Our business, of course, is not to expose the prophetic miscarriages of Savonarola, but simply to make clear what manner of thing his prophesying was.1 It was an instance of a kind of vaticination as old as Troy and Jerusalem, which had gone on in Christendom for centuries. Long before his day religious men had predicted wars, pestilences, famines, and the conversion of the Turks.2 The wars and plagues and famines were very safe prognostications: they came in every decade. And when we come to his alleged prediction of the sack of Rome we realize immediately, not only that the one detail of coincidence is wholly fortuitous, but that, like his predecessors, he was simply predicting a return of common evils already experienced a hundred times.3

The argument of Blass and others on this topic, confidently accepted and endorsed by Dr. Petrie, works out as sheer mystification. They lay special stress on the fact that in the sack of 1527 horses were stabled in the churches. It is likely enough: the same thing has been done a thousand times in the wars of Christendom. But the argument has been very negligently conducted. In the first place, though he tells of infinitely worse things, such as the wholesale violation of women, including nuns, the historian Guicciardini does not give the detail about the horses. That occurs in the document Il Sacco di Roma, ascribed latterly to his brother Luigi, which was first printed in 1664. Still, let us assume that the printing was faithful. If an interpolator had meant to vindicate Savonarola he would presumably have noted that the prophet specified not only horses but pigs, whereas the narrative says nothing of the latter. We are thus left with the item of the stabling of horses in the churches.

Here we have to note that as regards the main event Savonarola is predicting a thing that had repeatedly happened in Catholic times, and that as regards the minor details he is speaking with his eye on Jewish history. It was not the mere presence of horses and pigs in churches that he meant to stress, but the defilement that they brought. In the case of the Jewish Temple the “abomination of desolation” had been understood to include the defiling of the altar with swine’s flesh.4 This, in all likelihood, was the origin of Savonarola’s prediction as to the bringing of pigs into the sanctuary at Rome, which, as we have seen, was not fulfilled.

But there was nothing new about a Catholic sack of Rome. The city had been hideously sacked and in large part destroyed under Gregory VII (1084) by Robert Guiscard, the Pope’s ally, after having been captured without sacking by the German Emperor. It just missed being sacked by Frederick II in 1239. In 1413 it was captured by Ladislaus of Naples, who gave all Florentine property in the city to pillage. No question of heresy arose in these episodes; nor did the forces of the Church itself blench at either sack or sacrilege. Faenza was foully sacked in 1376 by Hawkwood, called in for its defence by the bishop of Ostia; and in 1377 the same condottiere massacred the population of Cesena under the express and continuous orders of Robert, Cardinal of Geneva, the papal legate, afterwards the “anti-pope” Clement VII. No more bestial massacre took place in the pandemonium of the fourteenth century; and the sacking of the churches and the violation of the nuns was on the scale of the bloodshed.5 In view of the endless atrocities of the wars of the Church and of Christendom there is a certain ripe absurdity about the exegetical comments on the subject of the sack of Rome in 1527. Says Blass:—

And Dr. Petrie adds: “Such a detail seemed excessively unlikely before the rise of Lutheranism; yet it came to pass.”7 It is interesting to realize the notions held by scholars of such standing in regard to European history after a century signalized by so much historic research; and to find that such an ignorant proposition as that just cited should for Dr. Petrie “explode the dogma” that really fulfilled prophecies8 have been framed post eventum.

For centuries before Luther the desecration of churches was a regular feature in every Christian war of any extent. It is arguable, perhaps, that in the sack of Rome the German troops might have made a special display of that mania for ordure as an instrument of war of which we have had such circumstantial accounts from Belgium of late, and of which similar details have been preserved in the domestic history of Paris since 1870.9 But the stabling of horses in churches was a familiar act of warfare, often explicable by the simple fact that the horses of an army could not otherwise be accommodated. The clerical chroniclers mention such things when they can tell a tale of the divine vengeance. Thus Spelman tells how “Richard, Robert, and Anesgot, sons of William Sorenge, in the time of William Duke of Normandy, wasting the country about Say, invaded the church of St. Gervase, lodging their soldiers there, and making it a stable for their horses. God deferred not the revenge.”10 In 1098 “the Earl of Shrewsbury made a dog-kennel of the church of St. Fridank, laying his hounds in it for the night-time; but in the morning he found them mad.”11 The putting of cattle in churches was sometimes a necessity of defensive warfare. In 1358, according to Jean de Venette, many unfortified villages in France made citadels of their churches to defend themselves from brigands;12 and in such cases the animals would be taken indoors. Fine churches, on the other hand, were often burned in the wars of that period.13 And when the Turks invaded Friuli in 1477 and 1478, burning and ravaging,14 they were likely enough to have stabled their horses in churches. It was probably of the Turks that Savonarola was thinking, predicting as he so constantly did their speedy conversion to Christianity.

