late-Quattrocento prophetic messianism

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Late-Quattrocento prophetic messianism is the name modern scholarship gives to the apocalyptic ferment of Italy in the closing decades of the fifteenth century — a stretch of years in which the renewal of church and world seemed to many people less a hope than a schedule. Preachers announced coming scourges from the city pulpits, printed broadsheets carried prophecies through the marketplaces, and in Florence the expectation briefly became a form of government.

The execution of Savonarola in the Piazza della Signoria, painted in 1498 by Filippo Dolciati — a contemporary record of the episode’s violent end. Museo di San Marco, Florence, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The materials were old. From Joachim of Fiore, the twelfth-century Calabrian abbot, the later Middle Ages had inherited the conviction that history itself was prophetic — that the two Testaments were written in a hidden concord, and that beyond the present age a third status, an age of the Spirit and of contemplative men, lay just ahead. Joachim himself had been an exegete who refused the name of prophet, and his own pattern of correspondences affirmed that the Church and the authority of Scripture would endure to the end; but the figural diagrams and the three-age scheme proved more portable than his guardedness, and within a century of his death in 1202 a whole library of pseudonymous prophecy was circulating under his name. From that pseudo-Joachite corpus the later centuries drew their two great expectant images: a pastor angelicus, an Angelic Pope who would purify a corrupted Church from within, and a Last World Emperor — in the western European versions a French king — who would chastise the wicked, recover Jerusalem, and hand the world over to its final peace. To these the same tradition added the converse terror, an Antichrist whose coming the abbot had warned of, and whose birth a famous report has Joachim placing already in Rome.

These were not free-floating fantasies but a working political grammar. By the late Quattrocento the Last World Emperor had long been read as a “Second Charlemagne,” and the figure attached readily to whichever prince seemed, at a given moment, to be the one God had raised up; the Angelic Pope gave the chronic disappointment of the actual papacy a redemptive future, a coming bishop who would be all that the reigning one was not. The two images together answered the two halves of the age’s anxiety — a Church visibly in need of reform and a Christendom visibly in need of a defender — and they did so by promising that the remedy was not a human program but a scheduled act of God, already begun. This was the inheritance Joachimist apocalypticism handed down: not a single doctrine but a repertoire of expectant roles into which contemporary persons and events could be slotted as they arose, and re-slotted when they failed.

What was old in substance was new in reach. Movable-type printing, in Italy from the 1460s, gave these inherited texts and the daily traffic in portents a circulation they had never had. Comets, monstrous births, floods, and astrological conjunctions — read through the long discipline of astrology as legible signs rather than mere accidents — were now set down in cheap pamphlets, sung in the streets by cantastorie, and revised from edition to edition as events overtook them. Ottavia Niccoli’s reconstruction of this world recovers a prophecy that was neither purely learned nor purely popular but moved constantly between the two registers: the same image of a chastising flood or a renovating emperor that a humanist read in a manuscript was hawked, sung, and reprinted below him, and fed back up. The fifteenth-century apocalypse was a print phenomenon as much as a theological one.

The press did more than spread the prophecies; it changed their character. A manuscript prophecy could be quietly corrected or forgotten when its term passed, but a printed one was fixed, dated, and multiplied — and a prophecy that failed could be reprinted with its numbers adjusted, the term pushed forward, the portent reinterpreted, so that the literature lived by continuous revision. The same conjunctions and comets that the learned weighed against the astrological tables were, in the pamphlets, evidence that the chastisement was at hand; a monstrous birth at Ravenna, a flood of the Tiber, an eclipse, each entered the prophetic ledger and was made to speak. What had been, in Joachim, a contemplative reading of the concord of the Scriptures became, in the Italian streets of the 1490s, a current-events apocalypse, restocked weekly.

