Alexander now demanded that the friar should be handed over to him for trial. After much negotiation it was agreed that the Pope should send two commissaries to judge of the spiritual offences, while the Florentine commissioners should decide on the offences against the city. At the same time, Alexander granted to Florence a tax of three-tenths on ecclesiastical revenues. ‘Three times ten makes thirty,’ said a Piagnone; ‘they have sold our master, as Christ was sold, for thirty pieces of silver.’ Meanwhile Savonarola had been put to the torture, and was said to have confessed that he was no true prophet. But it is acknowledged that confessions extorted under torture are not worthy of the slightest credit; there is good reason, moreover, to believe that his depositions were falsified. His enemies were determined on his ruin. All that was necessary to secure their final triumph was that the elections of May should return a Signory hostile to the friar. This was attained by excluding 200 Piagnoni from the Great Council. A Signory of Arrabiati was thus secured. Savonarola and his two followers, found guilty of heresy by the papal commissaries, and of treason to the State by his fellow-citizens, went to their death with all the constancy of martyrs, May 23, 1498. Contemporaries were much divided in their opinions on the merits of Savonarola, and the contest rages still. ‘The thing I shall be most anxious to know when I get into Heaven,’ said a later Pope, ‘is whether Savonarola was a righteous man or no.’ Those who denounce him as a hypocrite, pretending to believe in divine guidance, and in the gift of prophecy to attain his ends, are surely ignorant of the subtle influences under which religious leaders have ever acted; men who carry with them into life a profound conviction of the divine ruling of the world. Those who lightly dismiss him as a fanatic, have never felt the burning shame of sin which consumes the reformer’s soul. That he was led to think that God had intrusted him with a mission and had used him as the trumpet of His warnings we may well believe; that he was betrayed into some extravagances will only convict him of ordinary human frailty.