Edward Armstrong

“ The next four years saw first the arson and bloodshed which followed Piero's fall, then the irregular condemnation of five chief citizens; then, the storming of San Marco and the murder of Valori and his wife; and now the fever of political passion reached its climax in Savonarola's death. The republican experiment cost Florence very dear, alike in territory, blood and treasure.
The tragedy had become inevitable. It is never easy to screw up the moral standard of a people. ”

“ So fierce was faction that the people rejoiced at Capponi's death. Yet he was the hero of 1494, a passionate champion against French and Medici, the most, perhaps the only, capable soldier and statesman in the city. Nor was he an uncompromising opponent; he had cooperated with Savonarola in saving the Mediceans, and his attitude towards the Friar had not been consistently unfriendly. But marked character and high ambitions the Florentine love of equality could not brook; the ideal was a citizen who did everything that he was asked to do, and nothing very ill or very well. ”

“ By this simple expedient the constitution was more than once suspended. Savonarola saw that a single Signaria with an aristocratic or Medicean majority might, through such a plebiscite, overthrow in an hour the fabric of the new republic. On no political subject was his language more intemperate. There was now, he cried, no need of Parliaments: the sovereignty of the people was vested in the Council, which could make every law that the people could desire: Parliament was the robbery of the people's power. ”

“ Abuse of the clergy has always been popular, even when ill-deserved; but with much reason Italy was ashamed of her priesthood and her Pope. The moral standard of the clergy was absolutely, and not relatively, lower than that of the laity. In every town, therefore, Savonarola's invectives might find a hearing; but at Florence the seed fell upon ground peculiarly well-prepared. Florentine wickedness has often been painted in sombre colours to render her prophet's portrait more effective. Nothing can be more unjust, more contradictory of Savonarola's own utterances. ”

“ At all events in the most youthful of Savonarola's writings is expressed a loathing for the Court of Rome, a belief that throughout all Italy, and above all at Rome, virtue was spent and vice triumphant. The tribute which solitude exacts from those who court her is an abnormal consciousness of self. ”

“ Yet in Florence there was such a genuine and permanent element of what may almost be called puritanism that, had she stood by herself and enjoyed a period of profound peace Savonarola's system might have been partially successful. It would have needed, perhaps, no very professional knowledge to administer the State; the good man might have been not only the good citizen but the good ruler. The experiment was, however, tried at a crisis of peculiar complexity, when the elements of violence abroad and at home were unusually strong-when ethics and politics had least chance of fusion. ”

“ When a combination of aristocrats, who wished to discredit the Council, and of extreme men, who would carry democratic principles to their logical conclusions, strove to eliminate nomination, and to substitute a bare for an absolute majority, Savonarola preached against this enfeeblement of administrative efficiency.
Savonarola taught his congregation that every vote entailed a solemn responsibility; he amplified San Bernardino's warning that a single bean wrongly given might prove the ruin of the State. ”

“ The savage penalties proposed for gambling affected a large proportion of the citizens; the very suggestion that slaves, who turned informers, should be liberated by the State, disturbed the peace of many a fairly decent household. All satirists and reformers believe that their own is an age of decadence, that luxury and vice are the mushroom growth of their own short day. Had Savonarola read his Dante, he would have found his own invectives applied to the golden age of Florence. The effective scene-painting of sin had been the task of generations of mission-friars. ”

“ He now intrigued for the fall of the Twenty; and it was no difficult task to make the provisional government impossible. Soderini had just returned from an embassy to Venice; it was natural that he should sing the praises of her constitution. The cry caught up in the street was echoed from the pulpit. Soderini, it is said, first persuaded Savonarola to advocate a popular government on the Venetian model. It need not be assumed that Soderini was a hypocrite. He was virtuous and serious; but virtue and sobriety cast fantastic shadows which assume the forms of ambition and intrigue. ”

“ The weakness of the Medicean system stood confessed. An accepted monarchy may survive a weak and wicked ruler, but the Medici had no constitutional position, and were unprovided with props to a tottering throne, or with barriers to keep the crowd away. Their power rested only upon personal influence, upon the interests of a syndicate of families, on the material welfare of the middle classes, and the amusement of the lower. Even without the catastrophe of the French invasion Piero's government must have come crashing down. ”

“ The Pope and the Duke of Milan doubtless hastened the catastrophe, and Savonarola was in a measure the victim of his party's foreign policy. Causes, however, should not be multiplied without reason, and within Florence there was cause sufficient for the tragedy. If she were a good subject for ethical reform, it was otherwise with politics. It is easier to change the constitution than the character of a people. The Florentines, said Guicciardini, possessed two characteristics in apparent contradiction, the love of equality and the desire of each family to lead. ”

“ His enemies accused Savonarola of leading the poor to idle. The general sense of excitement and unrest was no doubt intensified by prophecy. Nevertheless he consistently preached the gospel of labour for rich and poor. He had made every member of his own convent toil for its support; from the pulpit he implored artisans to return to work, and the employers to find them labour; to give work, he repeated, was the best form of charity; no one need fear starvation who lived a godly and industrious life. The rich, he preached, should labour even as the poor ”

