575. The Medici: The Bonfire of the Vanities (Part 4)
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All of a sudden, I saw the sword that quivered over Italy turn its point downward. And like a great storm, go among them and scourge them all. The quivering sword, I tell you, Florence, belongs to the King of France. That sword will be felt through Italy.

Remember when I said three years ago now that a wind will come, as in that figure of Elijah, and that this wind would shake the mountain? This wind has come, and it has shaken the princes of Italy. See now, he has come, just as I said. Tell me, Florence, where now are your fortresses? Where now are your strongholds?

See now, he has come, and still you do not believe. So, Dominic, that was Girolamo Savonarola addressing his flock in the Duomo, the Cathedral of Florence, on the 13th of January, 1495, and instantly recognisable from his hoarse and rasping accent there, his voice.

dramatically and authentically recreated here on The Rest Is History in our ongoing series on the Medici. And Dominic Lorenzo the Magnificent is dead. Savonarola is on the scene. And that that I just read out, I think beautifully, is perhaps the most ferocious and memorable of all his many apocalyptic sermons. And he had it printed and distributed across the city. So a kind of very Luther-esque

awareness of the potential for the printing press to publicize his views and thoughts. And it's powerful, isn't it? Not just because of his rhetoric, but because of the circumstances. So he's talking there about the French king coming and indeed French troops have crossed the Alps. They're making Italy bleed. The Medici, who we've been talking about in the previous three episodes, they've been swept away. And Savonarola is preparing to purify Florence from

with a white hot flame and lead its people into a new age of righteousness. See, I thought I'd recovered from laughing, but now you've made me laugh again. Yeah. So for those people watching on YouTube or Spotify, I should apologize for basically having a breakdown while Tom was reading that. And actually I've been laughing so much that my glasses are still steamed up. So yes, an extraordinary reading.

And an extraordinary story that has been told many times in films, in TV series, in novels, in video games. And Savonarola is always cast as the villain. He is cast as the kind of mad monk, although you were saying off camera, he's not a monk, he's a friar. So he shouldn't be seen as a monk at all. But Tom, has history been a little bit unfair to Savonarola? We will find out today.

So now that I've completely recovered my composure, let's remind ourselves where we got to.

We ended in April 1492 with the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent. And Tom, those terrible omens on the night of his funeral, I have to say, I thought you were a little bit over-sceptical about those omens. You didn't believe that they took place. Wolves howling in the night and fire in the sky. It's just that this is lifted from Virgil. Is it lifted or does it just keep happening? Maybe. Maybe. One of the riddles of history. So people will remember that when Lorenzo lay dying...

One of the men called to his bedside was this Dominican friar from Ferrara, Girolamo Savonarola, intense, austere, with an extraordinary rasping voice. And he is based in the monastery of San Marco in Florence, and his apocalyptic sermons have taken Florence by storm. But at the time, when Savonarola walks out of Lorenzo's country villa, the idea that he would effectively succeed Lorenzo as the master of Florence would have seemed unthinkable.

Because everybody knows who's going to succeed Lorenzo. It's his son, Piero, who is 22 years old. And he is the person who is effectively anointed by the Medici loyalists. And actually, we talked about this a little bit earlier on.

Piero is an object lesson in how a rich and powerful family decays over time. He's handsome, he's spoiled by fortune, but he's entitled and arrogant and lazy. He prefers hunting to kind of pouring over his ledgers. He falls out with a lot of the Medici family, with his cousins in particular, and with some of his father's kind of old guard.

And people start muttering quite quickly, oh, Piero's just not up to it. You know, the hereditary principle has not worked. And actually, why should it work? They're not a kingdom or a duchy. They're a republic. So why should Piero just take over? Now, all of this would be ominous enough for the Medici, but what makes it worse is that Piero has taken over at a watershed in world history, a watershed for all kinds of reasons. So you might think, oh, 1492, Columbus and the New World, but that's not really the reason. For Italy...

What really happens in the early 1490s is that for the first time in generations, Italy becomes the front line in the struggle between the great powers of Europe. And in this case, the great powers are France, the Holy Roman Empire under the Emperor Maximilian at Habsburg, and the newly unified Kingdom of Spain. So we're on the brink of something called the Italian Wars.

And that is a conflict that will last for almost 70 years. And it will cause death and destruction on a colossal and in many ways unprecedented scale because they're bringing new technology, bigger armies,

A more kind of unrelenting, vengeful attitude, I think it's fair to say. And Florence is not a great power. It's been rich, but it's not a superpower by any means. And so for any Florentine leader caught in the eye of the storm, this would have been a horrendous challenge. But it is one that Piero is almost uniquely unsuited to handle. So let's get into the wars. It all starts with Charles VIII of France.

Charles VIII of France has a claim to the throne of Naples through his grandmother, who came from Anjou. Now, the dynasty of Anjou, the Angevins, had been kicked out of Naples back in 1442, replaced by the Aragonese. But Pope Innocent VIII, who has his seven children, he hates the ruling dynasty in Naples, the Aragonese. And he's been sending messages to the French saying, why don't you come and reclaim your inheritance? Come on.

Now, Charles of France is 20 years old. And like all the rulers in this story, he's a great character. He's very short. He's incredibly ugly. He's got an incredibly long and hooked nose. They all have hooked noses in the story. It's a renaissance. Everyone has got to abide law. Everyone has to have a hooked nose. He walks with both a crouch and a limp, which I think is an interesting combination. He twitches compulsively like Peter the Great. However, Charles loves the thought of this. France is at peace.

He has an enormous army, the largest and most modern in Europe. And he has groundbreaking artillery that are firing iron cannonballs. And this artillery really is a game changer in kind of military technology. And he's got the support of the papacy. And he also has the support of the great power in northern Italy, which is Milan.

But Lodovico Sforza, who is the regent of Milan, hates the Neapolitan royal family and keeps saying to Charles, come on, let's have a go at the Neapolitan. I hate Naples. Let's do this. So even before Lorenzo died in 1492, dare I say, the storm clouds of war were looming overhead.

And everybody knew that this war, when it came, would be really, really brutal, that the French would be coming with an enormous army. It wouldn't be like the sort of slightly performative Italian wars of the mid-15th century, where it's sort of lots of mercenary companies who basically spent a lot of their time boozing and just behaving badly in taverns and sort of hiding behind hedges. This is going to be really serious stuff.

And then there were two crucial developments. In August 1492, so a few months after Lorenzo died, Pope Innocent died, and he was succeeded by a tremendous person, Rodrigo Borgia, who becomes Pope Alexander VI.

