2

‘Blind wickedness’

GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA HAILED from the northern provincial city state of Ferrara, whose territory straddled the Po delta and its hinterland south of Venice. He was born on 21 September 1452, making him just three years younger than Lorenzo the Magnificent. He too had been exposed to genius at an early age, in the form of his paternal grandfather Michele Savonarola, who had been employed at the flamboyant court of the d’Este family, the rulers of Ferrara. Michele was one of the leading physicians of his age, and wrote numerous works, including The Practice of Medicine from Head to Toe, a comprehensive study that claimed to include all medical knowledge extant at that period. He also made a study of children and childcare that was way ahead of its time. In the light of such knowledge, Michele Savonarola could well be regarded as a pioneer of humanistic thought. Ironically, in real life he was very much the opposite. Spiritually he remained strictly a man of the era in which he had grown up – namely, the late 1300s. In this respect, Michele was a dyed-in-the-wool medievalist, and ‘certain of the minor works he wrote in his old age have the quality of being written by a learned anchorite rather than a doctor of the d’Este court, being as they are so full of pedantry and moralising’.¹ Such was the dominant personality who, on his retirement, would devote himself to educating the five-year-old Savonarola, instilling in his eager pupil all the rigid principles of an age that in parts of Italy was already passing into history. Indeed, this was very much the case in Ferrara, which was ruled by the sophisticated Duke Borso d’Este, scion of one of Europe’s most aristocratic families, who as patrons of the arts would during this period become second only to the Medici.^fn1

At the age of seven Savonarola would witness a formative historical event, when the new pope, Pius II, passed through Ferrara on his triumphal procession across northern Italy. (It was earlier on this very journey that the pope had been entertained in Florence by a pageant featuring the ten-year-old Lorenzo de’ Medici.) Pius II was accompanied by:

a cortège of incredible pomp, with ten cardinals, sixty bishops and many secular princes in his train … At Ferrara the Pope made his entrance under a canopy of gold brocade; the streets through which he passed were carpeted with cloth and sprinkled with flowers; rich tapestries hung from the windows, and the city echoed with music and song. On reaching the cathedral, Guarino [a renowned humanist scholar] read him a long Latin oration, crammed with learned allusions and praise of the Holy Father. For a whole week Pius II was detained in Ferrara by a succession of festivities.²

During his visit the worldly Pius II’s penchant for fine dining and entertainment by courtesans would certainly have been indulged by his generous host. Although this would have taken place amidst circumstances of the strictest privacy, gossip concerning such events would have spread amongst families who retained close court connections, such as the Savonarolas. Even after the retirement of Michele Savonarola, his son Niccolò continued to hold an unspecified minor post at the d’Este court.

Pius II may have been flattered by the magnificent welcome accorded him in Ferrara, but he had few illusions about his host, recording in his memoirs: ‘Borso was a man of fine physique and more than average height with beautiful hair and pleasing countenance. He was eloquent and garrulous and listened to himself talking as if he pleased himself more than his hearers. His talk was full of blandishments mingled with lies.’³ Borso was a homosexual and his frivolous squandering had hardly endeared him to Michele Savonarola, who secretly voiced the opinion that ‘the giving of robes, horses, possessions and money to buffoons and unworthy men diminishes the love of the people’.⁴ Such opinions were best kept to oneself, as anyone who had attended Borso’s court knew only too well, for beneath the castello were:

subterranean dungeons guarded by seven gratings from the light of day. They were full of immured victims, and the clanking of chains and groans of human beings in pain could be heard from their depths, mingling with the strains of music and ceaseless revelry going on above, the ringing of silver plate, the clatter of majolica dishes, and clinking of Venetian glass.⁵

Despite the need for secrecy, Michele Savonarola’s views on such matters would certainly have been passed on to his grandson, who was said to have been taken to court only once, by his father, and to have sworn never to repeat the experience.

