Lutheranism can have had very little to do with the matter: the brutality of the German Landsknechts was notorious long before Luther was heard of. But there was nothing specially German in the matter either. The Italian condottieri in general were "full of contempt for all sacred things." [78] It is instructive to note that Savonarola predicts nothing of the wholesale violation of nuns and other women which was to take place at Rome as it had done in a hundred other sacks of cities: he must have known that these things happened; but the thing that appealed to his imagination was the theological pollution resulting from putting horses and pigs in churches. He was not predicting: he was remembering. Long before his time, besides, Church Councils had to pass edicts against the use of churches as barns in time of peace.
It will be remembered that his main items are slaughters, famines, and pestilences. There was famine and pestilence in Florence when he was prophesying in 1496; there was more in 1497; [79] and a terrible pestilence had visited Venice during the Turkish invasions of 1477 and 1478. The preacher's description of a plague in a city is an account of what had happened a dozen times in the history of Florence, before and after the Plague which figures in the forefront of Boccaccio's Decameron. Preaching from the text of Amos, he arraigns Italy and Rome as Amos arraigns Israel and Judah; and his menaces are the menaces of the Hebrew prophet, immeasurable slaughters, famine, pestilence, and captivity, with the old corollary of regeneration and restoration, in the case of Italy and the Church as in the case of Israel. And his added detail of church desecration is at once a Biblical idea and a familiar item from Christian history.
In the historic crusade against the Albigenses in 1209, when Béziers was captured and every human being therein slain, seven thousand were, by the famous order of the Papal Legate, [80] put to the sword in the great church of St. Mary Magdalene, to which they had fled for sanctuary; and the whole city, with its churches, was burned to the ground. During the Hundred Years' War between England and France, says a social historian, a cleric--