Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D
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collection of manuscripts for their accommodation and the use of
students. As the end approached he sent for a priest, and with his
last strength insisted on leaving his bed to receive the sacrament
on his knees. He thought now of the uncompromising preacher who had
denounced him as a destroyer of liberty and a corrupter of youth,
and he longed to have that man's forgiveness before he died. He
despatched a friend to beg Savonarola to come to him to hear his
confession and give him a more precious absolution. Savonarola came.
According to Politian he offered absolution on three conditions:
that Lorenzo should have a lively faith in God's mercy, should promise
to mend his life if he recovered, and should meet death with
fortitude; Lorenzo agreed, and was absolved. According to Savonarola's
early biographer, G. F. Pico (not the humanist), the third condition
was that Lorenzo should promise "to restore liberty to Florence"; in
Pico's account Lorenzo made no response to this demand, and the
friar left him unabsolved. `050434 On April 9, 1492, Lorenzo died,
aged forty-three.
When the news of this premature death reached Florence almost the
entire city mourned, and even Lorenzo's opponents wondered how
social order could now be maintained in Florence, or peace in Italy,
without his guiding hand. `050435 Europe recognized his stature as a
statesman, and sensed in him the characteristic qualities of the time;
he was "the man of the Renaissance" in everything but his aversion
to violence. His slowly acquired prudence in policy, his simple but
persuasive eloquence in debate, his firmness and courage in action,
had made all but a few Florentines forget the liberty that his
family had destroyed; and many who had not forgotten remembered it
as the freedom of rich clans to compete in force and chicanery for
an exploitive dominance in a "democracy" where only a thirtieth of the
population could vote. Lorenzo had used his power with moderation
and for the good of the state, even to the neglect of his private
fortune. He had been guilty of sexual looseness, and had given a bad
example to Florentine youth. He had given a good example in
literature, had restored the Italian language to literary standing,
and had rivaled his proteges in poetry. He had supported the arts with
a discriminating taste that set a standard for Europe. Of all the
"despots" he was the gentlest and the best. "This man," said King
Ferdinand of Naples, "lived long enough for his glory, but too short a
time for Italy." `050436 After him Florence declined, and Italy knew
no peace.
CHAPTER V: Savonarola and the Republic: 1492-1534
I. THE PROPHET
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THE advantage of hereditary rule is continuity; its nemesis is
mediocrity. Piero di Lorenzo succeeded without trouble to his father's
power, but his character and his misjudgments forfeited the popularity
upon which the rule of the Medici had been based. He was endowed
with a violent temper, a middling mind, a vacillating will, and
admirable intentions. He continued Lorenzo's generosity to artists and
men of letters, but with less discrimination and tact. He was
physically strong, excelled in sports, and took part more frequently
and prominently in athletic competitions than Florence thought
becoming in the head of an endangered state. It was among his many
misfortunes that Lorenzo's enterprises and extravagance had depleted
the city's treasury; that the competition of British textiles was
causing economic depression in Florence; that Piero's Orsini wife
turned up her Roman nose at the Florentines as a nation of
shopkeepers; that the collateral branch of the Medici family,
derived from Cosimo's brother Lorenzo "the Elder," began now to
challenge the descendants of Cosimo, and led a party of opposition
in the name of liberty. It was Piero's crowning misery that he was
contemporary with Charles VIII of France, who invaded Italy, and of
Savonarola, who proposed to replace the Medici with Christ. Piero
had not been built to withstand such strains.
