Armed and Ruined Prophets of the Reformation

“From this it arises that all the armed prophets conquered,” wrote Niccolò Machiavelli, “and the unarmed ones were ruined.” 1 Moses was his preeminent example of a prophet-prince, since Moses relied not only on the revelation of Yahweh, but also on the arms used to maintain the way of life that revelation prescribed. For Machiavelli, the firebrand Dominican Girolamo Savonarola served as a timely Florentine example of a ruined prophet without arms, for mere popular support was not enough to sustain the serious changes the friar sought for Florence’s church and society. 2 To be sure, in Machiavelli’s day, there was a widespread belief that the Western church had fallen very far from its apostolic origins; recent popes such as Alexander VI, who had excommunicated Savonarola and fathered Cesare Borgia, could well serve as an archetype of ecclesiastical corruption. But while many agreed with Savonarola’s denunciations of wayward popes and clerics, his attempt at reform turned only into a prelude to the return of the Medici to Florence, and their influence over the papacy.