Where have they been? Where are they going? What are they doing? And why do they look so serene and content? The answer’s very simple the Rhine cuts right through the centre of the city and its population uses the river as a source of relaxation, well-being, exercise and even travelling to work. Or a man, for that matter, in damp swimming trunks. Or a woman doing the same in a dripping bikini. What little was left of the three Dominicans was thrown into the River Arno.Switzerland might not be considered one of the crazier countries in the world, nor Basel one of the crazier cities in Switzerland, but there can surely be few places where the sight of a naked man walking down a side street raises so few eyebrows. Some of them burst into tears, but others, including excited children, sang and danced delightedly around the pyre and threw stones at the corpses. With the piles of wood below the scaffold set alight, the flames quickly engulfed the three dangling bodies while a trick of the heat made Savonarola’s right hand move so that he seemed to be blessing the spectators. The executioner made cruel fun of him and then apparently tried to delay his demise so that the flames would reach him before he was quite dead, but failed, and Savonarola died of strangulation at about 10am. He answered, ‘The Lord has suffered as much for me,’ and these were his last recorded words.įra Salvestro and Fra Domenico were hanged first, slowly and painfully, before Savonarola climbed the ladder to the place between them. It is said that a priest standing near asked Savonarola what he felt about this approaching martyrdom. Some of the crowd screamed abuse at Savonarola and his two companions, who were formally unfrocked and left in their under-tunics with bare feet and their hands tied, before their faces were shaved, as was the custom. Wood for the burning was heaped up below. From the heavy beam dangled three halters, to hang the friars, and three chains, to support their bodies while they were subsequently burned to ashes. On the morning of 23 May a crowd of Florentines gathered in the Piazza della Signoria, where a scaffold had been erected on a platform (a plaque marks the spot today). ‘We shall have a fine bonfire,’ the senior commissioner remarked genially on arrival, ‘for I have the sentence of condemnation with me.’ All three were cruelly tortured before being condemned as heretics and handed over to the secular arm by two papal commissioners, who came hotfoot from Rome for the purpose on 19 May. On Palm Sunday in 1498 St Mark’s was attacked by a screaming mob and Savonarola was arrested by the Florentine authorities with two friars who were among his most ardent followers, Fra Dominico and Fra Salvestro. Among them was the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, who had good reason to feel uncomfortable with the Dominican’s denunciation of the laxity and luxury of the Church and its leaders, and who eventually excommunicated the rigorous friar. Not surprisingly, Savonarola made many powerful enemies. The friar also disapproved of profiteering financiers and businessmen. In the famous ‘bonfire of the vanities’ in 1497 he had gaming tables and packs of cards, carnival masks, mirrors, ornaments, nude statues and supposedly indecent books and pictures burned in the street. He put an end to the carnivals and festivals the Florentines traditionally enjoyed, substituting religious festivals instead, and employed street urchins as a junior gestapo to sniff out luxurious and suspect items. He called for laws against vice and laxity. He denounced the works of Boccaccio, nude paintings, pictures of pagan deities and the whole humanistic culture of the Italian Renaissance. His opponents called Savonarola and his followers ‘Snivellers’ and he grimly disapproved of jokes and frivolity, of poetry and inns, of sex (especially the homosexual variety), of gambling, of fine clothes and jewellery and luxury of every sort. A visionary, prophet and formidably effective hellfire preacher, obsessed with human wickedness and convinced that the wrath of God was about to fall upon the earth, he detested practically every form of pleasure and relaxation. Sent to Florence originally a dozen years before, he made a reputation for austerity and learning, and became prior of the convent of St Mark (where his rooms can still be seen). Girolamo Savonarola, Dominican friar and puritan fanatic, became moral dictator of the city of Florence when the Medici were temporarily driven out in 1494.
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