Savonarola also differed bitterly from Lorenzo’s circle on the subject of poetry. Lorenzo and his followers loved it and practiced it. Savonarola claimed to see it as an abomination. On February 26, 1492, Politian published an outline of knowledge, which he called the Panepistemon—the Book of Everything. He made what at first glance seem extraordinary claims for his own favorite art of poetry. The poet’s was a special kind of knowledge, which owed nothing to reason or experience or learning or authority. It was a form of revelation, divinely inspired. It was almost the equal of theology—a means of revealing God to man. Politian was speaking for most of his fellow scholars. He was uttering a commonplace among Florence’s academicians. Shortly afterward, in the summer of the same year, after the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Savonarola’s reply appeared in print. The idea that poets could write in praise of God was sickeningly presumptuous. “They blaspheme,” he declared, “with vile and stinking lips. For not knowing Scripture and the virtue of God, under the name of the most loathsome and lustful Jove and other false gods and unchaste goddesses and nymphs, they censure our omnipotent and ineffable Creator whom it is not at all permitted to name unless he himself allows it in Scripture.” Poetry “wallowed among the lowest forms” of art.16 Botticelli painted his enigmatic allegory of Calumny to defend the theology of poetry from Savonarola’s imprecations.17
In sermons, meanwhile, the friar began calling for the books of poets and Platonists to be burned. A couple of years later, when his supporters seized power in Florence and drove out Lorenzo’s heir, they made a bonfire of Medici vanities and outlawed the pagan sensuality of classical taste.
The Florentine engraver of the 1500 edition of Savonarola’s Truth of Prophecy imagines him debating the topic with the learned of all religions.
Girolamo Savonarola, Dialogo della verità prophetica (Florence: Tubini, Veneziano and Ghirlandi, 1500).
In retrospect, Savonarola came to see Lorenzo’s death as a kind of showdown with the values he hated and a kind of divine validation of his own views. He claimed to have predicted it. The night before lightning struck the cathedral he had another of his fits of sleeplessness. It was the second Sunday of Lent, and the lectionary called for a sermon on the subject of Lazarus, but Savonarola could not concentrate on the text. God seemed to take over. “This saying,” the friar later recalled, “came out of my mind at that time, ‘BEHOLD THE SWORD OF THE LORD, SUDDEN AND SWIFT, COVERING THE EARTH.’ So I preached to you that morning and told you that God’s wrath was stirred up and that the sword was ready and near at hand.” 18
Another death Savonarola claimed to predict occurred on July 25: that of Pope Innocent VIII. To understand the significance of his death, a retrospective of his life is necessary. Innocent never impressed anyone very favorably. The Florentine ambassador, Guidantonio Vespucci, summed up common opinion diplomatically when he said the pope was “better suited to receive advice than give it.” 19 Innocent became pope at a stalemated conclave in 1484, allegedly by signing petitioners’ claims for favors in his cell at night during the voting. He was renowned for affability and good intentions. But—even in his rare intervals of good health—he was hardly equal to the job.
Most of his pontificate was dominated by violent quarrels with the king of Naples, who scorned the papacy’s historic rights to jurisdiction in his kingdom and incited rebellions in the papal states. The throne of Naples, and that of Sicily, which was tied to it, had been disputed between rival claimants from Spain, France, and England for over two hundred years—ever since Spanish conquerors installed the ruling Aragonese dynasty and displaced the French House of Anjou, whose descendants never ceased to assert their claims and who were still plotting coups and launching raids. The Angevin claim was a subject of dispute in its turn between the houses that descended from the line: those of the dukes of Lorraine, who had a strong claim but little power with which to enforce it; the kings of England, who had long abandoned interest in Sicily; and the kings of France, who—because of their growing power, if for no better reason—were increasingly realistic claimants.
Another of Savonarola’s prophecies was that France would invade Italy in order to seize the Angevin inheritance. France was the sword that pierced his many visions. But you did not need to be a prophet to know that an invasion was only a matter of time. As Innocent’s pontificate unfolded, everyone could see it coming.
