But in the middle of the fifteenth century occurred the fall of Constantinople, that Saragossa sea into which had been drawn the literary treasures of the preceding centuries. Constantinople had become a treasure-house in which were assembled the manuscripts that had been carried away by the citizens of Rome fleeing from the Huns. As the centuries came and went, merchants, bankers, rich men from far-off provinces had taken their jewels, carved furniture, ivories, paintings, bronzes, marbles, rugs, silks, laces, and housed their treasure in palaces, looking out upon the Bosphorus. So that in 1452, when the advancing Saracens approached the city, the scholars and rich men of Constantinople fled to their boats, and spreading canvas sailed into the western sun. Months passed before these fugitives dropped anchor at the mouth of the Po. One morning, an old man, wrapped in a cloak stained with the salt seawater, stepped from a little boat to the wharf of Florence. Being poor and also hungry he made his way to a bread-shop. Having no money, he drew from beneath his cloak a parchment. When the bread-shop was filled with listeners he began to read the story of Helen's beauty and Achilles' courage; the story of Ulysses' wanderings and Penelope's fidelity; the tale of blind Œdipus, and of his daughter's loving care. He recited the oration of Pericles after the plague in Athens, and told the story of the wanderings of Æneas. With ever-increasing excitement the men of Florence listened. At last, waking from the spell, they lifted the stranger upon their shoulders and carried him to the palace of a merchant prince, and bade him tell the story, and soon the merchant's house was crowded with young men preparing pages of vellum and sheets of leather, while writers copied the poems and the dramas of the old manuscript, and artists turned the vellum pages into illuminated missals. The spark became a flame. Learning became a glorious contagion. The fires spread from village to village, and city to city. The dawn of the modern world had come.
In the city of Florence, circumstances and climate were singularly favourable to the new movement. Florence was the city of flowers; it lay upon the banks of the Arno, set amidst orange groves, and its palaces, art galleries, and churches, when the vineyards were in full bloom, looked like a string of pearls lying in a cup of emeralds. All that Athens had been to the age of Pericles, Florence was to be to the era of Savonarola. Neither time nor events have availed to lessen the hold of Florence upon the great men of earth. Because of her rich associations with genius and beauty, the greatest souls of the earth have often turned feet toward Florence, as the birds of paradise leave the desert to seek out the oasis with its fountain and flowers. Florence was the city of Dante with his Divine Comedy, the city of Giotto, with his tower, of Gioberti, with the gates of wrought iron that are so beautiful that Michael Angelo said they were worthy to be the gates of Paradise. To Florence in after years went Robert Browning, to write The Ring and the Book, and Elizabeth Barrett, with the finest love sonnets in literature. To Florence centuries later went George Eliot, to write her Romola, and in Florence, Keats and Shelley dreamed their dreams of song and verse. To Florence came Cavour, the statesman, and Mazzini, the reformer, Garibaldi, the soldier, to build the new Italy. Many the scholar and patriot who has said with Robert Browning, "Italy is a word graven on my heart." And it was to Florence that there came in the year 1490 Savonarola, the greatest moral force the city ever knew.
Savonarola was a man of almost universal genius. He was an orator, and the fire of his eloquence still burns in the sermons he has left the world. He was a reformer, and descended upon the sins of his age like a flame of fire, shaking Italy like the stroke of an earthquake. He was a prophet, and he dreamed dreams of a new Italy and of a golden age in morals. He was a statesman and he was created a preacher, and he fulfilled the dreams of a divine Orpheus, who drew all things to him by the mystery and magic of his speech. He was a martyr, and wore, not the red hat of the cardinal, but the fire that belonged to the chariot of flame, in which his soul rode up to Heaven to meet his God. Like all men of the first order of genius he was great on many sides. It was his glory that he awakened the moral sense and brought the life of God into the soul of man. Savonarola was like the Matterhorn or the Breithorn that lift their peaks so high that they look out upon the Rhine of the north and the Po of the south, upon the vineyards of France and the valleys of Austria.
