24

Judgement

TO THE SURPRISE of the Signoria, Alexander VI agreed to their proposal. In fact, he now wished to see Savonarola eliminated as quickly as possible. This would not only destroy a dangerous source of public defiance to his authority, but would put an end to Savonarola’s call for a Council of the Church, with the aim of deposing him. As ever, Alexander VI also had a further, more devious motive. The execution of Savonarola in Florence was liable to result in public disturbances, making the city ungovernable. This would provide an ideal opportunity for the reimposition of Medici rule. In a stroke, the city would be returned to stability, and would be ruled by an ally in the form of Piero de’ Medici, who would regard him with gratitude.

Alexander VI selected his two-man Papal Commission with some care. His first choice was the aged theologian Giovacchino Torriani, general of the Dominican order, who would lend the commission indisputable dignity and authority. Although just five years previously, in 1493, Torriani had in fact supported Savonarola’s wish to form a breakaway Tuscan Congregation, more recent events in Florence had deeply disturbed him. However, the leading figure in the delegation was undoubtedly Alexander VI’s second choice: his thirty-six-year-old protégé, Bishop Francesco Remolino,^fn1 an ambitious forceful character, whose legal expertise as a judge in Rome had proved his great worth to the pope in eliminating several of his enemies. Like the pope, Remolino was of Spanish descent and had become a close friend of the pope’s notorious son, Cesare Borgia. His loyalty had already seen him rewarded with no fewer than four bishoprics.

Meanwhile Savonarola languished in gaol. Much mythology has grown up around this period, and it features heavily in various forms in the contemporary biographies, which at this point tend heavily towards hagiography. Even so, certain facts seem evident. Savonarola’s cell was bare and he was forced to sleep on the stone floor. During the day it was dim, at night pitch-black, and he was allowed few visitors. His gaoler, a man of evil repute, was very much in favour of the Arrabbiati and treated his prisoner accordingly. However, close contact with the ‘little friar’ and observation of his saintly fortitude are said to have convinced this uncouth fellow of Savonarola’s cause. In response, Savonarola is said to have written for him a small tract entitled ‘A Rule for Leading the Good Life’. Given Savonarola’s pitiful physical and spiritual state, this seems unlikely, yet just such a tract would be published later in the year. The hagiographies also speak of Savonarola writing pious scraps for his gaoler to deliver to his daughter, and even of miraculously curing him of syphilis.

However, there is a second, more profound tract that shows many signs of having been written by Savonarola himself, and as such could not have been written at any other time in his life. Given his bodily condition, this was probably dictated to one of the loyal friars who were permitted to visit him. Entitled ‘An Exposition and Meditation on the Psalm ‘Miserere’, it begins:

Unfortunate am I, abandoned by all, I who have offended heaven and earth, where am I to go? With whom can I seek refuge? Who will have pity on me? I dare not raise my eyes to heaven because I have sinned against heaven. On earth I can find no refuge, because here I have created a scandalous state of affairs … Thus to Thee, most merciful God, I return filled with melancholy and grief, for Thou alone art my hope, Thou alone my refuge.¹

Savonarola then quoted the celebrated opening lines of Psalm 51, ‘Miserere mei, Deus: secundum magnam misericordiam tuam’² (‘Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness’). Later, he compared himself with Christ’s favourite disciple, St Peter, whom Christ had told on the night before his crucifixion: ‘Verily I say unto thee, That this day, even in this night, before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice.’³ And so it had come about. Yet St Peter had only denied Christ when he was asked whether he knew him:

But these questions were just words; what would he have done if the Jews had come and threatened to beat him … He would have denied once more if he had seen them getting out whips … If St Peter, to whom Thou granted so many gifts and so many favours, failed so miserably in his test, what was I capable of, O Lord? What could I do?⁴

This would appear to prove that Savonarola did indeed break down under torture and made certain untrue confessions concerning his faith. Possibly he agreed that he gave up going to confession (which we know was untrue); maybe he even went so far as to agree that his words did not come from God (despite his conviction that they did); possibly he even denied that he saw visions (his description in the ‘Compendium of Revelations’ of how he had these visions is utterly in accord with the modern psychological findings). However, it is still difficult to believe, as Ser Ceccone’s document claimed, that he confessed his ‘aim was … the glory of the world’ and that he ‘lost his faith and his soul’. It is worth considering a seemingly pedantic distinction here. St Peter denied that he knew Christ; he certainly did not deny his faith. Savonarola may well have denied that he knew God’s words; yet, like St Peter, he seems not to have denied his faith. The similarity would appear to have been intentionally exact – a comparison that would have been all too evident to an exceptional theologian such as Savonarola. He may have been cowed into signing a document that denied his faith, but he had not actually done so.