Expectations focused on the king of France, Louis XI, who united Angevin claims to Naples and Sicily because he was the residuary legatee of the previous claimant. Louis, however, was too prudent and practical to risk launching long-range wars. Louis was not made for glory. His mind was calculating, his methods cautious, his ambition worldly. “I will not say I ever saw a better king,” wrote his secretary, “for although he oppressed his subjects himself, he would not allow anyone else to do so.” By a mixture of astuteness and good fortune, he had a glorious reign. His great rival, Charles the Bold of Burgundy, fell at the Battle of Nancy, in 1477, in an attempt to re-create the ancient kingdom of Lorraine. The English, who had carved an empire in France by violence early in the century, had been expelled from the mainland by 1453, their former dominions firmly attached to the crown. Louis was free to assert royal power in parts of France that had formerly been merely nominal parts of the kingdom, including Languedoc in the south and Brittany in the north. France was the fastest-expanding realm in Christendom. Success nourished ambitions, excited envy, and attracted the eyes of outsiders in need of allies.
Louis’s son and heir, Charles, had an upbringing that might have been calculated to turn him away from the paths his father followed. Louis was a neglectful father, but when he did take a hand in his son’s education, he was full of uncharacteristically high-minded counsel.
God our creator has given us many great favors, for it has pleased him to make us chief, governor, and prince of the most noteworthy region and nation on earth, which is the kingdom of France, whereof several of the princes and kings who preceded us were so virtuous and valiant that they gained the name of Very Christian King, by reducing many great lands and divers nations of infidels to the good Catholic faith, extirpating heresies and vices from our realm, and preserving the Holy, apostolic See and the holy Church of God in their rights, liberties, and prerogatives, as well as by doing various other good deeds worthy of perpetual memory and in such a way that a certain number of them were held to be saints living forever in the very glorious company of God in his paradise.20
This rhetoric was traditional in the French royal house, as was the doctrine that the king was the servant of the people. But like most rhetoric, it tended to get honored more in the breach than in the observance. Charles’s values—his frameworks of understanding his role as a Christian king—were drawn more from stories of knights than of saints, more chivalry than clerisy. He ascended the throne as Charles VIII in 1483 at the age of thirteen, resolved to be as unlike his father as possible. Their personalities were at odds. Where Louis had been worldly, Charles was wooly; whereas the father was a realist, the son was a romantic. He spent most of his childhood in his mother’s company, reading her books. He became immersed in what we would now classify as chick-lit: romantic tales of chivalry, much the same kind of stuff that turned Columbus’s head—the medieval equivalent of dime novels, in which, typically, heroes undertook perilous journeys to conquer distant kingdoms and marry exotic princesses. In the Histoire de Mélusine, Charles read of a queen’s sons—young men like himself—who launched adventures of conquest in Cyprus and Ireland.
Lady, if you please, it seems the time has come for us to undertake a journey, so as to learn of foreign lands, kingdoms, and places and win honor and good renown on distant frontiers…. There we shall learn what is different about distant lands and what they have in common with our own. And then, if fortune or good luck is willing to befriend us, we would dearly like to conquer lands and realms.21
It would be hard to imagine a program that more exactly foreshadowed Charles
’s ambitions. Taking her leave of her adventurous sons, Mélusine grants them leave to do “what you wish for and what you see as being to your profit and honor.” She advises them to follow all the rules of a chivalrous life, adding counsel that seems to anticipate Charles’s methods as a conqueror:
And if God gives you good fortune and you are able to conquer land, govern your own persons and those of your subjects according to each person’s nature and rank. And if any rebel, be sure to humble them and make clear that you are their lords. Never lose hold of any of the rights that belong to your lordship…. Take from your subjects your rents and dues without taxing them further, save in a just cause.22
In one aspect, however, the successors of Mélusine’s sons failed to follow her advice. “Never,” said the heroine, “tell of yourselves what is not reasonable or true.” Writers of chivalry, by contrast, filled their chronicles with marvels and fables, improbable episodes, fantastic monsters, and impossible deeds. People treated them as true, much as modern TV addicts relate to their soap operas. Scenes from fictional pilgrimages adorned stained-glass windows at Sable and Chartres. Charles VIII was among the many readers chivalric tales suckered.
