The fact that he had been thwarted by lax brethren and by an (from the Roman point of view) irreligious government commended the fiery monk still further to his reformer-friends. He received a chair at the Sapienza (Roman University) and was made Counsellor to the Holy Office. In 1565 Cardinal Buoncompagni was sent on a mission to Spain, and, apparently to the Cardinal's disgust, the learned friar was included in his train. The sincerely religious temper of Sixtus V. makes it difficult for some of his biographers to understand his very original character. In spite of his virtue he was quite clearly ambitious,—one must live in the ecclesiastical world to realize how the ambition of power and the ambition to do good fuse with each other in the clerical mind,—he had an atrocious temper, and he retained what higher-born prelates would call the rudeness of a peasant. He quarrelled with Buoncompagni, and, as the mission was never really discharged, he had no opportunity to distinguish himself. However, the new Pope (for whose election Buoncompagni returned prematurely to Rome) was the friendly Dominican colleague, Pius V. Padre Montalto was made Vicar Apostolic over the Franciscan Order—the General having died—and he made a drastic effort to reform the reluctant friars and nuns (1566-1568). For this he received the red hat (1570) and was entrusted with the task of editing the works of St. Ambrose.
Unhappily for the ambitious cardinal-monk, Pius V. died in 1572, and Cardinal Buoncompagni ascended the throne and took the name of Gregory XIII. He withdrew the pension which Pius had assigned to Felice, and for the next thirteen years the Cardinal had to live in retirement and comparative poverty. In this again the very original character of Peretti reveals itself. One might expect that so stern a monastic reformer would retire to a friary when the Papal Court no longer required his presence, but he retired, instead, to his very comfortable palace and garden on the Esquiline. He had brought his sister Camilla and her son Francesco to live in this palace, and even romance and tragedy entered the friar's home. Francesco had married a beautiful and light-minded Roman girl, and her brother, Paolo Orsini, murdered Francesco in order to set her free for a nobler lover. The uncle could get no redress under Gregory XIII. He curbed his anger, quietly bent over his books, and watched the rising storm in Italy which was to close Gregory's reign.
Gregory died on April 10, 1585, and Cardinal Montalto was enclosed with his colleagues in the Sistine Chapel on April 21st for the making of a new Pope. He was in his sixty-fourth year, and his more malicious biographer would have us believe that he disguised his robustness under a pretence of decrepit age in order to deceive the cardinals. The fact seems to be that he waited quietly, and without taking sides, in his cell until the factions had worn themselves out and the hour had come for choosing a man who had not been regarded as papabile. Most assuredly he deceived the cardinals, though not by any dishonest artifice. For three days the Medici and Colonna and Farnese, and the French and Spanish factions, fought their traditional battle, and not one of the aspirants could get a majority. Then one or two cardinals bethought themselves of this quiet Cardinal Montalto, who had lived away on the Esquiline with his rustic sister for so many years, and who would surely be grateful to any for elevating him to the throne. They visited Montalto and found him humbly and gratefully disposed: they intrigued nervously and rapidly in the little colony: and presently cardinals rushed to do homage to the former swineherd and applaud the Pontificate of Sixtus V. He was duly grateful, for a few days. Lucrative appointments were at once divided amongst his friends and supporters; though some fear seized men when one of the cardinals ventured to bring before the new Pope the murderer of his nephew, and Sixtus, in sombre and terrible accents, bade the Orsini go and rid himself of his cut-throats. He was crowned on May 1st, and he lost little time in applying himself to the drastic schemes of reform which he had, apparently, matured in his peaceful garden on the Esquiline.
Yet the first act of the reformer betrays a defect and compels us to deal at once with the chief irregularity of his conduct. After the unhappy nepotism of Paul IV., that ancient and disreputable practice had been severely condemned, yet we find it flagrantly and immediately revived by Sixtus himself. It was, as we shall see, an essential part of his scheme to reform the College of Cardinals, and he would presently enact that no one should be raised to the cardinalate under the age of twenty-one, and no man with a son or grandson should attain the dignity. Yet within a fortnight of his coronation he announced that his grand-nephew, Alexander Peretti, a boy of thirteen, would be raised to the Sacred College, and another young grand-nephew was appointed Governor of the Borgo of St. Peter's and Captain of the Papal Guard. Their sisters were similarly enriched by noble alliances in later years. This grave impropriety is not excused by references to the ambition and determination of the Pope's sister Camilla; indeed, the wealth which that lady now obtained, and the notoriety with which she invested it in Rome, rather increased the Pope's guilt. He was assuredly not less strong of will than she. The defect shows how deeply rooted the evil was at Rome, when so resolute a reformer yields to it within a few years of the Protestant convulsion of Europe.
With this single concession to the older traditions, however, Sixtus turned energetically to the work of reform. The condition of the Papal States under Gregory XIII. had become scandalous. The leading officials sold the lesser offices to corrupt men, and these in turn recovered their money by receiving bribes to overlook crime. Brigandage of the most licentious character spread over Italy, and even Roman nobles supported bands of swordsmen who would with impunity rid them of an inconvenient husband, force the doors of a virtuous woman's house, or relieve the pilgrim of his money. A law prohibiting the use of firearms had been passed, but it had become the fashion to ignore law and police. The picture which Sixtus himself gives us in his early Bulls is amazing when we recall that, only a few years before, the future of the Church had depended in no small measure on the morals of Rome and Italy.
