Lorenzo was the most powerful figure in Italy, the most
widely-travelled, and the richest man of his time. Tiring of luxury
and flattery, he was ambitious to be called the patron of art and
literature. He had fitted up a great banqueting-room in his palace, in
which he could assemble painters, sculptors, architects, actors,
poets, philosophers. His seat at the head of the table was after the
fashion of a throne, and he had made himself a kind of dictator in the
realm of learning. Always open to flattery, he was surrounded by a
group of citizens who never ceased burning incense at the altar of his
egotism. He was at once a politician, a poet, an amateur actor,
dramatist, and singer. At his table sat Ficino, who translated Plato's
works into Latin, and Pico della Mirandola, who was the idol of
Florentine society. It was the latter's boast that a single reading
fixed in his memory any language, any essay or poem, and made it his
forever. Other guests were Leo Alberti and Leonardo, the two men of
comprehensive genius in all the group that lived in the palace of the
Prince. Constant adulation made Lorenzo arrogant and vain to the last
degree. In disguise he led a group of dissipated young men in the
carnival fêtes. He wrote licentious carnival songs and so degraded
were his followers that they went everywhither shouting his praises as
a poet superior to Dante. And when, in July of the following year,
Savonarola was elected Prior of St. Mark's, Lorenzo sent messengers to
him, bidding him to show more respect to the head of the State.
Savonarola refused to do so. One day the Prince was seen walking in
the garden of the monastery. An attendant came in to Savonarola, and
announced that Lorenzo the Magnificent was in the garden. "Does he ask
for me?" "No," replied the young monk. "Then let him walk." Shortly
afterward the Prince sent a deputation to wait on the new Prior,
telling him that it was not good form to preach against the Prince,
who was the patron of St. Mark's, to which Savonarola replied, "Did I
receive my position from Lorenzo, or from Almighty God?" Savonarola's
eyes blazed, and he spake in tones of thunder and the answer was,
"From Almighty God." "Then," went on the Prior, "to Almighty God will
I render homage."
Lorenzo, as it chanced, was drawing near to the end of his life. One
day a messenger came from the palace announcing his dangerous illness.
Because Lorenzo had usurped the liberties of his country, had robbed
and oppressed his own people, Savonarola would not go. Then a second
messenger came, saying that the Prince was dying and asked absolution.
The Prior found the Prince propped up upon velvet pillows, and lying
in a great silken chamber. All his life long, Lorenzo had been
accustomed to soft words and pliant service. Now this stern prophet of
duty towered above his couch like a messenger of God. The Prior told
him absolution could not be granted except upon certain conditions.
"Three things are required of you; you must have a full and lively
faith in God's mercy; you must restore your ill-gotten gains; you must
restore liberty to Florence." Twice the Prince assented, but the third
time his face went white. He shivered, as if in fear, and at length,
in silence, he turned his face toward the wall. Savonarola turned his
back. He would not grant absolution. Lorenzo died. The news was spread
through the city by the relatives and servants standing about the
bedside of the dead Prince. The event heaved the soul of Florence as
the tides heave the sea.
The Prior was now the most influential man in Italy. His sermons took
on a new boldness, and his denunciation of vices filled the city with
excitement. Ever increasing his power as a preacher, he now added
certain addresses as a patriot. He hated the tyranny of the Medici
with an undying hatred. Taking upon himself full responsibility, he
sent a letter of welcome to Charles VIII and his French army,
believing that if Florence opened her gates to the French, the
Florentines might recover their own liberty. Having expelled the
family of the Medici, he found it necessary to write a constitution
for Florence, and his influence in shaping that constitution was the
most powerful influence exerted in that critical time. Leaving to
others the task of writing the code, he told the people plainly that,
of necessity, a government by one man strengthened the single ruler
toward despotism and autocracy, while self-government, through the
choice of representatives, worked for the diffusion of strength and
responsibility. He proposed a grand council of 3,000 citizens
appointed by the city judges, a body that answers to our House of
Representatives, and another superior council of eighty citizens, all
over forty years of age, who, in turn, were to share with the
magistrates the task of appointing the higher officers of the State.
