Savonarola Preaches Lenten Sermons: February 1496

The Friar in Florence was preaching again. In a strong act of defiance against Pope Alexander VI, on 11 February, the Signory of Florence sent word to command Friar Savonarola to provide the Lenten sermons that year. This was a great honor offered to him, one that he had performed before. The novelty was that he would deliver them while under a restriction from the pope to refrain from preaching or giving sermons.

Despite not preaching for some four months the 'little friar' had been busy that winter of 1495-6. He had continued writing. He oversaw, it seems, the development of various texts, translations, and letters for eventual publication in this time as well. Then there was the spectacular march of thousands of Florentine youths in the city meant to cap the recent Carnevale celebration before Lent that he had organized. When city leaders voted to grant him the position of delivering that year's Lenten sermons in the weeks running up to Easter, the friar took this approbation as confirmation and vindication of his success.

Savonarola bent to the task centering the frame of his sermons around the Old Testament prophet Amos. Soon he was expounding against tyrants in his familiar way. As Amos did, Savonarola railed against greed and bribery, corruption in the church and how the mighty took advantage of the weak. Savonarola, and Amos as well, had warned that there would be justice from God to punish iniquity and it would come in the form of an invading foreigner. By the second week of sermons (26 February) Savonarola had turned to the vices that plagued the powerful.

Even legitimate princes became illegitimate, Martines shows Savonarola saying, through their devotion to their vices. [p.109] A tyrant thinks of himself first, then his family, then his hangers-on. Driven by 'pride, sensuality and greed' the tyrant seizes on public monies and assets in order to enrich himself, his house, and his brash way of life. Expensive in habit, a tyrant spends money to keep him on top and others in check. Exile, levies, and protection orders are used, and quickly, to oppress any who may disagree. Suspicious of people and brutal in practice, he also becomes consumed with misleading distractions and even expensive medicines to alleviate personal afflictions. A tyrant buys soldiers to protect himself and he knocks down the houses of the poor in order to build lavish palaces. Critical of everything that he doesn't produce the tyrant throws out competing citizens, undercuts their business and sends hired spies to report on anything new. The consequence of so much single-minded control placed in the hands of a tyrant, is a population that is 'pusillanimous and servile'. [p. 110]

Martines sums up Savonarola's view of a tyrant here, as combining elements of Lorenzo de Medici, Giovanni Bentivoglio of Bologna, the Baglioni of Perugia and 'a couple rulers of Ferrara' from the early fifteenth century. [p.109]

"In Savonarola's view of the public world, tyrants and lecherous money-loving churchmen represented all that was evil in the modern world, because, although charged with the gravest responsibilities, they were hopelessly turned away from Christ, from the meaning of the Cross, and dedicated to the physical world at its most vile levels." [p. 110]

Alexander VI would hear of Savonarola's return to the pulpit. It was reported that this pope would loudly complain to the Florentine ambassador Ricciardo Becchi who, at the behest of the Signory in Florence had been since November petitioning the Friar's return. [p. 134]
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notes and pagination from Martines, Lauro: Fire In The City: Savonarola and the struggle for the soul of Renaissance Florence ; Oxford University Press, New York, 2006