position assumed by the friar in his war with Rome was not a strong one, and the reasoning by which he supported it was marked by curious self-deception mingled with apparent efforts to deceive his audience.  He had not the audacious originality of Luther.  He never went to the length of braving Alexander by burning his bulls and by denying the authority of popes in general.  Not daring to break all connection with the Holy See, he was driven to quibble about the distinction between the office and the man, assuming a hazardous attitude of obedience to the Church whose head and chief he daily outraged.  At the same time he took no pains to enlist the sympathies of the Italian princes, many of whom might presumably have been hostile to the Pope, on his side of the quarrel.  All the tyrants came in for a share of his prophetic indignation.  Lodovico Sforza, the lord of Mirandola, and Piero de’ Medici felt themselves specially aggrieved, and kept urging Alexander to extinguish this source of scandal to established governments.  Against so great and powerful a host one man could not stand alone.  Savonarola’s position became daily more dangerous in Florence.  The merchants, excommunicated by the Pope and thus exposed to pillage in foreign markets, grumbled at the friar who spoiled their trade.  The ban of interdiction lay upon the city, where the sacraments could no longer be administered or the dead be buried with the rites of Christians.  Meanwhile a band of high-spirited and profligate young men, called Compagnacci, used every occasion to insult and interrupt him.  At last in March 1498 his staunch friends, the Signory, or supreme executive of Florence, suspended him from preaching in the Duomo.  Even the populace were weary of the protracted quarrel with the Holy See:  nor could any but his own fanatical adherents anticipate the wars which threatened the state, with equanimity.

Savonarola himself felt that the supreme hour was come.  One more resource was left; to that he would now betake himself:  he could afterwards but die.  This last step was the convening of a general council.[1] Accordingly he addressed letters to all the European potentates.  One of these, inscribed to Charles VIII., was dispatched, intercepted, and conveyed to Alexander.  He wrote also to the Pope and warned him of his purpose.  The termination of that epistle is noteworthy:  ’I can thus have no longer any hope in your Holiness, but must turn to Christ alone, who chooses the weak of this world to confound the strong lions among the perverse generations.  He will assist me to prove and sustain, in the face of the world, the holiness of the work for the sake of which I so greatly suffer:  and He will inflict a just punishment on those who persecute me and would impede its progress.  As for myself, I seek no earthly glory, but long eagerly for death.  May your Holiness no longer delay but look to your salvation.’