One man who was more in the mould of rabble-rousing revolutionary than the likes of Valla or Erasmus or Colet was Girolamo Savonarola. This prophetic figure, whose genius flared in a brilliant spurt of fiery fury in Florence at the end of the fifteenth century, blazed the trail – literally – for what was to come in the next century. A Dominican friar from Ferrara, in 1491 he started to excite Florence to an almost ecstatic fervour with his violent preaching, first at the church of San Marco, then at the cathedral. He soon held almost total sway over the city through the extraordinary power of his spoken words. Although he was kind and gentle as a confessor, when he preached, a special anger, at once divine and terrifying, overcame him. His sermons, delivered in his distinctive high-pitched tones, were long and electrifying. In some ways, the Reformation should have been his, not Luther’s.
Among those who heard him preach were John Colet passing through Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli and Michelangelo. Savonarola so scared Michelangelo that the artist fled from Florence in panic after hearing one of his sermons. So, Savonarola had something of the demagogue about him. Those who listened to him were variously alarmed, horrified and inspired. Yet he managed to temper the extremism of his eloquence with spiritual nobility.
He was an early Puritan, and this was another way in which he anticipated much that was to come. He presided over somewhat stagey ‘bonfires of the vanities’ in which vulgar books, pornography, immodest clothes, cosmetics, gambling materials, carnival masks and the like were publicly burned. His sermons, while severe and raw, were utterly inclusive in that he denounced sin with an unequivocal and far-reaching power that seemed to spare nobody. He abjured what he contemptuously called the ‘prostitute Church’. Politically, he was a republican. He also claimed to be a heaven-sent prophet. And people believed him.
Needless to say, none of this resonated too well in Rome. Pope Alexander VI, a lover of the vanities if ever there was one, first tried to shut him up by promising to make him a cardinal. Savonarola, to his credit, was uninterested in such preferment. Then Alexander simply ordered Savonarola to desist. The friar responded by condemning Alexander as a servant of Satan – and turning his fearsome attention to the ostentatious corruption of the papal court. So, Alexander excommunicated him.
In some ways, most importantly in his courageous and steadfast defiance of the papacy, Savonarola paved the way for the Reformation, although his impact was very localised. His main problem was political. Unlike his great successor Martin Luther, he had no friends in high places. He infuriated the Medici family, who wanted to regain their hold on Florence; he also alienated the powerful Franciscans. After he was excommunicated, his popular support – which had been enormous – ebbed rapidly away. His greatest modern biographer, Professor Lauro Martines, has noted that his enemies had the troops, the guns, the laws, the prisons and the gallows.
The city authorities, egged on by Pope Alexander, placed him on trial for heresy and schism. Alexander sent two emissaries north to Florence to assist with the trial. One of them, Francisco Remolins, quickly became the lead prosecutor. A friend of the pope’s son Cesare Borgia, Remolins was a Church careerist with a taste for bishoprics (he held four – Palermo, Sorrento, Fermo and Albano).
Needless to say, Savonarola was found guilty. In 1498, with two associates, he was publicly hanged and then burned. Once most of their flesh had burned away, and what was left of the remains still hung from their iron collars, local boys who had watched the execution threw stones at the blackened bones. They were trying to get hold of them; they wanted to drag them round the piazza for sport. Instead, the charred remains, the embers and ashes, were swept up and dumped in a cart, taken to the River Arno and thrown into the water. The authorities, scared of martyrdom, were determined to leave no remains, no relics. Meanwhile, Remolins returned to Rome with various gifts from the grateful Medici – including a nubile young widow.
Savonarola is remembered primarily as a public speaker of enormous power, but he left behind various writings. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, was to ban his Jesuits from reading anything by Savonarola, even though he admired some of his works. Of Savonarola’s contemporaries, his most ardent disciple was Giovanni della Mirandola, a philosopher and scholar who was a precocious Renaissance humanist. When he came under Savonarola’s influence, he changed his life and became a humble street evangelist.
Savonarola was very different from men like Valla or Colet because he was above all concerned to communicate directly with ordinary people – something he did superbly. In this, once again, he anticipated Luther. A man of magnetism, scope and apparently divine inspiration, he was by far the most charismatic of the various precursors of the Reformation. Yet his impact on Florence, while enormous, was short-lived; and his impact elsewhere was negligible.
The Christian Church had been essentially united in Europe for many centuries, yet there had been scattered breaks of serious anti-Church agitation. Jan Hus, a distant follower of the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe, was perhaps the most cerebral and influential dissident. Hus came from peasant stock in Bohemia and pursued an academic career as a philosopher at the University of Prague. He insisted, as Wycliffe had, that the fundamental authority for Christian belief was not the papacy but the Bible. Like the Lollards – and indeed the later Savonarola – he abhorred ecclesiastical grandeur and tilted bravely against it.
He was excommunicated in 1411 after he had denounced the sale of indulgences, which people bought in order to ensure their salvation. (Indulgences had originally been granted to those who had done exceptional work for the Church, such as the crusaders – but the medieval Church came to regard indulgences as an easy way of making money.) Hus was burned to death in 1415, and his martyrdom created a movement which was forcefully suppressed.
But the Hussites would not go away. Bohemia was wracked by the first serious, organised fighting between Christians over religion that Europe had known for many centuries. The Hussite ‘wars’ petered out in the 1430s – but they, too, anticipated the Reformation.
In the early sixteenth century in Germany, an eloquent nationalist historian called Jacob Wimpfeling became a scourge of clerical and papal corruption. He inveighed against the disgraceful state of the clergy, their ignorance and immorality. He objected vociferously to the pope’s interference in the appointment of German bishops. Further, he warned that Hussite-style heresy could easily sweep through Germany. Not everybody admired Wimpfeling; Martin Luther described him as an old and distracted scarecrow. But the historian contributed to a growing mood of nascent nationalism, which was often linked with a dislike of the Italian papacy.
It would, however, be wrong to overemphasise the way in which prophetic figures like Wycliffe, Hus and Savonarola, and even Wimpfeling, were harbingers of the tumult to come. One of the key characteristics of the Protestant Reformation was the manner in which so many of the reformers sought, and received, the support of the worldly and the powerful – not least princes and monarchs. By contrast, the followers of Wycliffe, Hus and Savonarola identified with the losers in society – indeed, they often were the losers in society. Crucially, the key supporter of Martin Luther was a powerful, established figure who could protect him: the Elector of Saxony.
Another cautionary point: the Roman Catholic Church’s worldliness, its riches and its frequent immorality did not inspire, or provoke, that much spiritual or holy anger. The power preaching of Savonarola in Florence was an exception.
There was, across Europe as the fifteenth century ended, a widespread spiritual malaise; and, while this was largely the fault of the Church, it is not correct to suggest that the Church had failed in one of its prime duties, which was to bring solace and consolation to people who were often devastated by plague, by war at both national and local level, by life-threatening poverty and by acute economic uncertainty. Not all the parish clergy were ignorant uncouth men unable to understand or even read the Latin of the services they took. Not all the parishes were in decay; some clergy were lively, helpful pastors whose minds were open to new forms of devotion. By no means everybody in the Church abhorred innovation and the new spirit of Renaissance humanism.
And, even in the countries and the areas where Protestantism was to spread like a bushfire, there often remained among the ordinary people a very strong attachment to the old ways –