The Savonarola family came from Padua to Ferrara about 1440, when
Michele Savonarola was invited by Niccolo III d'Este to be his court
physician. Michael was a man of piety rare in medicos; he was wont
to rebuke the Ferrarese for preferring romances to religion. `05051
His son Niccolo was a mediocre physician, but Niccolo's wife Elena
Bonacossi was a woman of strong character and high ideals. Girolamo
was the third of their seven children. They set him in his turn to
study medicine, but he thought Thomas Aquinas more absorbing than
anatomy, and solitude with his books more pleasant than the sports
of youth. At the University of Bologna he was horrified to find no
student so poor as to do virtue reverence. "To be considered a man
here," he wrote, "you must defile your mouth with the most filthy,
brutal, and tremendous blasphemies.... If you study philosophy and the
good arts you are considered a dreamer; if you live chastely and
modestly, a fool; if you are pious, a hypocrite; if you believe in
God, an imbecile." `05052 He left the University, and returned to
his mother and solitude. He became self-conscious, fretted over the
thought of hell and the sinfulness of men; his earliest known
composition was a poem denouncing the vices of Italy, including the
popes, and pledging himself to reform his country and his Church. He
passed long hours in prayer, and fasted so earnestly that his
parents mourned his emaciation. In 1474 he was stirred to even severer
piety by the Lenten sermons of Fra Michele, and he rejoiced to see
many Ferrarese bringing masks, false hair, playing cards, unseemly
pictures, and other worldly apparatus to fling them upon a burning
pyre in the market place. A year later, aged twenty-three, he fled
secretly from home, and entered a Dominican monastery in Bologna.
He wrote a tender letter to his parents begging their forgiveness
for disappointing the expectations they had had of his advancement
in the world. When they importuned him to return he answered
angrily: "Ye blind! Why do you still weep and lament? You hamper me,
though you should rejoice.... What can I say if you grieve yet, save
that you are my sworn enemies and foes to Virtue? If so, then I say to
you, 'Get ye behind me, all ye who work evil!'" `05053 Six years he
stayed in the Bologna convent. He proudly asked that the most humble
tasks should be given him, but his talent as an orator was discovered,
and he was set to preaching. In 1481 he was transferred to San Marco
in Florence, and was assigned to preach in the church of San
Lorenzo. His sermons there proved unpopular; they were too theological
and didactic for a city that knew the eloquence and polish of the
humanists; his congregation dwindled week by week. The prior set him
to instructing novices.
It was probably in the next five years that his final character
was formed. As the intensity of his feelings and purposes increased
they wrote themselves upon his features in the furrowed and frowning
forehead, the thick lips tight with determination, the immense nose
curving out as if to encompass the world, a countenance somber and
severe, expressing an infinite capacity for love and hate; a small
frame racked and haunted with visions, frustrated aspirations, and
introverted storms. "I am still flesh like you," he wrote to his
parents, "and the senses are unruly to reason, so that I must struggle
cruelly to keep the Demon from leaping upon my back." `05054 He fasted
and flogged himself to tame what seemed to him the inherent corruption
of human nature. If he personified the promptings of flesh and pride
as Satanic voices, he could with equal readiness personify the
admonitions of his better self. Alone in his cell, he glorified his
solitude by conceiving himself as a battleground of spirits hovering
over him for evil or for good. Finally it seemed to him that angels,
archangels, were speaking to him; he accepted their words as divine
revelations; and suddenly he spoke to the world as a prophet chosen to
be a messenger of God. He avidly absorbed the apocalyptic visions
attributed to the Apostle John, and inherited the eschatalogy of the
mystic Joachim of Flora. Like Joachim he announced that the reign of
Antichrist had come, that Satan had captured the world, that soon
Christ would appear to begin His earthly rule, and that divine
vengeance would engulf the tyrants, adulterers, and atheists who
seemed to dominate Italy.
When his prior sent him to preach in Lombardy (1486), Savonarola
abandoned his youthful pedagogic style, and cast his sermons into
the form of denunciations of immorality, prophecies of doom, and calls
to repentance. Thousands of people who could not have followed his
earlier arguments listened with awe to the newly impassioned eloquence
of a man who seemed to be speaking with authority. Pico della
Mirandola heard of the friar's success; he asked Lorenzo to suggest to
the prior that Savonarola should be brought back to Florence.
Savonarola returned (1489); two years later he was chosen prior of San
Marco; and Lorenzo found in him an enemy more forthright and
powerful than any that had ever crossed his path.
