Savonarola’s early life was as uneventful as that of most preaching friars. His grandfather, a Paduan, was a physician of repute at the court of Ferrara; his father a nonentity even for the hagiologist; his stronger characteristics have been attributed, as is usual, to his Mantuan mother. He thus had no inheritance in the keen, rarefied air from the Tuscan mountains, which is believed to brace the intellect and add intensity to the imagination of the dwellers in the Arno valley; he was a child of the north-eastern waterlands, more sluggish in intellectual movement but swept from time to time by storms of passion. Girolamo refused to enter his grandfather’s profession for which he was brought up; he secretly left home to enter the Order of St Dominic at Bologna. He preached later at Ferrara, but was no prophet in his own country, and was thence ordered to Florence to join the convent of Lombard Dominican Observantists who had been established by Cosimo de’ Medici in San Marco. Successful in teaching novices, he failed as a preacher until he found his natural gift of utterance among a more simple, less critical congregation at San Gimignano. His reputation was made at Brescia, and it is noticeable that in both these cases the fire of eloquence was kindled by a spirit of prophecy; the people were spell-bound by the denunciation of wrath to come. When he returned to Florence he stood on a different plane; the Florentines always gave a warm welcome to a reputation. In the following year (1491) he was elected Prior of San Marco. As this convent was under the peculiar patronage of the ruling house of Medici, Savonarola was in a position to become a leader of Florentine opinion.
The character of the new Prior had hitherto offered more features of interest than his career. He had been an unattractive, unchildlike child, shunning his playmates, poring over books often far beyond his years. He had no love for pleasure, for which Ferrara and its rulers lived; there is a tale that he was once taken to the palace and would never again cross its threshold. His peculiar characteristic was an overpowering sense of sin, a conviction of the wickedness of the world and more especially of the Church. He must have seen the festivities which greeted Pius II on his way to open the Congress of Mantua; it may have struck the serious child that they ill accorded with the sacred object of the Congress, the Crusade against the infidel. But after all, the court of Pius II was relatively decent. At all events in the most youthful of Savonarola’s writings is expressed a loathing for the Court of Rome, a belief that throughout all Italy, and above all at Rome, virtue was spent and vice triumphant. The tribute which solitude exacts from those who court her is an abnormal consciousness of self. In Girolamo’s letter to his father, excusing his flight from home, he urges that he at least must save himself. In his boyish poetical tirade against the Papacy, it is he who must break the wings of the foul bird; in praying for a new passage across the Red Sea, his own soul must traverse the waves which flow between the Egypt of Sin and the Promised Land of Righteousness.
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