One of the first noticeable acts of 1496 was his work with the youth in Florence. This would become in time a recruitment platform that would embrace the youth and working-age men of the surrounding countryside, as well. He would also publish books, circulate letters, the greater extent of which would come later. But with his reputation mostly secure, the popular Friar would brilliantly use the youth of the city for a more immediate concern. This was to spread a message to an even greater audience within the city, of those themes which he had thundered on at the pulpit. But from the mouths of children. And at one of that culture's most celebrated annual Catholic Festivals, Carnevale. As shown here the early workings this year in Venice.
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Carnevale then as now was a pre-Easter festival, set seven weeks before Easter-week festivities. It comes in the dead of winter, culminates in a big party and bonfire before the seven weeks of Lent begins. It had become customary in those days to give up tokens of sinful deeds, or vanities to be ritually consumed by fire. In the year of 1496 Savonarola and his followers were sending out invitations and instructing youth organizations in spreading the good news. As many as possible would be gathered for the march, and many did. Martines estimates that they comprised 8-20 percent of the city's population who showed up.
They would gather in groups and sing songs and go knocking door to door asking for vanities to be given up. They would set a crucifix and a candle up at street corners and ask for alms for the poor. Or set up barriers to limit traffic and do the same. Martines explains how 'remember the poor' was more pointedly aimed at the prideful.
"The theology behind burning 'the instruments of vanity' was uncomplicated. Pride, self-regarding pride, was the cardinal Christian sin, a turning toward the self and away from God. In a time of universal corruption, in high places most especially, the instruments that catered to pride, or that caused Christians to lose their way, called for demolition. This meant everything from mirrors, whigs and lecherous books and pictures to games of chance. Gambling fostered blasphemy, violence, and the ruin of families, while lechery led to self-abandonment in base pleasures, and hence to a falling away from God." [p. 116]From people's homes 'playing cards, dice, gaming tables, dolls, veil holders, cosmetics, musical instruments, pictures of nudes, masks, lengths of expensive cloth, jewellery' would be extracted. All these were brought to the Piazza della Signoria and, with an effigy of the devil placed atop it, the entire pile was set aflame. This collection took some days to carry out.
The songs they would sing were more explicit.'Tell them in Rome... that 'Christ has become King of Florence/ we respect no other power." Estimates of the size of the crowds on the last day of the festival that year, February 16, vary of course. Four or six or seven, or even ten thousand youths, after Mass, dressed in white smocks, headed by a large crucifix and a statue of Mary made their way up the Via Larga singing hymns. In front of the cathedral they changed direction and went south to the Ponte Santa Trinita, and then to the Ponte Vecchio and back to the square. [p.117]
After this display the Signoria passed a resolution that Friar Savonarola should give the important Lenten sermons. Over the next few years Savonarola would take these and others and publish them as tracts, essays, taking pieces of previous sermons and putting them together and thus spread them to a wider and wider audience.
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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
