THE SAVONAROLA FALLACY
Our business, of course, is not to expose the prophetic miscarriages
of Savonarola, but simply to make clear what manner of thing his
prophesying was. [64] It was an instance of a kind of vaticination
as old as Troy and Jerusalem, which had gone on in Christendom for
centuries. Long before his day religious men had predicted wars,
pestilences, famines, and the conversion of the Turks. [65] The wars
and plagues and famines were very safe prognostications: they came
in every decade. And when we come to his alleged prediction of the
sack of Rome we realize immediately, not only that the one detail of
coincidence is wholly fortuitous, but that, like his predecessors,
he was simply predicting a return of common evils already experienced
a hundred times. [66]
The argument of Blass and others on this topic, confidently accepted
and endorsed by Dr. Petrie, works out as sheer mystification. They
lay special stress on the fact that in the sack of 1527 horses were
stabled in the churches. It is likely enough: the same thing has been
done a thousand times in the wars of Christendom. But the argument
has been very negligently conducted. In the first place, though he
tells of infinitely worse things, such as the wholesale violation
of women, including nuns, the historian Guicciardini does not give
the detail about the horses. That occurs in the document Il Sacco di
Roma, ascribed latterly to his brother Luigi, which was first printed
in 1664. Still, let us assume that the printing was faithful. If an
interpolator had meant to vindicate Savonarola he would presumably
have noted that the prophet specified not only horses but pigs,
whereas the narrative says nothing of the latter. We are thus left
with the item of the stabling of horses in the churches.
Here we have to note that as regards the main event Savonarola is
predicting a thing that had repeatedly happened in Catholic times, and
that as regards the minor details he is speaking with his eye on Jewish
history. It was not the mere presence of horses and pigs in churches
that he meant to stress, but the defilement that they brought. In
the case of the Jewish Temple the "abomination of desolation" had
been understood to include the defiling of the altar with swine's
flesh. [67] This, in all likelihood, was the origin of Savonarola's
prediction as to the bringing of pigs into the sanctuary at Rome,
which, as we have seen, was not fulfilled.
But there was nothing new about a Catholic sack of Rome. The city had
been hideously sacked and in large part destroyed under Gregory VII
(1084) by Robert Guiscard, the Pope's ally, after having been captured
without sacking by the German Emperor. It just missed being sacked by
Frederick II in 1239. In 1413 it was captured by Ladislaus of Naples,
who gave all Florentine property in the city to pillage. No question
of heresy arose in these episodes; nor did the forces of the Church
itself blench at either sack or sacrilege. Faenza was foully sacked in
1376 by Hawkwood, called in for its defence by the bishop of Ostia;
and in 1377 the same condottiere massacred the population of Cesena
under the express and continuous orders of Robert, Cardinal of Geneva,
the papal legate, afterwards the "anti-pope" Clement VII. No more
bestial massacre took place in the pandemonium of the fourteenth
century; and the sacking of the churches and the violation of the
nuns was on the scale of the bloodshed. [68] In view of the endless
atrocities of the wars of the Church and of Christendom there is a
certain ripe absurdity about the exegetical comments on the subject
of the sack of Rome in 1527. Says Blass:--
Especially remarkable is this, that he [Savonarola] extends the
devastation to the churches of Rome, which in any ordinary capture
(!) by a Catholic army would have been spared, but in this case
were not at all respected, because a great part of the conquering
army consisted of German Lutherans, for whom the Roman Catholic
churches were rather objects of hatred and contempt than of
veneration. Now Lutheranism did not exist in 1496. [69]
And Dr. Petrie adds: "Such a detail seemed excessively unlikely before
the rise of Lutheranism; yet it came to pass." [70] It is interesting
to realize the notions held by scholars of such standing in regard
to European history after a century signalized by so much historic
research; and to find that such an ignorant proposition as that just
cited should for Dr. Petrie "explode the dogma" that really fulfilled
prophecies [71] have been framed post eventum.
