Charles VIII marches on Naples not knowing a brand-new plague is waiting for him, the Medici adapt to the existence of the new republic in different ways, and Savonarola and his allies in government tighten their grip over Florence, even while Rodrigo Borgia closes in on Florence’s popular preacher.
Transcript
Savonarola never really ruled Florence. In fact, you couldn’t even say that he had an invisible throne like the Medici did. But his sermons captivated his audiences with how they shifted gracefully from apocalyptic thunder to gentle cries for social reform, and as a result he had a great deal of influence over both the average people and the elites. As much as Savonarola owed to his skills as a preacher, he was also lucky enough to have a chance to hedge his bets on King Charles VIII of France. As Florence and Savonarola were about to christen their reformed republic, Charles was marching on Rome to face Pope Alexander VI, and it still seemed like King Charles really would reform the papacy itself.
I haven’t really talked about the Pope who would become Savonarola’s nemesis and has a family name as famous and notorious as the Medici. Pope Alexander or Rodrigo Borgia to go by his civilian name came from Valencia, then part of the kingdom of Aragon in modern Spain. He arrived in Italy on the coattails of his uncle who had become a cardinal and later was elected Pope Callixtus III. There’s a lot that could be said about Rodrigo Borgia, but I think it’s important to just note he wasn’t the depraved, incestuous monster legends would make him out to be. He actually tried to curb church corruption involving the sale of church land and cardinals taking extra ecclesiastical offices just to claim the income from them while not actually doing anything for it. When Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal, he welcomed thousands of them into the Papal Territories and gave them assurances they would not be persecuted or pressured to convert, much to the horror of his homeland’s sovereigns, Isabel of Castile and Fernando of Aragon. But that said, his personal behavior was to say the least unseemly for a regular bishop, much less the Pope, and he did nothing to hide it. In fact, he was the first Pope who openly acknowledged his illegitimate children as his children, unlike previous Popes who just tactfully referred to their offspring as their nieces and nephews. He even let them stay with him in the Curia and visit whenever they liked. And much like his predecessor Pope Sixtus, Alexander didn’t hesitate to tap into the resources of the Church on behalf of a family member, in his case his beloved son Cesare. Like what Sixtus tried to do for his nephew Girolamo, Alexander’s grand design was to carve a new kingdom out of the Romagna and bequeath it to Cesare.
For a while, it seemed like the notorious, self-serving Pope Alexander would not survive in Charles VIII’s wake. At the time of Charles’ arrival, Alexander’s popularity was at a low ebb, especially since the Pope had committed Rome to an unwanted alliance with Naples and put the city in France’s crosshairs mainly so he could just get a royal bride from the Neapolitan dynasty for Cesare. Alexander’s great enemy, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, certainly counted on Charles VIII stopping in Rome to hold a synod and finally rid him of the Borgia Pope. Unfortunately, what they didn’t count on was Charles VIII being so sincerely devout. After Charles arrived in Rome, Pope Alexander appeared before him in his full papal regalia. At the sight Charles fell to his knees and kissed the Pope’s feet. It couldn’t be more obvious that there would be no synod and no new Pope. Still, Alexander VI still had to deal with the French king’s advisors, who were more worldly in their attitudes toward the Pope than their king. Alexander had to agree to give up supporting Naples, although crucially he stopped short of actually formally acknowledging Charles as Naples’ rightful king. Also he granted the French army the right of passage through papal territories and loaded the army up with gold and treasure to help pay for the expensive war effort, with his own beloved son Cesare as King Charles’ hostage to guarantee the Pope’s good behavior.
But as people often did, Charles and his ministers underestimated the Borgias and their willingness to defy norms. While Charles and his army camped near the town of Valletri on papal territory, in the middle of the night Cesare disguised himself as one of the king’s footmen and escaped the camp. He took with him half the mules carrying the treasures from the Pope, which according to some accounts the Pope had shown to Charles before he left Rome. The chests left behind, which Charles and his men had not peeked inside, were completely empty.