Florence was surprised to discover that the swarthy preacher who a
decade before had chilled them with argument, could now awe them
with apocalyptic fantasies, thrill them with vivid descriptions of the
paganism, corruption, and immorality of their neighbors, lift up their
souls to repentance and hope, and renew in them the full intensity
of the faith that had inspired and terrified their youth.
-
Ye women, who glory in your ornaments, your hair, your hands, I tell
you you are all ugly. Would you see true beauty? Look at the pious man
or woman in whom spirit dominates matter; watch him when he prays,
when a ray of the divine beauty glows upon him when his prayer is
ended; you will see the beauty of God shining in his face, you will
behold it as it were the face of an angel. `05055
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Men marveled at his courage, for he flayed the clergy and the papacy
more than the laity, the princes more than the people; and a note of
political radicalism warmed the hearts of the poor:
-
In these days there is no grace, no gift of the Holy Spirit, that
may not be bought or sold. On the other hand, the poor are oppressed
by grievous burdens; and when they are called to pay sums beyond their
means the rich cry unto them, "Give me the rest." There be some who,
having an income of fifty [florins per year], pay a tax on one
hundred, while the rich pay little, since the taxes are regulated at
their pleasure. Bethink ye well, O ye rich, for affliction shall smite
ye. This city shall no more be called Florence but a den of thieves,
of baseness and bloodshed. Then shall ye all be poverty-stricken...
and your name, O priests, shall be changed into a terror. `05056
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After the priests the bankers:
-
You have found many ways of making money, and many exchanges which
you call lawful but which are most unjust; and you have corrupted
the offices and magistrates of the city. No one can persuade you
that usury [interest] is sinful; you defend it at the peril of your
souls. No one is ashamed of lending at usury; nay, those who do
otherwise pass for fools.... Your brow is that of a whore, and you
will not blush. You say, a good and glad life lies in gain; and Christ
says, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall inherit
heaven. `05057
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And a word for Lorenzo:
-
Tyrants are incorrigible because they are proud, because they love
flattery, and will not restore ill-gotten gains.... They hearken not
unto the poor, and neither do they condemn the rich.... They corrupt
voters, and farm out taxes to aggravate the burdens of the
people.... `05058 The tyrant is wont to occupy the people with shows
and festivals, in order that they may think of their own pastimes
and not of his designs, and, growing unused to the conduct of the
commonwealth, may leave the reins of government in his hands. `05059
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Nor shall that dictatorship be excused on the ground that it
finances literature and art. The literature and art, said
Savonarola, are pagan; the humanists merely pretend to be
Christians; those ancient authors whom they so sedulously exhume and
edit and praise are strangers to Christ and the Christian virtues, and
their art is an idolatry of heathen gods, or a shameless display of
naked women and men.
Lorenzo was disturbed. His grandfather had founded and enriched
the monastery of San Marco; he himself had given to it lavishly; it
seemed to him unreasonable that a friar who could know little of the
difficulties of government, and who idealized a liberty that had
been merely the right of the strong to use the weak without
hindrance by law, should now undermine, from a Medici shrine, that
public support upon which the political power of his family had been
built. He tried to appease the friar; he went to Mass in San
Marco's, and sent the convent rich gifts. Savonarola scorned them, and
remarked in a subsequent sermon that a faithful dog does not leave off
barking in his master's defense because a bone is thrown to him.
When he found an unusually large sum, in gold, in the alms box, he
suspected that it came from Lorenzo, and gave it to another monastery,
saying that silver sufficed the needs of his brethren. Lorenzo sent
five leading citizens to argue with him that his inflammatory
sermons would lead to useless violence, and were unsettling the
order and peace of Florence; Savonarola answered by telling them to
bid Lorenzo do penance for his sins. A Franciscan friar famous for
eloquence was encouraged to preach popular sermons with a view to
drawing the Dominican's audience away; the Franciscan failed.
