Note 1 — Chapter IX · BLASS AND FLINDERS PETRIE
Reading edition
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