the fall of Piero, that is, in more than a century, no notable act of violence had been witnessed, save when the Signoria hanged from the palace windows, red-handed, the Pazzi conspirators who had murdered Giuliano de' Medici in the Cathedral and attempted to storm the palace. The next four years saw first the arson and bloodshed which followed Piero's fall, then the irregular condemnation of five chief citizens; then, the storming of San Marco and the murder of Valori and his wife; and now the fever of political passion reached its climax in Savonarola's death. The republican experiment cost Florence very dear, alike in territory, blood and treasure.
The tragedy had become inevitable. It is never easy to screw up the moral standard of a people. Yet in Florence there was such a genuine and permanent element of what may almost be called puritanism that, had she stood by herself and enjoyed a period of profound peace Savonarola's system might have been partially successful. It would have needed, perhaps, no very professional knowledge to administer the State; the good man might have been not only the good citizen but the good ruler. The experiment was, however, tried at a crisis of peculiar complexity, when the elements of violence abroad and at home were unusually strong-when ethics and politics had least chance of fusion. For such a task a novice in the art of government must needs prove unequal; he must consciously or unconsciously hand the reins to those who had the experience which he lacked.
The Pope and the Duke of Milan doubtless hastened the catastrophe, and Savonarola was in a measure the victim of his party's foreign policy. Causes, however, should not be multiplied without reason, and within Florence there was cause sufficient for the tragedy. If she were a good subject for ethical reform, it was otherwise with politics. It is easier to change the constitution than the character of a people. The Florentines, said Guicciardini, possessed two characteristics in apparent contradiction, the love of equality and the desire of each family to lead. If the new constitution could satisfy the former, it could not assuage the latter. The influence of family rivalry was the vital distinction in the working of the Venetian and Florentine republics. At Venice family jealousies rarely influenced the State; at Florence they overmastered and corrupted public life. In vain Savonarola, like San Bernardino before him, inveighed against the party nicknames which would surely bring back the horrors of the strife of Guelf and Ghibelline. He became himself the very subject of these factions; he could not shake himself free from a Valori or a Soderini; his opponents regarded him as the dangerous tool of the most ambitious of their rivals. To gain admirable ends he was forced to work through agents who were compromised. Disavowing democratic principles, it was only a question of time to which branch of the aristocracy he would attach himself; his religious achievements might have been greater under the unquestioned rule of the Medici. This impossibility of
