Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  All these Medici were sentenced by the Signoria to exile in perpetuity, a reward of 4,000 florins being offered for the capture of Piero and 2,000 florins for Giovanni. Their cousins, the sons of Pierfrancesco, were exempted from the ban because of their vaunted opposition to Piero; but they prudently changed their name to Popolano and had the Medici coat of arms removed from the walls of their palace.

  Disguised as a Dominican friar, Piero's brother, Giovanni, who, at his father's instigation, had been created a cardinal two years before, managed to convey some of the treasures of the Medici library from the palace to San Marco. Other small treasures had been removed from the palace by Piero himself, who took them with him to Venice; but there was much left to plunder when a mob inevitably broke in, carrying off innumerable pictures and statues. ‘The best of the Medici furniture had been conveyed to another house in the city,’ Philippe de Commines reported. ‘But the mob plundered it. The Signoria got some of Piero's richest jewels, twenty thousand ducats in ready money from his bank in the city, several fine agate vases, as well as an incredible number of cameos admirably well cut, three thousand medals of gold and silver [and much more besides].’

  French quartermasters had already entered the city to mark with chalk the buildings considered suitable for the billeting of troops. As one of four delegates sent to Pisa, which the French had occupied and declared to be free of the tyranny of Medici rule, Savonarola assured King Charles that his troops would be welcome in Florence.

  ‘And so at last, O King, thou hast come,’ he is reported to have announced sententiously.

  Thou art an instrument in the hands of the Lord who has sent you to cure the ills of Italy as I have long since predicted. I say this to you in the name of the Lord… Thou hast come as the Minister of God, the Minister of Justice. We receive thee with joyful hearts and a glad countenance… We hope that, by thee, Jehovah will abase the proud, exalt the humble, crush vice, exalt virtue, make straight all that is crooked and reform all that is deformed. Come then, glad, secure, triumphant, since He that sent you forth triumphed upon the Cross for our redemption.

  It was, however, as a military conqueror rather than a ‘Minister of God’ that King Charles entered Florence on 17 November 1494 by way of the Porta San Frediano. Under a magnificent canopy held over his head by four knights, wearing his crown and a cloth-of-gold cloak over his gilt armour, riding a huge black war-horse and holding his lance at rest, the traditional gesture of conquest, he led a splendid procession of twelve thousand soldiers, Swiss Guards and Gascon infantry, cavalry in engraved armour, cuirassiers and long-bowmen, ‘extraordinarily tall men from Scotland and other northern countries, looking more like wild beasts than men’.

  True to Savonarola's promise, the citizens greeted the French army warmly, shouting ‘Viva Francia!’ as the thousands of troops, regiment after regiment, marched by. In the course of the next eleven days, while the King was entertained in the Medici Palace – to whose looted rooms furniture, tapestry and pictures had been hastily returned – there were far fewer disturbances than might have been expected from the presence of so large a foreign force; and it was not until after the French had gone, declining to pay for most of what their visit had cost, that the Florentines began to feel that their welcome had been more effusive than the circumstances warranted, and that Piero di Gino Capponi had been quite right to make his celebrated protest.

  This man had once been Florence's ambassador in France and had known the King as a little boy. He had been present when the terms which the Signoria had made with the French had been read out by a herald. The terms were harsh enough on the Florentines: they were to grant the French possession of Pisa and, for the time being, all the fortresses they had seized; and they were to make a contribution of 150,000 ducats towards the cost of the further advance of the French troops upon Naples. Through some oversight the figure of 125,000 rather than 150,000 had been inserted in the document which the herald read out, and when this lower figure was proclaimed, King Charles stopped the herald in mid-sentence, demanding that the sum of 150,000 be substituted. Otherwise, he threatened, he would order his trumpeters to call out his troops, who would then pillage the city without mercy. Piero di Gino Capponi, as angry as the King, then leapt forward, snatched the document from the herald's hands, tore it up and in a voice which Francesco Guicciardini described as ‘quivering with agitation’, shouted the words which were to become a Florentine proverb, ‘If you sound your trumpets, we shall ring our bells.’