And he basically is the man who gives Renaissance popes, who already have a terrible name, he gives them a diabolical name. And Jumanji from the Medici hates the Medici, doesn't he? Yeah, he does. Now, unbelievably, although he's from Aragon, he loves a political machination. So he's constantly changing sides, plotting against one side, then the other. You know, he's going to have some fun with this. And then the other developments in January 1494, King Ferrante of Naples. You may remember he liked to...

He liked to sit around with the embalmed bodies of his adversaries, or so men said. He died unexpectedly, and he was succeeded by his son, Alfonso. So Charles in France said, brilliant, this is the time, this is the moment. And in September 1494, a huge French army by the standards of the day, 40,000 people,

crosses the border and marches up into the Alps, heading for Lombardy. They get to Lombardy, they have a warm welcome from the Milanese, but as they move further south, terrifying reports start to spread through Italy of very, very poor conduct from the French. They're sort of using their siege artillery to smash their way into towns.

For the first time, towns are falling within days or even hours rather than the weeks and months of old. And the French, when they get inside, they are caught in horrendous massacres and sackings of the towns and stuff. And spreading syphilis, isn't that right? The French lead the world in sexually transmitted diseases then as now. And syphilis is their great contribution to Renaissance culture. I just saw Theo flicker up on the screen there, shaking his head sorrowfully.

Anyway, the question for Florence is what are the Florentines going to do? Now, already Charles has sent messages to Florence saying, I want safe passage and guarantees for my army. But Piero, spoiled brat, he's very close to the Neapolitans, not least through his wife, whose family have estates in southern Italy. So he refuses.

And then Charles does something that Piero did not expect. Charles expels all Florence's merchants and bankers from France, from the largest country in Europe. So kind of imposing sanctions. Yes, a massive irreparable economic shock to Florence, which was already experiencing a downturn. And at this, loads of people in Florence panic and they say to Piero, come on, oh my God, you have to do a deal with this guy.

But again, multiple times, in fact, Piero says no, even though the French army are closing in on the border of Tuscany. By October 1494, Charles has reached the frontier fortress at Fivizzano. He seizes the castle. He slaughters a lot of the inhabitants. He is now just three days away from Florence. And Piero is in a total and utter funk. He's sending begging messages to Naples and to Venice, come and help me.

But of course, no help comes. In Florence, the mood is very dark. And of course, one man more than any other has seen this coming. He has been telling people for years the end of days is at hand. And that man is Girolamo Savonarola. Now, we know, Tom, that Savonarola is drawing on an old apocalyptic tradition. But his supporters say...

He knows things. He's seen this happening. He can see the future. He really is a prophet and he's been proved right. Because you'll remember that after Lorenzo's death, he had had this sort of vision, he said, of a sword over the earth and the words, the sword of the Lord over the earth quickly and soon.

And he has been telling people a new Cyrus the Great is coming, coming for the children of Israel. And by that, he means Florence and the Florentines. No fortress will resist him. And of course, people at the time, as Donald Weinstein, Savonarola's biographer, says, people at the time are not mugs. They think he's talking about Charles VIII. This is obviously what's going to happen. And

Is that luck, do you think, on Zavarola's part? Or is he a keen student of French geopolitical ambition? I think it's not luck, actually, because I've read Donald Weinstein's book and he says it was clear to anybody who knew anything about politics from about 1490 onwards that the French are coming. You know, Charles has made it very clear. It's a little bit like, you know, the sort of 18 months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

All the signals are pointing in one direction. And so by this point, Savonarola's rhetoric has reached a kind of pitch, a peak of...

apocalyptic fervor. And Donald Weinstein summarizes it. Every path was befouled with vice. Maidens decked themselves out like whores. Sodomites ran free. Clerics, both priests and friars, were the root of corruption. Punishment was coming in the form of plague, hunger, and war. There was only one recourse. Like those who had found safety in Noah's Ark, the Florentines must take refuge in the spiritual Ark of Jesus Christ.

So this is the sort of message that he is saying day after day. In fact, his most memorable sermon, this Noah's Ark business, came on the 21st of September, 1494, when the French were advancing on Tuscany. There was a packed house in the cathedral. Remember, the cathedral holds 30,000 people in a city with only 50,000 people. And he took as his text God's decision to unleash the great flood. Behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth.

And it's clear that when he gave this sermon, I mean, it's an odd thing to say about a sermon, perhaps to our more secular listeners,

that it was this incredible spine-tingling moment. So Pico della Mirandola, the philosopher, said that he... I mean, he wrote afterwards, he said he felt his hair stand on end as he heard Savonarola talking about the flood. And it is said that... That usually means it didn't happen, but let's go with it. It is said that Michelangelo was there to hear this and fled Florence for Bologna straight after he'd heard it because he was so kind of...

moved and terrified by what Savonarola had said.

And Savonarola is pushing this message every, he's giving sermons every day in the midst of this crisis, saying to the Florentines, the only thing you can do is to repent and to fast and to do penance. He's an exhausted, he's even more hoarse than you're reading, Tom, because he's sort of pushing this message all the time. I mean, people who think it's mad, think about the impact that Greta Thunberg had. Yeah. You know, we are sinners. We have despoiled the earth. We've corrupted it. We must repent. Judgment is coming.

And the impact that had, it's perfectly possible, I think, for us in a more secular age to feel the resonance of a summons to repentance in the shadow of looming apocalypse. I totally agree with you. I don't think it's mad at all. I think it's the kind of thing that anybody who's ever seen or been on, you know, a demonstration, a nuclear disarmament demonstration in the 80s or an anti-war demonstration in the 2000s or whatever,

You know, the sort of millenarian spirit. You know, we come here to bear witness. We come here to repent. The end of the world is coming. All of that stuff. It's not so different. I think Savonarola is not insane. And I definitely don't think his listeners are insane either. Now, meanwhile, while they're all getting very excited, Piero's in a total and utter panic.

And he decides, I will do exactly what my father did. So in our last episode, he'd gone to Naples. He'd gone to Naples. He rides out of Florence, but crucially without telling the Signoria, the council, which is a great mistake. He rides out of the city towards the French camp and he says, I will go and negotiate with Charles personally.

He gets to the French camp and Charles greets him with total contempt, which is not how Lorenzo had been treated in Naples. Charles says, look, I want the Tuscan fortresses in the north. I want control of the ports of Pisa and Livorno. I want you to give me a subsidy of 200,000 ducats. Basically, I want everything. And if you give it to me, maybe I'll let you remain as master of Florence. Kind of Donald Trump negotiating approach. Yeah, exactly. And Piero totally and utterly crumbles. He says, oh,

Well, as long as I can stay in charge of Florence, you can have whatever you like. You know, that's all I'm interested in. And the French are said to have literally kind of laughed in his face when they heard him say that. Such a shameless capitulation. Piero rides back to Florence and he gets there on the 8th of November.