Sixtus had no cause to spare the memory of his predecessor, and he turned with truculence to the remedy of this disorder. Before the end of April he had four young men belonging to high Roman families hanged on gibbets, like common murderers, for carrying firearms in spite of the decree. At the Carnival he erected two gibbets, one at each end of the Corso, to intimidate roysterers from the use of the knife. On April 30th he, in his Bull Hoc Nostri, enacted the most drastic punishment for brigands and all who should support or tolerate them; and on June 1st he caused the Roman government to put a price on their heads. The nobles of Rome, who had included these picturesque criminals in their suites, were ordered, under the direst penalties, to yield or dismiss them, and even cardinals were threatened with imprisonment if they retained servants of that character. Such was the amazement of Rome that the wits are said to have dressed the statue of St. Peter for a journey and put into its mouth the reply, when St. Paul was supposed to ask the meaning of his travelling costume, that he feared that Sixtus was about to prosecute him for cutting off the ear of the high-priest's servant. From Rome the terror spread throughout the Papal States. Thousands—including renegade monks and mothers who prostituted their daughters—were executed or slain, and the bands fled to neutral territory. Thither the merciless hand of the Pope pursued them, and a few liberal concessions to the other Italian Powers induced them to fling back the banditti upon the arms of the Papal troops or the knives of those who sought blood-money.
That Sixtus pursued this very necessary campaign with absolute truculence and a disdain of delicacy in the use of means cannot be questioned, but, though the fact does not adorn his character, we know too well the licentious condition of Italy to waste our sympathy on his victims. The most stubborn and audacious outlaws fell in a few years before his attack. At Bologna, for instance, the Pepoli and the Malvezzi had for years sustained one of those terrible feuds which had so long disgraced the central State of Christendom. They laughed at Papal injunctions. Sixtus had Count Pepoli treacherously seized, tried (in his absence) at Rome, and decapitated. His followers, and those of the Malvezzi, scattered in alarm, and Bologna was not merely relieved of oppressive criminals, but was adorned with new buildings and enriched with educational institutions by the triumphant Pope. Later, in order to extinguish the embers of animosity, he promoted one of the Pepoli to the cardinalate. The feuds of the Gaetani, the Colonna, and other old families were similarly trodden out, or healed by marriages with grand-nieces of the Pope, and Italy became more sober and more prosperous than it had been for ages. Unhappily, the reform died with Sixtus and anarchy returned.
This campaign occupied a few years, but it had no sooner been launched than Sixtus produced other of the plans he had prepared in his secluded palace. I have shown how deeply the corruption of the College of Cardinals affected the religious history of Europe, and Sixtus began very quickly to reform it. It was, perhaps, not his misunderstood promise of gratitude to the cardinals who had elected him, but some feeling of incongruity with his own conduct in promoting his boy-nephews, which restrained him for a time. However that may be, he turned to the problem in the second year of his Pontificate, and his Bull Postquam Verus[315] laid down severe rules for the sustained improvement of the College. The number of cardinals was restricted to seventy (as is still the rule); illegitimates, and men who had sons and grandsons to favour, were excluded; and a cleric must have attained an age of at least twenty-two years before he could be promoted. In order to distribute and expedite the work of administration, he further divided the cardinals into fifteen "congregations" (some of which already existed), such as those of the Inquisition, of Public Works, of the Vatican Press, and so on.
We can hardly doubt that in this division he had an ulterior aim. The earlier procedure had been for the Pope to lay a question before the whole body of the cardinals and discuss it with them. Sixtus continued to do this, but the cardinals soon found that, although he desired discussion, he turned fiery eyes, and even showered rough and offensive epithets, on any who opposed his plans. He was essentially an autocrat, and the impetuosity which was inseparable from so robust a character made him an unpleasant autocrat. The advantage to him of splitting the cardinals into small groups was that, on any grave question, he had merely to take account of the consultative opinion of a few cardinals. His more admiring biographers record that he rarely dissented from the conclusions of his congregations; in point of fact, he decided grave issues before consulting them, or made his will unmistakably clear to them. His own promotions were generally sound, though he at times strained his regulations in favour of a friend. But he greatly improved the College of Cardinals, and made an admirable effort to exclude from it nationalist influences.
We must not, on the other hand, suppose that these congregations of cardinals count in any degree—except as the mere executive of his will—in the great work of his Pontificate. His own teeming brain and iron will are the sole sources of the mighty achievements of those five years. He had studied the Papal problem on all sides and was prepared at once to remedy a disorder or design a new structure. Agriculture and industry were feeble and unprosperous throughout the Papal States. Ruinous taxation, lawless oppression, and the ease with which one obtained one's bread at the innumerable monasteries, had demoralized the country and ruined the Papal treasury. Sixtus had some of the qualities of an economist—we still possess the careful account book he kept in his days of monastic authority—and he was especially concerned to nurse the Papal income in view of certain grandiose plans which he seems to have held in reserve, so that he applied himself zealously to this problem. It is generally agreed that his work here is a singular compound of shrewdness and blundering. By his restoration of public security he lifted a burden from agriculture, and he made special efforts to encourage the woollen industry and the silk industry.[316] He, at great cost, brought a good supply of water, from an estate twenty miles away, to Rome, and by this means and by the cutting of new roads re-established some population on the hills, which had long been almost deserted. We find Camilla speculating profitably in this extension of the city, but the more important point is that the population of Rome rose in five years from 70,000 to 100,000; still, however, only one tenth of the population of Imperial Rome. The Pope also gave a water-supply to Civita Vecchia and drained its marshes; and he spent—with very little result in this case—200,000 ducats in draining the marshes at Terracina, which he personally inspected in 1588.