The pope tried to keep his Spanish patrons happy, yet when Isabella demanded he persecute and expel the Jews in Rome, Alexander refused. Ferdinand and Isabella were determined to hold on to southern Italy, but to the north a young French king was equally determined to reclaim Naples, an ambition encouraged by the Borgias’ enemy, Cardinal Giulio della Rovere, the nephew of the late Pope Sixtus. Stuck in the middle, the Borgias chose what seemed to them the only possible option: duplicity.
Alexander’s position had been complicated by the death at the age of forty-three of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who on his deathbed received a Dominican priest, Girolamo Savonarola, prior of San Marco, who listened to El Magnifico confess his sins. The forty-year-old Savonarola, tiny, cadaverous, bald, hook-nosed with droopy lips, bushy eyebrows and green eyes that ‘sometimes gave forth red flashes’, was already the author of
Sure enough, in autumn 1494 the French army hoved into view under the youthful King Charles VIII, who ruled a kingdom that, after a hundred years of conflict with England, had emerged as a single state, the most populous in Europe (15 million people, against England’s 3.7). Charles was ‘hideous and small, his ill-made mouth hanging open and hands twitching with spasmodic movements’, but the French indulged his womanizing, calling him
Pietro de’ Medici, twenty-two years old, Lorenzo’s eldest – and stupidest – appeased King Charles by surrendering Pisa and Livorno, which so outraged the
‘If you make Florence a holy city,’ answered God, ‘you must give her a government which favours virtue.’
To rapt and terrified congregations, Savonarola fulminated: ‘Behold the Sword has descended; the scourge has fallen. It is coming. It has come!’ His high-pitched screech of a voice was so terrifying that Michelangelo said he could still hear it forty years later. ‘It’s not I who preach,’ claimed the Dominican, ‘but God who speaks through me!’ The Messenger of God warned Florentines to show virtue, desist from gambling, carnivals, scent, cosmetics and sex, reject the Medicis and the Borgias – and the pagans Plato and Aristotle. In a frenzy of apocalyptic commands, he and his followers, the Wailers, presided over a terror of virtue. His reign demonstrates how a small but determined clique of self-righteous, self-selected extremists can dominate a society, rewarding their supporters with spoils and destroying those deemed unvirtuous – a template for authoritarian ideologies ever since. They can always be foiled by the will of the majority, but they flourish when others fail to organize or lose their courage. Savonarola’s ‘blessed bands’ – posses of righteous children and teenagers – forced Florentines to kneel, pray and fast and to sing hymns aloud, then shaved their own heads as virtuous signals. Attractive women were denounced as prostitutes – ‘pieces of meat with eyes’, said Savonarola – and were whipped in public; fashionable women retired to convents. Wailers smashed mirrors, fans, rouge pots and cosmetics. Books and paintings were burned in ‘bonfires of the vanities’ on a pyramidal scaffold.
Leaving Savonarola as sacred dictator of Florence, Charles, dubbing himself
