Then the city, free from this rascal, who carried off what he could of the treasures of Cosimo and Lorenzo, turned not to Piero Capponi but to another foreigner, Girolamo Savonarola.  The political eagerness of this friar now came to the point of action.  He set up a Greater Council, which in its turn elected a Council of Eighty; he refused to call a parliament, since he told them that “parliament had ever stolen the sovereignty from the people.”  Then, on the 1st of April, he said that the Virgin Mary had revealed to him that the city would be more glorious, rich, and powerful than ever before, and, as Landucci says, “La maggiore parte del popolo gli credeva." He also said that the Greater Council was the creation of God, and that whoever should attempt to change it would be eternally damned.  Nor was this all.  If it were right and splendid for Florence to be free, free as she always had been from the domination of any other city, so it was for revolted Pisa.  Yet this fanatic Ferrarese told the people that he had had a vision in which the Blessed Virgin had told him that Florence should make treaty with France, and thus regain Pisa.  This was on the return of the King from Naples with Piero de’ Medici in his train.  However, he met the King at Poggibonsi, told him Florence was his friend, that God desired him to spare it, and with other tales succeeded in keeping Charles out of the city.  This, as it seems to me, is the one good deed Savonarola did for Florence.

But the people still believed in him, though he turned the whole life of the city into a sort of religious carnival.  Now, if Lorenzo had kept the people quiet with songs, Savonarola was equally successful with hymns.  “Viva Cristo e la Vergine Maria, nostra regina,” shouted the people,—­merchants, friars, women, and children dancing before the crucifix with olive boughs in their hands.  “On 27th March 1496, which was Palm Sunday, Fra Girolamo made a procession of children with olive branches in their hands and crowns of olive on their heads and all bore, too, a red cross.  There were some five thousand boys, and a great number of girls all dressed in white, then after came all the Ufici, and all the guilds, and then all the men, and after all the women of the city.  There never was so great a procession,” says Landucci.  Indeed, there was not a man nor a woman who did not join the company.  “It was a holy time, but it was short,” says Landucci again, whose own children were among “these holy and blessed companies.”

Short indeed!  The Italian League had been formed against France; only Florence and Ferrara remained outside.  If it were politics that had taken Savonarola so high, it was to them he owed his fall.  He denounced all Italy, and not least Alexander VI, the vicious but very capable Pope.  When he began to denounce Rome he signed his own death; her hour was not yet come.  “I announce to you, Italy and Rome, the Lord will come out of His place....  I tell you, Italy and Rome, the Lord will tread you down.  I have commanded penance, yet you are worse and worse....  Soon all priests, friars, bishops, cardinals, and great masters shall be trampled down.”  It was a brave denunciation, and if it were unjust, what was justice to one who had made Jesus King of Florence and established himself as His Vicegerent.