DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61902#0342
322
THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE.
outer circle—too multitudinous to be ever made into a
religious party, often caring nothing for religion, and made
up of persons who, but for their strong sense of the ne-
cessities of Florence, and the use of the friar to keep order,
and sway the masses in the right direction, would have
been naturally the opponents of the great religious re-
former—was the cause at once of his absolute triumph and
of his ruin. They used him, for purposes not ignoble,
and willingly made of him their bulwark against Piero
de’ Medici, their old tyrant, against the new tyrants whom
a parlemento might have saddled them with, and against
anarchy and internal tumult. But his prophetical threat-
enings were folly to them, his purity distasteful, his piety
superstition. When he said,Be free,” they cheered him
to the echo: when he said “ Be pure,” the effect was very
different. Now here, now there, at that point and at
this, these supporters fell off from him, joined the ranks
of his enemies, among whom, but for patriotism, they
would alway have found a more congenial place ; and
gradually—the tide ebbing ever more and more as the
momentary impulse toward a reformation of manners, by
which the whole city had been superficially affected, died
away—left the prophet, who had once felt himself almost
the prime minister of a theocracy, in the shrunken posi-
tion of the leader of a religious party. It had been pre-
mature, alas! though a heavenly delusion, that great shout
which all the noble Tuscan walls had seemed to echo,
Viva Gesu Cristo nostro Re! Jesus Christ was not yet to
be King of Florence, any more than of other fleshly king-
doms ; and Savonarola, after he had accomplished his
divine and unrewarded drudgery, and freed Florence and
tamed her, for the use of all these magnificent signori,
dropped back into the prior of San Marco, the head of
the Piagnoni, the religious leader against whom the world,
the flesh, and the devil, silenced and crushed for a mo-
ment, had now once more risen up in free fight.
THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE.
outer circle—too multitudinous to be ever made into a
religious party, often caring nothing for religion, and made
up of persons who, but for their strong sense of the ne-
cessities of Florence, and the use of the friar to keep order,
and sway the masses in the right direction, would have
been naturally the opponents of the great religious re-
former—was the cause at once of his absolute triumph and
of his ruin. They used him, for purposes not ignoble,
and willingly made of him their bulwark against Piero
de’ Medici, their old tyrant, against the new tyrants whom
a parlemento might have saddled them with, and against
anarchy and internal tumult. But his prophetical threat-
enings were folly to them, his purity distasteful, his piety
superstition. When he said,Be free,” they cheered him
to the echo: when he said “ Be pure,” the effect was very
different. Now here, now there, at that point and at
this, these supporters fell off from him, joined the ranks
of his enemies, among whom, but for patriotism, they
would alway have found a more congenial place ; and
gradually—the tide ebbing ever more and more as the
momentary impulse toward a reformation of manners, by
which the whole city had been superficially affected, died
away—left the prophet, who had once felt himself almost
the prime minister of a theocracy, in the shrunken posi-
tion of the leader of a religious party. It had been pre-
mature, alas! though a heavenly delusion, that great shout
which all the noble Tuscan walls had seemed to echo,
Viva Gesu Cristo nostro Re! Jesus Christ was not yet to
be King of Florence, any more than of other fleshly king-
doms ; and Savonarola, after he had accomplished his
divine and unrewarded drudgery, and freed Florence and
tamed her, for the use of all these magnificent signori,
dropped back into the prior of San Marco, the head of
the Piagnoni, the religious leader against whom the world,
the flesh, and the devil, silenced and crushed for a mo-
ment, had now once more risen up in free fight.