It is difficult to doubt the authenticity of the words in this last document attributed to Savonarola, now usually known simply as ‘Exposition’. Over the coming years they would profoundly move the many who eventually read them. Indeed, Savonarola’s ‘Exposition’ would have an ‘extraordinary fortune’⁵: over the course of the following two years no fewer than fourteen editions of this tract would be published – in Latin, ‘vulgar Italian’, and even ‘vulgar German’. Here was an almost saintly expression of spiritual despair: a document of rare profundity and passion, which was appreciated by scholars, clergy and laymen throughout Italy, Germany and beyond. Here was a document whose popularity would prove a dangerous focus, as dissatisfaction with the corrupt behaviour of the Church and its clergy on all levels grew ever more widespread.^fn2

Judging from the intensity and bleakness of emotion expressed by Savonarola in ‘Exposition’, by this stage he felt certain that he would soon be executed. In which case he was aware that this would probably involve him being burned at the stake as a heretic. Events were soon to confirm this likelihood. On 19 May 1498 the Papal Commission reached Florence, and by now the public mood was evident, for as the commission members rode through the city, the crowd of onlookers lining the streets shouted, ‘Death to the friar!’⁷ Remolino replied, ‘Indeed he will die.’ The Arrabbiatiwere overjoyed at the attitude of the ambitious young bishop from Rome, and in gratitude despatched to his residence a beautiful young prostitute dressed as a pageboy. The grateful Remolino assured his hosts that there could be no doubt about the outcome of the coming trial: ‘We shall have a good bonfire. I have reached the verdict already in my heart.’

Savonarola’s trial before the Papal Commissioners began the next day, with Bishop Remolino as the sole interrogator and just five Florentine dignitaries present as observers for the secular government. During the course of the preliminary questioning it became clear that Savonarola had recovered some of his composure during the month since his previous trial, which he had put to such good use composing his ‘Exposition’. This work may reveal an author amidst the most profound spiritual turmoil, yet he depicts the travails of this crisis with the clarity of a man who has regained his previous intellectual perspicacity. When Remolino began questioning Savonarola about his previous confessions, he ‘observed how [Savonarola] would pretend to answer a question, first by telling some of the truth and then obscuring it, but always without lying’.⁸

His interrogator’s patience soon snapped in the face of such apparent deviousness:

Remolino ordered that he be stripped of his robes so that he could be given the rope [strappado]. In absolute terror, he fell to his knees and said: ‘Now hear me. God, Thou hast caught me. I confess that I have denied Christ, I have told lies. O you Florentine Lords, be my witness here: I have denied Him from fear of being tortured. If I have to suffer, I wish to suffer for the truth: what I said, I heard from God. O God, Thou art making me do penance for having denied Thee under fear of torture. I deserve it.⁹

The transcript continued: ‘It was now that Savonarola was undressed, whereupon he sank to his knees once more, showing his left arm, saying that it was completely useless.’ Evidently it had been permanently dislocated during his previous subjection to the strappado, and must have remained dangling uselessly at his side during the previous month. As Savonarola had his hands bound behind his back, in preparation for them to be yanked into the air, he was clearly raving with terror, repeating: ‘I have denied you, I have denied you, God, for fear of torture.’ While he was being hauled into the air, he kept repeating frantically, ‘Jesus help me. This time you have caught me.’

Savonarola was by now reduced to the limits of endurance. One can but imagine the actual incoherence, raving and screaming which must have punctuated the more coherent words that appeared in the transcript. As Ridolfi observed, this included ‘such things as Ser Ceccone would never have recorded in his collection of lies’.¹⁰ There is no denying that this document of Savonarola’s third trial has a chilling ring of truth, evoking all manner of terror, its narrative and tone uninterrupted by any out-of-context insertions.

Remolino was an expert judicial examiner, having refined his technique in the interrogation chambers of Rome, where there were far fewer restraints upon procedure than in republican Florence. By this stage Savonarola was all but out of his mind, pleading ‘Don’t tear me apart!’ and ‘Jesus help me!’

Sadistically playing with his victim, Remolino asked, ‘Why do you call upon Jesus?’

Savonarola managed to reply, ‘So I seem like a good man.’

