The Poet Prince (58 page)

In the early hours of April 9, 1492, as Lorenzo de Medici was extracting promises from his loved ones on his deathbed, a series of unexplainable events occurred in the city of Florence. An intense electrical storm hit, and lightning struck Giotto’s Campanile, causing chunks of stone and marble to fly from the tower and land in the center of Florence. In the midst of this melee, the two male lions who symbolized the emblem of Florence, and who had lived peacefully together beside the Piazza della Signoria for years, began to roar and pace in their pen. They attacked each other and fought viciously. Both lions were dead by morning. So was Lorenzo de’ Medici.

The people of Florence saw these things as a terrible omen. Most were Medici supporters who feared the worst with Lorenzo gone. There was no leadership to fill his shoes, and the specter of Savonarola’s reign of terror loomed darkly over the city.

Girolamo Savonarola, for his part, manipulated the events of April ninth in another direction, and did so masterfully.

“God has spoken!” he roared the following Sunday. “He has struck down Lorenzo de’ Medici, the arch heretic and wicked tyrant. He has shown us his wrath and his disdain for the frivolities that Lorenzo indulged. God has shown us the evils inherent in art, in music, in any book that is not his own holy word. He has shown us with his lightning that he will take the entire Republic of Florence down, and he has killed the lions of this city as his first sacrifices. Do you wish to be his next sacrifice?”

The little friar roared his fire from the pulpit of the packed Duomo. The faithful in attendance, full of fear, roared in response, “No!”

“Did I not prophesy that Lorenzo would die before the seasons changed? Did I not tell you that God would no longer allow the Medici tyranny and blasphemy to continue?”

But Savonarola did not stop with fulfilling his own prophecy. He manufactured a tale of his final minutes with Lorenzo, telling of how the heretic refused to recant on his deathbed, despite Fra Girolamo’s
unselfish trek out to Careggi to offer him the comfort of absolution. Lorenzo de’ Medici remained a heretic until he drew his last breath, and he died with the heavy stains of sin on his soul. The monk had no choice but to refuse to administer last rites, as the man was an unrepentant heretic until the end.

The message was clear: heresy leads to death. And the Medici were heretics.

Florence
present day

T
HE SUN WAS
setting over the Arno, turning the rooftops of Florence into a burnished terra-cotta mosaic. Bérenger and Maureen sat hand in hand, enjoying the view, and each other.

“I had come here that afternoon to tell you that I would not marry Vittoria under any circumstances,” Bérenger explained. “Even if Dante was my son, even if Dante was the Second Coming as foretold in the prophecy. I had come to the realization—with some assistance from Destino—that the most noble action I could take would be to honor love. The best example I could provide for anyone would be to have the courage to stand up for the one thing that I know to be true in my life: my love for you.”

Maureen reached up to kiss him lightly, then said, “The time returns, but it doesn’t have to.”

“Precisely. It is time to break that cycle, Maureen, and that is what I realized. It is time for a new Renaissance, a golden age of the twenty-first century, a rebirth of the way we think and believe and respond. It is time to be reborn through love, and love alone. By shackling myself to Vittoria I would have been perpetuating the cycle of loss and turning my back on the most perfect gift that any of us can ever have. It would have served only to increase suffering, which as we know is not what God wants from any of us. It would have been a type of mar-
tyrdom.”

The realization of it hit Maureen hard. She understood in a new way exactly what it was that Destino had been trying to convey to so many of his students across so much time. They said the prayer of the Order in unison:

We honor God while praying for a time
when these teachings will be welcomed
in peace by all people
and there will be no more martyrs.

Felicity de Pazzi wrapped her hands tightly. The commemoration in honor of Savonarola’s martyrdom had gone beautifully. The confraternity crowd had been even larger than that in Rome, and the stigmata had bled perfectly and on time. The bonfire, while small, was sufficiently dramatic to destroy the books that had been accumulated. Heresy and blasphemy burned bright in the flames, urged on by the gasoline, which Felicity poured on them from a canister.

She picked up the canister now and took it to her car. Her hands hurt, and she would need them for what she planned to do next. They just needed to stop bleeding so she could work with them. But there were a few hours left until it was fully dark. She had time. But not
much.

Florence
1497

“S
HE IS YOUR
daughter, Girolamo, whether you wish to acknowledge her or not.”

Fra Girolamo Savonarola could not stand the sight of the little guttersnipe, nor her whore of a mother. This foul wench, who stood in his
cell in San Marco with a scrawny, underfed little girl, was an instrument of the devil. She had seduced him in a moment of weakness, and this dirty little thing was the spawn of that horrific mistake. Now this child was the one thing that threatened his future as the ruler of Florence’s austere republic. She had to remain a secret at all costs. He had far too much to lose at this point.

In the five years since Lorenzo’s death, Fra Girolamo Savonarola had successfully destroyed the Medici. It wasn’t hard once Lorenzo was gone. His eldest son, Piero, was one step above an idiot. Unprepared to take over the Medici empire, he had systematically run it into the ground without much help, weakening what was left of the family and making it easy for Savonarola to insist on their exile. He had even been allowed to ransack the Palazzo Medici in Via Larga to search out fuel for his bonfires, and fuel he found. Paintings, manuscripts, all aspects of heresy and foul paganism were confiscated from the palazzo and thrown onto one of the roaring bonfires that burned regularly in the Piazza della Signoria.

