonarola in his plain monk’s robes. Indeed, Pico was something of a peacock, who dressed in fashionable Renaissance-style attire, his long auburn locks flowing over his shoulders, his delicate face exhibiting an almost feminine sensitivity and beauty. His astonishing learning had by now begun to attract widespread attention: he had already mastered Latin and Ancient Greek, and had launched into studies of Hebrew and Arabic. Later he would be one of the few men in Europe who could understand Aramaic and Babylonian texts in Chaldean script. Yet Pico’s intellectual achievements were more than just an exhibition of dazzling brilliance. His studies were driven by a deep theological-philosophical impulse – a pressing need to understand the religions from which Christianity had sprung, combined with a dedicated quest for the common philosophical ideas that enlightened th
ese religions. Indeed, what drew Savonarola and Pico della Mirandola together more than anything was probably their shared deep understanding of the ancient Judaic texts that formed the Old Testament, and thus informed the Christianity of the New Testament. Savonarola may even have seen Pico some three years previously, when the then sixteen-year-old philosopher had taken part in a public theological debate in Ferrara, which had attracted much attention at the time. Pico had also attended lectures given at the University of Ferrara by Battista Guarino, where he too had found Guarino’s humanist ideas unsatisfactory. However, Pico’s reservations had not been through any dislike for humanism – far from it – but more on account of the narrowness of the classical ideas upon which Guarino’s humanism was based. For Pico, these took no account of the earlier and wider sources that had initially informed classical learning.

  Although Pico and Savonarola cannot have realised it at the time, their meeting in 1482 at the Chapter General of the Dominicans of Lombardy in Reggio was to have far-reaching effects for both of them. Despite the fact that this encounter between the nineteen-year-old aristocrat-scholar and the twenty-nine-year-old friar can only have been fleeting, there is no denying that it produced a meeting of minds. Their interpretation of the Christian faith, to say nothing of their individual philosophical outlooks, may have been widely disparate, but they certainly respected one another. Perhaps for the first time, each found himself encountering a man of his own generation who was his intellectual equal.

  There was, however, to be a more immediate consequence of Savonarola’s attendance at the Chapter General in Reggio. And this too would prove momentous. As many had feared, in May Venetian troops eventually invaded Ferrarese territory, and it appeared too dangerous for Savonarola to make his way back to the Dominican monastery in his home town. In consequence, he was posted as a lecturer on biblical exegesis at the monastery of San Marco in Florence. In May 1482 Savonarola set out to walk the ninety miles south across the pass over the Apennine mountains to the city ruled by Lorenzo the Magnificent. Clad in his hooded black cloak, his bare feet shod in sandals, he carried with him his sole worldly possessions: a well-worn breviary, its margins filled with his many annotations beside the hymns and prayers for the daily services, and the Bible that he had inherited from his grandfather Michele.