Lutheranism can have had very little to do with the matter: the brutality of the German Landsknechts was notorious long before Luther was heard of. But there was nothing specially German in the matter either. The Italian condottieri in general were “full of contempt for all sacred things.”15 It is instructive to note that Savonarola predicts nothing of the wholesale violation of nuns and other women which was to take place at Rome as it had done in a hundred other sacks of cities: he must have known that these things happened; but the thing that appealed to his imagination was the theological pollution resulting from putting horses and pigs in churches. He was not predicting: he was remembering. Long before his time, besides, Church Councils had to pass edicts against the use of churches as barns in time of peace.

It will be remembered that his main items are slaughters, famines, and pestilences. There was famine and pestilence in Florence when he was prophesying in 1496; there was more in 1497;16 and a terrible pestilence had visited Venice during the Turkish invasions of 1477 and 1478. The preacher’s description of a plague in a city is an account of what had happened a dozen times in the history of Florence, before and after the Plague which figures in the forefront of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Preaching from the text of Amos, he arraigns Italy and Rome as Amos arraigns Israel and Judah; and his menaces are the menaces of the Hebrew prophet, immeasurable slaughters, famine, pestilence, and captivity, with the old corollary of regeneration and restoration, in the case of Italy and the Church as in the case of Israel. And his added detail of church desecration is at once a Biblical idea and a familiar item from Christian history.

In the historic crusade against the Albigenses in 1209, when BÉziers was captured and every human being therein slain, seven thousand were, by the famous order of the Papal Legate,17 put to the sword in the great church of St. Mary Magdalene, to which they had fled for sanctuary; and the whole city, with its churches, was burned to the ground. During the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, says a social historian, a cleric—

In the wars of Burgundy and France in the fifteenth century Catholics habitually plundered Catholic churches. At the siege of Saint-Denis in 1411 “the Germans, the Bretons, and the Gascons promised themselves the pillage of the church and the treasures of the abbey.”19 Later “the English, the Picards, and the Parisians ... entered the monastery ... pillaged the apartments of the inmates, and carried away the cups, the utensils, all the furniture.”20 At Soissons, in 1414,

The historian is quite mistaken; the same horrors had been many times enacted, and even on a greater scale. At the sack of Constantinople by the Christian crusaders in 1204,

Savonarola was simply predicting for Rome, perhaps with his eye on the Turks, such a fate as befell Constantinople at Christian hands, regarding both as acts of divine vengeance, and expecting the capture of Rome to come soon. He pointed to the French invasion—he well might—as showing what was likely to happen.24 The practice of church desecration had never ceased in Christendom for a single generation. In 1315 Edward Bruce, in his raid in Ireland, is reported to have burned churches and abbeys with all the people in them, and to have wrecked and defaced other churches, with their tombs and monuments. During the centuries between the battle of Bannockburn and the union of the English and Scottish crowns, churches, cathedrals, or abbeys were plundered or burned on both sides in nearly every great border raid. Frenchmen and Burgundians wrecked each other’s churches. In his thirteenth chapter Philip de Commines tells “Of the storming, taking, and plundering the city of LiÈge; together with the ruin and destruction of the very churches.” The Duke of Burgundy set a battalion of his guards to defend them, and killed one soldier of those who tried to enter; but later the soldiers forced an entrance, and all were completely plundered. “I myself,” says Commines, “was in none but the great church, but I was told so, and saw the marks of it, for which a long time after the Pope excommunicated all such as had any goods belonging to the churches in that city unless they restored them; and the duke appointed certain officers to go up and down his country to see the Pope’s sentence put in execution.”25 As late as 1524, in the course of the campaign of Henry VIII in France, two churches were held and defended as fortresses on the French side, and captured by the invaders;26 and in 1487 Perugia “became a beleaguered fortress under the absolute despotism of the Baglioni, who used even the cathedrals as barracks.”27 Savonarola could not have missed hearing of that.

If there was anything astonishing for Italians in the desecration of churches at the sack of Rome, they must have had short memories. The conspiracy of the Pazzi in 1478, in which Giuliano de’ Medici was slain during high mass in the cathedral church of Florence, had been backed by the Pope; and the sacrilege of the planned deed was reckoned so horrible that one of the first appointed assassins, who blenched at it, had to be replaced by priests, who had transcended such scruples.28 On the capture of Brescia by the French under Gaston de Foix in 1512, “things sacred and profane, the goods, the honour, and the life of the inhabitants were for seven days delivered up to the greed, the lust, and the cruelty of the soldier,” only the nuns being spared.29 In 1526 the Milanese told the Constable Bourbon, the general of their ally:—

Guicciardini testifies that the Spaniards of the emperor’s forces had been more cruel than the Germans,31 violating the women and reducing to rags the men of their own allies.