Samantha Morris - The Pope’s Greatest Adversary: Girolamo Savonarola

To Matt

My best friend and confidant, who has steadfastly put up with

me dragging him around Italy on research trips and cheered me on

when things have been tough.

Girolamo Savonarola

Samantha Morris

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

Pen & Sword History

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire Philadelphia

Copyright Samantha Morris 2021

ISBN 978 1 52672 444 1

ePUB ISBN 978 1 52672 445 8

The right of Samantha Morris to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library.

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T here are so many people that I would like to thank for their help and support in writing this book too many in fact. The sheer amount of people that I owe gratitude to is long enough to be a book of its own, and honestly it has been so difficult to pick and choose who exactly to name here. But to each and every person who has been involved in this project even in the smallest way thank you. You all mean the absolute world to me.

I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone at Pen and Sword for their tireless, professional and friendly attitude, not only towards my creating this book but to others past and in the pipeline for the future. Special thanks go to Jonathan Wright, my commissioning editor without his belief in these projects, I would still be sitting there wondering if I was good enough to write anything. To the wonderful artists who have designed the cover for this project thank you! Your beautiful work has added the final, perfect garnish to this book, and I couldnt be more grateful. To Rosie Crofts your enthusiasm for history of all eras is a pleasure to see.

Special thanks go to the Medici Archive Project in Florence who have pointed me in the direction of various sources both secondary and printed primary, as well as the fantastic staff at various museums related to Savonarola in the city of Florence particularly at the Convent of San Marco and the Palazzo Vecchio. The staff in these beautiful places are incredibly knowledgeable and friendly, and happy to answer any and all questions that are put to them.

To Dawn for her constant pushing me to carry on writing even when I believed I couldnt; Jo (BFFs for life); Hasan Niyazi Renaissance mythbuster extraordinaire, may you rest in peace my friend; Poppi and Yazz, Tim and Claire Ridgway; Sammy; Craig; Dani; Andrea; Melanie and to all the extremely heavy metal bands that have been blasted into my ears during the writing of this project.

Of course very special thanks have to go to my mum and dad for believing in me when I first started out on the journey towards publication and for their constant love and support. And to my partner, Matt he has put up with me constantly being lost in the life of Savonarola and his contemporaries. Not only that, but he has accompanied me on so many research holidays and has managed to find an appreciation for the Italian Renaissance. I couldnt have done this without you.

T his book originally started out as a brief introduction to Savonarolas life; however I came to the decision that he needed something more. This Dominican friar was witness to some of the biggest events in Renaissance history and, in fact, was the driving force behind many of them. The journey of reading about this man is one that sees an intertwining of religion and politics, so I have tried to keep the details as simple as possible. Of course, his story cannot be told without bringing in the complicated politics of the city of Florence and of Italy at the time. I have endeavoured to keep these details as straightforward as I possibly can while still telling the full story of Savonarola and the world in which he lived. There are, of course, studies out there relating to Savonarola, and there is a list of sources available at the back of this book. I would particularly recommend Donald Weinsteins Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet and Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance as well as Lauro Martines Scourge and Fire and Paul Stratherns Death in Florence. All these biographies are excellent academic sources that provide a highly detailed account of Savonarolas life, his own academic work, his sermons and the politics of the time. It is my hope that this work will be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with these books and help bring Girolamo Savonarola further into the public eye, to tell his story and bring it to a new audience.

My own interest in him was piqued when, for my sins, I was watching Showtimes The Borgias many of my readers will already know my opinions regarding that television series so I began to look further into him. The Dominican friar who had stood up against the Pope became a niggle, and then an earworm, and it just wouldnt go away until I started reading about his life. Eventually he became another firm Renaissance favourite of mine, second only to the Borgia family. My interest grew even stronger when my partner and I took a trip to Florence and spent a good few hours wandering the halls of San Marco, the monastery that had been his home for so many years; sitting in the cell that held him at the end of his life and standing in the spot where he was executed. It certainly made me feel closer to the man that divided Florence straight down the middle. Our visit to Ferrara only made me love him all the more the city of his birth has the most beautiful statue of him in the piazza outside the castello, and you can even walk down a street named after him, which is also the street on which he was born. Many of the photographs in the middle of the book were taken by my partner and me on our trips to Florence and Ferrara, and it is my hope that they, along with the story told within these pages, will inspire people to visit these beautiful cities and continue to learn about such a fascinating era in Renaissance history.