On this episode of five minutes in church history we're going to Italy.

We're going to Florence in fact and we'll look at the pre-reformer Savannah Rola.

Savannah Rola was born around 1452 and died in 1498.

This is on the eve of the Reformation.

And though he did not live a long life,

he certainly left quite a legacy.

Early on, it looked like Savannah Rollo was being prepared for a career in medicine. His father was a physician and he had hopes of becoming a physician just like his father. But as he was studying medicine he just felt that tug to the religious life and

to pursue the religious life, and so he joined the Dominican Order.

He began early in his career to preach publicly and preached in a rather significant apocalyptic style we could say.

It was an interesting blend of sort of political reform and ecclesiastical reform.

He spent a great deal of time in the book of revelation And even went so far as to see

Florence as actually a new Jerusalem,

the center as it were of a new reform movement that would spread across Europe

and purify the church.

He was a rather fiery preacher, was always expected to say rather provocative things, and huge crowds would gather in the cathedral there in Florence to hear him.

Well as you can imagine word of this very quickly made its way to the Pope not too far away down in Rome and this just infuriated him and so the Pope began to go after

Savannah Rola and eventually Savannah Rola was excommunicated and eventually he'd be martyred.

Well before he was martyred in March of 1498 he wrote a wonderful little book called The Triumph of

the Cross.

It seems like in this book, savannah-rolla is sort of moving off of some of his early more

apocalyptic and rather interesting blend of political and church reform preaching to a more solid focus on the word and a focus on what would come

to be some of the doctrines that were so crucial to the Reformation.

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