One feast day in 1475, without telling anyone where he was going, he left his father’s house to seek admittance as a novice in the monastery of San Domenico at Bologna, where he was to remain for seven years. ‘You have more reason to thank God than to complain,’ he wrote to his father, explaining his sudden departure.
For God has given you a son and has deemed him worthy to become His militant knight. Do you not think it a great grace to have a son who is a cavalier of Jesus Christ?… I was unable any longer to endure the evil doing of the heedless people of Italy… I too am made of flesh and blood, and as the instincts of the body are repugnant to reason I must fight with all my strength to stop the Devil from jumping onto my shoulders.
To help others fight the Devil, Savonarola was sent out by the Dominicans from Bologna to preach elsewhere in Italy, to Ferrara, to Brescia, to Genoa, and many other towns in Tuscany and Lombardy. In 1481 he came to Florence where he was appointed lector at San Marco and asked to give the Lent sermons at San Lorenzo. In 1489 he settled permanently in Florence at the Monastery of San Marco.
At first he was a far from effective preacher, as he himself well knew, confessing in the days when he could boast that ‘all Italy’ was moved by his preaching that in those early years he did not know ‘how to move a hen’. ‘His gestures and pronunciation pleased none, so that scarcely twenty-five women and children remained to hear him,’ wrote Cinozzi, one of his first biographers. ‘He was so discouraged that he seriously thought of giving up preaching altogether.’ It was not only that his voice was hard and his gestures violent and uncouth; he was a far from prepossessing figure. Small, thin and ugly, with a huge hooked nose and thick, fleshy lips, it was only his eyes that gave any impression of his remarkable personality. Green, intense beneath heavy, black eyebrows, they ‘sometimes gave forth red flashes’.
Although most people in Florence were inclined to prefer the more graceful, cultured and polished sermons of the Augustinian monk, Fra Mariano, for whose order Lorenzo de’ Medici built a monastery outside the Porta San Gallo, the awkward Dominican gradually acquired a following of devoted supporters prepared to overlook all the faults of his delivery for the extraordinary content of his sermons and his passionate, urgent sincerity. By 1491 his congregations had increased so much that San Marco could no longer contain them; and his Lent sermons that year were delivered in the Cathedral.
They caused an uproar throughout Florence. Savonarola had convinced himself that he was gifted with foreknowledge of the future, that his words were divinely inspired and that to deny their truth was to deny the wisdom of God. ‘It is not I who preach,’ he said, ‘but God who speaks through me.’ After prolonged periods of fasting and meditation, visions of the future had been vouchsafed to him. He knew that the Church was to be scourged, then regenerated, and that ‘these things would quickly come to pass’. He knew, too, that unless the people of Italy and, in particular, the people of Florence mended their ways they would be dreadfully punished. Only a return to the simplicity of the early Christian Church could save them. They must turn their back on Aristotle and Plato, who were now rotting in hell; they must abandon the luxuries and sensual pleasures that were destroying their souls, abolish gambling and card games, dissolute carnivals and palio races, fine clothes and scent, powder and paint; and they must give the money they saved to the poor. They must blot out all those pictures so wantonly painted that they made ‘the Virgin Mary look like a harlot’. They must chastise prostitutes – those ‘pieces of meat with eyes’ – and burn sodomites alive. They must reform their political institutions. Cosimo de’ Medici had been quite wrong to declare that states were not ruled by paternosters; they could be governed well in no other way. ‘If you want to make good laws,’ Savonarola pronounced from the Cathedral pulpit, ‘first reconcile yourselves to the laws of God, since all good laws depend on the Eternal Law.’ The Florentines had bartered their ancient liberties for the spectacles provided for them by a tyrant. They must frame a new constitution. ‘I believe the best constitution is that of the Venetians,’ he said. ‘You should copy it; but leave out the worst features, such as the office of Doge.’
