Assassin's Creed II: Savonarola and the Real History

On 23 May 1498, Girolamo Savonarola was executed in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. The event is a big one within the events of Assassins Creed 2 as this black robed monk had been the antagonist of The Bonfire of the Vanities DLC and had been the thorn in the side of Ezio Auditore da Finenze. The DLC ends with Savonarola strapped to a stake, ready to be burned, and Ezio shows him mercy by assassinating him before the flames can give him a painful death. But who was Girolamo Savonarola really? Was he as mad as he is portrayed in the DLC, and just how accurate was the game when it came to his last hours before dying?

Girolamo Savonarola, known by many as the ‘mad monk of Florence’, was born in Ferrara in September 1452. He was the third child of Niccolo di Michele and his wife Elena, and he had noble blood through his mother. She claimed lineage of the Bonacossi family, who had ruled Mantua until they had been ousted by the Gonzaga family in 1328. Young Girolamo’s education was overseen by his grandfather Michele who was a celebrated physician in the court of Ferrara’s rulers, the Este. Thanks to his grandfather's links with the Este, Girolamo spent time as the court from a young age but even then was put off by the ostentation of those who considered themselves to be his betters. After Michele died in 1468, the young man's education continued and his aim was to follow in his grandfather's footsteps. After completing his education at the University of Ferrara, he prepared to enter medical school. But those plans never came to pass. He had long been ill at ease towards the church and what he perceived to be its faults, even writing apocalyptic poetry that singled out the Church in Rome. He believed the Church should be a simple thing, its priests free of the sins of the flesh and poor reputation. It was a sermon in a small church in Faenza that convinced him to leave his secular life behind, and enter the church.

So he left home, without so much as a word to his parents, and joined the Dominican Order. He spent his first year as a novice before being ordained into the priesthood and even took part in furthering his theological education. But even then he was critical of what he was seeing - the Dominican Order should have been living an austere lifestyle, but instead he witnessed the opposite with his superiors living as if they were rich men. These beliefs alienated his superiors, and even more so when he stood up to them wanting to change the Order’s rules in and around the owning of property. By 1482 he was transferred to the Convent of San Marco in Florence where he was to teach the novices and preach, as the rules of the Dominican Order said he should.

His first years in Florence were not easy and his early sermons there were regarded poorly, thanks to his nasally Ferrarese accent. The accent, he recorded in his diaries, put off the local population from attending his sermons. His time would soon come, however, and for a time he travelled between various Tuscan towns to work on his preaching. And all the time he was coming up with more and more ways that the Church should be scourged. By the time he returned to Florence in 1490, his confidence had grown. It is perhaps ironic that Savonarola’s return to Florence was orchestrated by Lorenzo de Medici, a man who Savonarola would later rail against. Upon his return his sermons began to attract huge crowds, so huge in fact that the venue had to be changed to the city’s cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore. These sermons concentrated on, of course, the corrupt clergy of the Roman Catholic Church. But as well as that he spoke openly of how the ruling classes were tyrants who exploited the freedoms of those beneath them. No names were mentioned during these sermons but it was clear to everyone just who Girolamo Savonarola was talking about - Lorenzo de Medici. He gained an inordinate amount of followers who hung on his every word and even proclaimed him to be a prophet. How could he not be a prophet when he had accurately prophesied that the French army would invade Florence? Savonarola proved himself here to be an excellent politician, even being sent to negotiate with the King of France to spare Florence. It worked and the French army moved on. Florence was now free of the French, and also the Medici - Lorenzo de Medici had died in April 1492, leaving his son and heir to carry on ruling the city. But by 1494 the Medici had been ousted from the city and it had become a true republic. With Girolamo Savonarola its king in all but name.

As a cleric, Savonarola could not hold office. But that did not mean he could not lead the people of Florence and its government. Under his guidance the government was completely reworked and those who had worked under the Medici were barred from office and every citizen in good standing was able to vote in a new parliament. A new law was even brought in that limited the use of capital punishment as a factional weapon. It seemed that Savonarola, the prophet of Florence, could do no wrong in the eyes of the majority of Florence’s citizens’ eyes.

