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. If the new constitution could satisfy the former, it could not assuage the latter. The influence of family rivalry was the vital distinction in the working of the Venetian and Florentine republics. At Venice family jealousies rarely influenced the State; at Florence they overmastered and corrupted public life. In vain Savonarola, like San Bernardino before him, inveighed against the party nicknames which would surely bring back the horrors of the strife of Guelf and Ghibelline. He became himself the very subject of these factions; he could not shake himself free from a Valori or a Soderini; his opponents regarded him as the dangerous tool of the most ambitious of their rivals. To gain admirable ends he was forced to work through agents who were compromised. Disavowing democratic principles, it was only a question of time to which branch of the aristocracy he would attach himself; his religious achievements might have been greater under the unquestioned rule of the Medici. This impossibility of detachment from family strife is the tragedy of Savonarola; he fell because he was believed to be Valori’s tool. The Florentines perhaps exaggerated the closeness of his intimacy with the party chiefs. In his sermons on Amos and on Ruth he implored his congregation to leave himself and his friars alone, and not to pester them with legislative proposals, with this or that man’s candidature,—questions for magistrates and citizens, and not for friars. He repeated that he was no politician, that he had no finger in their government, nor in their foreign relations. Yet in these very sermons he stated that he was accused of constant interference; and the visits of the party leaders to San Marco seemed to support the accusation. His enemies not unnaturally thought that the midnight meetings of Medicean days on the eve of elections had been but transferred from the palace in the Via Larga to the parlour of San Marco. Parenti describes in detail the passage of ValorTs measures from their initiation in San Marco to their consummation in the Council. The biographer Burlamacchi incidentally gives some slight colour to the charge of close intercourse with Valori, writing that Savonarola would not be interrupted in his prayers even when Valori called. The Friar himself protested to the Pope in 1495 that he could not obey the call to Rome because the new government needed his daily care. The pulpit was performing the functions of the modern press; its importance was heightened by the absence of debate in the assembly. If one party used this medium, the other was sure to follow. The pulpit of San Marco became the organ of the Piagnoni, that of Santa Croce the organ of the grandees.
It is not easy to time precisely the flow and ebb of public opinion towards and away from Savonarola. So early as June, 1497, a private letter written to Venice describes the populace as Medicean, the citizens as inclined towards Milan. From the early spring of 1498 the feeling against him had been strong. His preaching while under excommunication had scandalised earnest disciples; the threats of interdict were doubtless a terror to many more. Florence was not prepared for a breach with the visible head of her Church even at the bidding of her prophet. When the end came, the number of avowed supporters was not large; the pronounced Piagnoni whom the government excluded from the Council numbered sixty at the most. The lower classes had long been turning; with them Savonarola’s constitution had found no place; they had lost the amusement and sense of importance which an occasional Parlamento provided. The puritanism which replaced the extravagant splendour of Florentine festivities entailed a diminution both of work and pleasure. 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 feteswhich 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. Monti di pieta and burnings of the Vanities were poor substitutes for panis et Circenses. From the great Franciscan church the friars perpetually thundered against the rival Dominican; the Franciscans were after all the peculiar Order of the poor, and they gradually regained the influence which the eloquence of Savonarola had temporarily filched away from them.
The ordeal had decided all but zealous adherents, and the faith of these was widely, if only temporarily, shaken by the alleged confessions. This is clear from the piteous expressions of Landucci, who describes his grief and stupefaction at the fall of the glorious edifice built on the sorry foundation of lying prophecy, at the vanishing of the New Jerusalem which Florence had expected, and from which were to issue a code and an example of holy living, the renovation of the Church, and the conversion of the infidels. The disillusion was completed by Savonarola’s silence at the stake and by the Divine refusal of a miracle to save him. Among thinking men it is unlikely that Marsilio Ficino, the Platonist, and Verino, the Humanist, should have been alone in deserting him, although they were no doubt the most distinguished of their class. It is needless to brand them as hypocrites and turncoats. Marsilio at least had led a blameless life; his devotion to Savonarola was of long standing; they had much in common in their speculative mysticism, in their groping after the unseen world. Marsilio was no politician; he could gain or lose nothing by the change of front, which he himself ascribed to the fierce family divisions produced by Savonarola’s influence. The desertion of the Prior by the Brethren of San Marco must not be judged too harshly. Something was doubtless due to cowardice, the result of the fierce fight round the convent. But monastic life is subject to contagious waves of feeling; the belief might well run through the convent that its inmates had been befooled and duped by the saintly exterior and passionate eloquence of their Prior. The reaction from the spiritual excitement raised by prophecy brings with it the abandonment of the very foundations of belief. 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. Even Fra Benedetto, who spent the rest of his life in restoring his master’s memory, for the moment fell away.
The passionate hatred which Savonarola had excited may seem hard to explain. It was otherwise with Sant’ Antonino, who had laboured not less earnestly in the field of morality and religion, or with San Bernardino, who had found favour both with Guelf and Ghibelline. 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. Savonarola had striven to break the wings of the foul bird, and the bird had struck him with its talons; he had lifted his rod to part the waters, and the Red Sea had overwhelmed him.
The fascination which Savonarola exercised is almost as living to-day as it was when his congregation sat spell-bound round him. The object of these pages has been to discuss his influence upon political and constitutional history; but this is only one aspect of his career and to himself the least important. He was, perhaps, no skilled statesman, no wise political leader; but, as a spiritual force whose influence long survived him, he has had few equals. Those who would study this side of his character must leave the chroniclers, the despatches of ambassadors, and the biographies, and turn to his letters, his sermons, and his tracts. His zeal for righteousness, his horror of sin, his sympathy for