to think that what you have done has not been done with an evil motive, but from a certain simple-mindedness and a zeal, however misguided, for the Lord’s vineyard. Our duty, however, prescribes that we order you, under holy obedience, to cease from public and private preaching until you are able to come to our presence, not under armed escort as is your present habit, but safely, quietly and modestly, as becomes a religious, or until we make different arrangements.
Alexander VI then decreed that the Tuscan Dominicans, who had been granted their independence, should now revert to papal control as a preliminary step toward sending the ‘pestilential heretic’ to another monastery far away from Florence. The prior of San Marco declared that the pope had no authority in the matter. Alexander VI had no alternative but to excommunicate Savonarola for this attack on his supreme authority as pope.
When news of the excommunication arrived in Florence in June 1497, Savonarola remained silent for several months, praying for guidance. Then he announced that God’s word had been vouchsafed to him, and on Christmas Day he celebrated High Mass in the cathedral.
‘I can no longer place any faith in Your Holiness,’ Savonarola replied to a threat to place the whole city under an interdict, unless the Signoria either sent the prior to Rome or had him thrown into prison in Florence. ‘You have not listened to me,’ he continued. ‘I must trust myself wholly to Him who chooses the weak things of this world to confound the strong. Your Holiness is well advised to make immediate provisions for your own salvation.’
The Signoria, treated with equal high-handedness, had by now come to believe that the quarrel was getting out of hand. Savonarola’s opponents were becoming more outspoken every month; and the clergy were becoming concerned about his constant insistence that his was the voice of God. The Franciscans, in particular, long antagonized by the Dominicans’ claim to a special relationship with the Almighty, were demanding that the prior of San Marco should offer some proof of God’s exceptional favour.
Savonarola continued to preach. Soon after delivering several dramatic sermons during Lent in 1498, he was arrested by a guard and taken to a cramped cell in the Palazzo della Signoria, known with grim humour as the Alberghettino, ‘the little inn.’ From there he was taken to be tortured by the city’s rack-master.
Ambiguously he confessed all that was required of him while suffering the dreadful agonies of the
An immense pile of brushwood was prepared; a gallows was erected in its centre; and a high platform was built from the door of the Palazzo della Signoria to the gallows’ ladder, so that all who had been disappointed by the cancellation of the ordeal might be compensated by a view of the three Dominicans being conducted to their deaths. ‘They were robed in all their vestments,’ Luca Landucci entered in his diary under the heading of May 22, 1498:
These were taken off one by one with the appropriate words for the degradation… Then their faces and hands were shaved as is customary in this ceremony…When all three had been hanged a fire was made on the platform upon which gunpowder was put and set alight, so that the said fire burst out with a noise of rockets and cracking. In a few hours they were burnt, their legs and arms gradually dropping off. Part of their bodies remaining hanging to the chains, a quantity of stones were thrown to make them fall, as there was a fear of the people getting hold of them.
— CHAPTER 11 — Murder
‘HIS HOLINESS… THINKS OF NOTHING BUT THE WAY IN WHICH HE MAY SAFELY LAY HANDS ON THE GUILTY MEN’
‘ON WEDNESDAY 14 JUNE 1497,’ so Johannes Burchard carefully recorded:
Cardinal Cesare Borgia and Don Juan Borgia, Duke of Gandia, both dear sons of His Holiness, had supper with Donna Vannozza, their mother, and some other guests, in her villa near the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. After the meal, and since night was coming on, the Cardinal suggested to his brother the Duke that they should return to the Vatican; and so they mounted their horses and left with only one or two servants to accompany them. They rode together almost to Cardinal Ascanio Sforza’s palace, which had been built by His Holiness when he was vice-chancellor. At this point the Duke told his brother that he wanted to go out in pursuit of further pleasure before going back to the palace.
Juan, therefore, left his brother, dismissed the few servants he had with him, except for a footman and a mysterious man in a mask who had joined Juan during the supper party at his mother’s and who, moreover, had been to see Juan at the Vatican almost every day for the past month.
Juan made room for this masked man to ride behind him on his mule, and they rode off together to the Piazza degli Ebrei, where Juan told the footman to wait there an hour and then, if he had not returned, to go back to the Vatican. Soon afterward the footman was attacked and badly wounded. Discovered in a pool of blood, he was dragged into a nearby house, whose owner was so frightened that he refused to report what had happened until the next morning, by which time the man was dead.
By now Juan’s disappearance was causing consternation at the Vatican Palace. Alexander VI hoped that perhaps he had spent the night with a woman and had not wanted to be seen leaving her house in daylight. But the longer Alexander VI waited for his son’s return, the more anxious he became.
He made urgent enquiries in the area where Juan was known to have been the night before. One of those questioned was a timber merchant whose practice it was to have his wood unloaded from boats in the Tiber not far from the hospital of San Girolamo degli Schiavoni. This man said that he had been keeping a watch on a delivery of timber when, close to midnight, he saw two men walk down to the riverbank, where they looked about them, presumably to see if the coast was clear. Shortly afterward two other men stealthily approached the water, where they were joined by a man on a white horse, which appeared to have a corpse slung across its back. He and the four other men then moved silently along the riverbank, halting just past a place where sewage and rubbish were customarily thrown into the water.
Here the dead body was pulled from the horse and hurled into the Tiber. The rider who had brought it then asked the others if it had sunk. He was assured that it had; but, noticing the corpse’s cloak still floating on the surface, he threw stones at it until it had disappeared from view. The five men then left the river together and were soon lost to sight.
All this the timber merchant related when questioned. Asked why he had not reported these events earlier, he replied that he must have seen at least a hundred bodies thrown into the river at that point and had never thought much about it.
Fishermen and boatmen were now called up and ordered to drag the riverbed. They soon found Juan’s body. It was fully dressed, with a purse tucked into a belt, which still contained 30 ducats. He had been stabbed repeatedly in his body, legs, and head.
The corpse was then taken to Castel Sant’Angelo, where it was stripped, washed, and dressed in military uniform before being taken to the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo in a procession led by over one hundred torchbearers, ecclesiastics, and members of the dead man’s household, all, so Burchard related, ‘marching along, weeping and wailing and in considerable disorder.’
Alexander VI was distraught, ‘shutting himself away in a room in grief and anguish of heart, weeping most bitterly… From the Wednesday evening until the following Saturday morning, he ate and drank nothing, whilst from Thursday morning to Sunday, he was quiet for no minute of any hour.’
On the Monday, June 19, the pope made a solemn announcement at a special consistory called for that