The majority followed him blindly as he preached that Florence would be a new ‘Jerusalem’ with Christ as its King, rather than being under the umbrella of the Pope in Rome. He even tried having Florence split away from the Church in Rome which, along with Savonarola’s repeated diatribes against Pope Alexander VI, certainly caught the wrong kind of attention. But it was when Savonarola started to call for the people of Florence to denounce their worldly goods that they started to turn on him. Sodomy (same sex relations of both males and females) was outlawed as well as gambling and public drunkenness, with armies of young boys patrolling the streets to make sure that these laws were followed. His popularity waned. In Rome, Pope Alexander had had enough and summoned Savonarola to his presence to explain his actions. Savonarola refused the summons and cited ill health which incensed the Pope even more, to the point where he banned Savonarola from preaching. The ban was, of course, ignored.

February 1497 saw the beginning of what is now known as the burning of the vanities, and the moment in time shown within the Assassins Creed II DLC. Within the game we see Girolamo Savonarola using the apple of Eden to bring the people under his influence and using special lieutenants to help keep order. Ezio hunts down these lieutenants and assassinates them as piles of ‘vanities’ burn throughout the streets of Florence. With the lieutenants dead, Ezio and the other assassins convinced the people of Florence to turn on Savonarola - in May 1498 the mob descends on Savonarola’s residence at the Palazzo Pitti (it should be noted, however, that this is completely fictitious) and drag him to the Palazzo della Signoria where he is put to death. The preacher was to be burned but Ezio stepped in, assassinating him before the flames could take his life. Much of this retelling of Savonarola’s final moments within the game is entirely fictitious, with just small threads of truth woven in. So how did it really happen?

Pope Alexander VI excommunicated Savonarola in May 1497 and the preacher withdrew from preaching. Instead of preaching, he began to work on his writing and completed his famous work The Triumph of the Cross. Within this writing he hinted that he was able to perform miracles and was thus able to prove his divine mission. This was the beginning of the end. Savonarola was challenged to a trial by fire, where he or a surrogate would have to walk through flames in order to prove that the preacher was able to perform miracles. The trial was set for April 7, 1497, with Fra (Friar) Domenico de Pescia standing in as Savonarola’s surrogate. The aim of this trial was simple - walk through the flames without being burned and it would be proven that Savonarola was blessed by God. A huge crowd gathered in the piazza Santa Croce to witness the event but when it suddenly rained and the trial had to be cancelled, they rioted. Savonarola was to blame for it, and he had not been able to prove that he was indeed divine. They were out for blood. Savonarola and the friars who had accompanied him rushed back to San Marco where they locked themselves inside and prepared to fight the mob that had begun to march upon them. The mob soon overpowered the Dominicans and Savonarola was arrested alongside his colleague Fra Silvestro Maruffi and Fra Domenico.

Savonarola was kept locked in a cell within the tower of the Palazzo della Signore, nicknamed ‘L’Albergettino’, and was taken to the nearby Bargello where he was put to torture. The strappado was used on him, which involved his arms being tied behind his back and then, his wrists suspended from a rope, would be dropped from height repeatedly. This torture would dislocate the arms. It caused him to admit that he had completely made up his prophecies and his visions. When he recanted, he was tortured again until he confessed and signed his name to the confession. On 23 May 1498, Savonarola and his two colleagues were removed from their cells and taken before a tribunal in the piazza della Signoria - they were denounced as heretics by members of the clergy and stripped of their place within the church. They were then sentenced to death. A scaffold had been hastily erected within the piazza and the three of them were taken to die. The three of them were hanged until almost dead and then a pyre beneath their bodies was lit and they were burned. Once the sentence was carried out the ashes were scooped up and thrown into the Arno River, so that relics could not be preserved. There was certainly no mercy given to Savonarola in his final moments, no assassins blade to the throat. Instead he burned, having been turned on by the people who he had both preached before and ruled over.

The Bonfire of the Vanities DLC is certainly an interesting version of Savonarola’s last moments and there are threads of truth within the fiction. The developers did their research and showed Savonarola as the mad monk, as an evil human being who corrupted his followers using the Apple of Eden. Was Savonarola mad? Or was he simply a man ahead of his time who believed that reform needed to happen within Church and State? In many ways the real truth of Savonarola’s final moments is much more gruesome than what we are shown in game, and also much more sad. He was a man who believed wholeheartedly in what he was doing, believing that things needed to change within the Church from both the bottom and top end. He was one of the first reformers and influenced reformers such as Martin Luther. Girolamo Savonarola, without even knowing it, started a reform that would change the way Church and State was run across the world.