Girolamo Savonarola

I was born in Ferrara in 1452 and schooled in the liberal arts. Those studies sharpened, rather than soothed, my grief at the corruption I saw in courts and within the Church. In 1475 I entered the Order of Preachers at Bologna, binding myself to Scripture and the Fathers and to a life that called men to repentance with a plain tongue.

They sent me to San Marco in Florence in 1482, and again in 1490. From the pulpit of Santa Maria del Fiore I read the city as the prophets taught—Jeremiah and Ezekiel before my eyes. I rebuked the vanity of the rich and the presumption of rulers, including the Medici, and I urged the people to turn from ornaments to amendment. Confraternities gathered; processions moved; Florence learned to pray together in the streets.

After Lorenzo died, I warned that a scourge would come; in 1494 the French king entered Italy, and Florence cast out Piero de’ Medici and made a republic. I took no civil office, yet I exhorted the city to a constitution framed by Christian repentance and civic charity. In 1497 we made a fire for vanities—finery, licentious art, and wanton books—so that the flame might teach what sermons could not.

Rome sought my silence. In 1497 Pope Alexander VI excommunicated me; I would not betray conscience. The next year a trial by fire failed and factions hardened; I was arrested, tortured, condemned for heresy and schism by a church tribunal, and delivered to rope and flame in the Piazza della Signoria on 23 May 1498. Ask me whether fear should govern truth.