Girolamo Savonarola, the friar who proclaimed himself Florence's prophet
Girolamo Savonarola in Florence: the apocalyptic sermons, the sword of the Lord, the descent of Charles VIII and his execution in 1498 in the Signoria.
In the last years of the fifteenth century, Florence listened to a preacher who spoke openly of the future as a revelation received from God. Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar born in Ferrara in 1452, became within a few years the most powerful voice in the city, announcing scourges, punishments and a coming renewal of the Church. His career, which ended on the scaffold in 1498, is one of the great episodes of prophecy in Renaissance Italy.
The preacher of San Marco
Savonarola entered the Dominican order in Bologna in 1475. Arriving in Florence, he was assigned to the convent of San Marco, of which he became prior in 1491. His sermons, delivered in San Marco and then in the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, drew ever larger crowds. Commenting on the Apocalypse and the Old Testament prophets, he proclaimed three truths: the Church would be scourged, then renewed, and all this would happen soon.
Linked to these sermons is a Latin formula that he himself says he heard in a vision: “Ecce gladius Domini super terram cito et velociter”, behold the sword of the Lord over the earth, soon and swiftly. The image of a sword hanging in the sky was also reproduced in engravings and medals connected with the friar, becoming the very emblem of his prophecy.
The new Cyrus and the republic
In 1494 King Charles VIII of France came down into Italy with a great army to claim the kingdom of Naples. In Florence many saw in him the scourge foretold by Savonarola, the “new Cyrus” of whom the friar had spoken, drawing on the Book of Isaiah. Piero de' Medici was driven out, and Savonarola, sent among the ambassadors to the king, helped to spare the city from being sacked.
In the new republic the friar exercised enormous influence, supporting the Great Council and a moral reform of customs. In 1495 he published the Compendium of Revelations, in which he described how his visions had come to him and defended the divine nature of his mission. His followers, known as piagnoni, organised the famous bonfires of the vanities, in which luxury objects, playing cards, books and paintings were burned.
The fall
His sermons against the corruption of the Roman curia and his loyalty to the French alliance brought Savonarola into conflict with Pope Alexander VI, who forbade him to preach and in 1497 excommunicated him. Opposition grew in the city. In April 1498 a trial by fire between a Franciscan and a Dominican was proposed to test the truth of his teachings; it never took place, and the people considered him defeated.
A few days later the convent of San Marco was stormed and the friar arrested. Tried and tortured, he was condemned together with two fellow friars. On 23 May 1498 the three were hanged and their bodies burned in the Piazza della Signoria, where a plaque in the paving still marks the place of execution.
Savonarola's memory long divided Florence and the Church. For some he was a fanatic, for others a true prophet and martyr; Machiavelli, in The Prince, cited him as an example of the “unarmed prophets” doomed to ruin. Whatever the verdict, his story shows how in the Renaissance the prophetic word could become a political force able to contribute to the fall of one regime and the birth of another.