Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Savonarola During the French Invasion: November 1494

In the early weeks of November when the Medici family and their interests were driven out and the French came into the city, friar Girolamo Savonarola gave a few sermons. Lauro Martines, our current guide here, gives a quick survey of the matters at stake. But before this, Martines prefaces this with a sharp and closely written paragraph on the webs of Medicean power that had existed for much of the previous sixty years. They had been a primary focus of Savonarola's ire.
"Political patronage under the Medici reached into the civil law courts, the arrest and release of accused criminals, the assignment of personal taxes, the fixing of ambitious marriages, the obtaining of Church benefices, and, above all, election or appointment to public office. It may be taken as axiomatic that high office in  Florence made the man, because the honour meant that he enjoyed the approval of the top oligarchs in the city, that he had the ears of judges and tax commissioners, that his sons and daughters would be warmly looked to as possible marriage partners, that he could more easily obtain credit or borrow money, that he himself would carry weight behind the scenes, and that he therefore ranked as an influential patron. Tear up the political system, as happened in late 1494, and you disrupt all the ties that linked patrons and dependents, with consequent moral and psychological confusion, anxiety, and the readiness to turn coats, to accomodate, to be silent, or to watch and wait." [p. 42]

Outside the Medici, were the Tornabuoni, Soderini, Ridolfi, and the other cadet Medici houses not in the preferred line from Cosimo. After these in importance were the Caponi, Corsini, Guicciardini, Martelli, the Nerli, Pandolfini, and Salviati. All of these and more had to take stock all over again and look carefully at who would be enemies and who might be allies in self-protection and advancement. With the great masses of people stirred up in Florence, who could be trusted, what could be offered to calm them? For what outcomes and with what varying means might old friends, that were now potentially new opponents, could again agree to work together? Savonarola saw other ends and was privileged to see them while in the middle of these tumultuous times.

Savonarola liked to say in his sermons, 'O little friar' speaking of himself and his minor role. Such an insignificant bit part he spoke that he was playing. The ultimate outsider in the center of things. He however, had himself been called out by the French King and spoken personally with him in the days of the overthrow of the Medici. On the 9th of November the friar was in Pisa speaking with the King. (Martines gives us a number of phrases attributed to him, as Martines relates, by Franco Cordero in his four volume collection Savonarola from 1986-8).

Savonarola said to the King of France that the reason for the French coming to Florence had been revealed to him. That the French invasion was essentially God's will, as revealed to him. As a servant of God, his majesty had responsibilities to women and children, the women in convents and many other servants of God, and all this, despite the sins of Florence. If Florence was offensive to his majesty, he should forgive them, since they could only be ignorant and did not know that he, the King, was sent by God. [p.50]

A circular kind of logic then, flattering the King as a servant of God, but charging that he then protect the innocents despite the sins and ignorance of the rest. Savonarola saw his unique position and tried to maximize his influence. The King may have been flattered, but Savonarola certainly seems to have been as well, if seen in the light of his subsequent actions. But Martines tells us, this also was a bit of conclusion developed from the sermons the friar gave in the time before the French invasion. This was where Savonarola had warned that the French would come and cleanse the land, be a scourge, a pestilence, especially on Rome. In Florence during the occupation there was a surge reported of robberies, fires, stabbings and killings as conflicts between locals and French soldiers proliferated. [p.51]

The Haggai sermons that continued into November repeat the themes of boarding an ark in times of a great flood. The time for building or preparation was over and it was time to depart. Savonarola portrayed himself as a prophet but both seeing the future and acting on it in the present. The warnings were over, the flood was now, salvation was at stake. As social and political and economic laws and customs were being broken all over, all the time, each day bringing word of new disasters and needed responses, in the thick of it, Savonarola could speak of God's mercy. [pp.55]

In the fourth of these Haggai sermons, on November 11, he could console his congregation by saying that no blood had been spilled, that the Lord had restrained himself. And largely that was true, it wasn't a wholesale slaughter. So, they should thank God, and that it would yet be revealed whether the other cities could fair the same. The fifth sermon on Novemnber 16, came the day before the King himself arrived into the city of Florence with a parade. He told every person to 'hold their place', since most men would like to work in this new administration 'but don't have the aptitude.' In contrast with the former Medicean government, where there were those in the administration that did not fill their proper place, the people now should 'be content with their current station.' And go out and celebrate the new arriving servants of God.
"Political arrangements in Florence had suddenly opened up, and there was a gush of talk about office-holding, about men being eligible for service in public life, and about political inequities and qualified ancestors. Citizens were pressing forward in the councils, as well as in private, angling to make themselves eligible for high office...".
Savonarola may have had many more of those sorts coming forward, asking for a few words to be 'dropped in the right quarters'. Savonarola had to warn against that especially now. A kind of temptation he had railed against previously in others, but now, was learning the many ways he had to use to avoid it. Always returning in practice and in his sermons to return to abstract principles to explain and move in the world. [p.56]
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notes, pagination in Martines, Lauro: Fire In The City: Savonarola and the struggle for the soul of Renaissance Florence ; Oxford University Press, New York, 2006

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