Friday, May 12, 2017

May Dates 1497: Florence, A City In Turmoil

Though heavy rains reportedly had kept the forces and allies of Piero de Medici from breaching the walls of Florence on April 28, this was just one event of many that serially jolted the city and its people from one extreme to another that spring. The following week Friar Savonarola had been allowed to give the Ascension Day sermon on May 4, but that had turned into a circus of another set of events, sending partisans, clerics and the public reeling. News from Rome trickled in after a couple more weeks of the papal breve marking (May 13) Savonarola as an excommunicate, but the messenger was not even allowed to enter the city, so that the public declaration could be postponed. Meanwhile a new vote on May 12 granted new opportunities for more people to seek public office in Florence, creating a strange but temporary coalition that better shows the very fluid nature of the City's politics.

It was a pivotal moment in the central channels of these tumultuous times in Florence. The city was abandoned to its own problems at last without allies and with many adversaries all round. Under attack on many fronts as well, Savonarola was very busy. In addition to the Lenten sermons that year culminating in the famous and undelivered sermon of Ascension Day which turned into an upset, the friar had been putting the finishing touches on his Triumph of the Cross. He had also revised and sent out an Apology for the Brothers of the Congregation of San Marco earlier in the year. The day following the disastrous upheaval in the sacristy itself on Ascension Day, the Signoria banned all preaching until further notice. Without this outlet, by May 8, Savonarola penned another, "A Letter to All the Elect of God and Faithful Christians". When he had recieved a copy for the pope's breve of excommunication, he wrote a reply dated May20. Meanwhile matters in the city had reached a fever pitch.


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