Savonarola strongly disapproved of this, and as he passed through the cloisters with the Sacrament he bade them lay down their arms. Some of them obeyed him. By the evening the mob had set fire to the doors. They succeeded in scaling the walls and getting into the cloisters and chapel. Here Savonarola was found praying before the altar, and one of his friends, Fra Domenico, stood by him armed with an enormous candlestick to guard him from the blows of his assailants. In the midst of the turmoil and confusion, a traitorous monk declared that the shepherd should lay down his life for his flock. Immediately Savonarola gave himself up to the armed party which had been sent to arrest him. His two most faithful friends, Fra Domenico and Fra Silvestro, accompanied him. As he went he called out: “My brethren, remember never to doubt. The work of the Lord is ever progressive, and my death will only hasten it.”
As he came out into the street the mob greeted him with a shout of ferocious joy. It was night, and the faces of the threatening, yelling men in the torchlight must indeed have been terrifying. So great was their fury that the guards could with difficulty protect him as they led him and his companions to the great palace known as the Palazzo Vecchio, where they were cast into a dungeon.
The account of Savonarola’s torture is most tragic and terrible. He found that he simply could not bear the agony. While his limbs were stretched and twisted on the rack his courage and his senses forsook him, and he acknowledged himself guilty of any crime laid to his charge. The torture lasted for three days, and in the intervals he withdrew all he had said. “My God,” he cried, “I denied Thee for fear of pain.” Finally his judges, who were drawn from his bitterest enemies, condemned him to death. The Pope Alexander, who on hearing the news praised his well-beloved Florentines as true sons of the Church, wanted his enemy to be brought to Rome that he might see him suffer death before him. But the Arrabbiati were determined that his end should come in Florence itself. His two fellow-monks received the same treatment as he did. Fra Domenico showed great courage, and under the most cruel torture no syllable could be extracted from him which could hurt his master. Fra Silvestro, on the other hand, collapsed at the very sight of the rack, and acquiesced in every accusation brought against his master or himself.
On his last night in this world, though worn with weakness and racked by torture, nevertheless Savonarola slept a peaceful sleep with his two companions, and spoke a few touching words imploring the pardon of God for any sins he might have committed. The scaffold was erected on the Piazza and connected with the magistrates’ platform by a wooden bridge. As the three unfortunate Dominicans stepped over the planks, cruel boys thrust pointed sticks through the crevices to prick their bare feet. The first ceremony was to degrade them and deprive them of their robes. This was done by the papal nuncio. Then Savonarola, after witnessing the fate of his two friends, was taken himself and placed on the center beam of the huge cross, from the arms of which his disciples’ bodies were already dangling. A shudder of horror seemed to seize the multitude, and a voice was heard calling out, “Prophet, now is the time to perform a miracle.” There was a silence as he neared the place. He stood for a moment looking down on the crowd and his followers expected him to speak. But he said no word. The halter was fastened round his neck, light was set to the faggots, and in a few moments the great preacher, the lawgiver of Florence, was burned alive, amidst jests and taunts and curses, on the very spot where shortly before the vanities had blazed. The last words that passed his lips as the flames reached him were: “The Lord suffered as much for me.” His ashes were cast into the river Arno so that no trace of him might remain. Not many years after, with curious inconsistency, the Church wanted to canonize—that is, to make a saint of the man whom she had burned. This, however, was never done.
If we trust some of the accounts handed down to us, Savonarola can be accused of having shown weakness in the face of torture; he can be accused of having been too ambitious for political power and of having, in the fear of losing his authority, allowed without protest the execution of innocent men who were charged with conspiracy; he can be accused of having traded on the reputation of being a prophet who saw visions and to whom miraculous events occurred. He certainly placed too much confidence in the permanent effect of his eloquent preaching, and deluded himself in trusting in the loyalty of the people whom he had apparently moved. He may, no doubt, be called a fanatic—that is to say, a wild, odd man, who disregards every one and everything in his zeal to pursue the object he has in view. Such people are not frightened of making fools of themselves, and their peculiarities and their strange behavior can be very easily ridiculed. But apart from the contradictory accounts, and the incomplete records of history, we have Savonarola’s actual sermons and writings, without which he might indeed have been condemned as a charlatan. In them we can read in his own stirring language of his noble intentions and lofty aspirations, of his vigorous and single-minded pursuit of what he believed to be right, and of his uncompromising hatred of worldliness, wickedness, and crime. He was not immediately connected with the great movement known as the Reformation, in which Luther a few years later was the principal figure, when the Protestants broke off from the Roman Catholic Church. But Luther declared Savonarola to have been the precursor of his doctrine. And, indeed, his strong protest against the immorality and corruption of the Papacy and his fervent desire to increase the spiritual rather than the material authority of the Church—that is to say, its influence over men’s minds rather than its worldly power—helped to lay the foundations on which the great Reformers built. At the same time it must not be supposed that he himself had any desire to alter the creeds and traditions of the Roman Church.
A very fine description of Savonarola is introduced by one of our great novelists, George Eliot, in the story of “Romola.” Referring to his martyrdom, she says:
Power rose against him not because of his sins but because of his greatness, not because he sought to deceive the world but because he sought to make it noble. And through that greatness of his he endured double agony: not only the reviling and the torture and the death-throe, but the agony of sinking from the vision of glorious achievement into that deep shadow where he could only say, “I count as nothing: darkness encompasses me: yet the light I saw was the true light.”
A. P.