Yet the admiration which his biographers bestow on his finance is misplaced. It seems to have been chiefly in his native March of Ancona that he granted relief from the heavy taxes and imposts of his predecessor; the Papal States generally were still ruinously taxed, even in the necessaries of life. His hoarding of specie, partly for excellent but partly for visionary purposes, injured commerce; and such measures as his prohibition of the sale of landed property to foreigners were short-sighted. The rise of the Papal income, which enabled him to store 4,500,000 scudi (about 8,000,000 dollars) in five years, besides spending large sums on public works, was chiefly due to deplorable methods. The income from the issue of indulgences had now fallen very low—it had not wholly ceased, as some say, since they are still issued in Spain—and little money came from Spain or France. The fixed Papal income had fallen to 200,000 scudi a year, and in the expenditure of this the friar-pope made an economy of 140,000 scudi a year by reducing table-charges, dismissing superfluous servants, and (as is often forgotten) giving to other servants church-benefices so that they needed no salary. The result was still far too small for the creation of a fund, and Sixtus sold honours and offices as flagrantly as any Pope had done since Boniface IX. He sold positions which had never been sold before, and he created new marketable titles. He debased the coinage and imposed a tax on money-lenders. He carried to a remarkable extent the new Papal system of Monti.[317] He withdrew offices which Gregory XIII. had sold, and transferred them to higher bidders; and he must have known how the officials would recoup themselves.
By these means he raised his hoard, which seems to have been gathered for some visionary grand campaign against the Protestants and the Turks. We at once recall Julius II., but it is a comparison which the work of Sixtus V. cannot sustain; he was not so great a ruler as Julius, and he fell on less prosperous times. I must add, however, that part of his reserve fund was destined for practical uses. In 1586 famine and Turks and pirates caused grave distress in Italy. Sixtus did not even then abolish his heavy taxes on the necessaries of life and the means of distributing them, but he bought 100,000 crowns' worth of corn in Sicily, fixed the price of flour and punished unjust dealers, and set about collecting a fund of a million scudi to meet such emergencies. He was not economist enough to see the roots of the evil, and fair, fertile Italy continued to suffer under the unhappy Papal system.
The Pope's tenderness to the Jews was part of his crude financial policy. A Portuguese Jew, who had fled from the Inquisition, was his chief fiscal adviser, and Sixtus interpreted in the most genial manner the current teaching of theologians, that, since the Jews were irreparably damned on a greater count, they might lend money at interest, and the Papacy might tax their wealth. Baron Huebner, in a moment of unusual candour, corrects some of the less discriminating biographers: Sixtus, he says, "protected the Jews in order to exploit them."[318] Pius V. had expelled the Jews from all parts of the Papal States except Rome and the March of Ancona, and Sixtus, by his constitution Hebræorum Gens, cancelled the restriction and ordered Christians to treat the Jews and their synagogues with respect. We feel that interest led Sixtus on to a more human feeling. He dispensed the unhappy Jews from wearing the odious yellow dress which Christian princes and prelates imposed on them, and for a few years, in that one corner of Europe, they enjoyed the life of human beings.