  Rather than risk the city being called to arms, and his army being forced to fight at a disadvantage in its narrow, tortuous streets, the King gave way, making light of his objection. He signed the treaty and led his army south for Rome, leaving Florence to be governed in the name of God's servant, Girolamo Savonarola, now Prior of San Marco.

  The change of government from Medicean oligarchy to austere theocracy was carried through in a manner respectful to the forms of the Florentine constitution. A Parlamento was summoned and a Balìa established; the Medicean councils set up by Lorenzo were abolished; and a new republican government on the Venetian model was created, with a Maggior Consiglio, a Great Council, of several hundred members, with authority to elect magistrates, about eighty of whom would form a Minor Consiglio, or Ottanta. The Signoria and the Gonfaloniere were to remain, but neither could act without the authority of both these new councils.

  The Maggior Consiglio was so large an assembly that no hall of the Palazzo della Signoria was suitable for its deliberations; so, a few months after the departure of the French, Simone del Pollaiuolo, Il Cronaca, assisted by Francesco di Domenico and Antonio da Sangallo, was commissioned to design a new hall, for which both Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were asked to supply paintings.2

  Inspired by Savonarola, the new government was from the beginning persuaded to believe that its policies would be directed by divine will. ‘The wind drives me forward,’ the prior announced in a sermon preached shortly before Christmas. ‘The Lord forbids my return. I spoke last night with God and I said, “Pity me, O Lord. Lead me back to my haven.” “It is impossible,” said the Lord. “Do you not see where the wind is forcing you to go?” “I will preach if I must. But why need I interfere with the government of Florence?” “If you would make Florence a holy city, you must establish her on firm foundations and see that her government favours virtue.” ’

  God had called upon him to reform the city and the Church, and he, with crucifix in hand, called upon the government to support him in his mission. He commanded the citizens to fast, to cast aside their showy clothes and ornaments, to sell their jewels and give their money to the poor, to remove silver candlesticks and illuminated books from monasteries and churches. He called upon ‘blessed bands’ of children to march through the streets, their hair cut short, bearing crosses and olive branches, singing hymns and collecting alms, to enter houses and search out objects of vanity and luxury, to urge their parents to abandon their evil ways and follow the paths of virtue, to report to the authorities all instances of scandalous vice.

  The Florentines listened and many obeyed. Courtesans stayed indoors; gamblers concealed their dice boxes; fashionable ladies walked the streets in quiet colours; balladeers closed their books of ribald songs; and bands of children, as Savonarola had urged them to, patrolled the streets singing hymns, keeping wary eyes open for displays of extravagance or ungodliness, seeking admittance to houses and calling upon the inhabitants to deliver up articles of which they had grown unduly fond.

  One day in 1497 when Florence was normally given over to the pleasures of the carnival and the streets were full of revellers, a large band of these singing children was seen marching from church to church, carrying a statue of the boy Jesus by Donatello. To some, these children seemed like angels who had ‘come down to earth to rejoice with the children of men’, to others like dreadful little prigs and informers in need of a sound whipping. ‘Some lukewarm people gave trouble,’ so the apothecary, Luca Landucc
i, said, ‘throwing dead cats and other rubbish.’ But, undeterred, the children helped to carry piles of scent bottles and pomade pots, wigs and jars of rouge, looking-glasses, fans and necklaces to an enormous scaffold in the shape of a pyramid which had been erected in the Piazza della Signoria. They piled them round the base of this scaffold together with heaps of profane books and lewd drawings, stories by Boccaccio and Luigi Pulci, portraits of beautiful women, carnival masks, chessboards, packs of cards, dice boxes and manuals of magic; and on top of the mountainous jumble of vanities there was placed the effigy of a Venetian merchant who had offered 20,000 scudi for the works of art now to be destroyed. As trumpets were blown and choirs sang, as church bells rang all over the city, the flames from this Bonfire of the Vanities leapt towards the sky.

