The fact remains that the invasion was not resisted, and that Rome was "captured" in the sense of being entered by Charles, who did no military damage and marched out again. But when Charles proceeded to withdraw from Italy, having effected nothing, a battle was fought and won by him. It was two years later that Savonarola, acting on his standing doctrine that sin in high places must elicit divine vengeance, resumed his predictions of disaster to Rome, whose Pope was his enemy. As it happened, 1496 was again a year of expected invasions. Charles, now the ally of Florence, was announced to be preparing for a second inroad, and the apprehensive Sforza invited and furthered the intervention of the emperor Maximilian as he had before invited Charles. Predictions were again to be expected; at Bologna at least one was actually made; and the prophet, one Raffaele da Firenzuola, was tortured and banished. [57] Charles gave up his plan, but Maximilian came, albeit with a small force, and was welcomed by the Pisans.
It was before the coming of Maximilian [58] that Savonarola resumed his prophecy of the coming scourge in a series of sermons, in one of which he announces that Italy will be overwhelmed because she is full of sanguinary deeds; that Rome will be besieged and trampled down; and that because her churches have been full of harlots they will be made "stables for horses and swine, the which will be less displeasing to God than seeing them made haunts of prostitutes.... Then, O Italy, trouble after trouble shall befall thee; troubles of war after famine, troubles of pestilence after war." Again, in another sermon: "There will not be enough men left to bury the dead; nor means enough to dig graves.... The dead will be heaped in carts and on horses; they will be piled up and burnt.... And the people shall be so thinned that few shall remain." [59] At the same time he repeatedly predicted his own death by violence.
On the latter head he had abundant reason for his forecast. On the former it is very certain that he was not thinking of something that was not to happen for thirty years. Again and again he assured his hearers and his correspondents that his predictions were to be fulfilled "in our time." Towards the end of 1496 he described himself as "The servant of Christ Jesus, sent by him to the city of Florence to announce the great scourge which is to come upon Italy, and especially upon Rome, and which is to extend itself over all the world in our days and quickly." [60] In 1497, in a letter to Lodovico Pittorio, chancellor to d'Este, after speaking of the Lord's prediction of the fall of Jerusalem, he writes: "Great tribulations are always [i.e. in the Scriptures] predicted many years before they come. Yet I do not say that the tribulations which I have foretold will be so long in coming; nay, they will come soon; indeed I say that the tribulation has already commenced." [61]