Yet again, in 1498, he claims in a sermon that "a part has come to pass," noting that "in Rome one has lost a son"--a reference to the murder of the Duke of Gandia, son of the Pope; and adding that "you have seen who has died here, and I could tell you, an I would, who is in hell"--supposed to be a reference to Bernardo del Nero. [62] All this was in terms of Savonarola's theological and Biblical conception of things, the ruling political philosophy of his age, as of many before. Wickedness and injustice, fraud and oppression, were dominant in high places, and God must of necessity punish, in the fashion in which he was constantly described as doing so in the Sacred Books, from the Deluge downwards. In Savonarola's view the cup of Rome's abominations was full, and punishment had been earned by the men then living, in particular by Pope Alexander.
Within two years Savonarola had been put to death, after many tortures; and Alexander died in 1503 (not by poison, as the tradition goes) without having seen the predicted desolation. It was under the more respectable of the two Medicean Popes that Rome was twice sacked in 1527 by the forces of Charles V; and though there had been infinite slaughter and pestilence in Italy, the regeneration and reunion of Christendom predicted by Savonarola did not follow. When no reform whatever had followed on the French invasion he had explained that his prediction in that case was subject to conditions. Yet he announced that his prophecy of the conversion of the Turks was unconditional, declaring at the close of the Compendium Revelationum that it would be fulfilled in fifteen years, and assuring his hearers in 1495 that some of them would live to see the fulfilment. [63]
Our business, of course, is not to expose the prophetic miscarriages of Savonarola, but simply to make clear what manner of thing his prophesying was. [64] It was an instance of a kind of vaticination as old as Troy and Jerusalem, which had gone on in Christendom for centuries. Long before his day religious men had predicted wars, pestilences, famines, and the conversion of the Turks. [65] The wars and plagues and famines were very safe prognostications: they came in every decade. And when we come to his alleged prediction of the sack of Rome we realize immediately, not only that the one detail of coincidence is wholly fortuitous, but that, like his predecessors, he was simply predicting a return of common evils already experienced a hundred times. [66]