The austerity of his teaching excited some hostility against him,
especially on the part of the monks who did not belong to his order--that
of the Dominicans. He had poured such bitter invective both in his books
and in his sermons upon the vices of the Popes and the Cardinals, that
they too formed a powerful party in league against him. In addition the
friends of the Medicis resented the overthrow of their power, and the
populace, ever fickle in their affections, required fresh wonders and
signs to keep them faithful to their leader. The opportunity of his
enemies came when Charles VIII. of France retired from Florence. They
accused Savonarola of all kinds of wickedness. He was cast into prison,
tortured, and condemned to death as a heretic. In what his heresy
consisted it were hard to discover. It was true that when his poor,
shattered, sensitive frame was being torn and rent by the cruel engines of
torture, he assented to many things which his persecutors strove to wring
from him. The real cause of his destruction was not so much the charges of
heresy which were brought against his books and sermons, as the fact that
he was a person inconvenient to Pope Alexander VI. On the 23rd of May,
1498, he met his doom in the great piazza at Florence where in happier
days he had held the multitude spell-bound by his burning eloquence. There
sentence was passed upon him. Stripped of his black Dominican robe and
long white tunic, he was bound to a gibbet, strangled by a halter, and his
dead body consumed by fire, his ashes being thrown into the river Arno.
Such was the miserable end of the great Florentine preacher, whose strange
and complex character has been so often discussed, and whose remarkable
career has furnished a theme for poets and romance-writers, and forms the
basis of one of the most powerful novels of modern times.

Not only were the Inquisitors and the Cardinals guilty of intolerance and
the stern rigour of persecution, but the Reformers themselves, when they