accompanied Savonarola to the spot. Four monks with torches set fire to the pyramid, and as it crackled and blazed the people danced and yelled and screamed round it, while drums and trumpets sounded and bells pealed from the church towers. This was the very crude method by which Savonarola sought to abolish the luxury and the vanity which he considered were degrading the lives of the people.
While Savonarola was at the height of his power and fame, filling the cathedral with dense crowds who flocked to hear him, his enemies were already engaged in plotting his downfall. He had succeeded in destroying the authority of the Medici in Florence itself, but there was another and a stronger authority outside with whom he had still to reckon, and this was the Pope.
It is difficult to believe now, when a venerable and respected ecclesiastic, living in quiet retirement at Rome, represents the head of the Roman Catholic Church, that at the end of the fifteenth century a series of men held that office who were Italian princes, many of whom had for their chief purpose the enrichment of themselves and their families by means of treachery and violence. It happened that the very worst of these, a member of the Borgia family, whose infamous career of crime is notorious in history, was Pope at this time under the name of Alexander VI. A conflict was inevitable between this unscrupulous prince and the high-minded priest who desired to