Savonarola had become famous for the bonfires, called bonfires of the vanities. His followers now numbered in the thousands. The people of Florence called them the Pignoni, which meant “the weepers,” if one was being kind, or “the snivelers,” if one was not. It was the job of the Pignoni to collect vanity items to burn in the bonfires. Anything that pertained to physical vanity—perfumes, creams, clothing of any adornment, jewelry—was meant for the fires. All musical instruments were as well, given that they were used only for secular celebrations and led to the gyrations of dancing followed by rutting. All books that were not Bibles or works of Church fathers were headed to the fires, with a special emphasis on the pagan classics.

But Savonarola held a special place in his heart for the destruction of art. It was art that the Medici had cultivated, art that contained the hidden clues to their heresies and their Order. By destroying as much art as possible, he would eliminate the teaching tools of blas-
phemy.

Within three years of eliminating Lorenzo, Savonarola had the
Medici expelled from Florence, although the two he could not control, Giovanni and Giulio, were now cardinals in Rome. The current pope was a Borgia, and a Medici supporter, which was to be expected. The Borgias were the only family in Italy more corrupt than the Medici, from Savonarola’s perspective. So while Savonarola seethed that the Medici brothers thrived under Pope Alexander VI, at least they were far away from his Florence. By 1495 Savonarola was the undisputed ruler of the Florentine Republic. He created a new constitution and implemented new laws of morality and austerity. It was now illegal to walk through the streets wearing any kind of adornment. Vanity was the ultimate crime against God.

No one dared to oppose him, and his power grew. But the existence of this child was a problem, which had to be dealt with immediately.

“I have made arrangements for the . . . child to be adopted into the de Pazzi family,” he said without looking at the whore of a mother overlong. The sight of her sickened him. The de Pazzi had been his allies in eliminating the Medici, and they were easy to manipulate. They owed him a lifetime of favors, and he had convinced them to take on this girl with no questions asked.

“For your troubles, I will give you one hundred florins to go away and never utter a word of this to anyone, nor are you to ever see this girl again once she becomes a Pazzi.”

The woman started to object, but Savonarola produced a sack with gold florins worth a king’s ransom.

“Do you concede to this agreement, woman?”

She nodded mutely, reaching out to grab the sack.

He dropped it to the floor and laughed as the coins scattered. The woman was forced to collect them on her hands and knees.

“Leave the girl in the foyer. I will have the brothers take her to the Pazzi.”

He left the room and never looked at the girl or her mother again. The little girl, her eyes huge with all that she had seen in too hard a life, stared ahead of her. Had Savonarola stayed to look at her, he might have
noticed something disturbing about her, something in her eyes that held the earliest glint of madness.

Colombina was sweating with the effort but continued working
with her fellow Pignoni. They were loading the items for the bonfire that had been collected during previous days onto the carts. The
Pignoni had raided all across Tuscany in search of vanity items and heretical fuel for Savonarola’s bonfires. Every manuscript that Colombina prepared for burning made her stomach turn. Every piece of art she loaded onto the carts made her want to weep. But she could not show any emotion other than joy that these terrible offenses to God would see the flames.

It had taken Colombina and Sandro the better part of these last five years to become trusted members of the Pignoni. Savonarola did not trust either of them at first, but as they proved to be some of the most dedicated workers among his faithful, and were particularly involved with the bonfires, he became convinced of the sincerity of their conversion. Sandro Botticelli had even submitted a number of his Madonna-as-whore paintings to the flames to prove his devotion to the cause. Both Sandro and Colombina were considered leaders of the Pignoni now, and as such they saw everything that was being prepared for the bonfires.

They were working together today, preparing for the biggest fire yet in honor of the Lenten season. The hoard was so huge and impressive that Savonarola himself came out to inspect it.

“Ah, will you look at this! It shall give me so much joy to see this go up in the flames. Raise it up that I may see it.”

Two of the Pignoni held aloft what appeared to be a processional banner. A woman, a female saint, sat enthroned, surrounded by worshippers at her feet. Sandro swallowed hard as he recognized the Spinello Aretino masterpiece from Sansepolcro. He and Lorenzo had marched behind this banner when they were boys, in honor of the
woman depicted so beautifully upon it, their Queen of Compassion, Maria Magdalena.

“But first, I must make an incision,” Savonarola declared, reaching into his robe to remove the little dagger he used at meals.

The banner depicted Magdalene holding a crucifix. Savonarola took his blade to the banner’s canvas, slashing it. He cut in bold strokes around the painted face of Jesus on the cross, salvaging the image of Christ. “Now, I shall keep this image of Our Lord from burning. But throw the whore into the flames!”

The other Pignoni cheered the piece of theater as Savonarola marched out of the courtyard. Sandro looked at Colombina and then around them. There were three carts, and each had two Pignoni working it. Sandro scurried over to claim the banner for his cart, and no one argued with him. They had perfected this process, but the banner was big and they would have to be careful here. Waiting until the other
Pignoni took a break for lunch, Colombina and Sandro made their move. They removed the banner from the top of the pile and slipped it under the cart. A secret shelf space had been built into the carts for just this purpose. Since the implementation of the bonfires, Sandro and Colombina had been rescuing the finest art and literature of the Renaissance, one item at a time.