During the decades in which the fate of Italy was decided,
the spirit of prophecy was unusually active, and nowhere where it
displayed itself was it confined to any one particular class. We know
with what a tone of true prophetic defiance the hermits came forward
before the sack of Rome. In default of any eloquence of their own,
these men made use of messengers with symbols of one kind or another,
like the ascetic near Siena (1496) who sent a 'little hermit,' that is
a pupil, into the terrified city with a skull upon a pole to which was
attached a paper with a threatening text from the Bible.
Nor did the monks themselves scruple to attack princes, governments,
the clergy, or even their own order. A direct exhortation to overthrow
a despotic house, like that uttered by Jacopo Bussolaro at Pavia in the
fourteenth century, hardly occurs again in the following period: but
there is no want of courageous reproofs, addressed even to the Pope in
his own chapel, and of naive political advice given in the presence of
rulers who by no means held themselves in need of it. In the Piazza del
Castello at Milan, a blind preacher from the Incoronata--consequently
an Augustinian--ventured in 1494 to exhort Lodovico il Moro from the
pulpit: 'My lord, beware of showing the French the way, else you will
repent it.' There were further prophetic monks who, without exactly
preaching political sermons, drew such appalling pictures of the future
that the hearers almost lost their senses.
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