In the historic crusade against the Albigenses in 1209, when Béziers was captured and every human being therein slain, seven thousand were, by the famous order of the Papal Legate,[17] put to the sword in the great church of St. Mary Magdalene, to which they had fled for sanctuary; and the whole city, with its churches, was burned to the ground. During the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, says a social historian, a cleric—
in the rural districts of France the passage of the ravagers was traced by blackened ruins, by desecrated churches, by devastated fields, by the mutilated bodies of women and children.... Strange forms of disease which the chroniclers of those times sum up in the names of “black death,” or plague, were born of hunger and overleapt the highest barriers ... and ran riot within the overcrowded cities.[18]
In the wars of Burgundy and France in the fifteenth century Catholics habitually plundered Catholic churches. At the siege of Saint-Denis in 1411 “the Germans, the Bretons, and the Gascons promised themselves the pillage of the church and the treasures of the abbey.”[19] Later “the English, the Picards, and the Parisians ... entered the monastery ... pillaged the apartments of the inmates, and carried away the cups, the utensils, all the furniture.”[20] At Soissons, in 1414,
the Germans, the Bretons, and the Gascons were as so many wild beasts. The Comte d’Armagnac himself could not restrain them. After having pillaged the houses they set upon the convents and the churches, where the women had taken refuge. They could not escape the brutality of the men of war; the holy ornaments, the reliquaries, all was seized without respect; the hostia, the bones of the martyr, trodden under foot. Never had an army of Christians, commanded by such great seignors and formed of so many noble chevaliers, committed such horrors within the memory of man.[21]
The historian is quite mistaken; the same horrors had been many times enacted, and even on a greater scale. At the sack of Constantinople by the Christian crusaders in 1204,
the three Western bishops had strictly charged the crusaders to respect the churches and the persons of the clergy, the monks, and the nuns. They were talking to the winds. In the frantic excitement of victory all restraint was flung aside, and the warriors of the cross abandoned themselves with ferocious greed to their insatiable and filthy lewdness. With disgusting gestures and in shameless attire an abandoned woman screamed out a drunken song from the patriarchal chair in the church of Sancta Sophia.... Wretches blind with fury drained off draughts of wine from the vessels of the altar; the table of oblation, famed for its exquisite and costly workmanship, was shattered; the splendid pulpit with its silver ornaments utterly defaced. Mules and horses were driven into the churches[22] to bear away the sacred treasures; if they fell they were lashed and goaded till their blood streamed upon the pavement. While the savages were employed upon these appropriate tasks, the more devout were busy in ransacking the receptacles of holy relics and laying up a goodly store of wonder-working bones or teeth to be carried away to the churches of the great cities on the Rhine, the Loire, or the Seine.[23]
Savonarola was simply predicting for Rome, perhaps with his eye on the Turks, such a fate as befell Constantinople at Christian hands, regarding both as acts of divine vengeance, and expecting the capture of Rome to come soon. He pointed to the French invasion—he well might—as showing what was likely to happen.[24] The practice of church desecration had never ceased in Christendom for a single generation. In 1315 Edward Bruce, in his raid in Ireland, is reported to have burned churches and abbeys with all the people in them, and to have wrecked and defaced other churches, with their tombs and monuments. During the centuries between the battle of Bannockburn and the union of the English and Scottish crowns, churches, cathedrals, or abbeys were plundered or burned on both sides in nearly every great border raid. Frenchmen and Burgundians wrecked each other’s churches. In his thirteenth chapter Philip de Commines tells “Of the storming, taking, and plundering the city of Liège; together with the ruin and destruction of the very churches.” The Duke of Burgundy set a battalion of his guards to defend them, and killed one soldier of those who tried to enter; but later the soldiers forced an entrance, and all were completely plundered. “I myself,” says Commines, “was in none but the great church, but I was told so, and saw the marks of it, for which a long time after the Pope excommunicated all such as had any goods belonging to the churches in that city unless they restored them; and the duke appointed certain officers to go up and down his country to see the Pope’s sentence put in execution.”[25] As late as 1524, in the course of the campaign of Henry VIII in France, two churches were held and defended as fortresses on the French side, and captured by the invaders;[26] and in 1487 Perugia “became a beleaguered fortress under the absolute despotism of the Baglioni, who used even the cathedrals as barracks.”[27] Savonarola could not have missed hearing of that.
If there was anything astonishing for Italians in the desecration of churches at the sack of Rome, they must have had short memories. The conspiracy of the Pazzi in 1478, in which Giuliano de’ Medici was slain during high mass in the cathedral church of Florence, had been backed by the Pope; and the sacrilege of the planned deed was reckoned so horrible that one of the first appointed assassins, who blenched at it, had to be replaced by priests, who had transcended such scruples.[28] On the capture of Brescia by the French under Gaston de Foix in 1512, “things sacred and profane, the goods, the honour, and the life of the inhabitants were for seven days delivered up to the greed, the lust, and the cruelty of the soldier,” only the nuns being spared.[29] In 1526 the Milanese told the Constable Bourbon, the general of their ally:—
Frederick Barbarossa anciently desolated this city; his vengeance spared neither the inhabitants, nor the edifices, nor the walls; but that was nothing in comparison with the evils we now suffer. The barbarism of an enemy is less insupportable than the unjust cruelty of a friend ... our miseries have endured more than a month; they increase every hour; and, like the damned, we suffer, without hope, evils which before this time of calamity we believed to be beyond human endurance.[30]
Guicciardini testifies that the Spaniards of the emperor’s forces had been more cruel than the Germans,[31] violating the women and reducing to rags the men of their own allies.