Frederick Barbarossa anciently desolated this city; his vengeance spared neither the inhabitants, nor the edifices, nor the walls; but that was nothing in comparison with the evils we now suffer. The barbarism of an enemy is less insupportable than the unjust cruelty of a friend ... our miseries have endured more than a month; they increase every hour; and, like the damned, we suffer, without hope, evils which before this time of calamity we believed to be beyond human endurance. [93]
Guicciardini testifies that the Spaniards of the emperor's forces had been more cruel than the Germans, [94] violating the women and reducing to rags the men of their own allies.
So much for the "especially remarkable" fact that churches were desecrated in the sack of Rome in 1527, and that Savonarola should in 1496 have predicted such things for his own day. We have seen that his prediction was not a forecast of the event, that he had no idea of the causation of the ultimate sack of Rome, that he really prophesied an early event, and that he was simply announcing speedy divine vengeance after the manner of the Hebrew and many previous Christian prophets. What ground for argument, then, does his case furnish for an inference as to the date of the quasi-prophecy of the fall of Jerusalem in the third Gospel? Blass, despite his "especially remarkable" argument, puts his case pretty low:--
Accidentally, you will say, the event [in 1527] corresponded with the prophecy. But that is not my point, whether it was accidental, or the prophet had really foreseen the event; for in the case of the prophecies recorded by Luke you may raise the same controversy if you like. [95]
What then were the manner and the matter of the prophecy in Luke? The Messiah expressly grounds his prediction upon the non-acceptance by Jerusalem of him and his mission:--
If thou [Jerusalem] hadst only known in this day the things which belong unto peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee when thine enemies shall cast up a bank about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall dash thee to the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone on another (Luke xix, 42-44).