And his supporters, who are basically being paid, greet him as a hero. They're given wine. There's a lot of throwing of sweetmeats and all of this sort of stuff. Good. I was wondering about that. But the Signoria have already heard about the deal and they are appalled. They are furious. And they have already sent off a rival negotiating team of four people to hold talks with Charles, who has now reached Pisa. And one of those four men

is Savanarola, even though he's not a Florentine. Yeah, who's a foreigner. What an extraordinary thing this is. They're going to send this apocalyptic preacher. Why are they doing it? I think because...

He now has unmatched moral and spiritual authority. He's an austere puritanical person, morally upstanding. He has seen this coming. Well, also, he's been comparing Charles to Cyrus the Great. Yeah. I mean, you know, that's got to be flattering to Charles, right? Maybe Charles will listen to him. Exactly. So they've gone.

Meanwhile, Piero goes into the center of Florence the next day, goes to the Palazzo della Signora with his entourage, and he finds the doors blocked by armed men. And suddenly the great bell, the vacca, starts ringing overhead and people pour into the streets. Piero rushes back to the Palazzo Medici, but now the streets are absolutely packed with people chanting, Populo e Libertà, the people and liberty. Basically, a revolution has broken out.

And Piero, who is not a serious person, completely panics. And he and his family that evening flee the city for Venice, carrying what valuables they can. And this is a hammer blow to the reputation of the Medici family. Because with Piero gone, first of all, the Signoria votes to banish the family forever. And they put a bounty on Piero's head. They seize the assets of the Medici bank. They loot their palace and put their treasures up for auction.

In a very telling sign of the shift in power, the two statues we talked about last week, which were Donatello's bronzes of David and Judith, they were taken out of the Palazzo Medici and they were moved to the Palazzo della Signoria. Basically a symbol that the power in Florence had moved from the dynasty, from the family, to the civic centre, to the republic. And the worst thing of all, given that I'm a big fan of Cosimo,

They went to his tomb and prized off the plaque which had the words "Father of his country, pater patriae". They took that off the tomb which I think is a bit low. Now in the meantime Savonarola and the other negotiators have arrived in Pisa where the French have just moved into the city. By the way this is a really catastrophic blow to Florence. Arguably I think Florence never recovers from this, the loss of Pisa. Pisa was its main seaport.

So it's not just a big blow to their prestige, but it's a massive economic blow because now the French are in control of their kind of sea trade. They're led in to meet Charles. We're told that Savonarola did most of the talking. And actually, he does pretty well. He says to him, look, you, your majesty, you're clearly the instrument of God's plan. At last, co-king, you have come. You have come as the minister of God, the minister of justice. All this. He says, please be lenient with Florence.

We didn't realise that you were sent by God. If you forgive us, we'll work together to renew the church. We'll cast out sin, all of this. And Charles says, yeah, right. That's good to me. Fair enough. Why not? Fair enough. Yeah, I actually like thinking that I'm the instrument of God. Yeah, good. You talk a lot of sense, actually. So he says, I'll spare the city and I'll recognise a new Republican regime.

So on the 17th of November, an extraordinary moment, what a public spectacle, the French march into the centre of Florence. It's a moment that everybody who was in Florence remembered all their lives. The place had been decorated with the coat of arms of France. The Signoria had put up a big banner in French, hailing Charles as the guardian and deliverer of our liberty. Charles, despite his crouch, his limp, his twitching, his gigantic nose and various other issues,

He looks great. He's in golden armour on this huge black stallion. He's leading 10,000 troops. There are knights from France. There are Swiss and Gascon infantry, Scottish and Breton archers, like a great array. The crowds are chanting, Viva Francia. There's a lot of tension. They're desperate to suck up to the French because they're worried the French will sack the city. Actually, do you know what the French...

Don't disgrace themselves. Whether they give everybody syphilis, I don't know. But they don't sack the city. Eventually, they strike a deal, an alliance. Florentines will give Charles a subsidy, a big subsidy, 120,000 florins. And off he goes. I mean, it's amazing there are only florins left in the city by this point. This is going to be draining away. Exactly.

So off Charles goes to Naples and there's a massive sigh of relief. And everybody says, do you know who the hero of this story is? It's Savonarola. He saw it coming. He went to Charles. He got us a good deal. What an absolutely tremendous fellow he is. So hooray for Savonarola. Yeah, hurrah for Savonarola. What a tremendous person. But there are two consequences of this that I think matter. One...

Lots of people now really do think that Savonarola is not just any old prophet, but he's theirs. He's the hero of Florence. He is an intermediary between Florence and heaven and God. And so what he says goes. And the second and the very dangerous thing, I think, is that Savonarola himself undoubtedly believes this. So...

Maybe, I mean, it's hard to say who can tell. Did he always think it? Did he suspect it? Did he hope it would be true? But really, he's had the proof. Who wouldn't think it after things have worked out in this way? And so all those writers who've seen him as a sort of a hypocrite or an opportunist or a charlatan, the most famous one is Machiavelli. Machiavelli, who was there, Machiavelli thought he was a total charlatan and a con man and whatnot.

But actually the trend among his biographers is to say he's not a charlatan. He really thinks that he has this mission, that he's been appointed by God. There are many reasons why Machiavelli is shocking to those who read him in Renaissance Europe. But one of them is his refusal to acknowledge that people like Savonarola might be acting from very, very deeply rooted Christian principles. He sees everything as...

shaman hypocrisy. Yeah. Just to reiterate, I mean, what Savonarola is representing is an impulse that is recognizable for a thousand years of European history. And this is the midpoint of it.

So it's there in the great reform movements of the Middle Ages. But I mean, in a sense, the feeling that emblems of criminality have to be torn down, that people have to reform themselves. I mean, the nearest parallel probably in recent history would be Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020.

which enthused and roused and excited lots of people. And lots of people also saw as being kind of hysterical and over shrill and rather intimidating. And you get exactly those kind of responses, those mixed responses in Savonarola's Florence as well. I totally agree with you. I mean, there's clearly an impulse there deep in either in the human soul or in kind of Western culture.

that Savonarola is expressing and to just dismiss him and to say, oh, he's a hypocrite and he's a charlatan and whatnot, I think completely misses what makes him tick and what explains his appeal. Two days after the French left on the 30th of November, it was Advent Sunday, and there's a huge packed house in the cathedral. The relief is palpable. And Savonarola took us his text, a line from the Psalms. I love the Lord for he has listened to my prayer.

And he says to the crowd, the congregation, you know, we have done something unprecedented. We have had a revolution and thrown out the Medici and we've done it really without any bloodshed.