Even more relevant to Charles’s own prospects was The Book of the Kings’ Three Sons, in which young heirs to the thrones of France, England, and Scotland quit their homes secretly to fight for the king of Naples and his beautiful daughter, Yolande, against the Turks. “If you undertake the journey,” urged the knights who sought the princes’ help, “you will learn knowledge of all the world. Everyone will be happy to be your subject. Neither Hector of Troy nor Alexander the Great ever had the renown you will gain after your death.” In August 1492, when he was planning his own expedition to Naples, he read the book afresh. His moral education was largely based on a book of chivalric examples drawn from stories of the Trojan War and presented in the form of dialogues between Prince Hector and the Goddess of Wisdom.23
Historians have tried to discard the traditional view that tales of chivalry besotted Charles VIII and filled him with romantic notions. But none of the alternative explanations for his behavior works. There was no economic or political advantage to be gained from invading Italy, whereas the conclusion that storybook self-perceptions jostled in the king’s mind seems inescapable. As heir of René of Anjou, he succeeded to a great romantic lost cause. Beyond Naples and Sicily lay the lure of Jerusalem, the long-lost crusader kingdom. The title of King of Jerusalem, though disputed by other monarchs, went with the Sicilian throne. Charles’s accounts show that he remained an avid collector of chivalric books throughout his life. He identified with a former conqueror of Italy, his namesake Charlemagne, whom many writers reworked as a fictional hero. He called his son Charles-Orland, after Roland, Charlemagne’s companion, who, in fictions his legend spawned, supposedly roamed southern Italy performing deeds of love and valor and who, in an equally false and venerable fiction, died fighting Muslims. Charlemagne was more than a historical figure: legends cast him as a crusader and included a tale of a voyage to Jerusalem, which he never made in reality. He was a once and future king who, in legend, never died but went to sleep, to reawaken when the time was ripe to unify Christendom. The legend blended with prophecies of the rise of a Last World Emperor, who would conquer Jerusalem, defeat the Antichrist, and inaugurate a new age, prefatory to the Second Coming.
Italians with their own agendas encouraged Charles’s fantasies. When he entered Siena, the citizens greeted him with paired effigies of himself and Charlemagne, his supposed predecessor. In the violently divided politics of Florence, some citizens wanted him as an ally against others. Venetians and Milanese wanted him on their side in their wars against Naples and the pope. When popes had quarrels with Naples, they wanted him to fight on their behalf. When Charles was still a small boy, Sixtus IV had sent him his first sword as a Christmas gift.
