The real cause of his destruction was not so much the charges of
heresy which were brought against his books and sermons, as the fact that
he was a person inconvenient to Pope Alexander VI. On the 23rd of May,
1498, he met his doom in the great piazza at Florence where in happier
days he had held the multitude spell-bound by his burning eloquence. There
sentence was passed upon him. Stripped of his black Dominican robe and
long white tunic, he was bound to a gibbet, strangled by a halter, and his
dead body consumed by fire, his ashes being thrown into the river Arno.
Such was the miserable end of the great Florentine preacher, whose strange
and complex character has been so often discussed, and whose remarkable
career has furnished a theme for poets and romance-writers, and forms the
basis of one of the most powerful novels of modern times.
Not only were the Inquisitors and the Cardinals guilty of intolerance and
the stern rigour of persecution, but the Reformers themselves, when they
had the power, refrained not from torturing and burning those who did not
accept their own particular belief. This they did not merely out of a
spirit of revenge conceived against those who had formerly condemned their
fathers and brethren to the stake, but sometimes we see instances of
Reformers slaughtering Reformers, because the victims did not hold quite
the same tenets as those who were in power.
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