But when Remolino persisted with the question, Savonarola could only reply, ‘Because I am mad.’ Soon he was begging, ‘Do not torture me any further. I will tell you the truth, I will tell you the truth.’

Amidst the goading questions, Remolino suddenly asked, ‘Why did you deny what you had already confessed?’

Savonarola could only reply, ‘Because I am a fool.’

What was Remolino doing here? Savonarola had already revealed quite plainly why he had confessed to Ceccone. He had denied that he spoke with God, and that he saw visions of the future, only through his terror of torture. Yet this time he had told Remolino that he wished to suffer for the truth, that what he had said he had indeed heard from God. It was as if Remolino was determined to force Savonarola to admit that his earlier confession to Ceccone was true. For all his ruthless ambition, Remolino was still a man of God. Did he wish to make utterly sure that he was not an instrument in the interrogation (and possible martyrdom) of a prophet? This is certainly one of the interpretations that can be put on the bare outline that has come down to us through the various versions of this transcript – an interpretation that is reinforced by the later questions, where Remolino subtly sought to discredit the orthodoxy, and thus the validity, of Savonarola’s faith.

When Savonarola was finally lowered to the ground, he once again confessed, ‘When I am faced with torture, I lose all mastery over myself.’ He then added, with some relief, ‘When I am in a room with men who treat me properly, then I can express myself with reason.’

Yet it was now that Remolino’s masterly cunning came into play. He knew that Savonarola was in such a state that he was beyond reason. Sensing this, he began firing at him an inconsequential series of loaded questions, in the hope of forcing Savonarola inadvertently to condemn himself. At one point Remolino asked him, ‘Have you ever preached that Jesus Christ was just a man?’

Savonarola replied, ‘Only a fool would ever think such a thing.’ Had he given the wrong answer to this, or even a muddled reply, he could have been charged with heresy.^fn3

Other dangerous questions followed. Remolino asked, ‘Do you believe in magic charms?’

Savanorola was just able to reply, ‘I have always derided such nonsense.’ And somehow he managed to hold his ground.

On the second day of questioning, when Savonarola was seemingly capable of giving more coherent replies, Remolino turned in more detail to a matter that he had touched upon during the first day – a matter whose facts were of most interest to his master Alexander VI. Under the threat of further administration of the strappado, Remolino probed Savonarola with questions about the Council of the Church, which he had unsuccessfully attempted to summon in order to depose the pope. But Remolino soon realised that Savonarola could only tell him what he already knew. All the Italian leaders remained against Florence, and none had dared to commit to any move against Alexander VI. Remolino demanded to know which cardinals had been in favour of the council, but once again Savonarola’s answers accorded with Alexander VI’s intelligence. All had been wary of any such move. Yet Alexander VI evidently retained his suspicions, for Remolino pressed Savonarola again and again about Cardinal Caraffa of Naples, who had played such a crucial role in obtaining for Savonarola the establishment of an independent Tuscan Congregation. However, even after further application of the strappado, Savonarola continued to insist, ‘I did not make any contact with the Cardinal of Naples concerning the Council.’

Remolino reluctantly concluded that he would be able to collect no further information on this matter and soon ended the day’s interrogation, indicating that he would deliver his verdict the following day.

Even while Savonarola was still being examined by the Papal Commission, the Signoria summoned a Pratica to discuss Savonarola’s sentence. Despite the overwhelming Arrabbiati majority at this Pratica, the venerable legal expert Agnolo Niccolini, formerly a supporter of Piero de’ Medici, gave his opinion that it would be a crime to execute Savonarola, ‘for history rarely produces such a man as this’.¹¹ Niccolini went on:

This man would not only succeed in restoring faith to the world, should it ever die out, but he would disseminate the vast learning with which he is so richly endowed. For this reason, I advise that he be kept in prison, if you so choose; but spare his life, and grant him the use of writing materials, so that the world may not be deprived of his great works to the glory of God.

But the majority were all for Savonarola’s execution:

because no one can rely upon any future Signoria, as they change every two months. The Friar would almost certainly be released at some stage and once again cause disturbance to the city. A dead man cannot continue to fight for his cause.

