The argument of Blass and others on this topic, confidently accepted and endorsed by Dr. Petrie, works out as sheer mystification. They lay special stress on the fact that in the sack of 1527 horses were stabled in the churches. It is likely enough: the same thing has been done a thousand times in the wars of Christendom. But the argument has been very negligently conducted. In the first place, though he tells of infinitely worse things, such as the wholesale violation of women, including nuns, the historian Guicciardini does not give the detail about the horses. That occurs in the document Il Sacco di Roma, ascribed latterly to his brother Luigi, which was first printed in 1664. Still, let us assume that the printing was faithful. If an interpolator had meant to vindicate Savonarola he would presumably have noted that the prophet specified not only horses but pigs, whereas the narrative says nothing of the latter. We are thus left with the item of the stabling of horses in the churches.
Here we have to note that as regards the main event Savonarola is predicting a thing that had repeatedly happened in Catholic times, and that as regards the minor details he is speaking with his eye on Jewish history. It was not the mere presence of horses and pigs in churches that he meant to stress, but the defilement that they brought. In the case of the Jewish Temple the "abomination of desolation" had been understood to include the defiling of the altar with swine's flesh. [67] This, in all likelihood, was the origin of Savonarola's prediction as to the bringing of pigs into the sanctuary at Rome, which, as we have seen, was not fulfilled.
But there was nothing new about a Catholic sack of Rome. The city had been hideously sacked and in large part destroyed under Gregory VII (1084) by Robert Guiscard, the Pope's ally, after having been captured without sacking by the German Emperor. It just missed being sacked by Frederick II in 1239. In 1413 it was captured by Ladislaus of Naples, who gave all Florentine property in the city to pillage. No question of heresy arose in these episodes; nor did the forces of the Church itself blench at either sack or sacrilege. Faenza was foully sacked in 1376 by Hawkwood, called in for its defence by the bishop of Ostia; and in 1377 the same condottiere massacred the population of Cesena under the express and continuous orders of Robert, Cardinal of Geneva, the papal legate, afterwards the "anti-pope" Clement VII. No more bestial massacre took place in the pandemonium of the fourteenth century; and the sacking of the churches and the violation of the nuns was on the scale of the bloodshed. [68] In view of the endless atrocities of the wars of the Church and of Christendom there is a certain ripe absurdity about the exegetical comments on the subject of the sack of Rome in 1527. Says Blass:--