The friar's political enemies were strong, and the Pope, the very notable Borgia, Alexander VI, in anger and in fear, excommunicated him, and bade the Signory of Florence forbid him to preach. There was great disturbance over this action, and feeling ran to a passionate height. One of Savonarola's disciples, a foolish Dominican, challenged an adversary to the ordeal by fire; the challenge was accepted, and on the appointed day all Florence, in great excitement, flocked to the piazza. The Dominican and his adversary were there, and their respective partisans, but nothing was done. One delay followed another; there was nothing but hesitancy, disagreement as to conditions, backing and filling. The disappointed populace turned on Savonarola. They had believed him a prophet and expected to see a judgment of God. The Pope took advantage of this resentment, and demanded his trial. Savonarola was tried, and tortured. During the torture a confession was extorted from him, which was undoubtedly pieced out by forgery. Our apothecary says:—
"April 19, 1498. The confession of Fra Girolamo was read before the Council in the Great Hall, which he had written with his own hand,—he whom we held to be a prophet,—and he confessed that he was not a prophet, and had not received from God the things he preached, and he confessed to many things in the course of his preaching which were the opposite of what he had given us to understand. I was there to hear the confession read, and was bewildered and stood astonished and stupefied. My soul was in pain to see such an edifice tumble to earth because it all rested on a lie. I expected Florence to be a new Jerusalem from which should proceed laws, glory, and the example of a good life and to behold the restoration of the Church, the conversion of the infidels, and the comfort of good men, and now I behold the opposite,—and I took the medicine. In Thy will, O God, stand all things."
Savonarola was condemned to death for heresy; he was hanged, his body burned, and his ashes flung into the Arno. So ended the one moral effort of the Italian Renaissance.
After his death the Republican government endured for a time; but the Medicean faction was powerful and forced its way back in 1512. Then Lorenzo's second son, Giovanni (1475-1521), following the steps of Florentine art and humanism, went to Rome and became Pope Leo X. As Pope, he was able to strengthen his family in Florence and to extend its dominion. But Republicanism, quickened by the events then happening in Rome, flared up once more in 1527; but it was helpless before the hostile spirit of the time. Another Medici had become Pope, Clement VII, and the requirements of policy induced the calculating Emperor, Charles V, to suppress what he deemed a rebellion. Florence made a gallant defence; Michelangelo strengthened her walls, and the courage of the defenders threw a dying glory over the city. A great grandson of Lorenzo, Alessandro dei Medici, was put into power, and married to a daughter of Charles V. He was succeeded by a distant cousin, Cosimo (1537), who was honoured by His Holiness the Pope with the title of Grand Duke of Tuscany. Thus Florentine liberty was extinguished, and the Medici were established as dukes in name as well as in fact.
The Two Sicilies, 1494-1516
In the south, it will be remembered, Alfonso the Magnanimous, as the grateful humanists dubbed him, had united Sicily and the mainland; but on his death (1458) the kingdom fell asunder. Sicily, as a part of the Kingdom of Aragon, devolved on a legitimate brother, whereas Naples, claimed as a conquest, was bequeathed to a bastard son, Ferdinand the Cruel. The two kingdoms followed their respective dynasties for nearly fifty years, when Sicily came by inheritance to Ferdinand of Aragon. That crafty and eminently successful monarch, not satisfied with Castile, Granada, Sicily, and a transatlantic realm, but coveting the Kingdom of Naples, conspired with Louis XII of France, who now represented the traditional Angevin claim; the two invaded the coveted kingdom, and divided it between them (1500-1). Naturally, the rogues disagreed over the division of the spoils, and fell foul of each other. The Spaniards were triumphant, and the Kingdom of Naples was annexed to the crown of Spain. Thus the Two Sicilies were reunited under the Spanish crown, and on Ferdinand's death (1516) descended to his grandson, the Emperor Charles V. The unfortunate kingdom remained an appanage of Spain for two hundred years.
Venice, 1453-1508
In the northeast Venice still led a brilliant career, like a charming woman who has received some fatal hurt and does not know it, but instinctively lives more brilliantly than ever. Her fatal hurt was the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks (1453). At first the only obvious ill consequence was war. Venice, willy-nilly, stepped into the place of Constantinople, and became "the bulwark of the West." She waged war after war with the Turks and maintained her reputation for valour and resolution, but Turkey was too strong for her, and little by little stripped her of her long-drawn-out empire of coast and island. A far worse blow than direct war was the cutting of the great trade routes with the East, which damaged all the maritime cities of Italy, but Venice most. Turkey stopped the supplies of Venetian greatness, and slowly but surely sapped Venetian strength. On the stoppage of the straight road to Asia, the blocked current of commerce poked about for a new way, and discovered that it could reach the East by doubling the Cape of Good Hope. Commerce thus avoided Turkey, but it also abandoned the Mediterranean, great centre and source of ancient civilization, and left the maritime cities of Italy stranded, as it were, on the shores of a forsaken sea.
This doom, however, was still hidden in the obscurity of the future, and Venice appeared to be at the height of prosperity. The French ambassador, Philippe de Commines, called her "the most triumphant city I have ever seen." The Venetians were a people apart from other Italians; they never suffered from foreign invasion, or domestic revolt; they lived in isolation, maintained their own customs and usages, and enjoyed a sumptuous, opulent life, in proud security. Venice was the richest, the most comfortable, the best governed city in the world. In military strength she was commonly reckoned the first power in Italy, with the Papacy, the Kingdom of Naples, and the Duchy of Milan about equal in second rank. Venice entertained no suspicion of any seeds of decadence, and continued her greedy career of annexation on the mainland, with a haughtiness worthy of ancient Rome. She laid hands on part of Romagna, and angered the Popes who had a title thereto, which, however imperfect, was much better than the Venetian title. She provoked the Emperor Maximilian, of the House of Hapsburg, who claimed Verona as an Imperial city; and to the west she came into dangerous competition with the French invaders. These enemies, taking their cue from the piratical seizure of Naples by the French and Spanish, agreed together to partition the Venetian territory on the mainland, and invited all the powers of Europe to join them and take a share of the booty. The coalition planned a kind of joint-stock piracy. This was the League of Cambrai (1508), which stripped Venice of all her Italian territory, and threatened the city herself. The allies, however, fell out among themselves; and Venice, by biding her opportunity, in the course of time managed to recover most of her lost territory. Thus, though for a season the Barbarians brought the haughty city to her knees, she weathered the storms better than the rest of Italy, and continued to maintain her independence for three centuries to come.
The Papacy deserves a chapter to itself.