Florence underwent an extravagant though brief religious revival. The monk Savonarola preached against wickedness in high places, and thundered at the Florentines for their presumption and vanity. The impressionable people wept, they appointed a "day of vanities" and laid all their rich robes and jewels at Savonarola's feet. They made him ruler of the city. But, alas! they soon tired of his severities, sighed for their vanities back again, and at last burned the reformer at the stake.[23] In Rome itself there arose popes, Lorenzo's followers, who preferred art to Christianity, or others like the terrible Alexander Borgia, who adopted the maxims of the new statecraft. Alexander, a worthy disciple of Louis XI, admired falsehood before truth, and sought to win his aims by poisoning his enemies. The career of his nephew Caesar Borgia has supplied history with its most awful picture of successful crime, and the book written in his praise by Macchiavelli has given us a new word for Satanic subtlety and treachery. We call it Macchiavellian. The rest of Europe shrank from Italy in fear, and named it "poisoning Italy."[24] Against the spiritual dominance of such a land the world was surely ready for revolt. The mind of man, so long and slowly awakening, and at last so intensely roused, seeing great discoveries on every hand, was no longer to be controlled by authority. The time was ripe for the Reformation. [FOR THE NEXT SECTION OF THIS GENERAL SURVEY SEE VOLUME IX] [Footnote 1: See _Origin and Progress of Printing_, page 5.] [Footnote 2: See _Beginning and Progress of the Renaissance_, vol. ix, p. 110.] [Footnote 3: See _Rebuilding of Rome by Nicholas V_, page 46.] [Footnote 4: See _Mahomet II Takes Constantinople_, page 55.] [Footnote 5: See _John Hunyady Repulses the Turks_, page 30.] [Footnote 6: See _Ivan the Great Unites Russia_, page 109.] [Footnote 7: See _Establishment of Swiss Independence_, page 336.] [Footnote 8: See _Culmination of the Power of Burgundy_, page 125.] [Footnote 9: See _Death of Charles the Bold_, page 155.] [Footnote 10: See _Wars of the Roses_, page 72.] [Footnote 11: See _Murder of the Princes in the Tower_, page 192,] [Footnote 12: See _Conspiracy, Rebellion, and Execution of Perkin Warbeck_, page 250.] [Footnote 13: See _Conquest of Granada_, page 202.] [Footnote 14: See _Inquisition Established in Spain_, page 166.] [Footnote 15: See _Columbus Discovers America_, page 224.] [Footnote 16: See _The Sea Route to India_, page 299.] [Footnote 17: See _Discovery of the Mainland of North America by the Cabots_, page 282.] [Footnote 18: See _Columbus Discovers South America_, page 323.] [Footnote 19: See _Amerigo Vespucci in America_, page 346.] [Footnote 20: See _Balboa Discovers the Pacific_, page 381.] [Footnote 21: See _Lorenzo de'Medici Rules in Florence_, page 134.] [Footnote 22: See _Painting of the Sistine Chapel_, page 369.] [Footnote 23: See _Savonarola's Reforms and Death_, page 265.]