Charles was overcome with rage at being betrayed, by the head of the church no less! “All Italians are dirty dogs, and the Holy Father is the worst of them all!”, Charles was said to have screamed to his men. But as much as he might have liked to, he couldn’t just turn around and march on Rome. His army was already close to the border with the kingdom of Naples, and focusing on invading the Papal States and deposing Pope Alexander would cost Charles precious months, if not more than a year, giving Neapolitans plenty of time to prepare to, for example, get Queen Isabel and King Fernando over in Spain to attack France in their defense. Also in only a few months it would be spring, which would mean malaria would once again be festering in the swamps around Rome. Malaria had threatened many a foreign monarch who dared linger in Rome during the warmer months. So Charles marched on to Naples.
Luckily for Charles, the kingdom of Naples ended up crumbling like a sandcastle. An attempt by the Neapolitans to counterattack France by landing troops in Genoa had failed miserably. So when he heard that his only remaining major ally the Pope had surrendered to Charles, King Alfonso II of Naples abdicated and retired to a monastery in Sicily, leaving the throne and an impossible situation to his son Ferrante. Alfonso always knew very well how much his own people hated him. However, the gesture was too little too late, and much of the Neapolitan nobility still defected to Charles’ cause. It didn’t help that when Alfonso abdicated he took much of the royal treasury with him, leaving his own son with little money to pay for the defense of their own country. There was one spot that stayed steadfast though. A strategic fortress at Monte San Giovanni had a commander who was from a noble family extremely loyal to the old royal family. He resisted the call to surrender and even had the envoys French sent to him tortured and mutilated. When the French took the fortress with their cutting-edge heavy artillery they massacred most of the people inside in revenge. Anyone else in Naples who was tempted to resist the French got the message. This one ugly incident aside, Charles himself was pleasantly shocked at the speed in which Naples fell. It was a lesson not lost on Isabella d’Este, who wrote to her husband Francesco Gonzaga, the Marquis of Mantua: “This should be an admonition to all rulers to esteem the hearts of their subjects more than fortresses, treasure, and men-at-arms, because the discontent of subjects wages worse war than the enemy in the field.” Charles offered his rival Ferrante a pension and a nice estate somewhere in France, but Ferrante declined. Instead he held out on the island of Ischia on the Gulf of Naples, biding his time.
Charles did the same. He just got Naples and was determined to enjoy it, declaring his new kingdom to be an “earthly paradise.” That may be so, but to invoke the title of my favorite Oingo Boingo song, it was a fool’s paradise. A big part of the problem was that the French quickly proved to be bad guests. In his chronicle Guicciardini writes, “The natural arrogance of the French, exacerbated by the ease of their victory, as a result of which they had a highly esteemed opinion of themselves and no respect whatever for any Italian. They seized lodgings in Naples and in other parts of the kingdom with insolence and violence and wherever their troops were quartered they were hated; everywhere they treated their hosts so badly that the friendly welcome with which they had been received was now changed into burning hatred.” It didn’t help that Charles threw the nobility that had once been ready to support him very few bones. Instead he replaced more than half the members of the royal council and the majority of the highest administrative officials with Frenchmen. One interesting move he did make was with the city government of Naples he created a new political office called the tribune of Saint Lorenzo, who would represent the common people of the city on the city council of Naples, which was otherwise dominated by nobles. Maybe this was just a roundabout way of putting another check on the nobility, but it also seems possible that Charles was more conscientious about his responsibilities for Naples than most commentators of the time believed.
Nonetheless, Charles’ plan to use Naples as a launching pad for even greater adventures had also drastically fallen apart. A renegade Ottoman prince named Djem, who was a hostage of the papacy, had been possibly poisoned by agents of the Sultan but more likely just from an infection or pneumonia. Charles was counting on getting custody of Djem and setting him loose to destabilize the Ottoman Empire. More importantly, the whole enterprise was financially running on fumes. But that wasn’t even the worst of it. Unbeknownst to Charles, his soldiers were introduced to a disease that came across the ocean all the way from the Americas. The French called it the “Italian disease” while the Italians called it the “French disease.” Today, we know it as syphilis. Even with modern medicine it is still a serious bacterial infection spread through sexual relations, although it can be managed with antibiotics. Back then, when it first appeared, it was a horrifying, mysterious disease that could cause disfigurement, insanity, and eventually death.