Then he brought about a reform of taxation, full amnesty for political
offenders, made usury a treasonable act, founded a bank that loaned
money to the poor on their character and to the rich on their
collateral. He organized a movement against licentious plays, against
luxury, extravagance, ostentatious dress and houses. And when the
exiled princes made an alliance with the Pope, he denounced the crimes
of the Papacy.
Little by little, a great moral revival swept over Florence and Italy,
a revival that culminated in the coming together of the Florentines in
the public square, where the people threw upon a blazing fire their
vanities, with all the implements of gambling, fraud, and trickery, of
vice and drunkenness. Without being himself an ascetic, without making
any sweeping attack upon pleasure through music or the drama,
Savonarola was an opponent of every form of sensuality, and the gilded
vices that undermine sound morals. He was first of all a preacher,
changing men's lives and, incidentally, stating the reasons for their
personal reformation. Luther changed men's thinking first, and showed
men why this was wrong, and that was right, and therefore wrought
fundamental changes. But Savonarola was less of a thinker and more of
an evangelist. He had all the action of Demosthenes, all the
earnestness of Peter the Hermit, all the voice, the gestures and the
manner of Whitefield. He believed that the inevitable end of sin was
the Inferno of Dante, and therefore his language was full of fire, his
voice full of tears, and he plead with men to flee from Vanity Fair as
Lot fled from Sodom.
His uncompromising spirit had long since aroused the hatred of
political adversaries as well as of the degraded court of Rome. Even
now, when his authority was at its height, when his fame filled the
land, and the vast cathedral and its precincts lacked space for the
crowds flocking to hear him, his enemies were secretly preparing his
downfall. From the beginning it was plain that Socrates was fighting a
losing battle against the wicked judges of Athens. From the beginning
it must have been plain to Dante that his cunning and insidious foes,
who felt that he alone stood between them and their own enrichment,
would drive him an exile from Florence. And when Savonarola came into
collision with Pope Alexander VI, it was like a bird of paradise
going up against some Gibraltar of granite and steel.
Pope Alexander's two ambitions were the advancement of his family and
the strengthening of his temporal power. It was Alexander who, knowing
that the Sultan had a rival in the person of the young Prince Djem,
seized the young noble and put him in jail, on condition that forty
thousand ducats yearly should be paid for his jail fee. It was to
Alexander that, later, the Turk sent dispatches offering three hundred
thousand ducats if he would do away with the youth. History has
extenuated many of the crimes of Alexander, but this traffic in murder
for the Turks can never be forgiven. It was Alexander also who made
impossible liberty of the press, by forcing printers to submit their
books to the control of archbishops. It was Alexander who maintained a
harem in the Vatican. It was Alexander whose spies were in every inn,
in every village. His secret agents were in all the audiences of
Savonarola. Alexander looked upon the Prior as a traitor, disloyal and
dangerous to the Papacy. At first he sent agents to Florence, and
offered bribes to Savonarola, asked if he would accept a cardinal's
hat, and invited him to Rome to visit the Vatican. Savonarola
answered by redoubling his attacks. He called Rome a harlot church,
till the Pope ordered his excommunication. And at length, becoming
alarmed for their city, the magistrates of Florence forbade
Savonarola's preaching, and closed the cathedral to his work.
Retiring to St. Mark's, the great leader wrote letters to the crowned
heads of Europe, and called for a general council. He reviewed the
crimes of which the Pope had been guilty, and the list of vices was
long and black. His letters to various princes were intercepted, and
taken to Alexander. Then agents, with large sums of money, were sent
to Florence to organize a movement to destroy the Prior. Every
conceivable plot was organized against him, but he escaped poison, the
knife, and the assassin's club. His enemies challenged him to the
ordeal by fire, and when he asked that he might be allowed to carry
the crucifix and the sacrament in his hand they withdrew the
challenge. Thrown into prison, the inquisitors subjected him to the
most cruel torture. He was drawn up to the ceiling by a rope fourteen
times, and then suddenly dropped, until muscles, tendons and bones
were all but torn from their sockets. He was denied food and water and
sleep. And finally his reason gave way. Bodily pain so injured and
inflamed the brain that it refused its action. Among his last words
were the words of the dying Saviour, "In thee, O Lord, have I trusted.
