He wanted to forbid what he
could not deal with by any other means. In fact, he was anything but
liberal, and was ready, for example, to send the astrologers to the
same stake at which he afterwards himself died.
How mighty must have been the soul which dwelt side by side with this
narrow intellect! And what a flame must have glowed within him before
he could constrain the Florentines, possessed as they were by the
passion for knowledge and culture, to surrender themselves to a man who
could thus reason!
How much of their heart and their worldliness they were ready to
sacrifice for his sake is shown by those famous bonfires by the side of
which all the 'talami' of Bernardino da Siena and others were certainly
of small account.
All this could not, however, be effected without the agency of a
tyrannical police. He did not shrink from the most vexatious
interferences with the much-prized freedom of Italian private life,
using the espionage of servants on their masters as a means of carrying
out his moral reforms. That transformation of public and private life
which the Iron Calvin was but just able to effect at Geneva with the
aid of a permanent state of siege necessarily proved impossible at
Florence, and the attempt only served to drive the enemies of
Savonarola into a more implacable hostility.
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