And God now wants us to turn Florence into the new Jerusalem. He goes back to his ark metaphor. He says the flood has come and we have got into Noah's ark. And now that we're in it, we must be worthy of it. We must lead chaste and pious lives. We must give up things like, you know, dancing and poetry and philosophy and embrace, live lives of prayer and penance instead. Because this is always what happens is that...

reform movements that managed to ride the wave of a great popular enthusiasm. I mean, they always want to keep it going, even as the wave is starting to fade and ebb away. Of course, he's never going to say, let's go back home and get back to normal. And in fact, what's interesting is at this point, he is becoming for the first time, really much more overtly political. So he says in the same sermon,

It's time for the rich to give their money to the poor. It's time for the church to basically realize some of its assets and give more money to the arms for the poor of Christ. He says,

Why don't we find jobs for all those who need them? Why don't we relieve the tax burden and the suffering people of Florence? Well, you say that's political, but I mean, essentially, that's the message that Francis, St. Francis was preaching and who becomes a saint, but also lots of Christian preachers who get branded as heretics. The church is very, very nervous about

about the assumption that the rich should give away all their belongings to the poor. But of course, it's there in the Gospels. And so it's always a kind of latent message waiting to break out. That's fair. But I think it seems particularly political because of the context for two reasons. One, the Florentine economy has basically gone into meltdown. And the second thing is,

They're in the process of remaking their republic, of drafting a new constitution. So again, even to talk about politics in this context, however tangentially, is to put yourself at the center of these political debates.

Because just a few days later, the Signoria scraps the apparatus of Medici rule. So all the committees and councils and all of those kind of things. And they say, let's go back to a simpler Republican system. And Savonarola actually in his sermons is saying the best system is the system that they have in Venice. It's a republic run by a grand council run by good men.

And the great irony here is that copying the system of Venice is a pet project of humanist intellectuals, the very people that Savonarola most often kind of rails against in his sermons. But after a revolution, this idea of a more representative, simpler system of good, virtuous people, a kind of more populist system in a way, is bound to resonate on the streets.

And so it is that by Christmas they've agreed this new system. I mean, we don't need to massively go into it, but basically they have one grand council, much more representation, some estimates that as many as one in four Florentine men are now eligible to be on the council. So they've almost widened the kind of political base. And you can see why people are very excited and they think, you know, we're closer to achieving real liberty than ever before in Florentine history.

And although Savonarola himself, ironically, cannot join the council because he's not from Florence and he's a clergyman, there's a sense, I think now, that his moral authority reaches into almost every aspect of the city's life. So we've been comparing him to Luther.

But here, of course, he really resembles Calvin, the great French preacher who goes to Geneva and sets up a godly republic there. And the kind of the prefigurings of the great figures of the Reformation is so interesting in this story. I think that's a really interesting observation that he prefigures these people. But what's the interesting thing to me is that he's poised between them and his own immediate predecessors in Florence.

Because actually, there's a really good and obvious precedent for people in Florence who wield power without being in office. The Medici. The Medici. Right. So, Quasimo and Lorenzo ruled from behind the scenes and they used their clients and their connections and they relied on their money, their influence and their charisma. Now, Savonarola does not have clients, although he does have connections, and he doesn't have money, but he has loads of supporters and he has loads of influence. And of course, he has money.

An extraordinary charisma, a very different kind of charisma from Lorenzo, but one that is founded on his preaching and in his moral stature and his hotline to God, right? Which Lorenzo never had.

So as we enter 1495, against all the odds, this friar from Ferrara, Girolamo Savonarola, finds himself the most powerful man in the Florentine Republic. But Dominic, I guess the question is, you know, he's the most powerful man, but what is he going to do with his power? And we will find out the answer to that question after the break when the bonfires are lit and the revolution, or should I say the reformation, begins. ♪

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Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. So Dominic, the year is 1495 and Savonarola is now the most powerful man in Florence, despite himself not being a Florentine. So the big question,

What does he want? What's he going to do with this power? I think it's much easier to say what he doesn't want than what he does. So, I mean, he talks about a republic of virtue, about prayer and penance and stuff. You know, he talks about that, but actually what he's he talks about, what really gets him going when he's talking is all the things that he hates. And these will be very familiar to anybody, you know, who's ever read about Puritans of various kinds throughout history.

drinking, gambling, swearing, prostitution, and I quote, provocative dancing, fireworks, the things that actually...

attract intense criticism to this day. Now, interestingly, one of the things he really hates is gender fluidity. So he specifically objects to men with long hair. He doesn't like people who wear tight hose, so basically tight trousers and fancy colored capes because he says these things erase the divinely ordained distinction between the sexes. Well, unsurprisingly, because absolutely it's ordained by God and also it threatens the

the sins of sodomy, the various sins of sodomy. Florence is so notorious for these various sins that the German word for sodomy is Florenza. I mean, you've hit now on his real target. That accursed vice for which you know Florence is infamous throughout Italy, he says in one sermon, December 1494, make a law I say without pity so that such persons are stoned and burned.

And the Signoria then passes the most stringent laws of this kind in Florence's history. So there had previously been fines for sodomy, and now they're replaced. You go in the pillory, and then you're branded, and if you're a repeat offender, you are sentenced to death. And Dominic, can I just say that on this topic, again, there is nothing novel about what Savonarola is doing, because moral panics about sodomy are an absolute feature of the 15th century across Italy today.

So, at the beginning of the 15th century, in 1418 in Venice, the government there had established what they called the Collegium Sodomitarum. This is a magistracy that is specifically charged with eradicating what they describe as the crime which threatens a city with ruin. We talked about Bernardino coming to Florence and having bonfires of vanities and things like that.

And he had preached in the Duomo and had urged his congregation there to display their hatred for sodomy by spitting on the floor. And the sound of expectorations had rung throughout the vaults of the cathedral. So, you know, he is capitalizing on what seems to have been a kind of consistent moral panic. And a panic actually, I think, born out of the fact that although the

the church teaches that homosexuality is shameful and illegal and a sin and whatnot. It actually seems to have been reasonably tolerated in mid-15th century Florence. So Donald Weinstein points out middle-class Florentines generally got married quite late, the men, in their 30s. And he says there are very few opportunities for them to basically have any relationships with women, with respectable women before that.

So they resorted to female prostitutes or to young men. And there were particular taverns that were well known as kind of cruising grounds where people would pick up young men. Yeah. And this is why I think, you know, even in Germany, Florence has this reputation, a bit like maybe Amsterdam, Germany.

has had since the war for Europeans. And there's some historians who explain this. They say the reason this happens is basically because under Lorenzo the Magnificent, he allows this to flourish. There's a sense of sexual license because it's basically a way of distracting people from the fact that their political liberties have been severely curtailed. Basically, he'll control the elections, he controls the money and the power, and in return, go to the taverns and do whatever you like.