Let me never be confounded."
When he was condemned to the flames, he appealed to the government of
Florence, but the rulers hastened to support the papal decree, and
insisted upon the execution of the sentence. On the morning upon which
he was to die, the great public square in Florence was crowded with
citizens. Multitudes who had wept during his sermons and whose lives
had been changed by his teachings, stood in grief and trepidation
around the funeral pyre, just as the multitudes in Jerusalem stood in
fear about the cross of Christ. In pronouncing the sentence of death,
the bishop of Verona, overwhelmed with fear and confusion, said, "I
separate thee from the Church militant and the Church triumphant." To
which Savonarola answered, "From the Church militant, yes, but from
the Church triumphant, that is not given unto you." The soldiers
pushed the lowest dregs of the city, thieves, drunkards, diseased
criminals, close to his scaffold, and encouraged them to assail him
with vile words and vile deeds. At ten o'clock of the 23d of May,
1498, his enemies achieved his death. Like Elijah he ascended unto
heaven in a chariot of fire. But soon thereafter the guilty leaders of
the Church discovered that his work had just begun. He had aroused the
conscience of the people, who followed Luther in a revolt against the
sale of indulgences that gave the right for the crime and sin. His
assertion of personal liberty put strength into Luther's arm and faith
into the heart of Calvin. Erasmus borrowed from Savonarola his
teachings of reasonableness and light. In exalting the Bible as the
final source of authority, he had enthroned that Book and the
teachings of Jesus above all popes and cardinals and bishops.
Practical men, Galileo, and Bacon, and Erasmus, and Tyndale, borrowed
courage from his life and writings. And to this day the influence of
this preacher, prophet, martyr, is still potent, not alone in Italy,
but throughout the world.
III
WILLIAM THE SILENT
(1533-1584)
_And Brave Little Holland_
Be the reasons what they may, liberty owes much to little lands and
confined peoples. Go back to any age and continent, place side by side
a little nation and a large one, and if the first has made for liberty
and progress, the second has often made for bondage and superstition.
For the beginnings of morals and religion we go back, not to that
widely extended state named Babylon, but to little Palestine, shut in
between the desert and the deep sea. For the beginnings of art and
culture we go not to the vast, rich plains of Asia Minor, but to that
little rocky land named Greece. For the beginnings of the republic we
go not to the sunny plains of Italy, but to the narrow valleys between
the Alpine Mountains. What great contribution to civilization has
Russia made to the world? But the little Swiss Republic has given us
the international postal system, international arbitration and the
referendum. Commerce owes a great debt to little Venice. Modern
banking owes a great debt to little Scotland. Asia and Africa owe a
great debt to little England. And though Holland was a narrow strip of
land but twenty miles wide and one hundred miles long, yet the world
can never repay the debt it owes to this mother of republics.
For lovers of liberty the most sacred spot in modern Europe is the
square of the Binnenhof at The Hague. A tablet there records the words
with which William the Silent challenged Philip II--words that were
first made the foundation of the Dutch Republic, words that our
pilgrim fathers took as the basis of their New England institutions.
"We declare to you that you have no right to interfere with the
conscience of any one so long as he has done nothing to work injury to
another person or public scandal."
We can never forget that Holland gave the founders of our Republic
their shelter, with safety and leisure for working out their dreams
and visions of self-government. But a full century before the Pilgrim
Fathers set foot in Leyden, Holland had become a shelter to foreign
exiles, and her citizens had pledged themselves to a deathless hatred
of all forms of tyranny. To the cities of Holland had fled those men
who were denied liberty of thought in Paris and Nuremburg. To Holland
had come the victims of oppression in Venice and Florence. It was in
Holland that the great Humanist had lived and died, that scholar and
philosopher Erasmus, who wrought as powerfully for reform in religion
as Huss and Savonarola. It was Erasmus who forged the intellectual
weapons used by Luther in Germany, and Calvin in Geneva. It was
Erasmus who first made a correct text for the Greek Testament. It was
Erasmus who put the Bible into the common languages of Europe. And it
was a group of Dutchmen who first demanded the separation of Church
and State. Two generations before William Bradford gathered his little
band in Leyden, William the Silent stood forth to challenge the divine
right of kings.