Girolamo Savonarola, portrayed about 1497 by his follower Fra Bartolomeo — the best-known likeness of the friar, made in his lifetime. Museo di San Marco, Florence, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

At the center of the episode stands Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican friar of San Marco, who from 1490 preached that a scourge was coming to renew the Church and that it was near. When Charles VIII of France brought his army across the Alps in 1494, the prediction seemed to walk in at the gate. Savonarola hailed the king as the awaited instrument of God — a new Cyrus, the gentile conqueror whom Isaiah had named the Lord’s anointed for the deliverance of His people — and in the upheaval that drove out the Medici, Florence reorganized itself around the friar’s vision. The city was to be the elect city, a new Jerusalem; in a celebrated act Christ was proclaimed its true king, the Signoria governing as His lieutenant. For three years the republic legislated against vice and luxury, gathered the famous bonfires of the vanities, and held itself to be the seed-city of a reform that would spread outward to the whole of Christendom. The prophecy had three movements, and the friar repeated them until they hardened into a public creed: the scourge would come, and had begun; the Church would be renewed after the chastisement; and these things would happen soon. What raised the program above the ordinary penitential preaching of the age was the claim of direct revelation — Savonarola did not merely warn but reported that he had seen, and the visions of his Compendio di rivelazioni are offered as their own credential. Donald Weinstein’s study of those years argued that the decisive movement ran the opposite way from the legend: it was less that an austere friar imposed prophecy on a worldly city than that Florence, with its own long-standing myth of a divinely shaped civic destiny — the city as a second Rome, a new chosen people, an instrument of providence in Italy — converted Savonarola to its self-understanding, so that the friar’s apocalypse and the city’s patriotism became one thing. The new Jerusalem was a Florentine idea before it was a Dominican one. The experiment ended in May 1498. Excommunicated by Alexander VI, his demand for a general council unmet, the trial by fire that would have proved his mission abandoned at the last hour, and the crowd that had cheered him turned, Savonarola and two Dominican companions were hanged and their bodies burned in the Piazza della Signoria, the ashes thrown into the Arno so that no relic should remain.

Savonarola preaching against luxury — the campaign that produced the “bonfires of the vanities.” Painting by Ludwig von Langenmantel, 1879, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The learned and the unlettered in one ferment

The ferment was not confined to the unlettered, and that is much of its interest. The Florence that awaited the scourge was also the Florence of the Platonic revival, and the two enthusiasms ran through the same households and often the same minds. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola — who had drawn the first Christian use of Kabbalah into his nine hundred theses, and who held that the Jewish mysteries, rightly read, proved the divinity of Christ — passed his final years drawn toward San Marco and died in 1494, in the very weeks the French entered the city; he was buried there in the Dominican habit. His nephew Gianfrancesco Pico became Savonarola’s biographer and defender, and carried the friar’s cause into the next century. Marsilio Ficino, the translator of Plato and of the Hermetic writings whose recovered prisca theologia had reopened the very idea of a single ancient wisdom running beneath the religions, had at first taken the Savonarolan prophecies seriously; after the fall he turned bitterly against the friar, in an Apologia casting him as a deceiver who had bewitched the city. The same generation that recovered Plato and opened the Kabbalah to Christian readers awaited the end of the age, and frequently in the same persons — the wandering Hermetic prophet Giovanni “Mercurio” da Correggio, who paraded through Rome in 1484 proclaiming himself the angelic filius Dei and herald of a coming renovation, belongs to exactly this seam, where Renaissance Neoplatonism and apocalyptic expectation were not rivals but neighbors.

Portrait medal of the philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who was drawn toward San Marco in his final years and died in 1494. National Gallery of Art, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Nor did the expectation stay within one confession. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 — the catastrophe that scattered Sephardic communities across the Mediterranean and into the Italian peninsula — set off a parallel and largely independent wave of messianic reckoning, in which the sheer scale of the calamity was read as the birth-pang of redemption. Its most learned voice was Isaac Abravanel, the statesman, financier, and biblical commentator who had served the crowns of Portugal and Castile and who went into Italian exile after the edict. In the years immediately after 1492 he composed a messianic trilogy — a commentary on Daniel’s apocalyptic visions among them — that gathered the scattered prophetic and rabbinic calculations and, against the long tradition that forbade computing the end, set out dates: a redemption beginning in 1503, with the fuller deliverance falling in the opening third of the new century. Eric Lawee’s study weighs the old description of Abravanel as the father of the later Jewish messianic movements and finds it both apt and overdrawn — apt in that his marshalling of the calculations gave the sixteenth century a reservoir to draw on, overdrawn in that the expectation was already general. The structure of the Jewish reckoning mirrored the Christian one at a distance: a present catastrophe read as the darkness before dawn, an authorized prohibition on calculating the end pressed aside under duress, and a date set within living memory. The two waves were not in contact — Abravanel was answering the expulsion, not Savonarola, and the Florentine preacher knew nothing of the Daniel calculations being drawn up in the Adriatic exile — yet they rose in the same decade out of the same European convulsion, and a later eye can see them as one phenomenon refracted through two scriptures. The route from this fifteenth-century reckoning runs forward into the ecstatic and prophetic strands of Kabbalah and, after the catastrophe of the expulsion was rethought cosmologically, into the Lurianic doctrine of exile and restoration that would dominate the next century — a different country from the seventeenth-century messianic upheaval around Sabbatai Sevi, which belongs to its own later moment and should not be folded back into this one.