Now, the irony is that Savonarola's crackdown doesn't work at all. That's actually so often the case in history. These harsh new penalties are completely counterproductive because officials don't want to impose them. And people don't want to report their neighbours if they're worried they're going to be

killed so prosecutions actually fall in the 1490s under savonarola's moral regime and his rhetoric therefore becomes even more strident are there any councillors present i would like to see you build a nice fire of these sodomites in the piazza two or three male and female make a fire that all italy can see he says in july 1495

And I guess that brings us to, well, two of the really celebrated elements, or celebrated is the word, much discussed elements of Savonarola's regime, both of which are often cited as anticipating chilling things that happened in the 20th century.

So the first one is the bonfire of the vanities. And this, I think, is probably the one thing that there'll be a lot of listeners who've maybe vaguely heard of Savonarola. And if they've heard one thing about him, it's that he had a bonfire of the vanities. In the popular imagination, it's a huge public bonfire of books and artworks anticipating the book burnings of the Nazis. But the truth, as you've already mentioned, so many of Savonarola's aspects of his regime are not new.

And Florence has already had multiple bonfires of the vanities. There'd been bonfires of the vanities under the Medici. The only difference really with Savonarola's is that it feels more official. It's held on the date of Carnival, which always comes before Lent, and it's held on the Piazza della Signoria. So not outside a church, but outside the main civic building, the centre of civic power. And they built...

It's in 1497. They built this huge wooden pyramid with eight sides. And each of the eight sides, there are 15 shelves. And they fill the 15 shelves with, and I quote, well, I'm not going to read the whole list, but shameful pictures and sculptures, gambling devices, musical instruments, music books, masks, playing cards, dice, etc.

Lots of women's stuff, diadems, hair pieces, cosmetic cases, perfumes, wigs. Interesting because the bonfires organised by Bernardino, the great anti-sodomite preacher, had specifically focused on clothing that was associated with gender fluidity, if you want to put it like that. So the kind of the sense that both sexes, they need to maintain sex

a sobriety as well as a distinctiveness is kind of manifest in these great auto-de-fé. Yeah, exactly. Now, I think in the popular imagination, if you imagine this, you can sort of imagine the crowd looking on in shock, a gaggle of kind of hard-faced friars, kind of pinched white faces setting light to these things. But this is actually not right. There were huge processions because I remember it's basically coinciding with what once been the carnival.

So there are thousands of people. They're all singing hymns. The bells are ringing. And the setting of the pyramid on fire is a great public spectacle. And destruction is fun, isn't it? I mean, if you and particularly if you feel kind of that right is on your side. So, again, I mean, the kind of, you know, Black Lives Matter parallel, pulling statues down, throwing them into the sea.

It's great. People weren't po-faced about that. They're whooping and cheering, right? Which is exactly what they're doing at the Barn for the Vanities. The sources comment on how happy people were. They were loving it. It was a brilliant day out. Let's burn a load of perfume. Brilliant. Love it. Now, the second thing that Severo Aurelio is well known for is his kind of roving bands and moral enforcers.

Lots of societies have had moral enforcers, but savannah rollers are different because they are supposedly different because they're teenagers and children. So supposedly anticipating people like the Red Guards in Mao's Cultural Revolution. Now, again, the origins of this are more complicated. Florence was well known for its problems with gangs.

They were gangs of boys called fanciulli. They fought in the streets and they were particularly infamous for assaulting women, sexually assaulting women in the streets. These are kind of boys and teenagers. And Savonarola wants to fix this. And he and his allies say, well, what we'll do is we'll get these boys, age six to 16, the boys on the streets, we'll make men of them. We'll form them into companies. We'll get them to wear plain clothes. We'll get them to cut their hair.

We'll encourage them to elect their own officers and their job, we will get them to set the moral tone of the city. So he's the Baden Powell of Renaissance Florence. Again, not new. Religious fraternities like this had flourished in Florence all through the 15th century. The difference is because it's him, it feels a bit more official and that the tone is, his tone is always so aggressive and so impassioned.

So by the middle of the 1490s, you can see these boys groups everywhere in Florence. They will put up little altars at street corners and demand that you give them arms and they'll give these arms to the poor. Now, there is an edge to this. If they see a woman with a tiara on her head, they're encouraged to snatch it off. If they see somebody walking down the street looking like a bit of a dandy,

So a sort of Benjamin Disraeli figure in like a green suit or something. They'll harass them and they'll harass drunkards and things. But they're not really beating people up or killing them or doing any of these things. Now, outside Florence, stories of these boys spread. And in Rome in particular, people say, oh, Savonarola has set up a reign of terror. And these kind of gangs of youths roam the streets, making everyone's life a complete misery.

But I think this is nonsense, actually, because we know that the boys asked the signoria

for the power to punish homosexuals and prostitutes so that we may purge the whole of our city of vice, they said. And the Senorites said, no, there's no way we're giving you that power. That's demented. So they haven't, you know, the civic authorities have not completely rolled over and given in to Savonarola and his sort of moral shock troops. And other people who are actively opposed to him.

Yes. This is not... He does not rule with an iron fist. This isn't fascist. Nowhere near. So this is where... So at this point in my reading and research on this, I kind of was like, well, where's the reign of terror? Where's the evidence this is one of the most evil men in history? And he doesn't actually seem to have killed anybody. I mean, some of his rhetoric is very unsettling, like the sort of anti-gay rhetoric and whatnot, but he doesn't actually have the power to kill anybody. And...

He's always challenged. So there are his supporters, the weepers, the wailers, as they're called, the piagnoni. But there are always critics and they're called the arrabbiati. They're sort of the angry ones, the enraged, the furious. And they're probably a smaller group, but they are richer. They are more well-established. They're more kind of patrician, I suppose. And so ultimately they have deeper roots. Yeah, they probably do. Yeah.

And I think his rule is always so-called rule. I mean, he's setting the tone, but he's not sitting in judgment. His rule is always fragile for two reasons. Number one, as we've discussed, Florence is in a massive mess.

Its trade has collapsed. The war has done terrible damage. People aren't collecting their harvests. Prices are through the roof. There are bread riots. You know, everything feels very, very fraught. And what is more, the international situation is incredibly dangerous. So Rodrigo Borja, Pope Alexander VI, who we described as a man who loves a machination, he decides to change sides in 1495 and he forms a holy league to kick out the French.

And the Holy League is the Papal States, Venice, Milan and Aragon, as well as the Holy Roman Empire.

So Charles, who has captured Naples by this point, decides, oh, I'll go back to France. And he goes back to France. He fights his way back through Italy, fights a massive battle, beats the Holy League and goes all the way back to France. Now, the problem for Savonarola, for Florence, is they're allied to the French now. And Savonarola has told everybody that Charles is the new Cyrus the Great and that he's going to sort of lead the world into this sort of new age of reformation. Which he's signally failing to do. Yeah, which he's gone home. Yeah.