While Charles was enjoying his Neapolitan vacation and not minding too much that he wouldn’t be the liberator of Jerusalem from Turkish rule anytime soon, Piero de’ Medici was still stuck in Venice. He had some financial support from his little brother Giovanni, who luckily drew a fat income from the ecclesiastical offices his father helped arrange for him before his death. However, this wasn’t enough, and Piero had to start selling off some of the family belongings. The news coming from Florence was not at all promising. Although there were still friends of the Medici in the halls of power, they did not dare even try to assert themselves, much less launch a countercoup. The political mood was dead set against the exiled Medici returning at all as private citizens, much less being restored to power. True, Piero’s cousins, the sons of old Pierfrancesco, were allowed to stay in the city. But their hopes of a new Medici regime with themselves as the figureheads were forever dashed thanks to the quick and unexpected collapse of Piero’s government, and they knew it. Tellingly, they even changed their names from Lorenzo and Giovanni de’ Medici to Lorenzo and Giovanni il Popolano. In English, it’s like changing your last name to Everyperson or Commoner. It’s a strong parallel with what happened about 300 years later in France, when King Louis XVI’s cousin, Philippe d’Orleans, changed his name to Philippe Egalite, “Philip Equality.” But while Philip Equality still eventually lost his head to the revolutionaries, Lorenzo and Giovanni Commoner fared much better. They still were trusted with political offices, but political influence did not change the fact that they had invested much of the fortune their father left them in various commercial enterprises that all floundered under Florence’s economic recession.
As for Savonarola, he was enjoying the peak of his career and influence. If you’re familiar with the modern history of the United States, you could probably compare him to someone like Billy Graham or Jerry Falwell at the height of their own careers. Savonarola even enlisted troops in his own culture war. Turning to the notorious gangs of adolescent and teenage boys that ruled the streets of Florence, he organized them into his personal army of busybody thugs, who were simply called the Fanciulli, meaning “the children.” They would go around knocking on people’s doors asking for donations for charity, but also would harass women they judged to be dressed up too luxuriously and attack men who were gambling out in public or were suspected sodomites.
Of course, Savonarola didn’t hesitate to use his pull with the Great Council to intrude on people’s lives. He pushed for laws against fireworks and holding horse races on feast days. On his watch, for the first time in Florence’s history the penalty for sodomy was changed from fines to public pillorying. If convicted of a second offense, sodomites would be bound and paraded through the city to the Old Market where they would be publicly branded on the forehead and banned from political office for life. If convicted a third time, they would be burned alive. When some members of the Great Council protested that the punishment for the first offense should still just be a fine, Savonarola fired back, “I’d like to see you build a nice fire of these sodomites in the piazza, two or three, male and female, because there are also women who practice that damnable vice. I say offer them as a sacrifice to God.” They must have still been some resistance to Savonarola’s fiery rhetoric about sodomy. Only one sodomite was ever actually executed during Savonarola’s time, and he also happened to be an infamous robber.
Savonarola’s supporters were mockingly called the wailers, the Piagnoni, but they took the name as a point of pride. They never became a majority force in the politics of Florence. Still, for the years of 1495 through 1497 even members of the Signoria and the Great Council were afraid to run afoul of Savonarola and the Piagnoni. Landucci writes in his chronicle, “He was held in so much esteem and devotion in Florence at that time that there were many men and women who, if he had said to them, ‘go into the fire’ they would surely have obeyed him.” Foreign tourists would make seeing a Savonarola sermon a highpoint of their visit. But Savonarola’s appeal wasn’t just religious, but patriotic. For a Florence that was suffering through a never-ending recession and on top of that a famine in the winter of 1496-1497, his supporters were convinced Savonarola would lead Florence out of its current troubles to become the leading power of Italy. One song sung by his followers went, “Love live Christ our King and the happy Virgin Mary, Queen, who says that Florence more than ever will be richer, mightier, more glorious, and soon the worker of miracles.”