Scholarship and the sources

The documentary base for the episode is unusually rich, because so much of it was printed as it happened. Savonarola’s own Compendio di rivelazioni (Florence, 1495), his account of the visions and predictions he held vindicated, survives in the early Florentine editions and a Latin Compendium revelationum; alongside the printed sermons and the flood of broadsheet prophecy, it lets the modern reader watch an apocalyptic program being published in real time. The interpretive frame around all of this was built in the second half of the twentieth century. Marjorie Reeves’s The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages (1969) traced the long Joachimist inheritance — the genealogy of the Angelic Pope, the Last World Emperor, and the new spiritual men from the thirteenth century into the sixteenth — and her later collaborative volume Prophetic Rome in the High Renaissance Period extended the work into the Italy of the popes and Savonarola; her account established the continuity that the older histories, treating the Renaissance as the dawn of secular reason, had missed. Donald Weinstein’s Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (1970), building on his earlier essay in Church History, recast the Florentine episode itself, showing how the friar’s prophecy fused with the city’s pre-existing myth of a chosen civic destiny. Ottavia Niccoli’s Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy (Italian 1987; English 1990) recovered the street-level world of portents, printed prophecy, and itinerant singers beneath the famous names. Bernard McGinn’s Visions of the End (1979) supplies the wider apocalyptic-traditions backdrop, and Eric Lawee’s study of Abravanel’s messianism (2001) does the same for the Jewish wave. Read together, this scholarship has made the ferment legible as a unity rather than a scatter of curiosities: inherited medieval prophecy, amplified by a new technology, breaking out across confessions in the same decade. It has also dissolved an old periodization. The textbook Renaissance, lit by the recovery of the classics and the dignity of man, had little room for an Italy counting down to the end of the world; the prophetic literature was filed away as a medieval residue lingering past its time. Reeves’s demonstration of an unbroken Joachimist current from the thirteenth century into the sixteenth, and Niccoli’s recovery of a print-driven apocalypse running right through the high Renaissance, made that division untenable. The age of Ficino’s Plato and Pico’s Kabbalah was also the age of the scourge and the Angelic Pope, and the same presses served both.

The shape of the expectation

What gives the episode its coherence is that the expectation crossed every boundary the period is usually praised for opening. The dating of the end was formally forbidden in both the Christian and the Jewish traditions, and both the friar of San Marco and the exile from Castile pressed against that prohibition under the pressure of events — a French army at the gate, a people driven into the sea. The reading of comets and conjunctions belonged to the same intellectual world as the reading of Plato and the Hebrew mysteries; the prisca theologia that promised an ancient harmony of all wisdom and the prophecy that promised an imminent renovation of all things were two faces of a single conviction that the present was a hinge of history. The generation that recovered the dialogues of Plato and put the Kabbalah into Latin for Christian readers was the same generation that counted the years to the renovation — and when it counted, it counted in specific numbers, in dated broadsheets and dated commentaries, against traditions that had warned it not to. That refusal to leave the end vague is the signature of the moment: not a vague millennial mood but a culture that had learned to print, and printed the date.

→ Related: Joachimite Apocalypticism · Prophecy · Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola · Marsilio Ficino · Renaissance Neoplatonism · Apocalypse · Eschatology · The Renaissance · Middle Ages · Christian Kabbalah · Kabbalah Ecstatic Prophetic · Lurianic Kabbalah · Renaissance Hermetism · Astrology · Plato · Second Coming