These are the prophecies with which Savonarola anticipated the coming of a foreign conqueror.  It is interesting to trace in his apostrophes the double feeling of the prophet.  Desire for the advent of Charles as a Messiah, liberator, and purifier of the Church, contends with an instinctive horror of the barbarian.  Savonarola, like Dante, like all Italian patriots, except only Machiavelli, who too late had been lessoned by bitter experience to put no trust in foreign princes, could not refrain from hoping even against hope that good might come from beyond the Alps.  Yet when the foreigners appeared, he trembled at the violence they wrought upon the ancient liberties of Italy.  Savonarola’s chief shortcoming as a patriot consisted in this, that he strengthened the old folly of the Florentines in leaning upon strangers.[1] Had he taught the Italians to work out their self-regeneration from within, instead of preparing them to accept an alien’s yoke, he would have won a far more lasting meed of fame.  As it was, together with the passion for liberty which became a religion with his followers, he strove to revive the obsolete tactics of an earlier age, and bequeathed to Florence the weak policy of waiting upon France.  This legacy bore bitter fruits in the next century.  If it was the memory of the Friar which nerved the citizens of Florence to sustain the siege of 1528, the same memory bound them to seek aid from inconsequent Francis, and to hope that at the last moment a cohort of seraphim would defend their walls.[2]

[1] Segni, Ist.  Fior. lib. i. p. 23, records a saying of Savonarola’s, Gigli con gigli dover fiorire, as one of the causes of the obstinate French partiality of the Florentines in 1529.

    [2] See Varchi, Segni, and Nardi, who agree on these points.

That Savonarola believed in his own prophecies there is no doubt.  They were in fact, as I have already tried to show, a view of the political and moral situation of Italy, expressed with the force of profound religious conviction and based upon a theory of the divine government of the world.  But now far he allowed himself to be guided by visions and by words uttered to his soul in trance, is a somewhat different question.  It is just at this point that a man possessed of acute insight and trusting to the truth of his instincts may be tempted under strong devotional excitement to pass the border land which separates healthy intuition from hallucination.  If Savonarola’s studies of the Hebrew prophets inclined him to believe in dreams and revelations, yet on the other hand the strong logic of his intellect, trained in scholastic distinctions, taught him to mistrust the promptings of a power that spoke to him when he was somewhat more or less than his prosaic self.  How could he be sure that the spirit came from God?  We know for certain that he struggled against the impulse of divination and refused at times to obey it.