Michele Savonarola would die around 1468, when his grandson was sixteen.^fn2 By now young Girolamo Savonarola was exhibiting the precocious mental brilliance that his grandfather had doubtless detected at an early age, causing him to be singled out from his six siblings. By this time he had already learned by heart entire books of the Bible, and had absorbed as the Holy Writ the oft-repeated maxims of his ascetic grandfather, such as ‘That which God has ordered, the Popes and their Vicars cannot rule otherwise.’⁶ Such sentiments were not unusual at the time; there was indeed a widespread understanding throughout the secular educated classes in Italy that the Church was corrupt, and many discerning Italians maintained a sincere religious belief that remained separate and personal, paying little more than lip-service (and unavoidable financial contributions) to the hierarchy that claimed to represent their religion on Earth.

However, Michele Savonarola had not seen life this way, and had instilled in his grandson a more unaccommodating attitude. As a result, young Girolamo was filled with outrage at what he saw, and such laxity and corruption only served to spur him to a more urgent conception of life. Either religion meant saving one’s soul – the most overriding and vital task on Earth – or it meant nothing at all.

But Girolamo’s grandfather had also instructed him in philosophy – and here he learned to embrace Aristotelianism, rather than the fashionable new Platonism so favoured by the humanists. Savonarola took to heart the ideas of Aristotle as interpreted by St Thomas Aquinas, which over the years had become the orthodoxy of medieval scholasticism. This applied some Ancient Greek philosophy and Aristotelian logic to the Bible in order to explain the doctrine and mysteries of the Christian religion. It was an attempt to give religious belief and theology a more philosophical foundation, though over the years this had ossified into something of a rigid orthodoxy. Religious and philosophical argument had to proceed by appealing to the authority of the Bible or Aristotle. The recently rediscovered works of Plato, which had come to western Europe after the fall of Constantinople, as well as the classical works of Ancient Greece and Rome now so favoured by the humanists, were dismissed as pagan heresies.

All this the young Savonarola had taken to heart, and he spent many hours in precocious reading on such matters. During his adolescent years, it was said of him that ‘he was in the habit of speaking little with others, and was always withdrawn and solitary’.⁷Despite this, it seems that at some stage following his grandfather’s death Savonarola did in fact embark upon a course of liberal studies under Battista Guarino at the University of Ferrara. Savonarola’s father Niccolò persuaded him to embark upon this course so that he could obtain a Master of Arts degree, as a prerequisite for studying medicine. Niccolò placed great hopes in his son’s future, which he believed would bring the boy fame and fortune like that of his grandfather Michele. But Niccolò also had other motives for persuading his son to try and emulate his famous grandfather. Niccolò had come into a generous inheritance from his father, and in order to supplement his income as a minor functionary at the d’Este court he had used his inheritance to finance a sideline as a banker. Possibly in the attempt to raise his status at court, he had stood surety for loans to various courtiers who had then defaulted. Niccolò Savonarola was desperate for money, and the pressure he exerted on Girolamo to enter the university must have been considerable:when he became a successful doctor he would be expected to provide for the entire family, as well as help his father maintain appearances at court.

Girolamo’s studies under Guarino gave him a wide knowledge of humanism and the classical philosophers from whom it derived its ideas. As a result, when Savonarola later attacked humanism so vehemently, his adversaries would often be surprised at how well informed he was about their ideas and the attitude that they encouraged. Indeed, at some stage Savonarola himself even succumbed to the excitement of this new outlook on life, going so far as to learn how to play the lute and write poetry. Yet even here, amidst the melancholy so natural to any young poet, he often focused on the deeper concerns imbued in him by his grandfather:

In the sadness of my heart I spoke⁸

With the ancient Mother who never changes,^fn3

And weeping, her eyes modestly lowered,

She led me to her beggar’s cave.

