Death in Florence: the Medici, Savonarola and the Battle for the Soul

By the end of the fifteen century, Florence was well established as the home of the Renaissance. As generous patrons to the likes of Botticelli and Michelangelo, the ruling Medici embodied the progressive humanist spirit of the age, and in Lorenzo the Magnificent they possessed a diplomat capable of guarding the militarily weak city in a climate of constantly shifting allegiances between the major Italian powers. However, in the form of Savonarola, an unprepossessing provincial monk, Lorenzo found his nemesis. Filled with Old Testament fury and prophecies of doom, Savonarola s sermons reverberated among a disenfranchised population, who preferred mediaeval Biblical certainties to the philosophical interrogations and intoxicating surface glitter of the Renaissance. Savonarola s aim was to establish a City of God for his followers, a new kind of democratic state, the likes of which the world had never seen before.The battle which this provoked would be a fight to the death, a series of sensational events invasions, trials by fire, the Bonfire of the Vanities , terrible executions and mysterious deaths featuring a cast of the most important and charismatic Renaissance figure