In the conventual life of the fifteenth century absolute segregation was fortunately impossible. Savonarola’s latent sympathies were awakened by contact with his fellows. He had the gift of teaching younger men; he was a good master. Occasionally in his later sermons he would inveigh against the futility of human knowledge; he would cry that a little old woman who held the faith knew more than did Aristotle and Plato. Nevertheless he was convinced of the merits of education, of the power of human reasoning. Reason justified his flying from his home; reason supported his attack upon astrology; his own prophecies found their proof in reason. His farewell letter to his father had concluded with the plea that his little brother might be taught, in order not to waste his time. Hereafter he was to urge the Florentines to have their children taught the art of grammar, and that by good masters. The old-fashioned Scholastic dialectics in which the Dominicans were trained were to Savonarola a real vehicle of thought; to the last he was always thinking, putting everything to the test of his own judgment; page upon page of his sermons form one long argument. Savonarola was in fact eminently argumentative. If the coarse and tightly compressed lips betokened obstinacy and self-assertion, sympathy shone in the expressive eyes. Savonarola held his audience with his eyes as well as with his voice. The small plain-featured Lombard with the awkward gestures and the ill-trained voice was early loved in Florence by those who knew him. Impatient of indifference or opposition, his sympathy readily went out to those who welcomed him, expanding into a yearning love for Florence, his adopted city, and her people. Sympathy and self-assertion are perhaps the two keys to his character and his career.
Until Savonarola steps into the full light of history the tales told by his early biographers must be received with caution. The temptation to exaggerate and ante-date is with hagiologists and martyrologists of all ages irresistible. The atmosphere of asceticism favours imagination, and the houses of the great Religious Orders were natural forcing-beds for legends relating to their members. Such legends, serving to edification, will be welcome to all but dry historians who are more perplexed by the unconscious exaggerations of devotees than by the deliberate falsehoods of opponents. Savonarola’s party in 1497 destroyed the heads of the Medicean group; after the Medicean restoration of 1512 his name was indelibly stamped on the popular cause which had been overthrown; above all, his name became a watchword during the passionate struggle of the Second Republic. What then was more natural than to represent him as, from the moment of his settlement in Florence, promoting opposition to the Medici? The stories of his attitude of independence or incivility towards Lorenzo may or may not be true. The sermon which he preached before the Slgnoria on April 6, 1491, has been regarded as an attack upon the Medici. It is rather an academic lecture upon civic justice, which might have been appropriately preached before any European magistracy. Had the Friar been the recognised opponent of the ruling house, he would not have been invited to address the Signor’ia, the creatures of the Medici. Lorenzo, at the request, as it is said, ‘of Pico della Mirandola, had summoned him back to Florence; without Lorenzo’s favour he would scarcely have been elected Prior. Lorenzo was all-powerful both at Rome and Milan; a word from him would have relegated the preacher against tyranny to a distant Lombard convent.
For Savonarola’s independence at this period there are two scraps of personal evidence. On March 10, 1491, he wrote to his friend Fra Domenico that magnates of the city threatened him with the fate of San Bernardino of Feltre, who had been expelled. He added, however, that Pico della Mirandola was a constant attendant at his sermons and had subsidised the convent; now Pico was one of Lorenzo’s most intimate friends. In his last sermon on March 18, 1498, Savonarola stated that Lorenzo sent five leading citizens to dissuade him, as of their own accord, from his prophetic utterances; he replied that he knew from whom they came: let them warn Lorenzo to repent of his sins, for God would punish him and his: he, the alien Friar, would stay, while Lorenzo, the citizen and first of citizens, would have to go. For this tale there are several good authorities, though the sermon may be their common source: Guicciardini, the best of them, omits the Friar’s reply. It is certain that Lorenzo took no further measures; the chronicler Cerretani expressly affirms that, while Lorenzo lived, Savonarola was entirely quiet.
It is well known that Lorenzo summoned the Dominican to his deathbed at Careggi. This has been represented by modern writers as though it had been a strange and sudden thought, the result of an agony of repentance. But no act could have been more natural. Savonarola was now without question the greatest preacher in the city; he was Prior of Lorenzo’s own convent, in the garden of which he often walked; the rival divine Fra Mariano da Genazzano was not in Florence. Lorenzo with all his faults was no lost soul; he had a singularly sympathetic nature; he was keenly alive to religious as to all other influences. Whom should he better call from Florence to Careggi than the Friar whom he had brought back from Lombardy? The details of the deathbed scene as related by the Dominican biographers are difficult to accept; they rest on third-hand authority, contain inherent improbabilities, and are contradicted by contemporary evidence both direct and indirect. Neither in Savonarola’s writings, nor in the letters of Lorenzo, Politian, or Ficino, nor in the despatches of ambassadors, is there any statement as to the Dominican’s alleged hostility to the powers that be. Among his devotees were numbered Lorenzo’s two chief confidants, Pico and Pandolfini, his friend and teacher, Marsilio Ficino, the favourite painter Botticelli, and the youthful Michel Angelo, who had lived in the Medici palace almost as a son. Giovanni da Prato Vecchio, the financial adviser who did much to make the Medicean administration unpopular with the masses, was Savonarola’s personal friend.
Later writers, living under the terrorism of a restoration, neglected distinctions between the stages of Medicean rule; but contemporaries drew a strong line between the veiled and amiable despotism of Lorenzo and the overt tyranny of his son. The young Piero, they said, was no Medici, no Florentine. Born as he was of an Orsini mother, and wedded to an Orsini wife, his manners were Orsini manners, his bearing was that of an insolent Campagna lordling. With some of the purely intellectual gifts of his father’s house, he inherited none of its capacity for rule, none of the sympathy which attracted the men of culture and the men of toil, none of the political courage which could avert or brave a crisis. Savonarola’s future foe was a brutal athlete who had angered his father by his youthful brawls,—who, in Guicciardini’s phrase, had found himself at the death of a man or two by night. He and his disreputable train would all day long play ball in the streets of Florence, neglecting.the business of the State, disturbing the business of the city. 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.
From the outset of Medicean rule there had been a seesaw between monarchy and oligarchy. The ring of governmental families had admitted, not without some rubs, the superiority of Lorenzo; they showered upon Piero his father’s honours, but were not prepared