It might seem as if Savonarola must now have chosen his side, but of this there is little sign. Cerretani relates that the heads of the opposition, fully conscious of his power over the people, tried to win him but completely failed. Savonarola himself has absolutely stated that he took no part in politics until after Piero’s fall. In his sermons there is a passage against princes, but it was a cap that would fit royal heads of all shapes and sizes, and was intended, if for any in particular, for those of the rulers of Naples and Milan.
In 14-92 and 1493 Savonarola was much away in Lombardy. It has been assumed that he was removed from Florence by Piero’s influence; but of this there is no evidence. Savonarola’s journeys were in full accordance with the usual practice of his Order. On his return Piero energetically aided his endeavour to separate the Tuscan Dominican convents of stricter observance from the Lombard Congregation to which they had previously been united. The effect of this separation would be to confine Savonarola’s activity to Tuscaiiy, and thus to give him permanent influence at Florence. Savonarola’s chief, if not his only desire, was to restore the convents, over which he already exercised a personal influence, to the poorer and simpler life of the Order as founded by St Dominic; it is a libel to suggest that he had ulterior political motives. The separation of San Marco, which had been definitely re-founded within the century as a member of the Lombard Congregation, was a strong measure which cast reflection on the discipline of the parent body. The governments of Milan and Venice resisted the separation, which Piero warmly advocated. Savonarola became for the moment a figure of diplomatic importance. Alexander VI declared himself against the separation; but the story goes that when the Consistory had separated, the Cardinal of Naples playfully drew the signet ring from the Pope’s finger and sealed the brief which he held in readiness. Piero’s action makes it impossible to believe that Savonarola had assumed the role of a leader of political opposition. The only existing letter from the Friar to Piero expresses warm gratitude for his aid. Nevertheless the perpetual prophecies of impending trouble did undoubtedly contribute to political unrest, and Nerli ascribes Piero’s fall in some measure to his placing no check upon the Friar’s extravagant utterances.
At the moment of the French invasion (September, 1494) Savonarola was no politician, but a hard-working Provincial, throwing his heart into the reform of his new Congregation. This was no easy task, for he was thwarted by the particularist traditions of the larger Tuscan towns, where the Dominican convents resented subordination to that of the hated rival or mistress, Florence; they would more willingly have obeyed a distant Lombard Provincial. At Siena, Savonarola’s failure was complete; the Convent of St Catharine’s at Pisa was only united after the expulsion of the majority of the Friars. The new Congregation contained only some 250 members, whereas at the recent chapter at San Miniato more than a thousand Franciscans had been gathered.
Meanwhile all Florence was entranced by the eloquence of the Ferrarese Friar. What was the secret of his fascination? It consisted partly in the contagious force of terror. Italy had long been conscious of her military weakness, of her want of national unity. For fifty years her statesmen had nervously played with or warded off invasion; but, as the century closed, her generals were provoking the catastrophe. Disaster was in the air, and this atmospheric condition at once created the peculiar quality of Savonarola’s eloquence, and the susceptibility of his audience. His confident forebodings gave definite expression to the terror which was in every heart, terror of storm and sack, of fierce foreign troopers who knew not the make-believe campaigns of Italy, of antiquated fortresses crumbling before the modern French artillery. The audacious attack upon the ecclesiastical hierarchy also fell upon willing ears. 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. His permanent success was due to the moral superiority of Florence over other Italian capitals. For him, she was the navel and the watch-tower of Italy, the sun from which reform should radiate, the chosen city, the new Jerusalem. Florence was a sober God-fearing State after a somewhat comfortable, material fashion. There was much simplicity of life, a simplicity observed by travellers down to the eighteenth century. Private letters and diaries, which frankly relate such scandals as occur, testify to this. Her art and literature at this period compare not unfavourably with those of modern days. Accusations, when pressed home, usually reduce themselves to the lewd carnival songs; but the fetes of the city were altogether exceptional as a gross survival of medieval or pagan license. Florentines, who were neither prudes nor prigs, looked with horror on the corruption of the papal Court. Lorenzo de’ Medici could warn his young Cardinal son against this sink of iniquity. The youthful Guicciardini spoke of the simony at Rome with all the disgust of a later Lutheran, and incidentally mentions the character of Cardinal Soderini as being “respectable for a priest.” His father would not stain his conscience by making any one of his five sons a priest, notwithstanding the rich benefices which awaited them. The Florentines had recently been shocked at their Milanese visitors, who ate meat in Lent. The rulers of Florence had been religious men. San Marco had long set the standard of religion, and the Medici were deeply interested in its future. Both Cosimo and Piero were men of piety, notwithstanding political finesse, and occasional moral lapses. Lorenzo’s mother was noted for her piety; her spiritual songs are among the city’s heirlooms. Lorenzo, whatever his backslidings, had the potentiality of a religious nature. Paganism unabashed found scant favour at Florence. Platonism became a serious religion, shaking off the slough of materialism, and searching for union with Christianity. The whole city had worshipped Sant’ Antonino; all upper-class Florence had lately been moved by the eloquence of Fra Mariano da Genazzano, an eloquence, indeed, of the polished, artificial type, enhanced by cadence and gesture, garnished with classical allusion and quotation. Yet this was the fashion of the day, and in matters intellectual Florence was at fashion’s height. The vices of Florence were those of a rich, commercial city, extravagance in clothes and furniture, in funerals and weddings. Young bourgeois might think the brothel and the tavern the ante-chambers of gentility. Men of all classes gambled and swore. Dowries were high, and it was becoming difficult to marry. Yet in Florentine society there was a healthy consciousness that all this was wrong, and a predisposition in favour of any preacher who would say so. Savonarola’s sympathetic nature, when once he had learned his method and his manner, touched this chord. The very novelty of his style was a merit with the Athens of the fifteenth century. The Florentines had forgotten the careful simplicity of San Bernardino of Siena, his fund of anecdote and his playful humour. Preaching was either too classical or too grotesque. Fra Mariano represented the former school, and there are hints that Savonarola’s other rival, Fra Domenico da Ponzo, the Franciscan, was an exponent of the latter. The new preacher struck a middle note, captivating Florence by his directness, his naturalness, his fire. He abandoned the artificial division of the sermon into parts, a survival of the Roman art of rhetoric; his sermons are, indeed, lacking in composition; mystical flights often soar far beyond the subject of discussion. There are contradictions in his method, which receive curious illustration from two facts of his early life. Letters exist from the learned Garzoni of Bologna, which rally the youth on his revolt from the rules of Priscian, while his first teacher at Florence lectured him on his excessive subtlety in argument, and forced him to the simplicity which at the outset he exaggerated to a childlike “yea” and “nay.” Such contradictions are explained by the preacher’s impressionable nature; and this, combined with his power of expression, produced a contagious effect upon his audience. A thorough Dominican in his intellectual dialectic training and in the exposition of definite doctrine in his tracts, his sermons have much of the Franciscan style. The spirit of prophecy linked him closely to the Fraticelli of Monte Amiata, the believers in Abbot Joachim, and through them to the half-religious, half-political extravagances of B-ienzi in