Girolamo Savonarola - Reformer

Reformer

With Savonarola’s advice and support (as a non-citizen and cleric he was ineligible to hold office), a Savonarolan political "party," dubbed ‘the Frateschi,’ took shape and steered the friar’s program through the councils. The oligarchs most compromised by their service to the Medici were barred from office. A new constitution enfranchised the artisan class, opened minor civic offices to selection by lot and granted every citizen in good standing the right to a vote in a new parliament, the Consiglio Maggiore, or Great Council. At Savonarola’s urging the Frateschi government, after months of debate, passed a "Law of Appeal" to limit the longtime practice of using exile and capital punishment as factional weapons. Savonarola declared a new era of "universal peace." On January 13, 1495 he preached his great Renovation Sermon to a huge audience in the Cathedral, recalling that he had begun prophesying in Florence four years earlier, although the divine light had come to him "more than fifteen, maybe twenty years ago." He now claimed that he had predicted the deaths of Lorenzo de’ Medici and of Pope Innocent VIII in 1492 and the coming of the sword to Italy—the invasion of King Charles of France. As he had foreseen, God had chosen Florence, "the navel of Italy", as his favorite and he repeated: if the city continued to do penance and began the work of renewal it would have riches, glory and power.

If the Florentines had any doubt that the promise of worldly power and glory had heavenly sanction Savonarola emphasized this in a sermon of April 1, 1495, in which he described his mystical journey to the Virgin Mary in heaven. At the celestial throne Savonarola presents the Holy Mother a crown made by the Florentine people and presses her to reveal their future. Mary warns that the way will be hard both for the city and for him, but she assures him that God will fulfill his promises: Florence will be "more glorious, more powerful and richer than ever, extending its wings farther than anyone can imagine." She and her heavenly minions will protect the city against its enemies and support its alliance with the French. In the New Jerusalem that is Florence peace and unity will reign.

Buoyed by liberation and prophetic promise, the Florentines embraced Savonarola’s campaign to rid the city of "vice". At his repeated insistence, new laws were passed against ‘sodomy’ (which included male and female same sex relations), adultery, public drunkenness, and other moral transgressions, while his lieutenant fra Silvestro Maruffi organized boys and young men to patrol the streets to curb immodest dress and behavior. For a time, Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503) tolerated fra Girolamo’s strictures against the Church, but he was moved to anger when Florence declined to join his new Holy League against the French invader and blamed it on Savonarola’s pernicious influence. An exchange of letters between the pope and the friar ended in an impasse which Savonarola tried to break by sending His Holiness " a little book" recounting his prophetic career and describing some of his more dramatic visions. This was the Compendium of Revelations, a brilliant self-dramatization which was one of the farthest-reaching and most popular of his writings. The pope was not mollified. He summoned the friar to appear before him in Rome, and when Savonarola refused, pleading ill health and confessing that he was afraid of being attacked on the journey, Alexander banned him from further preaching. For some months Savonarola obeyed, but when he saw his influence slipping he defied the pope and resumed his sermons which became more violent in tone. He not only attacked secret enemies at home whom he rightly suspected of being in league with the papal Curia, he condemned the conventional, or "tepid" Christians who were slow to respond to his calls. He dramatized his moral campaign with special masses for the youth, processions, bonfires of the vanities and religious theater in San Marco. He and his close friend, the humanist poet Girolamo Benivieni, composed lauds and other devotional songs for the Carnival processions of 1496, 1497 and 1498, replacing the bawdy Carnival songs of the era of Lorenzo de’ Medici. These continued to be copied and performed after his death, along with songs composed by Piagnoni in his memory. A number of them have survived.