Note 24 — Chapter X · THE SAVONAROLA FALLACY

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.