Girolamo Savonarola versus Papa Alexandru al VI-lea
Girolamo Savonarola versus Pope Alexander the VI-th

Summary/Abstract: Following the decentralising process in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, of all the Italian cities seized by the freedom of self-expressing, one city would stand out by its unparalleled cultural brilliance – Florence. In the „capital” of thinking and arts of Renaissance Italy, a Florentine friar appeared – Girolamo Savonarola, a tempestuous personality, who undertook both a prophetic and a political role. Hence, the upcoming conflict between him and the Borgia Pope, Alexander, ended in the friar’s being sentenced in 1498 to death by pyre. Savonarola has remained a controversial character ever since: convicted as an heretic by Pope Alexander VI, rehabilitated by other pontiffs, regarded by Luther as a forerunner of the Protestant Reform and as a saint by many neoprotestants, many an honest historians and theologians still consider him a reformer of morals in the Roman Catholic Church, yet a reformer who overstepped the bounds of his relationships with his superior.

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