[17] From Mr Armstrong's Lorenzo de' Medici.
[18] The Palle, it will be remembered, were the golden balls on the Medicean arms, and hence the rallying cry of their adherents.
[19] The familiar legend that Lorenzo told Savonarola that the three sins which lay heaviest on his conscience were the sack of Volterra, the robbery of the Monte delle Doti, and the vengeance he had taken for the Pazzi conspiracy, is only valuable as showing what were popularly supposed by the Florentines to be his greatest crimes.
[20] This Compendium of Revelations was, like the Triumph of the Cross, published both in Latin and in Italian simultaneously. I have rendered the above from the Italian version.
[21] When Savonarola entered upon the political arena, his spiritual sight was often terribly dimmed. The cause of Pisa against Florence was every bit as righteous as that of the Florentines themselves against the Medici.
[22] This Luca Landucci, whose diary we shall have occasion to quote more than once, kept an apothecary's shop near the Strozzi Palace at the Canto de' Tornaquinci. He was an ardent Piagnone, though he wavered at times. He died in 1516, and was buried in Santa Maria Novella.
[23] "He who usurpeth upon earth my place, my place, my place, which in the presence of the Son of God is vacant,
"hath made my burial-ground a conduit for that blood and filth, whereby the apostate one who fell from here above, is soothed down there below."–Paradiso xxvii.
–Wicksteed's Translation.
[24] Sermon on May 29th, 1496. In Villari and Casanova, Scelte di prediche e scritti di Fra Girolamo Savonarola.
[25] Professor Villari justly remarks that "Savonarola's attacks were never directed in the slightest degree against the dogmas of the Roman Church, but solely against those who corrupted them." The Triumph of the Cross was intended to do for the Renaissance what St Thomas Aquinas had accomplished for the Middle Ages in his Summa contra Gentiles. As this book is the fullest expression of Savonarola's creed, it is much to be regretted that more than one of its English translators have omitted some of its most characteristic and important passages bearing upon Catholic practice and doctrine, without the slightest indication that any such process of "expurgation" has been carried out.