pageturner chronicles: i, 1497

On that rainy day in late April when the attempt by Medicean partisans to 'take back' Florence was secretly planned, the city leaders had been talked into summoning a number of partisans from within the city. These men once they arrived (and before the attack outside the walls had begun), were then held indoors under a strict guard. Meanwhile in the rain, the forces outside the walls tried to raise an alarm that was simply not answered. The city would not allow the bells to ring.

If the plan for Piero de Medici was to swarm the gate outside the city, while his cohorts and allies inside could gather the assumed swells of Medicean supporters answering that bell in order to topple the forces ranged against them within the city, then, those supporters in the city did not materialize in enough numbers. This deceptive summoning, followed by those persons being essentially seized as hostages, until the crowd's moment had passed, brought many things to light. There were also disastrous consequences for many.

Francesco Valori was later blamed for advising the fathers to take this measure. Several families and their offspring were implicated. Individuals in several churches were called out as secret Medicean sympathizers. Certain other individuals with a past, already exiled and officially called 'rebel' and 'outlaw' came back around. One in particular Lamberto dell' Antella had gone to Rome and had gained friends there, but had spent this spring coursing back and forth across Italy and eventually, had fallen out with Piero. Deemed too much a bother, Piero asked Siena to take charge of this rebel's rebel. They did, but then confined there, Lamberto's anger turned against Piero and he began sending messages to Florence asking for safe conduct there where he might tell them all he knew. He was coaxed out of hiding and by early August 1497, was captured and interrogated at Florence. He named names.

This investigation and its immediate effects would strike at the center of Florentine politics, destroying the lives of many and killing a number of its prominent politicians.

pp. 178-83; 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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The plague had hit Italy again that June. In Florence it was coupled with a mysterious fever that killed many as well. People were still starving there. Parenti says as many as thirty-six victims a day were counted at the height of the sickness, Landucci not quite as many. Weinstein tells us,

"Those who could do so fled the city. Fearing contagion, the Great Council suspended its meetings and public business slowed. Imports and distributions of food suffered, and prices, already steep, soared. So many people were falling in their tracks from disease and starvation, wrote Landucci, that every hour the streets had to be cleared, while the hospitals overflowed with the sick and dying." [p. 236]

In early July fra Tommaso Busini, a Dominican colleague of Savonarola at San Marco fell to the plague. Reports say Savonarola then asked for 'divine protection' through prayer and led a procession through the cloister 'carrying white candles and red crosses' singing 'Ecce Quam Bonus'.  But his frequent letters show none of these difficulties in this, his last summer. Indeed he sharply criticized brothers who wished to flee to the country and avoid the 'city air'. He wrote to family members to reassure them that relatives were still safe in the cloister. Despite this he had to admit some fifty to a hundred people, or worse, were dying per day due to the alternate fever that year.

"But the pestilence grew more severe and it was decided to send the younger friars into the more slaubrious air of the countryside. ... Savonarola's adversaries put it about that this unusual measure of sending clerics out to live among the laity proved that there was disunity in the cloister, noting with perverse satisfaction, that having terrified the city by threats of plague, the friars were the first to suffer it." [p. 237]

But Savonarola remained unperturbed. He read a Hebrew bible and studied with close colleagues the Jewish prophets, he tended the sick, he wrote extensively. The letter to unnamed friends quotes Dominican Archbishop Antoninus Pierozzi on its first page. Pierozzi was made a saint as soon as 1523.

Quotes, references and pagination from, Donald Weinstein: Savonarola: the rise and fall of a renaissance prophet , Yale University Press, New Haven, 2011
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Marin Sanudo had already mentioned by 5th of June, 1497, that the plague had struck in Venice and that they had developed a municipal plan to combat it.