[1] It is enough to allude to Arnold of Brescia in Rome, to Fra
    Bussolari in Pavia, ami to John of Vicenza.  Sec Appendix iv.

To Lorenzo succeeded the incompetent Piero de’ Medici, who surrendered the fortresses of Tuscany to the French army.  While Savonarola was prophesying a sword, a scourge, a deluge, Charles VIII. rode at the head of his knighthood into Florence.  The city was leaderless, unused to liberty.  Who but the monk who had predicted the invasion should now attempt to control it?  Who but he whose voice alone had power to assemble and to sway the Florentines should now direct them?  His administrative faculty in a narrow sphere had been proved by his reform of the Dominican Convents.  His divine mission was authenticated by the arrival of the French.  The Lord had raised him up to act as well as to utter.  He felt this:  the people felt it.  He was not the man to refuse responsibility.

During the years of 1493 and 1494, when Florence together with Italy was in imminent peril, the voice of Savonarola never ceased to ring.  His sermons on the psalm ‘Quam bonus’ and on the Ark of Noah are among the most stupendous triumphs of his eloquence.  From his pulpit beneath the somber dome of Brunelleschi he kept pouring forth words of power to resuscitate the free spirit of his Florentines.  In 1495, when the Medici had been expelled and the French army had gone upon its way to Naples, Savonarola was called upon to reconstitute the state.  He bade the people abandon their old system of Parlamenti and Balia, and establish a Grand Council after the Venetian type.[1] This institution, which seemed to the Florentines the best they had ever adopted, might be regarded by the historian as only one among their many experiments in constitution-making, if Savonarola had not stamped it with his peculiar genius by announcing that Christ was to be considered the Head of the State.[2] This step at once gave a theocratic bias to the government, which determined all the acts of the monk’s administration.  Not content with political organization, too impatient to await the growth of good manners from sound institutions, he set about a moral and religious reformation.  Pomps, vanities, and vices were to be abandoned.  Immediately the women and the young men threw aside their silks and fine attire.  The Carnival songs ceased.  Hymns and processions took the place of obscene choruses and pagan triumphs.  The laws were remodeled in the same severe and abrupt spirit.  Usury was abolished.  Whatever Savonarola ordained, Florence executed.  By the magic of his influence the city for a moment assumed a new aspect.  It seemed as though the old austerity which Dante and Villani praised were about to return without the factious hate and pride that ruined medaeival Tuscany.  In everything done by Savonarola at this epoch there was a strange combination of political sagacity with monastic zeal.  Neither Guicciardini nor Machiavelli, writing years afterwards, when Savonarola had fallen and Florence was again enslaved, could propose anything wiser than his Consiglio Grande.  Yet the fierce revivalism advocated by the friar—­the bonfire of Lorenzo di Credi’s and Fra Bartolommeo’s pictures, of MSS, of Boccaccio and classic poets, and of all those fineries which a Venetian Jew is said to have valued in one heap at 22,000 florins—­the recitation of such Bacchanalian songs as this—­