A core reason why Savonarola had so much power was that he had a powerful ally in the government: Francesco Valori. Previously Valori had been a member of the Medici party and a personal friend of Lorenzo the Magnificent, but like many others he turned against Piero de’ Medici when word of Piero’s horrid agreement with Charles VIII reached Florence. After Piero Capponi died, Valori was elected gonfaloniere, but even after his term ended he remained a loud and demanding voice within the Florentine government. Without Valori, Savonarola may not have gotten most of the laws he wanted on the books.
However, the relationship may not have been a one-way street. Since Valori was a staunch oligarch I suspect Valori may have been an important reason, if not the key reason, why Savonarola took a turn away from populist policies. He opposed a law to lower the eligibility requirements to enter the Great Council from 30 to 24 – a measure ironically supported by Valori – and later called for those requirements to be tightened in a way that would exclude more people from a working-class background. Savonarola also called for a restriction in direct payments to the poor and supported the establishment of workhouses. Of course, Savonarola did not hesitate now to use the power of the pulpit to further his political aims and attack supporters of measures he disliked. When one faction in the Great Council proposed returning to election by lot for all political offices, Savonarola explicitly attacked them in a sermon, crying out, “I tell you that anyone who wants this sortition is moved by his passion, not by reason. Confess, confess that you are a sorry Christian, even a wicked one, because knowing the kind of life you are living, you’re afraid you won’t be elected.”
While Savonarola fumed behind the pulpit, Francesco Valori became his arm in the Great Council. Valori would convene advisory councils and stack their memberships with politicians he trusted to support whatever law he wanted to pass. If anyone dared oppose one of his and Savonarola’s measures, he would reintroduce it again and again until it made it past his exhausted and frustrated opponents. Also with Valori’s help Savonarola was able to lash out against his critics. Francesco Cei, whose only crime was writing and publishing a poem that satirized Savonarola and his key supporters, got exiled for life.
The peak of Savonarola’s career was also his most famous event: the Bonfire of the Vanities. Now it wasn’t a concept Savonarola invented, but had often been hosted in towns and cities across Italy for centuries. However, Savonarola’s bonfire has become proverbial. That year, 1497, Savonarola got the Great Council, likely with Valori’s help, to ban the usual Carnival celebrations. On February 7, 1497, instead of the bonfires burning in each neighborhood around which people danced, there was only one big fire to be held in the plaza of the Signoria. A great eight-sided wooden pyramid was built in the center of the square with an effigy of the Devil, complete with horns and cloved feet, sitting on top. Each side of the pyramid had fifteen shelves containing vanities collected by the Fanciulli. These included pictures and sculptures deemed shameful, musical instruments and books, masks, costly foreign draperies, playing cards, dice, mirrors, makeup cases, hairpieces, perfumes, wigs, and books written by humanist authors like Petrarch, Dante, and Boccachio. The shelves were structured according to seven tiers, each representing one of the deadly sins. Inside were sacks of straw, piles of wood, and small bags of dynamite with all the vanities stacked on top. It rose sixty feet with a circumference of 240 feet, which is roughly the height of a five-storey building and the length of some airplanes.
The most vivid description of the grand celebration of godliness comes from Guicciardini: “Arriving at the Piazza della Signoria, the Fanciulli arranged themselves on both sides of the square. As they sang an invective against the figure of Carnival, the towering pyramid was set on fire ‘with great happiness and joy of the whole people,’ the burning of so many vanities and snares of the devil causing not only men, women, and children but even “insensible creatures” to celebrate. The palace bells rang out, the Signoria’s trumpets, pipes, and cymbals sounded the glory of the great triumph offered to God, and the flames rose to the sky to the honor of God and the ignominy of Satan.”
No one records what Savonarola thought during the bonfire, which would make him a figure of legend and proverb even far outside the history of his own country. Perhaps he recognized that this was his moment and thought it was the first of many more vindications to come. Or maybe it was just another day for him. It’s possible his mind was elsewhere, like with his ongoing struggle against Pope Alexander. If he did view the bonfire of the vanities as some kind of triumph, he didn’t have long before the taste of victory would turn bitter. Soon, the king he once praised as the savior of Italy, Charles VIII, would abandon him and Florence and one of the most cunning and ruthless men to ever become Pope, Rodrigo Borgia, would be coming for Savonarola.
Please join me next time, and buona note.
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