If Charlemagne’s road through Naples led—at least in fiction—to Jerusalem, it was conceivable at the time that Charles VIII could follow him all the way. The prospects for renewing the crusade against the Turks seemed genuinely promising. The internecine squabbles of the Ottoman dynasty had driven the pretender to the sultanate, Prince Djem or Zizim, into the arms of the Knights of Rhodes, who had sent him to France for safekeeping in 1482. The Book of the Kings’ Three Sons featured a Turkish prince who embraced Christianity and converted his people: to Charles, it must have read like a prophetic text. The sultan of Egypt, who put politics above religion, offered a million ducats in support of a new crusade. Meanwhile, the menace of Turkish power in the Mediterranean grew as raids spread as far as Italy and a Turkish task force seized Otranto. In 1488, a Venetian publicist visited France to canvas support. “Today,” he complained, “faith has fallen, zeal is dead. The Christian cause has tumbled to a point so low that it is no longer for the sake of Jerusalem, or Asia, or even Greece that the Holy See has sent us to your Majesty, but it is for Italy herself, for the very towns of the holy Roman Church, her cities and people, that we have come to beg your aid.” 24
On the way to Jerusalem and the lands of the Turks, the crown of Naples and Sicily gleamed. As early as 1482, the pope—Sixtus IV at that time—trailed the possibility before the unresponsive eyes of Louis XI, suggesting explicitly that young Charles could be the beneficiary. If France wanted to conquer Naples, “now is the acceptable time…. This realm belongs by hereditary right to his royal Majesty…. The pope’s will is that his Majesty or the lord dauphin be invested with this kingdom.” 25
In the late 1480s, dissensions within the kingdom of Naples seemed to make the project increasingly practicable. In 1489, Charles received a group of dissident Neapolitan nobles at his court. Their numbers grew over the next three years. During 1490, they laid out plans for the conquest at repeated meetings of Charles’s council. The pope’s envoys reported—with some cautious qualifications—that the French at last seemed to be steeled for the invasion. Charles prepared his route southward by alliance with Milan and covered his northern flank by marrying Anne of Brittany and attaching that dangerously independent duchy firmly, at last, to France. The news of the fall of Granada in January 1492 came like a call to compete for glory. A few weeks later, Innocent made his peace with Naples. Broadly speaking, the terms were that the pope would continue to dispense justice in Naples—but only according to the king’s wishes—while Naples would support the papacy with force of arms. To seal the bargain, the Neapolitans presented the pope with their most precious relic—the tip of the lance that was supposed to have pierced Christ’s side at the Crucifixion. Ironically, the settlement excited French interest as the dispute never had. French lust for the Neapolitan crown began to increase, with consequences that would prove fatal in the future. From March to May 1492, a Milanese embassy was in Paris, enticing the king into a final decision. Their machinations infuriated Peter Martyr, who from his vantage point at the court of the King of Aragon thought it “folly to place a viper or scorpion in one’s own bed in the hope that it may poison one’s neighbor…. You will all see. Charles, if he has any sense, will know how to exploit his chance.” 26
While they were at work, news of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s death arrived. A major obstacle disappeared. Florence, weakened by Lorenzo’s death and awestruck by Savonarola’s preaching, would be unable to put up much resistance to a French advance. Meanwhile, almost as soon as Innocent fixed matters with Naples and took solemn possession of the Holy Spear, a new, protracted illness overcame him, which proved to be his last. His physicians grew desperate. One of them allegedly offered to succor his patient with his son’s blood, which the pope refused to drink. By July, Innocent’s stomach pains were becoming unbearable, the sores on his legs unsightly. The shadow of his impending death seemed visible. The mob grew restive. The cardinals began to maneuver in preparation for the conclave. By July 19, according to the Florentine ambassador, the pope’s body was effectively dead and only his soul remained to him. He yielded it up five days later. Before an invasi
on could begin, however, another obstacle arose. Innocent VIII had already decided to back a rival contender for the throne of Naples; but between indecision and infirmity he is unlikely to have offered serious opposition to Charles’s hopes, had he lived.
The conclave that followed his death took place in an atmosphere redolent of corruption. Moralists loved to find fault with Rome. According to the most anticlerical and sententious of the diarists of the time, the city housed sixty-eight hundred harlots “not counting those who practiced their nefarious trade under the cloak of concubinage and those who practiced their arts in secret.” The front-runner to succeed Innocent VIII seemed representative of all that was rotten in Rome. Rodrigo Borgia had been the favorite and runner-up at the last conclave, when Innocent VIII was elected, but his reputation, as a Florentine ambassador recorded, was already unsavory: false and proud. People excused his notorious womanizing, and the three children he fathered, on the grounds that he was fatally attractive. The wealth he piled up by accumulating benefices and offices of profit quenched all his disadvantages. “He possesses,” as a diarist who knew him observed, “immense quantities of silver plate, pearls, hangings, and vestments embroidered in gold and silk, and all of such splendid quality as would befit a king or a pope. I pass over the sumptuous adornments of his litters and trappings for his horses, and all his gold and silver and silks, together with his magnificent wardrobe and his hoards of treasure.” 27
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