In truth, the authorities remained seriously afraid of Savonarola and his remaining followers. Savonarola’s modern biographer Desmond Seward has produced intriguing evidence of such fears from the contemporary journal written by Sandro Botticelli’s brother Simone Filipepi. This records how, some eighteen months later, Doffo Spini, the notorious leader of the Compagnacci, happened to call late one winter’s night at Botticelli’s studio. As they sat before the fire, Botticelli began questioning Spini about Savonarola’s trials, which he knew Spini had attended. Spini confided to him, ‘Sandro, do you want me to tell you the truth? We never found anything that he had done wrong, neither mortal sin, nor venial.’¹² According to Spini, if they had spared Savonarola and his two fellow friars, and allowed them to return to San Marco, ‘the people would have turned on us, stuffing all of us into sacks and tearing us to pieces. The whole thing had gone too far – we had to do it just to save our own skins.’

On 22 May, Remolino conducted a further brief examination of Savonarola, without even bothering to include his fellow commissioner Torriani. After this, an official message was despatched to Savonarola ordering him to appear the following day, ‘when his trial would be concluded and he would receive his sentence’.¹³ Savonarola could only reply to the papal messenger, ‘I am in prison; if I am able, I will come.’ Prior to Remolino sending his report to Alexander VI, the Papal Commissioners then met the Florentine authorities to ratify the fate of Savonarola, along with that of Fra Domenico and Fra Francesco, neither of whom the commissioners had even bothered to question. In an attempt to display a modicum of Christian compassion, which all present must surely have recognised as breathtaking hypocrisy, Bishop Remolino suggested that the life of the obdurate but saintly Fra Domenico should be spared. But one of the Florentines reminded Remolino, ‘If this friar is allowed to live, all Savonarola’s doctrines will be preserved.’¹⁴Whereupon Remolino reverted to his true character and replied, ‘One little friar more or less hardly matters; let him die too.’

Bishop Remolino then retired to compile his report to Alexander VI. This incorporated Savonarola’s confessions from Ser Ceccone’s transcript without any regard for consistency, including all its farcically inaccurate details, obvious forgeries, insertions, lies and exaggerations. ‘He confesses to inciting citizens to revolt, to deliberately causing shortages of food which caused many of the poor to starve to death, and to murdering important citizens …’,¹⁵ and so forth. Not surprisingly, Remolino reported in the strongest possible terms Savonarola’s confession concerning his attempt to summon a Council of the Church, and how:

He sent letters and communications to many Christian princes, urging them to defy your Holiness and to create a schism in the Church. Such was the depth of iniquity and evil in this dissimulating monster that all his outward appearance of goodness was nothing more than a charade.

At this, Remolino’s imagination appeared to fail him, and he chose instead to protect the sensibilities of his Borgia master from the truth of Savonarola’s wickedness: ‘Of such a horrendous nature were his vile crimes that I cannot even bring myself to write them down, let alone pollute my mind with the thought of them.’

The three monks were finally condemned ‘as heretics and schismatics and for having preached new things etc’.¹⁶ On the morrow all three of them were to be ‘degraded’ (that is, stripped of their priesthood), whereupon they would be handed over to the appropriate secular authorities for due punishment.

It soon became plain to all that this punishment had already been decided. Landucci wrote of Savonarola’s fate (which was to be shared with his two fellow friars):

22 May. It was decided that he should be condemned to death, and that he should be burnt alive. That evening a scaffold was put up at the end of a walkway which reached into the middle of the Piazza della Signoria … and here was erected a solid piece of wood many braccia high, with a large circular platform around its base. A piece of wood was nailed horizontally near the top of the vertical piece of wood making it look like a cross. But people noticed this, and said: ‘They are going to crucify him.’ And when word of this reached the ears of the authorities, orders were given to saw off part of the wood, so that it would not resemble a cross.¹⁷

This was the very spot where, six weeks previously, the ordeal by fire had been due to take place.

^fn1 Sometimes referred to as Remolines or Remolins; in Florence, possibly because he had been sent from Rome, he was often called Romolino.

^fn2 Latin editions would certainly have reached England long before any English version appeared. The first known English edition, which came out in 1543, was entitled ‘An exposicyon after the maner of a coteplacyo vpon .lj. Psalme called Miserere me De’.⁶ Such was the demand for this work that it was soon followed by other translations, suggesting that it proved popular amongst upper-class women who were educated to read, but had not been taught Latin, as well as amongst literate, less-educated men, such as merchants, certain guild members and officials. These translations appeared despite England’s separation from the Church of Rome in 1531 – a further indication, if such was needed, of the regard in which this work came to be held by all Christians.

^fn3 Believers in the Arian heresy, which caused the most serious split in the ancient Church less than three centuries after the death of Christ, basically declared that Christ was ‘begotten’ – in other words, that he was a man, and not divine.