Cosimo de' Medici set Marsilio Ficino to translate Plato and then, when a Greek manuscript of the Hermetic writings arrived, had him put that first. Ficino and his contemporaries believed the Hermetic texts to be Egyptian and older than Moses, a wisdom given to the ancients that ran parallel to revelation, and that belief is what gave them authority. It survived until 1614, when Isaac Casaubon showed on linguistic grounds that they were composed in the early Christian centuries. By then the damage, or the achievement, was done: a philosophical magic with astrological medicine, planetary talismans and music for drawing down influences had entered European learning and would run through it for two hundred years.
Ficino set that out in his three books on life, written for scholars whose melancholy he treated as an occupational hazard. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, in the same circle, added the claim that Jewish kabbalah confirmed Christian doctrine, and offered nine hundred theses for public debate in Rome, some of which were condemned.
Into that city came Girolamo Savonarola, prior of San Marco, preaching that Florence would be scourged and then renewed. The French invasion of 1494 and the fall of the Medici appeared to confirm him, and for four years he was the dominant voice in a republic that declared Christ its king. Children were organised to collect luxuries, and the burning of the vanities in 1497 consumed books, paintings, cosmetics and instruments. He was excommunicated, a rival friar challenged him to an ordeal by fire that collapsed in farce, and in 1498 he was hanged and burned in the square where the bonfire had stood.