Sunday, April 24, 2016

Savonarola Pushes For Social Change in Florence: spring 1496

Friar Savonarola further advanced the efforts of the newly active faniculli, the brigades of youths who grew in the spring of 1496 sometimes into roaming bands of vice police. Donald Weinstein gives us a starker image of these youth who appeared dramatically at that year's Carnevale festival in Florence and beyond. The Friar also worked at curbing the excessive displays of women, exhorting them to organize and similarly police themselves. There was a great deal of negative response from all sides, Weinstein tells us, and Savonarola seemed to relent some.

Weinstein's description of the street in Florence at the end of the fifteenth century, explodes the simplistic story of innocent youths beseeching alms from rich magnates and the culturally elite of Florence at the height of her glory years.
"Gangs of boys (faniculli) and young men harrassed passersby, especially women, and fought pitched battles in the streets. Gang rape was not uncommon. Policing was ineffectual-- poorly paid and barely professional. Fathers might deplore the rowdiness but used it when it served their purposes .... If grown men, sunk in their debaucheries, would respond only to harsh punishment, young people... might be rescued and enlisted ... as public police, for their parents." [p. 183]
Boys from the ages six to sixteen would be reigned in and intensively taught discipline by fra Domenico da Peschia in the city, who would then, as Savonarola told (in a sermon in December 19, 1495), form squadrons in the different quarters of the city to 'monitor personal behavior'. Quarrels would be mediated, profanity censored, silence in church enforced. The various shrines around would be maintained and kept up. Dress codes would be maintained, most of all with the squads, keeping things plain. The boys could learn to police themselves and solve their own disagreements, exact punishment, throw out incorrigibles.

Through the year and the next, Savonarola would continue to try to push for legislation to allow more freedoms and leniency to the funiculli, but the Signoria would allow the vote to go to the Great Council again and again where the proposal always would die. News of the funiculli upset everyone. Through the spring it was said that even the pope in Rome complained about this to his cardinals as a highly irresponsible teaching. But even with these wide-ranging critics, the groups of youth grew in size, and spread beyond the city.

A still more ambitious effort landed by Savonarola was in the display by these youth groups on March 27, Palm Sunday that year. They drew alms for a project that Savonarola had been given apart from the other fratres. This was the communal loan for the Monte di Pieta, an effort to make available funds for the poor. Here, Weinstein tells us this communal loan was used as economic relief from usurous loans extracted by, often, Jewish lenders. This was part of Savonarola's plan, too: to rid the city of Jewish wealth and 'corruption'. [p.73]

The women in Florence gained especial attention as well and a number of proposals were made by Savonarola and his adherents  to curb their manners. Again, Weinstein gives us a starker image of life in Florence. He quotes at length an anonymous letter addressed to Savonarola warning that summer was coming and young women would need to know how to dress.
"... [I]n warm weather it was the habit of well-dressed Florentine women to wear open-work hose and shirts that revealed "the outline of the parts that incite lust and ought to be hidden". Over these they wore a gown slit at both sides so that every slight breeze "revealed the whole person." Young women lounged about al fresco in garments like these and got up to all manners of sin." [p. 188]
Savonarola had proposed (in a sermon on March 18) the naming of good women that lived among the four quarters of the city who would select other women, who in turn could organize troops of women to patrol and censure bad behavior. But this project, as related by another letter that Weinstein delivers, devolved into ridicule and laughter in town and created more problems. The Friar returned again to the pulpit two days later, saying women could not be expected to organize themselves in this way and needed further guidance from men. Here, Weinstein suggests the lack of support of this issue in particular from the Rucellai and Bongianni families who may have convinced Savonarola to retreat. So the issue was put off. In the mean time,
"Brazen sexual display by Florentine women had long been on Savonarola's list of vices to be expunged. Women came to church to exhibit themselves to men, he complained. Like whores, their heads uncovered to display their beautiful hair, they crowded into the sanctuary so close to the priest they attracted his gaze -- instruments of the devil." [p. 188]
Some expressed the desire to set up curtains so that the priests did not have to see the laity and that the women could not gaze so intently on the clergy. This didn't come to pass either. At the end of March, the envoy at Rome, Ricciardo Becchi was reporting that the pope had set up a special counsel led by the Dominican general to look into the Friar's work. So Becchi asked the Ten and the Signoria for letters showing the high regard that the people still had for him.

The pope thought the French king might soon return to Italy. Florence, as the closest prospect of an ally to the French king was being solicited by its neighbors to therefore act as spokesperson as well. As a political calculation, if the pope wanted to form a new alliance with the King of France, then he might have to do that now through channels in Florence. In the short term it might benefit the papacy to not bring tooo much pressure on Florence or its Friar.
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quotes and pagination in Donald Weinstein: Savonarola: the rise and fall of a renaissance prophet , Yale University Press, New Haven, 2011

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