The Pope excommunicated him:  the factions in Florence—­the Arrabbiati, the Compagnacci, the Palleschi—­rejoiced; yet the people he had led so long seemed inclined to support him.  Then came the plague, and then the discovery of a plot to bring back Piero.  Well, Savonarola began to preach again; but he was beaten.  Many would not go to hear him, of whom Landucci was one, because of the excommunication.[100] And at last Savonarola himself seems to have seen the end.  “If I am deceived, Christ Thou hast deceived me,” he says and at last he challenged the fire to prove it.  It was too much for the Signoria; they agreed.  It was the Franciscans he had to meet; whether or no they meant to persist with the “trial by fire” we shall never know, but when, on 7th April 1498, the fire was lighted in Piazza della Signoria, it was Savonarola who refused.  A few minutes later, amid the uproar, a deluge of rain put out the flames.  Savonarola’s last chance was gone.  The people hounded him back to S. Marco, and but for the Guards of the Signoria he would have been torn in pieces.  On 8th April, which was Palm Sunday, in the evening, the attack that had been threatening all day began:  through the church, through the cloisters the fight raged, while the whole city was in the streets.  At last Savonarola and Fra Domenico, his friend, gave themselves up to the guard, really for protection, and were lodged in Palazzo Vecchio.  There the Signoria tortured them, with another friar, Silvestro, and at last from Savonarola even they seem to have dragged some sort of admission.  What such a confession was worth, drawn from the poor mangled body of a broken man, one can well imagine; but that mattered nothing to the wild beasts he had taught to roar, who now had him at their mercy.  The effect of this on the city seems to have been very great.  “We had thought him to be a prophet,” writes Luca Landucci simply, “and he confessed he was not a prophet, that he had not from God the things he preached....  And I was by when this was read, and I was astonished, bewildered, amazed....  Ah, I expected Florence to be, as it were, a New Jerusalem, ... and I heard the very contrary.”

The Signoria which tortured Savonarola was presently replaced by another; and though, like its predecessor, it too refused to send him to Rome, it went about to compass his death.  Again they tortured him; then on the 23rd May, the gallows having been built over night in the Piazza, they killed him with his companions, afterwards burning their bodies.  “They wish to crucify them,"[101] cried one in the crowd; and indeed, the scaffold seems to have resembled a cross.  Was it Florence herself perhaps who hung there?

FOOTNOTES: 

[97] Not without protest, for the Sylvestrians appealed to the schismatic counsel at Basle, but got no good by it; and a whole series of lawsuits followed.

[98] See p. 256.

[99] Cf.  L. Landucci, Diario Fiorentino (Sansoni, 1883), p. 80.