Note 9 — Chapter X · THE SAVONAROLA FALLACY

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.