Greater throngs than ever before came to San Marco, until its church
could no longer hold them. For his Lenten sermons of 1491 Savonarola
moved his pulpit into the cathedral; and though that edifice had
been designed to contain a city, it was crowded whenever the friar was
scheduled to speak. The ailing Lorenzo made no further effort to
interfere with his preaching.
After Lorenzo's death the weakness of his son Piero made
Savonarola the greatest power in Florence. With the reluctant
consent of the new pope, Alexander VI, he separated his convent from
the Lombard Congregation (of Dominican monasteries) of which it had
been a part, and made himself in practice the independent head of
his monastic community. He reformed its regulations, and raised the
moral and intellectual level of the friars under his rule. New
recruits joined his flock, and most of its 250 members developed for
him a love and fidelity that upheld him in all but his final ordeal.
He became bolder in his criticism of the laic and clerical
immorality of the time. Inheriting, however unwittingly, the
anticlerical views of the Waldensian and Patarine heretics who still
lurked here and there in northern Italy and central Europe, he
condemned the worldly wealth of the clergy, the pomp of ecclesiastical
ceremony, "the great prelates with splendid miters of gold and
precious stones on their heads.... with fine copes and stoles of
brocade"; he contrasted this affluence with the simplicity of the
priests in the early Church; these "had fewer gold miters and fewer
chalices, for what few they possessed were broken up to relieve the
needs of the poor; whereas our prelates, for the sake of obtaining
chalices, will rob the poor of their sole means of support." `050510
To these denunciations he added prophecies of doom. He had predicted
that Lorenzo and Innocent VIII would die in 1492; they did. Now he
predicted that presently the sins of Italy, of her despots and her
clergy, would be avenged by a dire disaster; that thereafter Christ
would lead the nation in a glorious reform; and that he himself,
Savonarola, would die a violent death. Early in 1494 he foretold
that Charles VIII would invade Italy, and he welcomed the invasion
as the chastening hand of God. His sermons at this time, says a
contemporary, were "so full of terrors and alarms, cries and
lamentations, that everyone went about the city bewildered,
speechless, and, as it were, half dead." `050511
In September, 1494, Charles VIII crossed the Apennines into Italy,
resolved to add the Kingdom of Naples to the French crown. In
October he entered Florentine territory and besieged the fortress of
Sarzana. Piero thought he could save Florence from France as his
father had saved it from Naples, by going in person to the enemy. He
met Charles at Sarzana, and yielded to all demands: Pisa, Leghorn, and
every bastion of Florence in the west were surrendered to the French
for the duration of the war, and Florence was to advance 200,000
florins ($5,000,000) to help finance Charles's campaign. `050512
When news of these concessions reached Florence the Signory and the
Council were shocked; contrary to Lorenzo's precedents, they had not
been consulted in these negotiations. Led by the Medici opponents of
Piero, the Signory decided to depose him and restore the old republic.
When Piero returned from Sarzana he found the gates of the Palazzo
Vecchio closed in his face. As he rode to his home the people jeered
him, and urchins pelted him with stones. Fearing for his life, he fled
from the city with his family and his brothers. The populace sacked
the Medici palace and gardens, and the homes of Piero's financial
agents; the art collection gathered by four generations of Medici
was plundered and scattered, and its remains were sold at auction by
the government. The Signory offered a reward of five thousand
florins for the delivery of Piero and Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici
alive, two thousand for their delivery dead. It sent five men,
including Savonarola, to Charles at Pisa to ask for better terms;
Charles met them with noncommittal courtesy. When the delegation had
left, the Pisans tore the lion and lilies of Florence from their
buildings, and declared their independence. Charles entered
Florence, consented to some slight modification of his demands, and,
eager to get to Naples, led his army to the south. Florence
addressed itself now to one of history's most spectacular
experiments in democracy.
