Girolamo Savonarola was born at Ferrara in 1452.[1] His grandfather Michele, a Paduan of noble family, had removed to the capital of the Este princes at the beginning of the fifteenth century. There he held the office of court physician; and Girolamo was intended for the same profession. But early in his boyhood the future prophet showed signs of disinclination for a worldly life, and an invincible dislike of the court. Under the House of Este, Ferrara was famous throughout Italy for its gayety and splendor. No city enjoyed more brilliant and more frequent public shows. Nowhere did the aristocracy maintain so much of feudal magnificence and chivalrous enjoyment. The square castle of red brick, which still stands in the middle of the town, was thronged with poets, players, fools who enjoyed an almost European reputation, court flatterers, knights, pages, scholars and fair ladies. But beneath its cube of solid masonry, on a level with the moat, shut out from daylight by a sevenfold series of iron bars, lay dungeons in which the objects of the Duke's displeasure clanked chains and sighed their lives away.[2] Within the precincts of this palace the young Savonarola learned to hate alike the worldly vices and the despotic cruelty against which in after-life he prophesied and fought unto the death.
[1] In this chapter on Savonarola I have made use of Villari's Life (translated by Leonard Horner, Longmans, 1863, 2 vols.), Michelet's Histoire de France, vol. vii., Milman's article on Savonarola (John Murray, 1870), Nardi's Istoria Fiorentina, book ii., and the Memoirs of De Comines.
[2] See p. 424.
Of his boyhood we know but little. His biographers only tell us that he was grave and solitary, frequenting churches, praying with passionate persistence, obstinately refusing, though otherwise docile, to join his father in his visits to the court. Aristotle and S. Thomas Aquinas seem to have been the favorite masters of his study. In fact he refused the new lights of the humanists, and adhered to the ecclesiastical training of the schoolmen. Already at the age of twenty we find him composing a poem in Italian on the Ruin of the World, in which he cries: 'The whole world is in confusion: all virtue is extinguished, and all good manners; I find no living light abroad, nor one who blushes for his vices.' His point of departure had been taken, and the keynote of his life had been struck. The sense of intolerable sin that came upon him in Ferrara haunted him through manhood, set his hand against the Popes and despots of Italy, and gave peculiar tone to his prophetic utterances.
The attractions of the cloister, as a refuge from the storms of the world, and as a rest from the torments of the sins of others, now began to sway his mind.[1] But he communicated his desire to no one. It would have grieved his father and his mother to find that their son, who was, they hoped, to be a shining light at the court of Ferrara, had determined to assume the cowl. At length, however, came the time at which he felt that leave the world he must. 'It was on the 23d of April 1475,' says Villari; 'he was sitting with his lute and playing a sad melody; his mother, as if moved by a spirit of divination, turned suddenly round to him, and exclaimed mournfully, My son, that is a sign we are soon to part. He roused himself, and continued, but with a trembling hand, to touch the strings of the lute, without raising his eyes from the ground.' This would make a picture: spring twilight in the quaint Italian room, with perhaps a branch of fig-tree or of bay across the open window; the mother looking up with anxious face from her needlework; the youth, with those terrible eyes and tense lips and dilated nostrils of the future prophet, not yet worn by years of care, but strongly marked and unmistakable, bending over the melancholy chords of the lute, dressed almost for the last time in secular attire.
[1] Often in later life Savonarola cried that he had sought the cloister to find rest, but that God had chosen, instead of bringing him into calm waters, to cast him on a tempest-swollen sea. See the Sermon quoted by Villari, vol. i. p. 298.
On the very next day Girolamo left Ferrara in secret and journeyed to Bologna. There he entered the order of S. Dominic, the order of the Preachers, the order of his master S. Thomas, the order too, let us remember, of inquisitorial crusades. The letter written to his father after taking this step is memorable. In it he says: 'The motives by which I have been led to enter into a religious life are these: the great misery of the world; the iniquities of men, their rapes, adulteries, robberies, their pride, idolatry, and fearful blasphemies: so that things have come to such a pass that no one can be found acting righteously. Many times a day have I repeated with tears the verse:
Heu, fuge crudeles terras, fuge littus avarum!
I could not endure the enormous wickedness of the blinded people of Italy; and the more so because I saw everywhere virtue despised and vice honored.' We see clearly that Savonarola's vocation took its origin in a deep sense of the wickedness of the world. It was the same spirit as that which drove the early Christians of Alexandria into the Thebaid. Austere and haggard, consumed with the zeal of the Lord, he had moved long enough among the Ferrarese holiday-makers. Those elegant young men in tight hose and particolored jackets, with oaths upon their lips and deeds of violence and lust within their hearts, were no associates for him. It is touching, however, to note that no text of Ezekiel or Jeremiah, but Virgil's musical hexameter, sounded through his soul the warning to depart.
In this year Savonarola composed another poem, this time on the Ruin of the Church. In his boyhood he had witnessed the pompous shows which greeted Æneas Sylvius, more like a Roman general than a new-made Pope, on his entrance into Ferrara. Since then he had seen the monster Sixtus mount the Papal throne. No wonder if he, who had fled from the world to the Church for purity and peace, should need to vent his passion in a song. 'Where,' he cries, 'are the doctors of old times, the saints, the learning, charity, chastity of the past?' The Church answers by displaying her rent raiment and wounded body, and by pointing to the cavern in which she has to make her home. 'Who,' exclaims the poet, 'has wrought this wrong?' Una fallace, superba meretrice—Rome! Then indeed the passion of the novice breaks in fire:—
Deh! per Dio, donna,
Se romper si potria quelle grandi ale!
The Church replies:—
Tu píangi e taci: e questo meglio parmi.
No other answer could be given to Savonarola's impatient yearnings even by his own hot heart, while he yet remained a young and unknown monk in Bologna. Nor, strive as he might strive through all his life, was it granted to him to break those outspread wings of arrogant Rome.
The career of Savonarola as a preacher began in 1482, when he was sent first