In the very year that Constantinople fell, and the scholars fled, carrying their manuscripts—as sparks fly from the hammer falling upon an anvil—Savonarola entered into being in the beautiful little city of Ferrara. His grandfather was a physician, a teacher of the youth of his town, and a member of the council. He had achieved some honour as a scholar, and won much gold and favour as a skillful surgeon. To his father's house came a few leading men of the villages round about to read the pages of Dante and to talk about the manuscripts that had thrown all Italy into a fever of excitement. The boy had a hungry mind, and rose early and sat up late to read the copies of the few books that his father had in the little library. His native town was the capital of the little state, and the Duke of Este was his father's friend. When the boy was six years of age, Pope Pius II passed through Ferrara on his way to a celebration in Venice, and in preparation for his coming a crimson canopy was stretched above the street, while in the public square a throne was erected, and when the Pope had taken his seat therein a procession of children passed by, strewing flowers at the feet of the Pope. Young men and women sang songs in his honour, and chanted hymns of his praise, midst clouds of golden incense filling all the air. On the outskirts of the crowd stood the miserable poor, the half-starved peasants, the ragged children, the miserable lepers. Their faces were gaunt, their eyes hollow, their bread, crusts, their garments, rags, and the spectacle of gluttony, drunkenness and luxury, in contrast with the vast multitude of starving poor, created such a revulsion in the mind of the boy that from that hour all should have known that it was only a question of time when this gifted youth would become an ascetic and a reformer.
The revulsion in the heart of Savonarola was inevitably deepened by the lust and cruelty laid to the door of the Church itself. That was a dark hour for the Papacy and Italy. Paul II was a Venetian merchant, greedy, ambitious, who, in middle age, saw that the Pope was incidentally an ecclesiastic, but essentially an emperor, a statesman and a banker. Everything he touched in business turned to gold. He had agents out in all the world buying diamonds, pearls, rubies and emeralds. He hired architects, sculptors and painters, and made the church an art gallery. "Once the church had wooden cups and plates for the communion, but golden priests. Now," wrote Savonarola, "the church has golden cups and plates, but wooden-headed priests." The Rome of that time was a Rome of art and vice, gold and blood, cathedrals and mud huts. The least shocking page in the papal history of the time describes Alexander VI, and his son Cæsare and his daughter Lucretia, standing in the open window of the papal palace, looking down into the courtyard, filled with unlucky criminals. These prisoners, sentenced to death, ran round and round the court, while Cæsare let fly his arrows, and the Pope and Lucretia applauded each lucky hit. The scene is one of many, and the knowledge of such scenes inevitably brought about rebellion in the soul of Savonarola.
At the beginning of his career, the young reformer attracted but little attention. He entered a monastery and became a monk, and his novitiate was chiefly marked by a fervour of humilities. He sought the most menial offices, and did penance for his sins by the severest austerities. He was soon worn to a shadow, but his gaunt features were beautified by an expression of singular force and benevolence. Luminous dark eyes sparkled and flamed beneath his thick brows and his large mouth was as capable of gentle sweetness as of power and set resolve. But the spectacle of the sensualism, drunkenness, cruelty, theft, ignorance and wretchedness of Florence, that had a handful of aristocrats at one extreme and thousands of paupers at the other, gradually filled his soul with burning indignation. He began to see visions and to make prophecies which afterward were mysteriously fulfilled. His first success as a preacher came when he was thirty-one and the following year at Brescia, in a sermon on the Apocalypse, he shook men's souls by his terrible picture of the wrath to come. A halo of light was reported to have been seen about his head, and when, six years later, he returned to Florence, to preach in the cathedral, his fame as an orator had gone before him and the cloister gardens were too small to contain the crowds that flocked to hear him.
The occasion of his first sermon in the cathedral was one long remembered in the city. The vast multitudes saw a gaunt figure whose thick hood covered