o owned
no offensive weapon but his tongue, and who yet began to grow more
dangerous for him than all the kings, dukes, princes, in the whole world
could ever be; this man was the poor Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola,
the same who had refused absolution to Lorenzo dei Medici because he
would not restore the liberty of Florence.

Girolamo Savonarola had prophesied the invasion of a force from beyond
the Alps, and Charles VIII had conquered Naples; Girolamo Savonarola had
prophesied to Charles VIII that because he had failed to fulfil the
mission of liberator entrusted to him by God, he was threatened with a
great misfortune as a punishment, and Charles was dead; lastly,
Savonarola had prophesied his own fall like the man who paced around the
holy city for eight days, crying, "Woe to Jerusalem!" and on the ninth
day, "Woe be on my own head!" None the less, the Florentine reformer,
who could not recoil from any danger, was determined to attack the
colossal abomination that was seated on St. Peter's holy throne; each
debauch, each fresh crime that lifted up its brazen face to the light of
day or tried to hide its shameful head beneath the veil of night, he had
never failed to paint out to the people, denouncing it as the off spring
of the pope's luxurious living and lust of power. Thus had he
stigmatised Alexander's new amour with the beautiful Giulia Farnese, who
in the preceding April a added another son to the pope's family; thus had
he cursed the Duke of Gandia's murderer, the lustful, jealous fratricide;
lastly, he had pointed out to the Florentines, who were excluded from the
league then forming, what sort of future was in store far them when the
Borgias should have made themselves masters of the small principalities
and should come to attack the duchies and republics. It was clear that in
Savonarola, the pope had an enemy at once temporal and spiritual, whose
importunate and threatening voice must be silenced at any cost.

But mighty as the pope's power was, to accomplish a design like this was
no easy matter. Savonarola, preaching the stern principles of liberty,
had united to his cause, even in the midst of rich, pleasure-loving
Florence, a party of some size, known as the 'Piagnoni', or the
Penitents: this band was composed of citizens who were anxious for reform
in Church and State, who accused the Medici of enslaving the fatherland
and the Borgias of upsetting the faith, who demanded two things, that the