Outline the rise and fall of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola in post-Medici Florence

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Answer 1

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In November 1494, Piero the Unfortunate, head of the Medici family, faced with the threat of French invasion, finally agreed to cooperate with the French king, Charles VIII. A Florentine mob drove Piero from the city. Into this power vacuum came Savonarola, abbot of the monastery of San Marco. Although, as a priest, he could not hold office in what was once again ostensibly a republic, Savonarola wielded tremendous political power. He appealed to a moralistic faction of the populace that saw, in the behavior of the city’s upper classes, and in their humanistic attraction to Classical Greek and Roman culture, clear evidence of moral decadence. He appealed as well to the Florentine populace’s desire to reestablish its identity as a republic, which Savonarola had preached had become under the Medici little more than a den of thieves. Savonarola railed against the Florentine nobility, going so far as to organize troops of children to collect the city’s “vanities”—everything from cosmetics to books and paintings—and burn them in giant bonfires. Finally, in June 1497, an angry Pope Alexander VI excommunicated him for his antipapal preachings and for disobeying the pope’s directives. When Savonarola continued to preach, he was forcibly removed from San Marco, tortured as a heretic along with two fellow friars, hanged until nearly dead, and then burned at the stake.