II. THE STATESMAN
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On December 2, 1494 the citizens were summoned to a parlamento
by the great bell in the Palazzo Vecchio tower. The Signory asked
and received the power to name twenty men who would appoint a new
Signory and new magistrates for a year, after which all offices were
to be filled by lot from a register of the approximately three
thousand enfranchised males. The Twenty dismissed the councils and
agencies which under the Medici had considered and administered public
affairs, and divided the diverse functions among themselves. They were
inadequately experienced for these tasks, and were torn by family
factions; the new governmental machinery broke down, and chaos was
imminent; commerce and industry hesitated, men were thrown out of
work, and angry crowds gathered in the streets. Piero Capponi
persuaded the Twenty that order could be saved only by inviting
Savonarola into their councils.
The friar summoned them to his monastery, and expounded to them an
ambitious program of political, economic, and moral legislation. Under
his leadership and that of Pietro Soderini, the Twenty devised a new
constitution, partly modeled on that which was so successfully
maintaining stability in Venice. A Maggior Consiglio or Great
Council was to be formed of men who- or their ancestors in the
preceding three generations- had held a major office in the state; and
these initial members were to choose twenty-eight additional
councilors in each year. The executive organs of the government were
to remain essentially as under the Medici: a Signory of eight priors
and a gonfalonier, chosen by the Council for a term of two months, and
various committees- The Twelve, The Sixteen, The Ten, The Eight- to
carry on administration, taxation, and war. Complete democracy was
postponed as impractical in a society still largely illiterate and
subject to waves of passion; but the Great Council, numbering almost
three thousand members, was considered to be a representative body.
Since no room in the Palazzo Vecchio could house so large an
assemblage, Simone Pollaiuolo- Il Cronaca- was engaged to redesign
part of the interior into a Sala dei Cinquecento, or Hall of the
Five Hundred, where the Council could meet in sections; here, eight
years later, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo would be
commissioned to paint opposed walls in a famous rivalry. Through
Savonarola's influence and eloquence the proposed constitution
received public acclaim, and the new Republic came into operation on
June 10, 1495.
It began amiably by issuing amnesty to all supporters of the deposed
Medici regime. With self-respecting generosity it abolished all
taxes except a ten-per-cent levy on income from real property; the
merchants who dominated the Council thus exempted commerce from
taxation, and laid the whole burden on the landowning aristocracy
and the land-using poor. At Savonarola's urging the government
established a monte di pieta, or state loan office, which lent money
at five to seven per cent, and freed the poor from dependence on
private moneylenders, who had charged up to thirty per cent. Again
at the friar's prompting, the Council attempted to reform morals
with laws: it forbade horse races, gross carnival songs, profanity,
and gambling; servants were encouraged to inform against masters who
gambled, and convicted offenders were punished with torture;
blasphemers had their tongues pierced, and homosexuals were degraded
with merciless penalties. To aid in the enforcement of these reforms
Savonarola organized the boys of his congregation into a moral police.
They pledged themselves to attend church regularly, to avoid races,
pageants, acrobatic displays, loose company, obscene literature,
dancing, and music schools, and to wear their hair short. These "bands
of hope" roamed the streets soliciting alms for the Church; they
dispersed groups that had gathered to gamble, and tore from the bodies
of women what they judged to be indecent dress.
For a time the city accepted these reforms; many women gave them
enthusiastic support, behaved modestly, dressed plainly, and put aside
their jewelry. A moral revolution transformed what had been the gay
Florence of the Medici. People sang hymns, not Bacchic lyrics, in
the streets. Churches were filled, and alms were given in
unprecedented quantity. Some bankers and merchants restored illegal
gains. `050513 Savonarola called upon all the population, rich and
poor, to shun idleness and luxury, to work assiduously, and to give
a good example with their lives. "Your reform," he said, "must begin
with the things of the spirit... your temporal good must serve your
moral and religious welfare, on which it depends. And if you have
heard it said that 'states are not ruled by paternosters,' remember
that this is the rule of tyrants... a rule for oppressing, not for
liberating, a city. If you desire a good government you must restore