  Consumed in the flames, so it was said, were paintings considered lascivious or sensual by the artists themselves. For all the kindness he had received at the hands of the Medici – and Savonarola had declared that any attempt to restore them would be a capital offence – Botticelli was believed to be one of these artists; Lorenzo di Credi was another; so was Fra Bartolommeo. Many others, writers and scholars as well as artists, had been deeply impressed by Savonarola's passionate sermons, his blazing sincerity, his vision of a ‘City of God’. ‘His efforts to maintain the observance of good behaviour were holy and admirable,’ wrote Francesco Guicciardini, a law student in Florence at this time. ‘There was never such goodness and religion in Florence as in his day.’ Others condemned him as a religious fanatic. Indeed, the silk merchant, Marco Parenti, said in 1497 that opinion in Florence was so mixed that ‘it divided fathers and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters. Young men between the ages of eighteen and thirty differed greatly about Savonarola.’

  Luca Landucci, whose diaries give so vivid a picture of these times, was proud to have children marching in the prior's ‘blessed bands’; Giorgio Vespucci, uncle of Amerigo, the navigator, a canon of Santa Maria del Fiore and a learned bibliophile, spoke of Savonarola with respect and admiration; so did the Strozzi brothers, whose vast palace was still under construction. They were far from exceptional: most of his warmest supporters were to be found amongst the poor and middling classes; but his appeal extended also to members of the richest families in the city, who roundly condemned his disdainful critics and the rabble that beat drums to drown his voice. They were proud to be numbered amongst the ‘frateschi’ (the friars), the ‘capaternostri’ (the prayer mumblers) and the ‘piagnoni’ (the snivellers), as the prior's enemies referred to his adherents. These enemies were numerous, but too disparate to be well organized. Among them were men so passionate in their opposition to Savonarola's regime that they were known as ‘arrabiati’, as well as hundreds of former Mediceans who, now that they prudently refrained from showing themselves in their true colours, were called ‘biggi’ (greys), and scores of rowdy, wild young men, mostly from the families of the arrabiati, who became known as ‘compagnacci’.

  While these various opponents of Savonarola were making plans to overthrow the government which his preaching had inspired, his apocalyptic pronouncements and accusations were making him enemies far beyond the confines of Florence.

  The most influential of these enemies was Roderigo Borgia, the new Pope Alexander VI, a worldly, wily, rich and pleasure-loving Spaniard, as determined to advance the interests of his six sons as he was to drive the French out of Italy. The French army was now in Naples, from which King Alfonso had fled to a Sicilian monastery. King Charles was enjoying himself there with a succession of mistresses, whose portraits he had bound together in a big book.

  In order to force the French to withdraw across the Alps, Pope Alexander set about the formation of what he called a Holy League. He persuaded Venice to join the league; he also enlisted the support of Lodovico Sforza of Milan, who was now regretting his earlier encouragement of the French invasion; he won the backing of the Spanish King Ferdinand and of the Emperor Maximilian. The forces were placed under the command of Francesco Gonzaga, the fierce-looking Marquis of Mantua.

  Formidable as they seemed, the forces of the Holy League were no match for the large and ruthless French army which now marched north towards the Apennines, a mule loaded with looted treasure to every two men. Gone now were the earlier days of Renaissance warfare when armies manoeuvred around each other in a kind of choreographic parade, when troops were more concerned to pillage than to fight, when such a battle as that at Anghiari in 1440 – in which nine hundred men were killed – was most unusual, when, as Luca Landucci said, the system of Italian soldiers was formulated thus: ‘You turn your attention to plundering in that direction, and we will do the same in this. Getting too near each other is not our game.’

  The mercenary forces of the Holy League and the outnumbered French army clashed head on by the banks of the River Taro. The battle was short and savage; the iron cannon-balls of the French artillery, which was ‘of a sort never seen in Italy before’, mowed columns of Italian soldiers down, leaving the wounded to be cut apart by the French camp-followers. The French army, mauled yet still a formidable force, resumed its march to the north.

  The Pope had called upon Florence to play her due part in his Holy League; but the Florentines, who had seen for themselves the strength of the French army, and who were anxious not to lose so valuable a customer as France for their manufactured goods, had been deaf to his appeals; while Savonarola had continued to speak in support of the invader, claiming to be God's mouthpiece in doing so.