For centuries before Luther the desecration of churches was a regular
feature in every Christian war of any extent. It is arguable, perhaps,
that in the sack of Rome the German troops might have made a special
display of that mania for ordure as an instrument of war of which we
have had such circumstantial accounts from Belgium of late, and of
which similar details have been preserved in the domestic history
of Paris since 1870. [72] But the stabling of horses in churches
was a familiar act of warfare, often explicable by the simple fact
that the horses of an army could not otherwise be accommodated. The
clerical chroniclers mention such things when they can tell a tale
of the divine vengeance. Thus Spelman tells how "Richard, Robert,
and Anesgot, sons of William Sorenge, in the time of William Duke
of Normandy, wasting the country about Say, invaded the church of
St. Gervase, lodging their soldiers there, and making it a stable
for their horses. God deferred not the revenge." [73] In 1098 "the
Earl of Shrewsbury made a dog-kennel of the church of St. Fridank,
laying his hounds in it for the night-time; but in the morning he
found them mad." [74] The putting of cattle in churches was sometimes a
necessity of defensive warfare. In 1358, according to Jean de Venette,
many unfortified villages in France made citadels of their churches to
defend themselves from brigands; [75] and in such cases the animals
would be taken indoors. Fine churches, on the other hand, were often
burned in the wars of that period. [76] And when the Turks invaded
Friuli in 1477 and 1478, burning and ravaging, [77] they were likely
enough to have stabled their horses in churches. It was probably of
the Turks that Savonarola was thinking, predicting as he so constantly
did their speedy conversion to Christianity.
Lutheranism can have had very little to do with the matter: the
brutality of the German Landsknechts was notorious long before Luther
was heard of. But there was nothing specially German in the matter
either. The Italian condottieri in general were "full of contempt for
all sacred things." [78] It is instructive to note that Savonarola
predicts nothing of the wholesale violation of nuns and other women
which was to take place at Rome as it had done in a hundred other
sacks of cities: he must have known that these things happened;
but the thing that appealed to his imagination was the theological
pollution resulting from putting horses and pigs in churches. He was
not predicting: he was remembering. Long before his time, besides,
Church Councils had to pass edicts against the use of churches as
barns in time of peace.
It will be remembered that his main items are slaughters, famines,
and pestilences. There was famine and pestilence in Florence when he
was prophesying in 1496; there was more in 1497; [79] and a terrible
pestilence had visited Venice during the Turkish invasions of 1477 and
1478. The preacher's description of a plague in a city is an account
of what had happened a dozen times in the history of Florence, before
and after the Plague which figures in the forefront of Boccaccio's
Decameron. Preaching from the text of Amos, he arraigns Italy and Rome
as Amos arraigns Israel and Judah; and his menaces are the menaces
of the Hebrew prophet, immeasurable slaughters, famine, pestilence,
and captivity, with the old corollary of regeneration and restoration,
in the case of Italy and the Church as in the case of Israel. And his
added detail of church desecration is at once a Biblical idea and a
familiar item from Christian history.
In the historic crusade against the Albigenses in 1209, when Béziers
was captured and every human being therein slain, seven thousand were,
by the famous order of the Papal Legate, [80] put to the sword in
the great church of St. Mary Magdalene, to which they had fled for
sanctuary; and the whole city, with its churches, was burned to the
ground. During the Hundred Years' War between England and France,
says a social historian, a cleric--
in the rural districts of France the passage of the ravagers was
traced by blackened ruins, by desecrated churches, by devastated
fields, by the mutilated bodies of women and children.... Strange
forms of disease which the chroniclers of those times sum up
in the names of "black death," or plague, were born of hunger
and overleapt the highest barriers ... and ran riot within the
overcrowded cities. [81]
In the wars of Burgundy and France in the fifteenth century Catholics
habitually plundered Catholic churches. At the siege of Saint-Denis
in 1411 "the Germans, the Bretons, and the Gascons promised themselves
the pillage of the church and the treasures of the abbey." [82] Later
"the English, the Picards, and the Parisians ... entered the monastery
... pillaged the apartments of the inmates, and carried away the cups,
the utensils, all the furniture." [83] At Soissons, in 1414,
the Germans, the Bretons, and the Gascons were as so many
wild beasts. The Comte d'Armagnac himself could not restrain
them. After having pillaged the houses they set upon the convents
and the churches, where the women had taken refuge. They could
not escape the brutality of the men of war; the holy ornaments,