To such criticisms of the Medicean regime, Lorenzo had listened with patience and toleration. His friend Pico della Mirandola had assured him that Savonarola was a great and godly man; other friends of his, Poliziano and Botticelli amongst them, had spoken of him with similar respect and awe; Michelangelo as an old man was to say that he could still hear the friar’s voice ringing in his ears. When the name of Savonarola had been put forward as Prior of San Marco, Lorenzo had raised no objection; nor had he shown any displeasure when Savonarola studiedly declined to acknowledge the Medici’s special connection with the monastery to which they had contributed so much. Once, it seems, some senior supporters of the Medicean regime called on Savonarola and suggested that he ‘should not preach such sermons’; but he had replied, ‘Go and tell Lorenzo to repent of his sins, for God will punish him and his.’ Yet Lorenzo on his deathbed had sent for Savonarola, as well as Fra Mariano, and, according to Poliziano, had been blessed by them both.
After Lorenzo’s death, Savonarola’s dire warnings of disaster and criticisms of the Medicean regime increased in intensity and became more explicit. In his sermons of 1492 he spoke of visions of the ‘Sword of the Lord’ hanging threateningly in a darkened sky over the city of Florence; of awful tempests, of plague and war, flood and famine; of a black cross, inscribed with the words ‘The Cross of God’s Anger’, rising from Rome, its arms reaching across the whole earth on which storms raged tumultuously; and of another cross, a golden cross, reaching up to the sky from Jerusalem, bathed in sunlight.
‘Repent, O Florence, while there is still time,’ Savonarola called to a congregation that sat as though petrified by the horror of his vivid images. ‘Clothe thyself in the white garments of purification. Wait no longer, for there may be no further time for repentance.’ He made it clear to them what his visions foretold: unless they turned to the golden cross, disaster would befall them. There would, indeed, be pestilence and war; foreign enemies would pour across the Alps, like ‘barbers armed with gigantic razors’, bringing distress as bitter as a dish of borage and enforcing reforms as relentlessly ‘as a mill grinding out the flour of wisdom’.
‘The Lord has placed me here,’ Savonarola declared, ‘and He has said to me: “I have put you here as a watchman in the centre of Italy that you may hear my words and announce them to the people.”’ The people listened in fear. The Prior of San Marco had foretold the death of Lorenzo; and Lorenzo was dead. He had predicted the death of Pope Innocent VIII and of King Ferrante of Naples; they, too, were dead. He had prophesied that within the lifetime of many of his congregation, the Turks would be converted to Christianity; and though they were still Mohammedans, their conversion would surely now be effected as Savonarola said. So, also, would the Sword of the Lord fall upon Florence, and the armies of a foreign king would pour across the Alps.
On hearing of Lorenzo’s death, Pope Innocent was said to have exclaimed, ‘The peace of Italy is at an end!’ The King of France, Louis XI, was also dead; and his death, too, caused men to think of war. For his successor, Charles VIII, was a young man of energy and ambition, who dreamed romantic dreams of rivalling the exploits of Roland and of gaining glory by brilliant use of that well-organized standing army which his father had raised to crush his enemies within the Kingdom of France. But Charles appeared ill cast for the role of knightly hero. Twenty years old when the Florentines were first warned of the coming of the ‘Sword of God’, he was very small, short-sighted and distressingly ugly with a nose even larger and more hooked than Savonarola’s and with thick, fleshy lips constantly open though partially concealed by the wisps of a scattering, reddish beard. His head and hands twitched convulsively; the few words that ever escaped him were muttered rather than spoken; he walked with a crouch and a limp; his feet were so big that he was rumoured to have a sixth toe; he was notoriously gluttonous and lecherous; he was appallingly ill-educated. Yet there was something about his restlessness, his wayward, adventurous spirit that, for all his naïveté and uneasy affability, made men wary in his presence. His father, though he had enormously increased the area of France, had never been drawn into Italy to claim the Kingdom of Naples as inheritor by force of the rights of the House of Anjou; but it seemed more than probable that Charles would march across the Alps as soon as the opportunity was offered him. A young man who had paid court to the bright, good-looking Anne, Duchess of Brittany, when she was already engaged to Maximilian of Austria, and who had ridden off with her and married her, was not to be discounted.