“ In the Council and in the magistracies, Savonarola, as was afterwards proved, must have numbered hundreds of secret adherents. Yet one citizen only, Agnolo Niccolini, dared to suggest that death should be commuted for perpetual imprisonment, so that posterity might not lose the fruits of the invaluable works which Savonarola might write in prison. The Florentine constitution was still a sham; there was still no correspondence between real and nominal power; the mandatories of the people were swayed by a ferocious faction, as they had been swayed by a cool-headed dynasty. ”

“ The wealth of Florence, the source of luxurious expenditure, was commerce; the landed classes might live in easy circumstances, but not in state; yet commerce was now exempt. The arbitrary taxation of individuals was remedied by shifting it to the shoulders of a class. The new tax fell hardly on the nobles who were unrepresented in the State; it was therefore popular with the ruling middle-classes, who were jealous of their social influence. The French were still in Italy, while Pisa was in full revolt, and Florentine territory exposed to depredation. ”

“ Many of the poor were of course dependent on the great houses, most of which were opposed to Savonarola. The East end of Florence, the poorest quarter, had long been a Medicean stronghold; sooner or later it must feel the loss of Medicean charities. The great square of Santa Croce, the playground of the poor, missed the fetes which had drawn thither the beauty and fashion of Florentine society. Life had now left it for the religious centres of the Cathedral and San Marco. ”

“ Saints are not necessarily unpopular. The cause may, perhaps, be sought in Savonarola's self-assertion, in his perpetual use of the first person, in the reiteration of all that he had done for Florence, of all the prophecies that had been fulfilled or were to be fulfilled, at the expense of those who would not listen. Whoever will force himself to read one of his more emphatic sermons from an opponent's point of view may find the key to the final verdict of the city. The child had grown into the man. ”

“ The King of the Romans had been induced by Milan and Venice to enter Italy in favour of the League. He came, however, as little more than Ludovico Moro's condottiere; he had few troops and less money; "he had sailed," as the saying went, "with a short supply of biscuit in his galley." His wider schemes shrank to the relief of Pisa. In welcoming a King of the Romans the Pisans felt a glow of their old Ghibelline enthusiasm. They had thrown the Florentine lion from their bridge into the Arno, and a statue of Charles VIII was reigning in its place ”

“ Ludovico il Moro gibed at the diplomatic methods of the new republic. But all this was not enough; the oligarchs must satisfy not only the populace but each other, which was indeed impossible. One of the cleverest, the most experienced, the most ambitious aristocrats, Paol' Antonio Soderini, had been excluded from the Twenty, probably by the influence of his rival Piero Capponi. On the death of Lorenzo del Medici he had tentatively resisted the advance of the monarchy, but when young Piero showed his teeth he shrank from the encounter. ”

“ Then the gambling-hells, the taverns, the brothels drove a roaring trade; and Savonarola's death was followed by scenes of profanity such as Florence had never before witnessed. It was a necessary result of the fusion of ethics and politics that the reformer regarded opposition to his political views as involving sin. Thus the dividing line in politics produced cleavage in morals and religion, and vice versa. Serious political opponents became confused with men of pleasure, and, indeed, scents and silks and sin were too apt to be the outward signs of the party loyalty of the Arrabbiati. ”

“ To Savonarola's modern biographers no language has seemed too hard for Fra Malatesta who headed the apostasy, and who had witnessed Savonarola's signature of the depositions. But he too had borne a spotless character; he was a man of high birth, a Canon of the Cathedral, who from genuine devotion had joined San Marco, abandoning a fine income and the certainty of advancement. Men of this type may in a moment of physical and spiritual disturbance be weak, but they seldom then begin to be deliberately wicked. ”

“ He preached against Cosimo de' Medici's maxim that a State could not be governed by paternosters: the more spiritual a polity, the stronger it was: where there was grace, there were unity, obedience, sobriety, and therefore strength: riches followed grace and enabled the citizens to help each other and the Commune in times of need: in a State that kept its word, the soldiers were braver and more regularly paid: enemies feared the city that was at unity with itself, and friends more readily sought its alliance. ”

“ Nevertheless the mob was still idle and therefore dangerous; shops and factories were closed; the artisans restlessly roamed the streets; the French officers were chalking the doors for quarters; unmarried girls were being hurried off to distant convents or country cousins. Prophecy seemed nearing its fulfilment. Why should men work, when either the Millennium or the Cataclysm was upon them!
Savonarola was not in Florence when Piero was expelled. He was chosen on November 5 as one of the envoys who were sent to the French King at Pisa. ”

“ His zeal for righteousness, his horror of sin, his sympathy for the poor, his love of children appeal to the earnest and loving of all ages. There is little question that for most foreigners, certainly for those of the English-speaking race, the very thought of Florence centres in Dante, the exile of Ravenna, and in Savonarola, the alien of Ferrara. ”

“ The aristocrats intended to replace the rule of a single house by an oligarchy of a group of houses. But the people were excited; they sacked the Medici palace, ably assisted by French officers already in the town, on the improbable pretext that the Medici bank owed them money. The mob then burnt and plundered the houses of Piero's financial agents, but were drawn away to the piazza, where all ranks were shouting People and Liberty. Lungs pay no bills, and thus coinage and taxation are apt to be the first victims of revolution. The aristocrats felt obliged to make popular concessions. ”