With his verse exhibiting such Freudian undertones, it comes as no surprise that around this time the young poet fell in love. The object of his intense affections was a girl called Laodamia, an illegitimate daughter of the distinguished Strozzi family, then in exile from Florence, whose house was next door to the Savonarola family home. A narrow alleyway separated the two houses, making it possible to converse between them from the opened windows of the overhanging upper storeys, and it seems that Savonarola and Laodamia got to know each other in this way. Soon he was serenading his inamorata with his lute. However, Savonarola evidently misjudged the situation, for when he asked Laodamia to marry him she scornfully turned down his proposal, telling him that no Strozzi would ever stoop to marry a mere Savonarola. Stung by this rejection, Savonarola at once retorted that no legitimate male Savonarola would ever condescend to marry a Strozzi bastard.

This story only came to light some three centuries later, amongst the papers of Fra Benedetto of Florence, Savonarola’s colleague and early biographer.⁹ Even so, the story was dismissed as a legend. However, subsequent research has revealed that the Savonarola house in Ferrara did indeed stand next door to the Strozzi mansion; and that according to the records, Roberto Strozzi had an illegitimate daughter called Laodamia, who lived in Ferrara at the time. Fra Benedetto received most of his information at first hand from Savonarola himself, indicating that this incident must have lodged in Savonarola’s mind long after he foreswore the ways of the world. Such a sexual rejection, especially with its social overtones, may well have been formative. Some years after this incident, Savonarola would write that even before he took holy orders he had ‘not had desire for a woman’. Given his passion for truth-telling, Savonarola must consciously have believed this at the time.¹⁰ Yet according to Fra Benedetto’s account, in his later years Savonarola would recall the story of his rejection by Laodamia. The sexual and social implications of this incident may have become all the stronger as a result of this memory being repressed during the intervening years. His detestation of ‘lustfulness [and the] lusts of the flesh’¹¹ and his hatred of class privilege would become integral to his religious drive.

Such inclinations were now to be reinforced in the raw. In 1471 Duke Borso d’Este fell mortally ill, either as a result of his dissipation or by poisoning. As he lay at death’s door in his residence at Belfiore, forty miles north of Ferrara, civil war broke out in the city between his younger brother Ercole and his nephew Niccolò, who – in the absence of any declared succession – both claimed to be his rightful heir. Niccolò took over the castello, appealing to Milan and Mantua to back his claim; meanwhile Ercole called on nearby Venice for support. Opposing groups of supporters took to the streets, and the result was what Savonarola would later refer to as ‘the bloody Saturnalia of Ferrara’.¹² Desperately barricaded into their house on one of the main streets leading to the castello, the Savonarola family could only watch terrified as:

the partisans, intoxicated by the fumes of blood, fought a veritable war of extermination. The wives and daughters of the leaders of the opposing factions were dragged from their homes to be publicly dishonoured by the lowest plebs. People were pitched from the roofs of their houses where they had fled for refuge to be hacked to pieces in the streets below. Dwellings were set on fire and the inhabitants, prevented from coming out by their beleaguerers, perished in the smoke and flames.¹³

The mob supporting Ercole eventually prevailed; yet according to one source, the aftermath was almost as bad: ‘Caleffini reports that the bodies of two hundred of the leading citizens, after being stripped and mutilated, were nailed to the eaves of the ducal palace.’¹⁴ The young and impressionable Savonarola could hardly have avoided this grotesque sight, which was less than half a mile down the road from his house and the nearby university.

Soon after this, Savonarola obtained his Master of Arts degree and began to study medicine. The intimate involvement with the flesh required of such studies must soon have begun to repel him, awakening in him an intense spiritual yearning. He was disgusted by all he saw around him, and abhorred the sordid world in which he found himself. As he would write in a poem entitled ‘On the Ruin of the World’:

Now those who live from theft are all content,¹⁵

And those who feed the most on others’ blood …

He goes on to rail against those who mock Our Lord in Heaven, and how Rome is so filled with vice that it can never return to the days of its great past, and how ‘usury is now called philosophy’.

