At the request of the Florentine Republic, though still suffering from the Pope's interdict, he then resumed his preaching.

Alexander sought next to corrupt the man he could not intimidate.

To the suggestion that a Cardinal's hat might be offered him, Savonarola replied that he preferred the red crown of martyrdom.
Ascending the pulpit of the Duomo in 1496, he preached the most fiery of all his Lenten courses.

Of this series of orations Milman writes: 'His triumphal career began with the Advent of 1494 on Haggai and the Psalms.
But it is in the Careme of 1496 on Amos and Zechariah that the preacher girds himself to his full strength, when he had attained his full authority, and could not but be conscious that there was a deep and dangerous rebellion brooding in the hearts of the hostile factions at Florence, and when already ominous rumors began to be heard from Rome.
He that would know the power, the daring, the oratory of Savonarola, must study this volume.'[1] [1] These sermons were printed from the notes taken by Lorenzo Violi in one volume at Venice, 1534.
Very terrific indeed are the denunciations contained in these discourses--denunciations fulminated without disguise against the Pope and priests of Rome, against the Medici, against the Florentines themselves, in whom the traces of rebellion were beginning to appear.
Mingled with these vehement invectives, couched in Savonarola's most impassioned style and heightened by his most impressive imagery, are political harangues and polemical arguments against the Pope.

The position assumed by the friar in his war with Rome was not a strong one, and the reasoning by which he supported it was marked by curious self-deception mingled with apparent efforts to deceive his audience.