John Ruskin once called attention to the fact that as every great
art-age has been a reaction from an era of unendurable ugliness, so
every movement for liberty has been a reaction precipitated by
unwonted tyranny. Certain it is that as Oliver Cromwell represented a
rebound from feudalism, and Abraham Lincoln a reaction from the
cruelty of slavery, so William the Silent represented a thrilling
protest against the crime of a foreign usurper. His career is as
romantic and many-coloured as the career of David, the fugitive,
fleeing from Saul, or that of Robert Bruce, hiding in caves and dens
from the pursuers who threatened his life. In youth he was the
companion of kings, but he became the champion of the people against
their king, the idol of his followers, and the hero of a lost cause.
Like David, he knew the weariness and painfulness of the exile's lot.
Like Lincoln, he had a face furrowed with anxiety, and fell a victim
to the assassin's bullet. Reared in luxury, the heir to titles and
vast estates, the head of a dynasty, whose blood still flows in the
veins of Europe's rulers, for the cause of liberty he resigned his
rank, that he might serve the poor and oppressed. He was a statesman,
and had the foresight that organizes out of defeat, and is
unconquerable because it never knows when it is defeated. He was a
reformer, and attacked injustice and despotism in an era when of
necessity his labours were fruitless. He was a soldier, and had the
personal daring and the strong arm that count for more than strategic
skill. He was a hero, and though daily the hired poisoners sought
entrance to his palace, and assassins ever dogged his steps upon the
streets, despite the six attempts upon his life, he maintained his
courage and his boundless hope. In an age when society had not yet
doubted the divine right of kings, William of Orange fronted Philip II
with a denial of this citadel of tyranny and injustice, affirmed the
principle that the creed of a nation and the creed of individuals is a
matter of their own choice and their own conscience.
Our libraries hold no more instructive volumes than Motley's story of
the Netherlands, their rise to material prosperity and their struggle
for liberty under the leadership of this man known as William the
Silent. The tale of their slow growth as a maritime nation is an epic of
indomitable courage in the face of every conceivable form of obstacle.
We see these people for the sake of liberty retreating from the rich
plains of central Europe into the morass that the Roman historian said
was "neither land nor water." With infinite labour they built barriers
and dikes against the North Sea, developed a system of veins and
arteries through which they compelled the ocean to fertilize their
fields, and constructed watery highways for carrying their commerce into
distant lands. At length a region outcast of earth and ocean alike
"wrestled from both domains their richest treasure." Brave cities
floated mermaid-like upon the bosom of the sea. Standing upon the canal
boats, travellers looked down upon cattle grazing below the level of the
ocean, beheld orchards and gardens whose tree-tops scarcely reached the
level of the waves. Unconsciously this race that had struggled so long
and victoriously over storms and seas was educating itself of the
struggle with the still more savage despotism of man.
With intelligence and enterprise came the development of trade, and in
the fifteenth century the Hollanders became the carriers of the
world's commerce. Their ships and their sailors made their way around
into the Baltic, to the ports of all northern Europe, to the ports of
France and Spain, of Genoa and Naples and Venice, to Constantinople
and Alexandria, and from thence south into all countries and
continents. As bees flitting from orchard to orchard fertilize the
fruit, so these ships passing from port to port and continent to
continent fertilized the minds of men. Returning home they brought
bulbs, roots and seeds that soon made Holland the gayest flower-garden
in Europe and the home of modern floriculture and horticulture. From
the Far East they brought the suggestion of movable types. The
bleached linens, the tapestries and woollen goods of Holland won fame
throughout the world. The homes of her burghers were models of
comfort and even luxury. Small merchants of Amsterdam and Leyden and
Rotterdam became merchant princes. Weavers and spinners of linen and
silk, workers in iron, as well as silver and gold, left the other
lands of Europe and settled in the Dutch seaports.