Amidst all his castigating it is possible to detect a growing sense of the injustice of it all. The rich clambered over the poor in an attempt to gain more riches; instead of compassion and theology, men concentrated their minds on making money. Instead of discovering God, they discovered how to make a fortune by means of usury. It is difficult to avoid seeing his father’s role in all this: prompted by avarice, Niccolò had lost the family fortune by resorting to usury. And because of this, Savonarola had been forced to go against all his inclinations and study medicine – until early in 1474 things finally came to a crisis. To celebrate the May holiday, Savonarola walked the forty miles to Faenza. Away from his Bible and his medical books, crossing the humid terrain of the Po delta, pacing along the road between the flat green fields, he was alone with his nagging thoughts. Having reached Faenza, he explored the streets amidst the throng of the May Day crowds. But the sight of such blatant godless enjoyment amidst the market stalls, street hawkers and puppet booths drove him to seek sanctuary in the Church of Santo Agostino, where a friar was delivering the day’s sermon, his distant voice echoing through the dim stillness. His text was taken from Genesis, where God speaks to Abraham, telling him: ‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house …’¹⁶ As Savonarola would later recount in his own sermons, he at once recognised that this was the voice of God speaking directly to him. From that day on he knew that he would have to leave his home, abandon his family and forsake everything to follow God. He returned to Ferrara firm in the conviction that he would renounce the world and become a priest.

Yet it would be almost a year before Savonarola could bring himself to act upon this resolution. He had no wish to provoke a hysterical scene, in which he would have been confronted by the tears and entreaties of the various members of his family, for ‘truly this would have broken my heart, and I should have renounced my purpose’.¹⁷ Instead, he waited until 24 April the following year, choosing to slip away from his home whilst the family were in the midst of the St George’s Day celebrations. Hastily he set off to walk the thirty miles to Bologna, where he made his way to the Dominican monastery, rapped on the door and asked to be taken in as a novitiate monk. The following day the twenty-three-year-old wrote a long letter addressed ‘To the noble and illustrious man Niccolò Savonarola, a most excellent parent’. In this he attempted to comfort his family, who were ‘doubtless suffering greatly because of my departure, and especially because I departed secretly from you’. He went on:

I thus beg you, my dear father, to put an end to your weeping and spare me any further sadness and pain than I suffer already. However, you must understand that I do not suffer because of regret at what I have done, for I would not undo this even if such a choice would make me greater than Caesar himself, but instead my suffering is because I too am flesh and blood, just like you, and our senses quarrel with our reason. I must constantly battle to prevent the Devil from leaping onto my shoulders, and all the more so when I feel for you.

And why had he chosen such a life? After cataloguing ‘the great wretchedness of the world, the evil of men, rapes, adulteries’ and so on, he sums up his reason for taking holy orders: ‘I did this because of the blind wickedness of the people of Italy.’

Either Savonarola had fled from this ‘blind wickedness’, or his intention was to do something about it. Despite fleeing from his family, the former course of action ran contrary to his nature. Thus from the very outset it would seem that his aim was more than merely the saving of his own soul. Indeed, in a second letter, addressed to his family (the first had been very badly received by his father), he ends by haughtily informing them that they should ‘rejoice that God made me a doctor of souls, rather than a doctor of bodies’.¹⁸ He would cure the spiritual ills of the world rather than its physical ailments.

Other evidence tends to contradict this somewhat exalted view of himself. When he first entered the monastery he is said to have done so not with the intention of becoming a priest, but instead to serve out a penance for his sins. He wished to be assigned only the humblest tasks: to become the monastery drudge, sewing the brothers’ clothes, digging the garden, working in humility and peace. As he put it, he had no intention of ‘exchanging the Aristotelianism of the world for that of the monastery’. Yet it is not necessary to choose between such contradictory evidence. Far from it. Such contradictions hint at the deep conflicts that remained unresolved in his complex and driven character. Only intense pride craves such extreme humiliation; only an intellectual dreams of losing himself in mindless drudgery. Such a drudge would have been regarded as an almost subhuman serf; worse still, sewing was considered women’s work. A monk, for all his chastity, remained nonetheless a man in the Italy of this period, and was proud to be regarded as such. In his letter to his father, Savonarola specifically contrasted ‘a strong man who spurns transitory things to follow truth’¹⁹ with the ‘passion of a simple woman’. In view of his constant strictures against women, it is worth bearing in mind that Savonarola’s view of the female sex was for the most part informed by the passionate and angry misogyny of the Old Testament prophets, as well as the prejudices of his time and his country – along with his experiences of Laodamia and of his mother Elena, of whom little is known during this period beyond one salient, undermining fact. On the night before he fled the family home, his mother heard him strumming on his lute, whose melancholy tones caused her to pause from what she was doing. In a flash of intuition she realised what was going to happen and said to him: ‘My son, what you are playing today is a sign that you are parting from us.’²⁰ It had been a ‘simple woman’ who had seen through him.

