[1] See Muratori, vol. xxiii. p. 839.
[2] Annales Bononienses. Mur. xxiii. 890.
[3] Diario Ferrarese. Mur. xxiv. pp. 17–386.
It sometimes happened that the contagion of such devotion spread from city to city; on one occasion, in 1399, it traveled from Piedmont through the whole of Italy. The epidemic of flagellants, of which Giovanni Villani speaks in 1310 (lib. viii. cap. 121), began also in Piedmont, and spread along the Genoese Riviera. The Florentine authorities refused entrance to these fanatics into their territory. In 1334, Villani mentions another outburst of the same devotion (lib xi. cap. 23), which was excited by the preaching of Fra Venturino da Bergamo. The penitents on this occasion wore for badge a dove with the olive-branch. They staid fifteen days in Florence, scourging themselves before the altars of the Dominican churches, and feasting, five hundred at a time, in the Piazzi di S. M. Novella. Corio, in the Storia di Milano (p. 281), gives an interesting account of these 'white penitents,' as they were called, in the year 1399: 'Multitudes of men, women, girls, boys, small and great, townspeople and countryfolk, nobles and burghers, laity and clergy, with bare feet and dressed in white sheets from head to foot,' visited the towns and villages of every district in succession. 'On their journey, when they came to a cross-road or to crosses, they threw themselves on the ground, crying Misericordia three times; then they recited the Lord's Prayer and the Ave Maria. On their entrance into a city, they walked singing Stabat Mater dolorosa and other litanies and prayers. The population of the places to which they came were divided: for some went forth and told those who staid that they should assume the same habit, so that at one time there were as many as 10,000, and at another as many as 15,000 of them.' After admitting that the fruit of this devotion was in many cases penitence, amity, and alms-giving, Corio goes on to observe: 'However, men returned to a worse life than ever after it was over.' It is noticeable that Italy was devastated in 1400 by a horrible plague; and it is impossible not to believe that the crowding of so many penitents together on the highways and in the cities led to this result.
During the anarchy of Italy between 1494—the date of the invasion of Charles VIII.—and 1527—the date of the sack of Rome—the voice of preaching friars and hermits was often raised, and the effect was always to drive the people to a frenzy of revivalistic piety. Milan was the center of the military operations of the French, the Swiss, the Spaniards, and the Germans. No city suffered more cruelly, and in none were fanatical prophets received with greater superstition. In 1516 there appeared in Milan 'a layman, large of stature, gaunt, and beyond measure wild, without shoes, without shirt, bareheaded, with bristly hair and beard, and so thin that he seemed another Julian the hermit.' He lived on water and millet-seed, slept on the bare earth, refused alms of all sorts, and preached with wonderful authority. In spite of the opposition of the Archbishop and the Chapter, he chose the Duomo for his theater; and there he denounced the vices of the priests and monks to vast congregations of eager listeners. In a word, he engaged in open warfare with the clergy on their own ground. But they of course proved too strong for him, and he was driven out of the city. He was a native of Siena, aged 30.[1] We may compare with this picturesque apparition of Jeronimo in Milan what Varchi says about the prophets who haunted Rome like birds of evil omen in the first years of the pontificate of Clement VII. 'Not only friars from the pulpit, but hermits on the piazza, went about preaching and predicting the ruin of Italy and the end of the world with wild cries and threats.'[2] In 1523 Milan beheld the spectacle of a parody of the old preachers. There appeared a certain Frate di S. Marco, whom the people held for a saint, and who 'encouraged the Milanese against the French, saying it was a merit with Jesus Christ to slay those Frenchmen, and that they were pigs.' He seems to have been a feeble and ignorant fellow, whose head had been turned by the examples of Bussolaro and Savonarola.[3] Again, in 1529, we find a certain monk, Tommaso, of the order of S. Dominic, stirring up a great commotion of piety in Milan. The city had been brought to the very lowest state of misery by the Spanish occupation; and, strange to say, this friar was himself a Spaniard. In order to propitiate offended deities, he organized a procession on a great scale. 700 women, 500 men, and 2,500 children assembled in the cathedral. The children were dressed in white, the men and women in sackcloth, and all were barefooted. They promenaded the streets of Milan, incessantly shouting Misericordia! and besieged the Duomo with the same dismal cry, the Bishop and the Municipal authorities of Milan taking part in the devotion.[4] These gusts of penitential piety were matters of real national importance. Writers imbued with the classic spirit of the Renaissance thought them worthy of a place in their philosophical histories. Thus we find Pitti, in the Storia Fiorentina (Arch. Stor. vol. i. p. 112), describing what happened at Florence in 1514: 'There appeared in Santa Croce a Frate Francesco da Montepulciano, very young, who rebuked vice with severity, and affirmed that God had willed to scourge Italy, especially Florence and Rome, in sermons so terrible that the audience kept crying with floods of tears, Misericordia! The whole people were struck dumb with horror, for those who could not hear the friar by reason of the crowd, listened with no less fear to the reports of others. At last he preached a sermon so awful that the congregation stood like men who had lost their senses; for he promised to reveal upon the third day how and from what source he had received this prophecy. However, when he left the pulpit, worn out and exhausted, he was seized with an illness of the lungs, which soon put an end to his life. Pitti goes on to relate the frenzy of revivalism excited by this monk's preaching, which had roused all the old memories of Savonarola in Florence. It became necessary for the Bishop to put down the devotion by special edicts, while the Medici endeavored to distract the minds of the people by tournaments and public shows.
[1] See Prato and Burigozzo, Arch. Stor. vol. iii. pp. 357, 431. It is here worth noticing that Siena, the city of civil discord, was also the city of frenetic piety. The names of S. Caterina, S. Bernardino, and Bernardo Tolomei occur to the mind.
[2] Storia Fiorintina, vol. i. p. 87.
[3] Arch. Stor. vol. iii. p. 443.
[4] Burigozzo, pp. 485–89.
Enough has now been quoted from various original sources to illustrate the feverish recurrences of superstitious panics in Italy during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It will be observed, from what has been said about John of Vicenza, Jacopo del Bussolaro, S. Bernardino, Roberto da Lecce, Giovanni della Marca, and Fra Capistrano, that Savonarola was by no means an extraordinary phenomenon in Italian history. Combining the methods and the aims of all these men, and remaining within the sphere of their conceptions, he impressed a rôle, which had been often played in the chief Italian towns, with the stamp of his peculiar genius. It was a source of weakness to him in his combat with Alexander VI., that he could not rise above the monastic ideal of the prophet which prevailed in Italy, or grasp one of those regenerative conceptions which formed the motive force of the Reformation. The inherent defects of all Italian revivals, spasmodic in their paroxysms, vehement while they lasted, but transient in their effects, are exhibited upon a tragic scale by Savonarola. What strikes us, after studying the records of these movements in Italy, is chiefly their want of true mental energy. The momentary effect produced in great cities like Florence, Milan, Verona, Pavia, Bologna, and Perugia is quite out of proportion to the slight intellectual