The natural sciences were then only branches of philosophy, and the latter, though employed as preliminary to the study of medicine, was purely scholastic.  The books which came into the hands of the young Savonarola were the works of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Arabic commentaries on Aristotle.  He was specially fascinated with the works of St. Thomas, but besides literature he studied music.  He also composed verses.

All particulars, however, of Savonarola’s boyhood are unfortunately lacking.  But we can form a vivid idea of the surroundings which must have influenced him.  Ferrara was then the splendid capital of the House of Este, with 100,000 inhabitants and a court which was one of the first in Italy, and was continually visited by princes, emperors, and popes.  The lad must have witnessed gorgeous pageants, like the two which occurred on visits of Pope Pius II., in 1459 and 1460.  But during all this period Savonarola was entirely absorbed in studying the Scriptures and St. Thomas Aquinas, allowing himself no recreation save playing sad music on his lute, or writing verses expressing, not without force and simplicity, the griefs of his heart.

The contrasts that the youth witnessed between the magnificence ostentatiously displayed and the evidences of tyranny in palaces and castles in whose dungeons were immured numerous victims, clanking their chains, made indelible impressions on his mind.  Conducted once by his parents to the ducal palace at Ferrara, he firmly refused ever to enter its doors again.  With singular spiritual fervour in one so young, Savonarola surrendered his whole heart and soul to religious sentiments and exercises.  To him worldly life, as he saw all Ferrara absorbed in its gaieties, became utterly repellent, and a sermon to which he listened from an Augustinian friar determined him to adopt the monastic life.

April 24, 1475, when his parents were absent from home attending the festival of St. George, he ran away to Bologna and presented himself at the Monastery of St. Dominic, begging that he might be admitted for the most menial service.  He was instantly received, and at once began to prepare for his novitiate.  In this retreat he submitted himself to the severest penances and discipline and displayed such excessive zeal and devotion as to win the admiration of the monks, who at times believed him to be rapt in a holy trance.

II.—­1475-1481

Savonarola’s sojourn at Bologna in the Dominican Monastery lasted for seven years, during which his spirit was occupied not only with faith and prayer, but with deep meditation on the miserable condition of the Church.  His soul was stirred to wrathful indignation.  The shocking corruption of the Papacy, dating from the death of Pius II. in 1464, was to reach its climax under Alexander VI.  The avarice of Paul II. was soon noted by all the world, and so boundless was the profligacy of his successor, Sixtus IV., that no deed was too scandalous for him to commit.