In fact, we know little of Savonarola’s early life in the monastery; as his biographer Roberto Ridolfi put it, ‘the silence which enveloped him through these seven long years seems symbolic of the silence in which as a young man he entered the cloister, intent upon building, in humility and contemplation, his new life’.²¹ The Dominican order had been founded in 1216 by St Dominic, a scholarly Spanish monk who gave up his possessions to aid the poor. He established the Dominicans as a preaching order of mendicant friars, who took a vow of poverty and depended upon charity for their livelihood. Much like its founder, the order tended to attract men of high intellectual calibre who sought to preach and alleviate the sufferings of the poor. It also produced many lecturers in the universities, and was later put in charge of the Inquisition (which accounts for why the inquisitors were known as ‘Hounds of God’: in Latin domini canes). However, more generally they were known as the ‘Black Friars’, on account of the distinctive hooded black cloaks, which they wore over their white woollen habits.

Savonarola would later look back on his novitiate year in the Dominican monastery at Bologna as the happiest in his life, ‘where I found liberty, and did all that I wanted, because I wanted nothing else, desired nothing else, than to do all that I was told or commanded to do’.²² He welcomed the self-denial that was required of the monks, and rejoiced in the further abstinence he was able to impose upon himself. From the outset, Savonarola was excused the usual lessons in Latin because he had already learned this at university. Instead, he spent much of his time studying the great medieval philosopher St Thomas Aquinas, whose interpretations of Aristotelian thought had by now become his favourite reading. Savonarola probably took his vows in May 1476, and thereupon immersed himself in the monastic life. His zeal for abstinence and self-denial soon became apparent to all. So too did his enthusiasm for the customary course of theological studies at the celebrated Dominican Studium generale in Bologna. This was one of the most distinguished theological colleges in Italy, with many eminent scholars amongst its teaching staff. Savonarola soon began to shine amongst his fellow pupils. Indeed, such was his exemplary aptitude for both the ascetic and the theological aspects of monastic life that within a few years he was considered ready for a teaching post. In 1479, just four years after leaving home, the twenty-seven-year-old Savonarola returned to Ferrara, where he took up a post as teaching master for the novices at the local Dominican monastery. By now his father had been forced to sell their home to the next-door Strozzi, and the young priest is said to have seen little of his family during this time.

Meanwhile, Italy had entered yet another volatile political period. Three years previously, in 1476, Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan had been assassinated in church. In the same year, Niccolò d’Este led an armed invasion of Ferrara in another attempt to wrest the dukedom from his uncle, but this was defeated and Niccolò was beheaded (before his head was sewn on again and he was buried in the family vault). Just two years later, news of the Pazzi family’s attempted assassination of Lorenzo de’ Medici, backed by Sixtus IV and King Ferrante of Naples, rocked Italy. The fact that his would-be assassin was a priest, and the murder was backed by the pope himself, merely gave public confirmation to what so many had privately known: the Church hierarchy, especially in its upper echelons, had become all but irredeemably corrupt. In his poem ‘On the Ruin of the World’ Savonarola had written despairingly:

The sceptre has fallen into the hands of a pirate;²³

Saint Peter is overthrown;

