rentines. In 1495, when the
Medici had been expelled and the French army had gone upon its way to
Naples, Savonarola was called upon to reconstitute the state. He bade
the people abandon their old system of Parlamenti and Balia, and
establish a Grand Council after the Venetian type.[1] This institution,
which seemed to the Florentines the best they had ever adopted, might be
regarded by the historian as only one among their many experiments in
constitution-making, if Savonarola had not stamped it with his peculiar
genius by announcing that Christ was to be considered the Head of the
State.[2] This step at once gave a theocratic bias to the government,
which determined all the acts of the monk's administration. Not content
with political organization, too impatient to await the growth of good
manners from sound institutions, he set about a moral and religious
reformation. Pomps, vanities, and vices were to be abandoned.
Immediately the women and the young men threw aside their silks and fine
attire. The Carnival songs ceased. Hymns and processions took the place
of obscene choruses and pagan triumphs. The laws were remodeled in the
same severe and abrupt spirit. Usury was abolished. Whatever Savonarola
ordained, Florence executed. By the magic of his influence the city for
a moment assumed a new aspect. It seemed as though the old austerity
which Dante and Villani praised were about to return without the
factious hate and pride that ruined medaeival Tuscany. In everything done
by Savonarola at this epoch there was a strange combination of political
sagacity with monastic zeal. Neither Guicciardini nor Machiavelli,
writing years afterwards, when Savonarola had fallen and Florence was
again enslaved, could propose anything wiser than his Consiglio Grande.
Yet the fierce revivalism advocated by the friar--the bonfire of Lorenzo
di Credi's and Fra Bartolommeo's pictures, of MSS, of Boccaccio and
classic poets, and of all those fineries which a Venetian Jew is said to
have valued in one heap at 22,000 florins--the recitation of such
Bacchanalian songs as this--

Never was there so sweet a gladness,
Joy of so pure and strong a fashion,
As with zeal and love and passion
Thus to embrace Christ's holy madness!
Cry with me, cry as I now cry,
Madness, madness, holy madness!

--the procession of boys and girls through the streets, shaming their
elders into hypocritical piety, and breeding in their own hearts the
into