While Savonarola intervened with the king, the Florentines expelled the ruling Medici and, at the friar ’ s urging, established a popular republic.

In 1495 when Florence refused to join Pope Alexander VI ’ s Holy League against the French, Savonarola was summoned to Rome.

A trial by fire proposed by a rival Florentine preacher to test Savonarola ’ s divine mandate was a fiasco and popular opinion turned against him.

His arrival was widely understood as proof of Savonarola ’ s gift of prophecy.

As the populace took to the streets to expel Piero, the late Lorenzo de ’ Medici ’ s son and successor, Savonarola led a delegation to the camp of the French king.

Cited in Chapter VI of Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince ( Concerning New Principalities Which Are Acquired By One ’ s Own Arms And Ability ) Fra Girolamo Savonarola was seen by Machiavelli as an incompetent, ill-prepared, and ' unarmed prophet ', unlike ' Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus ' ( Machiavelli's The Prince )

With Savonarola ’ s advice and support ( as a non-citizen and cleric he was ineligible to hold office ), a Savonarolan political " party ," dubbed ‘ the Frateschi ,’ took shape and steered the friar ’ s program through the councils.

At Savonarola ’ s urging the Frateschi government, after months of debate, passed a " Law of Appeal " to limit the longtime practice of using exile and capital punishment as factional weapons.

Buoyed by liberation and prophetic promise, the Florentines embraced Savonarola ’ s campaign to rid the city of " vice ".

For a time, Pope Alexander VI ( 1492 – 1503 ), the unsavory Rodrigo Borja, tolerated fra Girolamo ’ s strictures against the Church, but he was moved to anger when Florence declined to join his new Holy League against the French invader and blamed it on Savonarola ’ s pernicious influence.

A plaque commemorates the site of Savonarola ’ s execution in the Piazza della Signoria, Florence.

By emphasizing his political activism over his puritanism and cultural conservatism they restored Savonarola ’ s voice for radical political change.

This somewhat anachronistic image, fortified by much new scholarship, informed the major new biography by Pasquale Villari, who regarded Savonarola ’ s preaching against Medici despotism as the model for the Italian struggle for liberty and national unification.

In Germany, the Catholic theologian and church historian Joseph Schnitzer edited and published contemporary sources which illuminated Savonarola ’ s career.

In 1924 he crowned his vast research with a comprehensive study of Savonarola ’ s life and times in which he presented the friar as the last best hope of the Catholic Church before the catastrophe of the Protestant Reformation.

For the next half century Ridolfi was the guardian of the friar ’ s saintly memory as well as the dean of Savonarola research which he helped grow into a scholarly industry.

Today with most of Savonarola ’ s treatises and sermons and many of the contemporary sources – chronicles, diaries, government documents and literary works – available in critical editions, scholars can provide fresh, better informed assessments of his character and his place in the Renaissance, the Reformation and modern European history.

Almost thirty volumes of Savonarola ’ s sermons and writings have so far been published in the Edizione nazionale delle Opere di Girolamo Savonarola ( Rome, Angelo Belardetti, 1953 to the present ).

* Macey, Patrick, Bonfire Songs: Savonarola ’ s Musical Legacy ( Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998 ).

* Dall ’ Aglio, Stefano " Savonarola and Savonarolism " ( Toronto, 2010 )

* As Machiavelli described the start of the “ Italian Wars ”, Charles VIII, hoping to capture the Kingdom of Naples, invaded Italy at the head of a 30, 000 man force, one of the first armed with modern artillery, and on October 29th 1494 the French king breached Fivizzano ’ s defensive walls with an artillery assault and then sacked the city on the way to Florence where Savonarola praised the French monarch as a savior who would cleanse the city of decadent corruption.

As in Puzo ’ s The Godfather, the lovemaking, the opulent festivities, the sub rosa plotting, and the complex double-dealing are interspersed with outbursts of violence, including one memorable scene in which the reformist priest Girolamo Savonarola is torn apart on the Rack.

Savonarola was a priest from Ferrara, who came to Florence in the 1480s, and had won the people to his cause by his vigorous preaching, and his predictions.

The republican government succeeded where Savonarola failed, when the Secretary of War, Niccolò Machiavelli, captured Pisa.

He was elected gonfaloniere for life in 1502 by the Florentines, who wished to give greater stability to their republican institutions, which had been restored after the expulsion of Piero de ' Medici and the execution of Savonarola.

The eclipse of this period of relative artistic and erotic freedom was precipitated by the rise to power of the moralizing monk Girolamo Savonarola.

In 1836 appeared his Faust, in which he laid bare his own soul to the world ); in 1837, Savonarola, an epic in which freedom from political and intellectual tyranny is insisted upon as essential to Christianity.

* May 23 – Girolamo Savonarola, Italian religious reformer and ruler of Florence ( b. 1452 )

* September 21 – Girolamo Savonarola, Italian religious reformer and ruler of Florence ( d. 1498 )

These paintings can be seen as a mirror of the political and religious crisis in Florence at the time: the theme of the fresco, the clash between Christianity and Paganism, was hotly debated in the Florence of Girolamo Savonarola.

The relative bareness of the church corresponds with the austerity of religious life, as preached by Girolamo Savonarola.

If, as Vasari asserts, he spent the last years of his life in gloomy retirement, the change was probably due to preacher Girolamo Savonarola, under whose influence he turned his attention once more to religious art.

The Immaculate Conception with Saints, at the Uffizi, and the Holy Family, at Dresden, illustrate the religious fervour to which he was stimulated by Savonarola.

For the next several years Savonarola lived as an itinerant preacher with a message of penitence and reform in the cities and convents of north Italy.

In France many of his works were translated and published and Savonarola came to be regarded as a precursor of evangelical, or Huguenot reform.

After his grandfather's death in 1468, Savonarola may have attended the public school run by Battista Guarino, son of Guarino da Verona, where he would have received his introduction to the classics as well as to the poetry and writings of Petrarch, father of Renaissance humanism.

Because of their search for power, they made enemies of other powerful families such as the Medici and the Sforza, as well as the influential Dominican friar Savonarola.

According to the art historian Giorgio Vasari, Botticelli was a partisan of Savonarola: " he was so ardent a partisan that he was thereby induced to desert his painting, and, having no income to live on, fell into very great distress.

In the in-game version, Savonarola had stolen the " Apple of Eden " from Ezio Auditore da Firenze at the end of the Battle of Forli DLC, and used it to hypnotize people into supporting him.

* Girolamo Savonarola, sentenced to death, allegedly rose off the floor of his cell into midair and remained there for some time.

Singing laude was a popular practice in Florence following the legacy of Girolamo Savonarola who strongly encouraged its use, and it is natural therefore that Phillip would incorporate this practice into his meetings.

But, one Girolamo Savonarola saw the exact opposite ; Florence is gradually turning into an free-thinking city, with its people starting to forget God and worshipping knowledge.