rrested in his cell, and conducted
to prison amid the insults of the crowd, who, always in extremes,
whether of enthusiasm or hatred, would have liked to tear them to
pieces, and would not be quieted till they had exacted a promise that
the prisoners should be forcibly compelled to make the trial of fire
which they had refused to make of their own free will.

Alexander VI, as we may suppose, had not been without influence in
bringing about this sudden and astonishing reaction, although he was
not present in person; and had scarcely learned the news of Savonarola's
fall and arrest when he claimed him as subject to ecclesiastical
jurisdiction. But in spite of the grant of indulgences wherewith this
demand was accompanied, the Signoria insisted that Savonarola's trial
should take place at Florence, adding a request so as not to appear to
withdraw the accused completely from the pontifical authority--that
the pope would send two ecclesiastical judges to sit in the Florentine
tribunal. Alexander, seeing that he would get nothing better from the
magnificent republic, sent as deputies Gioacchino Turriano of Venice,
General of the Dominicans, and Francesco Ramolini, doctor in law: they
practically brought the sentence with them, declaring Savonarola and
his accomplices heretics, schismatics, persecutors of the Church and
seducers of the people.

The firmness shown by the Florentines in claiming their rights of
jurisdiction were nothing but an empty show to save appearances; the
tribunal, as a fact, was composed of eight members, all known to be
fervent haters of Savonarola, whose trial began with the torture. The
result was that, feeble in body constitutionally nervous and irritable,
he had not been able to endure the rack, and, overcome by agony just at
the moment when the executioner had lifted him up by the wrists and then
dropped him a distance of two feet to the ground, he had confessed, in
order to get some respite, that his prophecies were nothing mare than
conjectures. If is true that, so soon as he went back to prison, he
protested against the confession, saying that it was the weakness of
his bodily organs and his want of firmness that had wrested the lie
from him, but that the truth really was that the Lord had several times
appeared to him in his ecstasies and revealed the things that he had
spoken. This protestation led to a new application of the torture,
during which Savonarola succumbed once more to the dreadfu