Here lust and greed are everywhere …^fn4

Even so, Savonarola remained unwavering in his faith – as, for the most part, did the pope’s flock throughout Christendom. The new Duke Ercole of Ferrara was particularly renowned for his church-going, unfailingly attending Mass and Vespers every day. He also lavished considerable sums on the building of churches and religious institutions in Ferrara, making the Renaissance a golden age for the city. The great historian Jacob Burckhardt was in no doubt as to Ferrara’s eminence:

If the rapid increase of the population be a measure of prosperity actually attained, it is certainly a fact of importance that in the year 1497, notwithstanding the wonderful extension of the capital, no houses were to be let. Ferrara is the first really modern city in Europe; large and well-built quarters sprang up at the bidding of the ruler: here, by the concentration of the official classes and the active promotion of trade, was formed for the first time a true capital.²⁴

The population of Ferrara rose to around 25,000 during this period; by comparison the population of London was around 50,000, and that of Florence probably around 90,000. Even so, the architecture of Ferrara certainly rivalled that of its Tuscan counterpart – when Savonarola first arrived in Florence he would be no overawed provincial, despite being regarded as such by many Florentines.^fn5

But in 1482 Ferrara was once again directly disturbed by the volatility of the Italian political scene. In the aftermath of the failed Pazzi conspiracy, and Lorenzo’s courageous dash to Naples, which had secured a peace treaty with King Ferrante, Sixtus IV had been forced to join this treaty. This new alliance, and Christianity as a whole, now faced peril. The threat came from the distant East. Since taking Constantinople in 1453, Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror had gradually expanded the Ottoman Empire across Greece and the Balkans, eventually reaching the Adriatic shore opposite Italy. In August 1480, Ottoman forces had landed in the heel of Italy, taking the port of Otranto. 12,000 of the inhabitants were slaughtered, a similar number shipped into slavery; 800 remaining inhabitants were then beheaded for refusing to convert to Islam, their skulls piled into a pyramid. Christendom itself had stood in danger, and Sixtus IV had rallied Italy for the defence of the faith. Then in May 1481 Mehmet the Conqueror had died, most of the Ottoman forces had been withdrawn and Otranto was retaken.

With the passing of the Ottoman threat, Sixtus IV thought better of launching another attack on Florence, which would only have brought Ferrante I of Naples into the field against him. Instead, he decided to move against Ferrara, which had long been claimed as a papal possession. Venice had supported Ercole d’Este in his claim to the dukedom, and Ferrara continued to rely for its protection on its powerful northern neighbour. But Sixtus IV now secretly induced Venice to switch to an alliegance with the papacy, promising the Venetians the valuable Ferrarese salt-pans of the Po delta if they aided his ‘nephew’ Girolamo Riario in taking Ferrara. Sixtus IV intended that Ferrara should be added to the papal territory already ruled by Riario. Consequently, in the spring of 1482 Ferrara found itself under threat, with Venetian forces poised to cross the Po and mount an invasion.

At the time, Savonarola was not in fact present in Ferrara. He had been selected as representative for Ferrara at the Chapter General of the Dominicans of Lombardy – an indication of his growing regard within the order. The Chapter General was the annual congress that debated the theological policy of the order, and was being held at Reggio, sixty miles west of Ferrara, attracting clerical and lay delegates from far and wide, as well as a number of leading philosophical and literary figures. Here Savonarola listened to the debates conducted by distinguished Dominican theologians. As part of these debates, Savonarola himself delivered a passionate attack on the corruption of the Church, which was heard by the precocious nineteen-year-old philosopher Pico della Mirandola, who was so impressed by Savonarola’s evident intellectual powers and deep theological learning that he sought him out afterwards. The two established a rapport that was as immediate as it was unlikely.

Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, to give him his full title, was a prodigy of impeccable aristocratic descent, with links to the d’Este family, the Sforzas of Milan and the distinguished House of Gonzaga, which ruled nearby Mantua. Pico had spent his early years in the tiny independent city state of Mirandola, which was ruled by his family and was under the protection of Ferrara, whose capital city lay just thirty miles to the east. Pico’s appearance was very much the polar opposite of the raw-featured Savonarola in his plain monk’s robes. Indeed, Pico was something of a peacock, who dressed in fashionable Renaissance-style attire, his long auburn locks flowing over his shoulders, his delicate face exhibiting an almost feminine sensitivity and beauty. His astonishing learning had by now begun to attract widespread attention: he had already mastered Latin and Ancient Greek, and had launched into studies of Hebrew and Arabic. Later he would be one of the few men in Europe who could understand Aramaic and Babylonian texts in Chaldean script. Yet Pico’s intellectual achievements were more than just an exhibition of dazzling brilliance. His studies were driven by a deep theological-philosophical impulse – a pressing need to understand the religions from which Christianity had sprung, combined with a dedicated quest for the common philosophical ideas that enlightened these religions. Indeed, what drew Savonarola and Pico della Mirandola together more than anything was probably their shared deep understanding of the ancient Judaic texts that formed the Old Testament, and thus informed the Christianity of the New Testament. Savonarola may even have seen Pico some three years previously, when the then sixteen-year-old philosopher had taken part in a public theological debate in Ferrara, which had attracted much attention at the time. Pico had also attended lectures given at the University of Ferrara by Battista Guarino, where he too had found Guarino’s humanist ideas unsatisfactory. However, Pico’s reservations had not been through any dislike for humanism – far from it – but more on account of the narrowness of the classical ideas upon which Guarino’s humanism was based. For Pico, these took no account of the earlier and wider sources that had initially informed classical learning.

Although Pico and Savonarola cannot have realised it at the time, their meeting in 1482 at the Chapter General of the Dominicans of Lombardy in Reggio was to have far-reaching effects for both of them. Despite the fact that this encounter between the nineteen-year-old aristocrat-scholar and the twenty-nine-year-old friar can only have been fleeting, there is no denying that it produced a meeting of minds. Their interpretation of the Christian faith, to say nothing of their individual philosophical outlooks, may have been widely disparate, but they certainly respected one another. Perhaps for the first time, each found himself encountering a man of his own generation who was his intellectual equal.

There was, however, to be a more immediate consequence of Savonarola’s attendance at the Chapter General in Reggio. And this too would prove momentous. As many had feared, in May Venetian troops eventually invaded Ferrarese territory, and it appeared too dangerous for Savonarola to make his way back to the Dominican monastery in his home town. In consequence, he was posted as a lecturer on biblical exegesis at the monastery of San Marco in Florence. In May 1482 Savonarola set out to walk the ninety miles south across the pass over the Apennine mountains to the city ruled by Lorenzo the Magnificent. Clad in his hooded black cloak, his bare feet shod in sandals, he carried with him his sole worldly possessions: a well-worn breviary, its margins filled with his many annotations beside the hymns and prayers for the daily services, and the Bible that he had inherited from his grandfather Michele.

^fn1 The d’Este were a widespread aristocratic family, branches of which had already provided a thirteenth-century German king, as well as rulers of Bavaria and Carinthia. Later they would produce the Elector of Hanover, who in the eighteenth century became King George I of Great Britain.

^fn2 Some sources claim this event took place in 1466, others that it was even earlier. At any event, its effect on his youthful grandson was profound.

^fn3 That is, the eternal Mother Church, as distinct from the corrupted contemporary Church.

^fn4 The sceptre of course represented the papacy, which traced its lineage back to St Peter; Sixtus IV was widely said to have made his fortune as a pirate in his younger days, using this to enable his rapid advance in the Church hierarchy.

^fn5 In 1570 Ferrrara would be struck by a devastating earthquake, which demolished many of its fine buildings, a disaster from which it would not recover. Never again would it bear comparison with Florence. When Charles Dickens visited Ferrara in 1846 he wrote of its ‘long silent streets and the dismantled palaces, where ivy waves in lieu of banners, where rank weeds are creeping up the long-untrodden stairs’.²⁵