  The Pope, egged on by a succession of Florentine arrabiati who had gone to Rome to spread tales of the iniquities of the detested Prior of San Marco, angrily summoned him to Rome. Savonarola replied that it was not God's will that he should go; the Pope, slowly abandoning hope that the prior's enthusiasm would sooner or later wear itself out, forbade him to preach any more; Savonarola, after allowing one of his disciples to preach in his stead, soon resumed his sermons in the cathedral.

  Pope Alexander decreed that the Tuscan Dominicans, who had been granted their independence, should revert to papal control as a preliminary step towards sending the ‘pestilential heretic’ to another monastery far away from Florence. The Prior of San Marco declared that the Pope had no authority in the matter. In the hope that bribery might succeed where threats had failed, Pope Alexander offered to give Savonarola a cardinal's hat if only he would give up preaching. The prior replied that another kind of hat would suit him better, ‘one red with blood’.

  In June 1497 Savonarola was excommunicated. For a long time the prior remained silent, praying for guidance as his supporters and opponents struggled for dominance in the Maggior Consiglio. Then, evidently encouraged by an election of priori favourable to the frateschi, he announced that God's word had been vouchsafed to him: on Christmas Day he celebrated High Mass in the cathedral.

  ‘I can no longer place any faith in your Holiness,’ Savonarola replied to a threat to place the whole city under an interdict unless the Signoria either sent the prior to Rome or had him thrown into prison in Florence. ‘You have not listened to me… I must trust myself wholly to Him who chooses the weak things of this world to confound the strong. Your Holiness is well advised to make immediate provisions for your own salvation.’

  The Signoria, treated with equal high-handedness, had by now come to believe that the quarrel was getting out of hand. Savonarola's opponents were becoming more outspoken every month. Such escapades as those of the compagnacci – who desecrated the cathedral pulpit when the prior was about to preach and sent a chest crashing down into the nave when he had reached a particularly alarming passage in his sermon – were not to be taken too seriously. But older, graver men were joining the ranks of the prior's critics, while the clergy were becoming increasingly concerned about his constant insistence that his was the voice of God. The Franciscans, in particular, long antagonized by the Dominicans' claim to a special relationship with the Almighty, were demanding that the Prior of San Marco should of
fer some proof of God's exceptional favour. Moreover, for a city which was intended to be a model for Italy, Florence was showing few signs of God's approbation. Poor harvests, which had led to food shortages so severe that several poor people had died of starvation in the streets, had been followed by an outbreak of plague; and war had once again broken out with Pisa, which the King of France had not handed back to Florence as he had undertaken to do, but had made over instead to the Pisan people.

  Having regard to Florence's plight, and the discord between those who saw the Prior of San Marco as its only hope and those who condemned him as the cause of all their suffering, the Signoria asked him to preach no more. He agreed, on condition that he be allowed to explain himself in a final sermon.

  He gave this sermon, so he claimed when permission was granted him, not because he wanted to, but because he was compelled to do so by a raging fire within the very marrow of his bones. ‘I feel myself all burning,’ he declared, ‘all inflamed with the spirit of the Lord. Oh, spirit within! You rouse the waves of the sea as the wind does. You stir the tempest as you pass. I can do no other.’ He cited the fulfilment of so many of his prophecies. He had foretold the death of Lorenzo de' Medici and he was dead; he had foretold the deaths of Pope Innocent VIII and King Ferrante of Naples and, soon afterwards, they had both died too; he had issued warnings of the armies of a foreign king which would come pouring across the Alps, and the French had come. It was his bounden duty to continue preaching and prophesying; he had a divine right to resist all unlawful authority, to attack the Church, which was now a mere Satanic institution for the promotion of vice and whoredom.

  All this was too much for the Franciscans, one of whom challenged him to walk through fire with him. This would surely show that the Dominican prior was not under divine protection. Savonarola declined the challenge: he was destined for more important work; he had, however, no objection to another Dominican, Fra Domenico da Pescia, taking his place, nor to the Franciscans being represented by Fra Giuliano Rondinelli when their original champion declined to match himself in the ordeal with anyone other than Savonarola himself.