I could not have imagined how Florence would change in the years that followed Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death. Savonarola’s sermons drummed fear into the population. He preached about Noah’s ark, comparing those who did not heed his warnings with the unfortunate souls who taunted Noah. The ark’s door would soon be closed and locked, he said, and anyone living a life of sin would drown in the coming flood. Penance was the only hope.
Lorenzo’s son and heir, Piero, as incompetent and immoral as my grandfather had feared, had turned his back on our city’s long-standing alliance with France in favor of one with Naples. Savonarola claimed a new Charlemagne was coming, and when France invaded Italy, few were willing to dismiss his prophecies any longer. Piero, trying in vain to emulate his father, went to confront his enemy’s king, Charles VIII. Despite not having the authority to do so, he ceded land to the French: six of our territories, including Pisa. When he returned home, he was refused entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio. The city no longer wanted his rule; the people flung mud at him. He fled, ending the Medici’s long control of Florence, and never again saw the city of his birth.
The King of France rode through our gates on 17 November 1494 and paraded his army through the city. Soon, he’d negotiated peace and promised not to destroy Florence. We would have Pisa returned to our control, among a few other concessions, but in exchange, we were to pay the king 120,000 gold florins. Savonarola’s new Charlemagne was no friend to us.
The Medici gone, the friar at last had the opportunity to seize power and return the city to republican government. He wrote a new constitution. He encouraged Charles VIII to start a crusade to the Holy Land. He preached that God had allowed the rule of the Medici tyrants as punishment for our citizens’ sins. Now, he said, we’d entered a new era. Florence must change its very character and become a city of God.
Many people listened. They believed him. Had he not, after all, prophesized the French invasion? They accepted his claim that God communicated directly through him, that he had been divinely chosen. He had personally spoken to Charles VIII, imploring him not to sack Florence. Did we not, then, owe him everything?
The tone of the friar’s sermons shifted. He promised that God was singling Florence out for greatness. With Christ as its invisible king, it would become a second Jerusalem, and like the Jews freed from captivity, the Florentines must build a new temple. No longer should we revere the ancient texts that had spurred our city to become a center of art and learning; only virtue mattered now. Savonarola rejected the humanists’ notion that one could come closer to God through Neoplatonism. He stated clearly that Cicero and Aristotle could not help us know the Lord.
The leaders of Florence had long been learned men, poets and scholars. Were we to reject this tradition? Savonarola insisted he was returning us to the old days of the Republic, before the Medici had corrupted the city. We would be free again. Florence, he promised, would be richer, more glorious, more powerful than ever. Who did not long for that?
Florentines knew factions caused chaos. In Dante’s day, the Ghibellines had fought the Guelphs. Later, the Pazzi attacked the Medici, their conspiracy culminating with the bloody assassination of Lorenzo il Magnifico’s brother in the cathedral. Now we would be divided again, this time into the Piagnoni and the Arrabbiati, the former Savonarola’s supporters, the latter those who rejected him.
We had all read Dante, memorized his words. He had illuminated the punishments of hell. Who, then, would choose damnation, if following Savonarola could lead to salvation? Never before in the history of Florence had the fate of our mortal souls been brought into political discussion. What more powerful motivator could any leader have?
Florence had led the world in the rediscovery of ancient ideas. These ideas had, in turn, ignited a golden age, when artists and poets, architects and men of science showed us the limitless possibilities of human achievement. Brunelleschi built his dome, insisting it could be done even before he knew how. Botticelli brought pagan mythology to life, inextricably connecting it to contemporary Florence. Petrarch taught us how to reconcile ancient ideas with Christian beliefs.
None of it could have happened without men like my grandfather, who rescued from monastic libraries the manuscripts full of the ideas that had sparked it all. He had warned me such ideas could come under threat. Savonarola had catalyzed his worries, and the friar was far more powerful now than he’d been then. What would Nonno do, when the humanist values of Florence looked more fragile than I would have ever thought possible? I had promised him I would save his books, but had always understood this meant more than just preserving paper and ink. The ideas were what mattered.
And so, I embarked upon a project, a project that must be kept quiet. First, I hired a printer to make copies of the most important books in grandfather’s collections, the books he had named as such on a list: Cicero’s letters, the works of Aristotle, Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, and more. The books, however, would only be the start. There was much, much more to be done.