Yeah. So Florence is now completely isolated and Florence doesn't join the Holy League. And Pope Alexander, the Borgia Pope, says, this is terrible. Why have Florence, you know, Florence have let the side down. And he personally blames Savonarola. He said, this is because this demented friar they've got in Florence. He's already been reading about Savonarola's apocalyptic prophecies, his denunciations of corruption in the church. And of course, if you're the Pope,

And you have this bloke in Florence who claims, you know, he's got the gift of prophecy. He's got the link with God.

You know, he knows what's coming. I mean, that could not be a more serious threat to papal authority. Of course. And this is why the papacy and the institutional structures of the church have always looked askance at apocalyptic preaching. Yeah. It's dangerous. Absolutely. July 1495, so quite early on in Savonarola's kind of regime, as it were, the Pope summons him to Rome, says, come to Rome. He says, look, you know,

You know, I don't mean you any harm. I receive you in love and charity. I just want to hear from your own lips what on earth's going on over there. And Savonarola says, I mean, this is where he could argue he makes his big mistake or would he have ended up like Martin Luther? Who can say? Savonarola says, oh, I'm not coming to Rome. I'm too ill. I've got dysentery. I mean, to be fair, he's got dysentery. You probably don't want to see him. I've got dysentery and I'm worried I might be assassinated on the way.

Now, his refusal to come to Rome is a very, very serious step. You can see why he does it, because he's worried that if he gets to Rome, he'll almost be put on trial at the papal court. He'll either be made to admit that he's an imposter to back down, or

or he'll be condemned as a heretic if he sticks to his guns. So he kind of thinks it was lose-lose, I'll stay where I am, thank you. But of course, by not going to Rome, he sets himself dead against papal authority and he makes a confrontation pretty much inevitable. So then there's a long standoff. The Pope, at the end of 1495, he accuses Severo Rola of falling victim to perverse dogma and insanity of mind. He bans him from public preaching.

Savonarola completely ignores this. Preaching is his power, but it's his power base. If he stops preaching, he loses all his influence. And as the time goes on, his rhetoric becomes ever more aggressive. He really openly condemns. He's always talking about popes and prelates and how corrupt they are. He says, I'm Moses leading my people across the Red Sea. Which presumably makes the pope pharaoh. Exactly. He's casting the pope as pharaoh. The pope's not going to like that.

The Pope hits on another wheeze. He says, I want to reorganize all the sort of Dominican authorities in Italy and put Savonarola's monastery under a new kind of regional jurisdiction. If Savonarola agreed, that would mean they could transfer him out of Florence and put him in a different monastery. So Savonarola just completely ignores it and says, you know, I'm not even listening to you now. So this, I think, suggests that Savonarola really isn't a charlatan.

He's not a con man because a con man at this point, he'd run away or he'd give in to the Pope or he'd find a compromise. Savonarola has drunk his own Kool-Aid. And also, Dominic, just to say, I mean, he's not corrupt. He's not using his position to make money or anything like that. Do you know, a funny thing is that people always say about Savonarola in this sort of popular accounts, the great monsters of history. The one thing they always say is he's a hypocrite.

And yet he's not in any way a hypocrite. I mean, this is the thing. There's a sort of assumption when somebody is a Puritan and a reformer, they must be a hypocrite. There's probably all kinds of stuff going on in the back office that we don't know about. But actually, in this case, there's nothing. There's no sexual decadence. There's no greed. There's no sort of, I mean, I'm not saying I'd have him around for dinner, but he's not in that sense an evil man. Yeah, I mean, if you wanted to reform Chipping Norton...

You'd have him in, wouldn't you? He'd be the guy. Yeah, I suppose. I suppose. Yeah, I probably would. I don't think we'd have a lot to... I don't think we'd have natural soulmates. Well, you'd play the role of a kind of Medici prince. I suppose I would, yeah. You could retire and just let him crack on. Yeah, I'd use him against my enemies while I was on a night out in Dublin after a Restless History recording with Paul Rouse. That's exactly what would happen. So we get to 1497 and we haven't had any enough bombshells in this episode, so let's have a few.

First of all, Charles VIII, he really let Savonarola and God down. He signs a truce with the Holy League. So now the French are out of the war. I mean, that's a terrible blow to Savonarola's credibility. And he hasn't done his Cyrus the Great stuff. He hasn't done his Cyrus the Great. And also he hasn't given Pisa back to the Florentines. So the Florentines have lost Pisa. They've got nothing to show for it. Bad on every level.

Then, the summer of 1497, the Pope excommunicates Severo Nero. And the order is read out across Florence and the churches. And Severo Nero says, listen, nobody needs to take any notice of this. The Pope's based this on false information. And an excommunication based on false information is no excommunication at all.

So it's interesting that unlike Luther in a similar situation, Savonarola isn't attacking it on theological terms. No, no, no. See, it's interesting. He never gets into that kind of theological debate. That's not really his thing, which is a big difference with Luther.

But there's a definite sense, I think, that momentum is shifting now because rival religious orders in Florence. And don't forget, a lot of these religious orders absolutely despise one another more than they do people who aren't even Christians. Like the Franciscans. The Franciscans can't stand Savonarola. And there are Franciscans who are calling him, and I quote, a hypocritical lying and false prophet.

Very openly. So the idea that he's got this reign of terror and censorship is just not right. You can see sort of obscene graffiti on street corners mocking him. They put nails into the pulpit or something so that he'll hammer down his fist and skewer it. Exactly. There's that. And they also fixed the rotting hide of an ass to the pulpit.

to sort of put him off. I think that would put you off, actually. And what's worse, the mood in Florence is really darkening.

Basically, they've got nothing to eat. They've got no money. There are waves and waves of plague and disease. There's homeless people dying in the streets. It's all a general atmosphere of kind of misery and paranoia. And do you think that Savonarola's tendency to harp on all the plagues and disasters and horrors that the apocalypse will bring is slightly starting to lose its appeal now that things are really getting terrible? You made the comparison with the mood of 2020, 2021. As we know, that only lasts so long because people ultimately get bored of it.

I think. And Savonarola has a bad habit of blaming people themselves. You see, this is his message. So when people are starving and they've got no money, he says, oh, you repent of your sins. People are like, come on, we want bread. Yeah, we want bread. Exactly. In March 1498, 9th of March, the Pope sends an ultimatum to the Signoria in Florence. He says, right.

Enough now. Shut this bloke down or else. He says, I will put you under interdict. So that means no one can be born, die or take communion or whatever in Florence. That's right, isn't it?

