On March 25, 1498 a Franciscan friar, preaching in the church of Santa Croce, turned the drama of the case upon himself by challenging Savonarola to an ordeal of fire. He stigmatized the Dominican as a heretic and false prophet, and offered to walk through fire if Savonarola would do the same. He expected, he said, that both of them would be burned, but hoped by his sacrifice to free Florence from the disorders that had been caused by a proud Dominican’s disobedience of the Pope. Savonarola rejected the challenge; Domenico accepted it. The hostile Signory seized the chance to discredit a prior who in its view had become a troublesome demagogue. It approved of the resort to medieval methods, and arranged that on April 7 Fra Giuliano Rondinelli of the Franciscans and Fra Domenico da Pescia should enter a fire in the Piazza della Signoria.
On the appointed day the great square was filled with a crowd eager to enjoy a miracle or the sight of human suffering. Every window and roof overlooking the scene was occupied with spectators. In the center of the square, athwart a passage two feet wide, twin pyres had been erected of wood mixed with pitch, oil, resin, and gunpowder, guaranteed to make a searing flame. The Franciscan friars took their stand in the Loggia dei Lanzi; the Dominicans marched in from the opposite direction; Fra Domenico carried a consecrated Host, Savonarola a crucifix. The Franciscans complained that Fra Domenico’s red cape might have been charmed into incombustibility by the prior; they insisted on his discarding it; he protested; the crowd urged him to yield; he did. The Franciscans asked him to remove other garments which they thought might have been charmed; Domenico consented, went into the palace of the Signory, and changed clothes with another friar. The Franciscans urged that he should be forbidden to approach Savonarola, lest he be re-enchanted; Domenico submitted to being surrounded by Franciscans. They objected to his carrying either a crucifix or a consecrated Host into the fire; he surrendered the crucifix but kept the Host, and a long theological discussion ensued between Savonarola and the Franciscans as to whether Christ would be burned along with the appearances of bread. Meanwhile the Franciscan champion remained in the palace, begging the Signory to save him by any ruse. The priors allowed the discussions to go on till darkness fell, and then announced that the ordeal could no longer take place. The crowd, cheated of blood, attacked the palace, but was repulsed; some Arrabiati tried to seize Savonarola, but his guard protected him. The Dominicans returned to San Marco, jeered by the populace, though apparently the Franciscans had been the chief cause of delay. Many complained that Savonarola, after claiming that he was inspired by God and that God would protect him, had allowed Domenico to represent him in the ordeal, instead of facing it himself. These thoughts spread through the city, and almost overnight the prior’s following faded away.
On the morrow, Palm Sunday, a mob of Arrabiati and others marched to attack the monastery of San Marco. On the way they killed some Piagnoni, including Francesco Valori; his wife, drawn to a window by his cries, was shot through with an arrow; his house was pillaged and burned; one of his grandchildren was smothered to death. The bell of San Marco tolled to call the Piagnoni to the rescue, but they did not come. The friars prepared to defend themselves with swords and clubs; Savonarola in vain bade them lay down their arms, and himself stood unarmed at the altar, awaiting death. The friars fought valiantly; Fra Enrico wielded his sword with secular delight, accompanying each blow with a lusty cry, Salvum fac populum tuum, Domine—“Save thy people, Lord!” But the hostile crowd was too numerous for the friars; Savonarola finally prevailed upon them to lay down their arms; and when an order came from the Signory for his arrest and that of Domenico, the two surrendered, and were led through a mob that jeered, struck, kicked, and spat upon them, to cells in the Palazzo Vecchio. On the following day Fra Silvestro was added to the prisoners.
The Signory sent to Pope Alexander an account of the ordeal and arrest, begged his absolution for the violence committed on an ecclesiastic, and asked his authorization to subject the prisoners to trial, and, if necessary, to torture. The Pope urged that the three friars should be sent to Rome to be tried before an ecclesiastical court; the Signory refused, and the Pope had to be content with having two papal delegates share in examining the accused.34 The Signory was resolved that Savonarola should die. As long as he lived his party would live; only his death, they thought, could heal the strife of factions that had so divided the city and its government that alliance with Florence had become worthless to any foreign power, and Florence lay open to internal conspiracy or external attack.
Following the custom established by the Inquisition, the examiners put the three friars to torture on various occasions between April 9 and May 22. Silvestro succumbed at once, and answered so readily as the examiners wished that his confession was too facile to be useful. Domenico resisted to the last; tortured to the verge of death, he continued to avow that Savonarola was a saint without guile or sin. Savonarola, high-strung and exhausted, soon collapsed under torture, and gave whatever replies were suggested to him. Recovering, he retracted the confession; tortured again, he yielded again. After three ordeals his spirit broke, and he signed a confused confession that he had no divine inspiration, that he had been guilty of pride and ambition, that he had urged foreign and secular powers to call a general council of the Church, and that he had plotted for the deposition of the Pope. On charges of schism and heresy, of revealing confessional secrets as pretended visions and prophecies, of causing faction and disorder in the state, the three friars were condemned to death by the united sentence of state and Church. Alexander graciously sent them absolution.
On May 23, 1498, the parricide Republic executed its founder and his comrades. Unfrocked and barefoot, they were led to the same Piazza della Signoria where twice they had burned the “vanities.” As then, and as for the trial by ordeal, a great crowd gathered for the sight; but now the government supplied it with food and drink. A priest asked Savonarola, “In what spirit do you bear this martyrdom?” He answered, “The Lord has suffered much for me.” He kissed the crucifix that he carried, and did not speak again. The friars walked bravely to their doom, Domenico almost joyfully, singing a Te Deum in gratitude for a martyr’s death. The three men were hanged from a gibbet, and boys were allowed to stone them as they choked. A great fire was lighted under them, and burned them to ashes. The ashes were thrown into the Arno, lest they be worshiped as the relics of saints. Some Piagnoni, braving incrimination, knelt in the square and wept and prayed. Every year until 1703, on the morning after the 23rd of May, flowers were strewn on the spot where the hot blood of the friars fell. Today a plaque in the pavement marks the site of the most famous crime in Florentine history.
Savonarola was the Middle Ages surviving into the Renaissance, and the Renaissance destroyed him. He saw the moral decay of Italy under the influence of wealth and a declining religious belief, and he stood bravely, fanatically, vainly against the sensual and skeptical spirit of the times. He inherited the moral fervor and mental simplicity of medieval saints, and seemed out of place and key in a world that was singing the praises of rediscovered pagan Greece. He failed through his intellectual limitations and a forgivable but irritating egotism; he exaggerated his illumination and his capacity, and naively underestimated the task of opposing at once the power of the papacy and the instincts of men. He was understandably shocked by Alexander’s morals, but intemperate in his denunciations and intransigeant in his policy. He was a Protestant before Luther only in the sense of calling for a reform of the Church; he shared none of Luther’s theological dissents. But his memory became a force in the Protestant mind; Luther called him a saint. His influence on literature was slight, for literature was in the hands of skeptics and realists like Machiavelli and Guicciardini; but his influence on art was immense. Fra Bartolommeo signed his portrait of the friar, “Portrait of Girolamo of Ferrara, prophet sent by God.” Botticelli turned from paganism to piety under Savonarola’s preaching. Michelangelo heard the friar frequently, and read his sermons devotedly; it was the spirit of Savonarola that moved the brush over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and traced behind the altar the terrible Last Judgment.