of the Priors refused to break the law, but were threatened with personal violence by members of the Pratica. Valori, thumping the ballot box on the table, swore that either he or the prisoners should die, while Carlo Strozzi took Piero Guicciardini round the waist and tried to throw him from the window. Two of the five Priors were intimidated, and thus the appeal was rejected by six beans, Guicciardini and two colleagues courageously protesting to the end. On the same evening the sentenced men were executed.
The appeal would certainly have failed; it was merely a forlorn expedient to catch at the chances which time might offer. Yet when popular passion had cooled, men reflected that a fundamental law of the new constitution had on the supreme question of life or death been broken, and this threw discredit upon those concerned. It had hardly been a party issue. Valori and his Savonarolist followers shared the attack with aristocrats who had reason to fear Piero's restoration. For the defence Vespucci and the Nerli were most active because they regarded Bernardo as their party leader. Others were moved by friendship or relationship or the fear of giving the people a taste for blood. Piero Guicciardini, who throughout was opposed to extreme measures, was a moderate Savonarolist, and both the Priors for the Lesser Arts originally supported him. Two Savonarolist diarists, Landucci and Cambi, regard the sentence as cruel, and the historian Guicciardini condemns the refusal of appeal. Of Savonarola's attitude nothing certain is known; he was under excommunication, and not at this time preaching. After Piero's fall his entreaties had saved these very citizens; the law of appeal was universally regarded as his peculiar work. In the course of his own trial he confessed that he should have preferred Bernardo's exile; that he had recommended Lorenzo Tornabuoni to Valori, but in cold terms such as he was not wont to use when he wished his requests fulfilled.
A revulsion in public sympathy was only natural. Ordinary citizens had from the first resented the application of torture to the best blood of Florence. The well-known figure of the bright young Tornabuoni was soon missed; men remembered the brilliant marriage-feast, when he had led home the pride of Florence, the beautiful Giovanna d' Albizzi. The loss of territory and trade, the famine, the faction, the ferocity of the new republic were contrasted with what men began to call the joyous times before 1494. The responsibility for the judicial crime was fixed upon Valori; he desired, it was said, to lord it over the Council,, and he struck down Bernardo del Nero because he alone was sufficiently able to withstand him. He would, indeed, gladly have saved Tornabuoni; but then his own rival would have escaped. The practice of old Roman proscription had prevailed-friends must be sacrificed that enemies might die. Meanwhile Valori alone profited; until the close of 1497 his will was law. Lorenzo de1 Medici had been called a tyrant because, after his brother's murder, the State had voted him an escort of outriders. The