the reliquaries, all was seized without respect; the hostia,
the bones of the martyr, trodden under foot. Never had an army
of Christians, commanded by such great seignors and formed of so
many noble chevaliers, committed such horrors within the memory
of man. [84]
The historian is quite mistaken; the same horrors had been many times
enacted, and even on a greater scale. At the sack of Constantinople
by the Christian crusaders in 1204,
the three Western bishops had strictly charged the crusaders to
respect the churches and the persons of the clergy, the monks, and
the nuns. They were talking to the winds. In the frantic excitement
of victory all restraint was flung aside, and the warriors of the
cross abandoned themselves with ferocious greed to their insatiable
and filthy lewdness. With disgusting gestures and in shameless
attire an abandoned woman screamed out a drunken song from the
patriarchal chair in the church of Sancta Sophia.... Wretches blind
with fury drained off draughts of wine from the vessels of the
altar; the table of oblation, famed for its exquisite and costly
workmanship, was shattered; the splendid pulpit with its silver
ornaments utterly defaced. Mules and horses were driven into the
churches [85] to bear away the sacred treasures; if they fell
they were lashed and goaded till their blood streamed upon the
pavement. While the savages were employed upon these appropriate
tasks, the more devout were busy in ransacking the receptacles of
holy relics and laying up a goodly store of wonder-working bones
or teeth to be carried away to the churches of the great cities
on the Rhine, the Loire, or the Seine. [86]
Savonarola was simply predicting for Rome, perhaps with his eye
on the Turks, such a fate as befell Constantinople at Christian
hands, regarding both as acts of divine vengeance, and expecting the
capture of Rome to come soon. He pointed to the French invasion--he
well might--as showing what was likely to happen. [87] The practice
of church desecration had never ceased in Christendom for a single
generation. In 1315 Edward Bruce, in his raid in Ireland, is reported
to have burned churches and abbeys with all the people in them,
and to have wrecked and defaced other churches, with their tombs and
monuments. During the centuries between the battle of Bannockburn and
the union of the English and Scottish crowns, churches, cathedrals,
or abbeys were plundered or burned on both sides in nearly every
great border raid. Frenchmen and Burgundians wrecked each other's
churches. In his thirteenth chapter Philip de Commines tells "Of the
storming, taking, and plundering the city of Liège; together with the
ruin and destruction of the very churches." The Duke of Burgundy set
a battalion of his guards to defend them, and killed one soldier of
those who tried to enter; but later the soldiers forced an entrance,
and all were completely plundered. "I myself," says Commines, "was
in none but the great church, but I was told so, and saw the marks
of it, for which a long time after the Pope excommunicated all such
as had any goods belonging to the churches in that city unless they
restored them; and the duke appointed certain officers to go up and
down his country to see the Pope's sentence put in execution." [88]
As late as 1524, in the course of the campaign of Henry VIII in France,
two churches were held and defended as fortresses on the French side,
and captured by the invaders; [89] and in 1487 Perugia "became a
beleaguered fortress under the absolute despotism of the Baglioni,
who used even the cathedrals as barracks." [90] Savonarola could not
have missed hearing of that.
If there was anything astonishing for Italians in the desecration of
churches at the sack of Rome, they must have had short memories. The
conspiracy of the Pazzi in 1478, in which Giuliano de' Medici was slain
during high mass in the cathedral church of Florence, had been backed
by the Pope; and the sacrilege of the planned deed was reckoned so
horrible that one of the first appointed assassins, who blenched at it,
had to be replaced by priests, who had transcended such scruples. [91]
On the capture of Brescia by the French under Gaston de Foix in 1512,
"things sacred and profane, the goods, the honour, and the life of the
inhabitants were for seven days delivered up to the greed, the lust,
and the cruelty of the soldier," only the nuns being spared. [92]
In 1526 the Milanese told the Constable Bourbon, the general of
their ally:--
Frederick Barbarossa anciently desolated this city; his vengeance
spared neither the inhabitants, nor the edifices, nor the
walls; but that was nothing in comparison with the evils we now
suffer. The barbarism of an enemy is less insupportable than the
unjust cruelty of a friend ... our miseries have endured more
than a month; they increase every hour; and, like the damned,
we suffer, without hope, evils which before this time of calamity
we believed to be beyond human endurance. [93]
Guicciardini testifies that the Spaniards of the emperor's forces
had been more cruel than the Germans, [94] violating the women and
reducing to rags the men of their own allies.