You're basically cast out of the community. You can't live, you can't be born, you can't die. That's the joke. It seems likely he will call for foreign military intervention against Florence unless they put Savonarone under house arrest. But what really frightens the Signoria are the reports that the Pope is preparing to arrest all Florentine merchants and bankers in Rome and to confiscate their assets. And at that point,

The Florentines are like, well, okay, well, that's, you know, the stuff about our immortal soul was one thing, but the money, that's no good. So they formally order Savonarola to stop preaching. That's on the 17th of March. And then on the 25th of March, a really sensational development. A bloke called Francesco di Puglia, who is a Franciscan friar at the rival monastery of Santa Croce. He says to his congregation, look, we've all had enough of this. Let's settle this.

let's let god decide let us hold an ordeal by fire savannah roller and i will walk through the flames and if he can do this and come out unscathed then he will win but if he can't then he will be exposed as a liar so it's a friar off a friar and a fire off oh my word so exciting and actually the people at the time are even more excited than we are telling this story they it's like the

It's like Christmas, the birthday, World Cup final, all in one. Oh, my God. Literally, people are running around the streets. They can't wait. People say, oh, I'd love to do it. I can't. I'll do it too. They're so excited. Now, when the news reaches the Palazzo della Signora, some of the councillors say, oh, my God, are you joking? This is barbaric. One of them actually says, our ancestors would be ashamed of us if we let this go ahead.

See, the idea that everybody in the past is kind of sunk in superstition or not is obviously rubbish. Lots of people say, come on, this is mad. Oh, I reframe it. I mean, throughout history and into the present, people love a hideous spectacle of suffering. Correct. And lots of people, the majority of people on both sides, so Pianioni and Arrabbiati, say, oh, I love the thought of this. That's brilliant. This is the final. Let's decide this now.

Now, Savonarola is not keen. He says, why would I do this against this Franciscan bloke? He's not my enemy. I mean, he'd do it against the Pope, but he's not going to do it against this guy. So one of his cronies, Fra Domenico, he says, well, I'll stand in. I'll do it in your stead. Now, at that point, the original Franciscan says, well, I was not doing it against some bad carrier. So he gets to stand in as well, who's called Fra Giuliano.

And the deal is that if either of them dies and is burned, then their hero, the guy they're standing in for, will be banished. What nobody ever considers is they might both come out unhurt. What would happen then? They'd, you know, penalty shootout of some. It's a huge operation. I mean, imagine seeing this. This would have been so exciting. It's held on Saturday, the 7th of April, 1498, in the Piazza della Signoria in the heart of Florence, Italy.

The place where they always have their little parlamentos, the place where they had the bonfire, the vanities. There it is. All foreigners are kicked out of the city.

The gates of the city are closed. The streets are barricaded. There are armed guards everywhere. That morning, Savonarola and Domenico lead their supporters from the monastery of San Marco. They're holding crosses and they're singing psalms. Savonarola's put on a special white velvet robe. He looks splendid. And he's carrying the host, which is the body of Christ, isn't it, from communion. They get to the square. There are grandstands in the square filled

filled with support fans. They're not women. Women are not allowed to watch this. So the women, if you remember, the women were allowed to watch a load of stallions going berserk over a mare. Remember that? Yes, they were for their entertainment. Yeah. People said it was especially good for girls. Educational. Yeah. But they're not allowed to watch this burning. They've built a long kind of brick platform from the Palazzo della Signoria into the square.

And it's lined with kind of sticks and branches and brushwood. So this is the fire. And the fire will be on either side. And there's a very narrow gap. And you have to walk down the middle kind of through the fire. So kickoff approaches, which is moments from kickoff. And suddenly, a massive row. It's like the 1978 World Cup final between Holland and Argentina. A dispute about somebody having a bandage on his hand. There's a huge row. Domenico wants to carry a crucifix. And the Franciscans say, you can't take a crucifix into the fire. Come on. That's poor.

Stefan Arota says, you're right, actually, you can't. I think you should take the host instead. Now a huge row of the Franciscans go berserk at this. Take the host into the fire? Are you joking? Well, it's kind of like taking drugs, isn't it? If you're a cyclist or something. Doping. Of course, it's massive doping. It's like theological doping. The crowd are getting very restive. Come on, get on with it. You know, because time is passing and they're like digging into the Bible to find precedence or whatever. And then, unbelievably...

they hear thunder and it starts to rain. Oh no. So actually it's not a football match. It's a cricket match. It's a cricket match. It is a cricket match. It rains and rains and rains. And basically you get to late to mid to late afternoon. And it's pretty obvious the rain is not going to stop. No, there'll be no play today. There'll be no play today. Exactly. Now, as they all go back,

The crowd are absolutely furious. They've given up their time at a weekend for nothing. And the person they blame is Savonarola. All this nonsense about crucifixes and the host. You were just playing for time. You didn't even want it to happen because you knew you'd lose. And maybe he could see the storm clouds literally approaching. Maybe, yeah, coming over the mountains. As he goes back to his monastery, they're being jostled, he and his supporters, by the crowd.

And it's only because they've got armed guards they're able to get back to the monastery. And that night, some of his supporters say to him, come to San Marco. And they say, look, mate, the city's turned against you. You know, we need to crack down now. We need to get weapons. You know, otherwise we're in real trouble. And Savonarone says, no way. You see, this again suggests to me he's not one of the most evil men in history. Because he says, that's the last thing I want to have bloodshed on the streets of Florence. I hate that idea.

Isn't he kind? So the next day is Palm Sunday, services all day in the cathedral and a sense of tension. And at Vespers, fighting breaks out between pro and anti Savonarola people. And the crowd starts chanting, let's go to San Marco. And there's a real sort of sense of passion has reached a crescendo. And the crowd becomes a mob and they surge through the streets all the way toward the monastery. And there Savonarola is leading an evening service. Remember, this is a man who's been excommunicated.

So he shouldn't really be doing this. He's actually kneeling before the crucifix when they hear the first kind of banging and crashing on the doors and shouting and people throwing stones. Basically, they're under siege. Now, some of his monks had thought this was coming and had been stockpiling weapons.

So they're like, brilliant, let's do this. So they charge up to the roof and they're like firing down on the crowd. They're hurling tiles, bricks. They get the big pinnacle from the roof and they drop it on the crowd. There's bells ringing, there's bodies everywhere, people screaming. So this must have made up for the lack of the firewalking. Yeah, I think this is fun in its own way. I think ideally you'd have had both, but one out of two is not bad. Anyway, late that night, the Signoria, the

the Grand Council votes. They decide, okay, Severn has got to go. And they send troops to secure the convent. There's now basically a full-scale battle. They bring up artillery and explosives. Some of the friars, I'm impressed to discover, had handguns and crossbows that are firing back at them. So it's a great film, this. The battle lasts about eight hours.