In that little strip of land were inclosed 208 walled cities and 6,300
villages guarded by a belt of sixty fortresses. Little wonder that
Spain looked longingly toward this people and meditated plans for
breaking down its fortresses, subjugating its peoples and transferring
its accumulated treasure from the chests of the burghers to the vaults
of the Spanish dons and cavaliers. And when at length it began to look
as if the scepter of the sea might pass from Spain to Holland, King
Philip and his soldiers, under Bloody Alva, resolved to draw a circle
of fire around little Holland and rob her of the treasure she had so
slowly earned.
Fully to understand the heroic struggle of the Hollanders under William
of Orange, we must know the immediate cause of the controversy and the
source of the tyranny they opposed. That cause was the Inquisition and
the tyranny was that of Spain's ambitious rulers. At the moment of the
outbreak, Spain was the richest and the most powerful nation in Europe.
Victorious in Africa and Italy, her emperor had carried war into France
and now reigned over Germany as well as those provinces now known as
Belgium and Holland. If we ask from whence Spain derived the money for
these wars of conquest the answer is found in the vast treasure she
acquired in the New World. Prescott tells us that when the Spanish
soldiers captured the capital of Peru, the soldiers spent days in
melting down the golden vessels which they found in the vaults of
temples and palaces. In that era, when the yellow metal was worth so
much, a single ship carried to Spain $15,500,000 in gold, besides vast
treasures of silver and jewels. When Cortez approached the palace of
Montezuma the king's messengers met the general bearing gifts from their
lord. These gifts included 200 pounds (avoirdupois) of gold for the
leader and two pounds of gold for each soldier. The full value of the
treasure that Spain carried from the cities and states of the New World
will, doubtless, never be known.
But it must be remembered that the Spanish soldiers who went into
Mexico and Peru turned those two countries into a wilderness. For a
full half-century these brutal soldiers, burning with avarice, went
everywhither, looting towns, pillaging cities, butchering the people,
lifting the torch upon cottage and palace alike. The awful anguish and
suffering that Spain wrought upon the helpless people of Mexico and
Peru is one of the bloodiest chapters in history. The eagle pouncing
upon the dove, the panther leaping upon the young fawn, but faintly
interpret to us the savage cruelty of the Spaniard as he raged through
the new world. And when the Spanish ships came home, laden with gold
and silver the Emperor found means to prosecute his plans for military
conquest. Spanish armies were soon marching into northern Italy, into
Austria and Germany, into France and finally into Holland. Flushed
with victory and greedy of Holland's treasures, Philip determined to
punish these people for their refusal to vote supplies to his army, by
establishing there the Inquisition by the sword.
The Inquisition, that mediæval instrument for the detection of
punishment of disbelievers in the established Church, had existed in
all its horrible malignity for two hundred and fifty years. But it
remained for Philip of Spain to make its name forever a byword and a
hissing in the mouth of history. He had begun by employing it against
the wealthy Jews and Moors, who made up the richest, the most
intelligent and prosperous classes in Spain. During the first few
years after its institution the Spanish population fell from
10,000,000 to 7,000,000. In eighteen years Torquemada burned 10,220
persons and confiscated the property of 97,321 others. Primarily, the
Inquisition was a machine to search men's secret thoughts. It arrested
on suspicion, "tortured for confession and then punished with fire."
One witness brought a victim to the rack, and two to the flames.
The trial took place at midnight in a gloomy dungeon dimly lighted by
torches. Lea tells us "the Grand Inquisitor was enveloped in a black
robe with eyes glaring at his victim through holes cut in the hood."
Preparatory to examination, the victim, whether man, maiden or matron,
was stripped and stretched upon a bench, after which all the weights,
pulleys, and screws by which "tendons could be strained without
cracking, bones crushed without breaking, body tortured without dying,
were put into operation." When condemnation was pronounced the tongue
was mutilated so that the victim could neither speak nor swallow. When
the morning came, a breakfast with rare delicacies was placed before
the sufferer and with ironical invitation he was urged to satisfy his
hunger. Then a procession was formed, headed by the magistrates,
prelates and nobility, and the prisoner was led to the public square,
where an address was given, lauding the Inquisition, condemning heresy
and warning the people against want of subjection to the Pope and the
Emperor. Then while hymns were sung, blazing fagots were piled about
the prisoner until his body was reduced to a heap of ashes.