The soldiers burst in through the kind of burning doors of the church. They find a lot of the monks sort of gibbering in terror in the church. And Savonarola is in the library. He's praying on his knees. They're in the Medici library, Tom. Performatively, do you think? No, I don't. Why would I think that's very cynical? That's Machiavelli speaking. Performative, perhaps the wrong word, but emblazoning a visual representation of his piety and

on the eyeballs of his attackers? Maybe, yes, maybe. Or is it a bit like, you know, The Mission, you know, the Jeremy Irons film?

At the end, when the soldiers attack, he walks through the sort of smoke and the slaughter carrying across, doesn't he? And the kind of the oboe is playing and all that stuff, the moving music. It's a bit like that. It's like a last gesture of defiance. I think it is performative in a sense, but not in a cynical way. Does that make, does that seem fair? I would never be cynical about Samarone. That's good to know because otherwise you wouldn't be yourself.

So actually, they drag him through the streets past jeering crowds to this Plaza de la Senora. And they put him, do you know where they put him? They put him in the same cell that Cosimo de' Medici was put in 65 years earlier. But presumably not deliberately. They're not making a point there. No, they're not making a point. It's just they've probably only got two cells. Well, I don't know. The impression I'm getting of the Senora, I think they've probably got quite a lot of cells. So what actually follows is quite grim.

long days of interrogations and torture, something called the strapado. So the strapado is a terrible thing. Basically what they do is they bind your hands behind your back with a rope, at one end of the rope. Then the other end of the rope they put through a hook in the ceiling or pulley. Then people pull on this rope and they basically, that pulls your arms back over your head, dislocates your shoulders, I imagine, and lifts you off your feet and breaks your arms and you're hanging there in absolute agony.

And they do this to him, you know, multiple times. They'll give him a turn almost with every question they ask. But I'd rather do that than have my feet burnt off. Really? Yeah, that's horrible. Well, the guy died in 700. I didn't die at this, I suppose. But I don't know. It's not like Luther. They don't care about his theology. They just want him to admit that he was a fake and that all he wanted was political power.

And what they get when you read through it, it's this dreadful kind of rambling series of confessions and retractions. Historians and biographers have always argued, you know, did he mean his confessions or not? And I mentioned this book by Donald Weinstein. He says he thinks Savonarola actually did think he was guilty, that in his kind of agony, he came to think that

God would not have deserted him without a reason and that therefore he must have been wrong when he said he was a prophet and that he's as sincere in his confession as he was in his original prophecies. That both times, actually, he's not cynical. He really means it. And I think that's perfectly plausible psychologically. He feels...

His own failure and his own humiliation proved to him that he must have been mistaken and he was a sinner all along. So that's pretty bad for him. And then to make matters worse, there's kind of a knock on the door one day and in came some interrogators from Rome. The last people you want to see in Severn Road situation. And they have a go too. And they do the same thing with him for days. And this is really terrible. I mean, his confessions now are just rambling, contradictory. He's begging for mercy, sort of sobbing. It's really, really awful.

And the end finally came on the 23rd of May. He and his two cronies, who were called Domenico and Silvestro, they were publicly stripped of their clerical robes. They were hanged in the central square. Everybody was expecting that Savonarola would make a final kind of resounding speech.

But he didn't really say anything at all. And the crowd were very disappointed. And is that because he's broken or because he feels his prophetic voice has now gone? I think both, Tom. I think both. He has actually, he wrote sort of commentaries on the Zams while he was in prison. That's impressive considering his arms are broken. Yeah. Well, I don't know how he did it. You're doing it with his teeth. I don't know how he did it, but apparently, I mean, I'm not really, I'm not a man for such things myself, but people say they're very moving and very well done. Anyway.

They're hanged. When they're dead, the platform was set on fire and there were little explosives put on the platform basically to blow up their bodies. And then people came along with carts, swept up all their ashes and threw them in the River Arno so there'd be no relics. However, that wasn't quite the end of Savonarola. The authorities tried to erase his legacy completely. So they banned his books, his writings. I mean, this is the irony. He's the person who's always thought of as the book banner, but his books were banned.

Even the bell of his monastery was whipped through the streets and withdrawn from sight for half a century. But as you will know, the first Protestant reformers, the sort of generation, I guess, that follow him, they couldn't get enough of Savonarola. Martin Luther called him, and I quote, a holy man, a godly man of Florence. Calvin, compared to Calvin, Calvin was a big fan of Savonarola. And the first kind of histories of Protestantism

often mentioned him as a forerunner and said, oh, there was this bloke in Florence. He was brilliant. Well, because he denounced the Pope, I suppose. Yes, that's exactly what it is. So anyway, he's dead. What do I think of him? I think it's pretty clear what I think of him to the listeners. I actually feel quite sorry for him. I don't think he was one of the most evil men in history. What do you think, Tom? I mean, the whole way through the Middle Ages,

from the 11th century onwards, you have these reformers who summon Christians to repentance and to, um,

often targeting wealth specifically and sometimes they become saints and sometimes they're condemned as heretics and in a way Savonarola is the last of these because he is also serving to kind of presage the reformation which will take Europe into a very different world. Alright now Theo wants us to wrap up because he says we're running quite long so just

Just two last loose ends. The Medici. The Medici did get back to Florence eventually under Lorenzo's brother Giovanni the Cardinal. He recaptured the city with papal troops in 1512.

The Medici ended up becoming hereditary dukes of Florence and then grand dukes of Tuscany, and they ruled until the 18th century. And Tom, as you pointed out in the first episode or the second episode, I can't remember, they produced a couple of popes and a couple of queens of France. Catherine de' Medici. But I think it's telling that the Medici who really dominate the world's imagination are the first ones, Cosimo and Lorenzo. And that is because of the other loose end, which is Florence.

Florence never recovered, really, from the turmoil of the 1490s. Because by the time the Italian wars were over in the middle of the 16th century, Florence basically lost its reputation for financial innovation and economic prosperity and was becoming a bit of a backwater. And that, of course, is great for its future as a tourist attraction, because it means that the glorious architecture of the 15th century is kind of preserved.

Yeah, I think that's dead right. So nobody really cares about the Later Medici, and we probably won't do them, but we will do another Italian family on this podcast who we've already mentioned, and they are, of course, the Borgias. And you can look forward to that perhaps next year. First, before we come to them, the next series we'll be doing...

Much nearer in time because we are crossing the sea from Britain to Ireland, to Dublin, to explore the Irish War of Independence against Britain in the aftermath of the Great War going into the 1920s. And as always, of course, members of the Restless History Club will get early access to those six epic episodes and you can sign up for them at therestlesshistory.com. So thank you, Dominic. Thank you, everyone, for listening and goodbye. Arrivederci.

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