Sixtus was less lenient to the Jesuits than to the Jews. The primitive fervour of the Society was already dimmed by prosperity or perverted by casuistry, and complaints came to Rome from all parts. Having been a Franciscan monk, Sixtus was not well disposed toward the new congregation, which had aroused the hostility of the older religious bodies. He used to observe, in his grim, meditative way: "Who are these men who make us bow our heads at the mention of their name?" He referred to the Catholic practice of inclining the head at the mention of the name of Jesus, but he disliked the whole constitution of the Society and resented the privileges it had won from his predecessors. A prolonged quarrel of the worldly and degenerate Jesuits of Spain with General Acquaviva gave him an opportunity to intervene, and he ordered an inquiry into their rules. In 1590 he announced that he would alter the name and the constitutions of the Society. Acquaviva stirred such Catholic monarchs as were docile to his brethren to petition the Pope in their favour, but Sixtus was not prepared to listen to the suggestions, in ecclesiastical affairs, of worldly princes. Acquaviva then persuaded Cardinal Carafa, to whom the inquiry had been entrusted, to prolong his inquiry, and it became a race between the failing energy of the Pope and the intrigues of the Jesuits. Rome witnessed the contest with the interest it had once bestowed on the chariot-races of the Blues and the Greens. The inquiry was transferred to other prelates, and, when these also were suborned, Sixtus peremptorily ordered Acquaviva to request that the name of the Society should be changed. The petition was reluctantly made, the Bull authorizing the change of name was drafted and—Sixtus V. died before he put his name to it. In the circumstances it was inevitably whispered that Jesuit poison had ended the Pope's life, but the legend was as superfluous as it was familiar.[319]
The rest of the Pope's administrative work must be briefly recorded before we pass to the consideration of his political activity. He attempted to restrict the prodigality of the Romans in dress, food, funeral and wedding expenses, etc., but this sumptuary legislation[320] was not enforced. He found general and disgraceful laxity in the convents of nuns, and enacted a death-penalty against offenders: the same penalty he, with his habitual truculence, imposed for cheating at cards or dice. He directed the police to cleanse Rome of prostitutes and astrologers, reformed the prisons,[321] made provision for widows and orphans, pressed the redemption of captives,[322] and constructed ten galleys for the defence of the Italian coast against the Turks and pirates. He cleared of debt the Roman University (Sapienza) and restored it to its full activity. He engaged Fontana to crown St. Peter's with its long-deferred cupola, and threw such energy into the work that he almost completed in twenty-two months a task which the builders expected to occupy ten years. He, with equal vigour, set up the obelisks in front of St. Peter's, reconstructed the Lateran Palace in part, and restored the columns of Trajan and Antoninus; though, in a naïve desire to express the triumph of Christianity over Paganism, he put statues of Peter and Paul on the ancient Roman pedestals.[323] He also set up a press in the Vatican Library, which he restored and decorated, and from this he issued the Latin version of the Bible which the Council of Trent had ordered, as well as the works of St. Ambrose and St. Bonaventure.
The magnitude of this domestic program and the vigour of the sexagenarian Pope are enhanced when we further learn that his brief Pontificate was, as usual, occupied with grave political problems. With German affairs the Papacy had now little concern, but we must record that Sixtus permitted some of the Catholic bishops to allow the laity to communicate in both kinds. To England he devoted more attention, though his violent and undiplomatic methods only made worse the position of the Catholics in that country. Mary Stuart contrived to write to him, after she had been condemned, and he spoke of Elizabeth to the cardinals as "the English Jezabel." He urged Henry III. to intercede for Mary and himself wrote a defence of her. When she was executed, he spurred Philip I. in his designs against England and promised him 500,000 florins when his fleet reached England and a further half million when the Spaniards occupied London. When an English spy was detected at Rome, Sixtus ordered his tongue to be cut out and his hand struck off before he was beheaded. In defiance of his own decree he bestowed the cardinalate on William Allen, and he directed Allen to translate (for distribution in England) the Bull in which he enumerated the dark crimes of Elizabeth, renewed the sentence of excommunication against her, and declared her subjects released from their allegiance. These measures, which only increased the sufferings of the Catholics, betray again the limitation of the Pope's vigorous intelligence, and, when the Armada sank, he turned from Spain to France and realized the futility of his policy.
The chief political problem was, however, the attitude of Rome toward the rival Catholic Powers, Spain and France, and the less important action of Sixtus in Venice (which, as a bulwark against the Protestant north, he sought, in spite of his old grievances, to conciliate), Savoy (where he compelled the Duke to refrain from appointing bishops), Besançon (where he forced upon the reluctant chapter a friar-friend whom he had made Archbishop), Belgium (where he demanded a truce between the University and the Jesuits), and Switzerland (where he attempted in vain to restrain the secular authorities), need not be considered at length. The French problem, complicated by the ambition of Spain, might have given anxious hours to a more astute statesman than Sixtus, and we shall hardly expect a man with so little subtlety to reach a distinguished solution of it.
The ineptness of Catherine de' Medici and the folly and profligacy of her diseased son, Henry III., had brought France to a dangerous pass. Henry of Guise coveted the throne, under a pretence of zeal for the Church: Henry of Navarre grimly awaited his natural succession to it: and Philip of Spain dreamed of annexing France, as well as England, to his swollen dominion. The Spanish representative at Rome, Count Olivarez, who nourished a secret disdain of the peasant-Pope, urged Sixtus to eliminate Henry of Navarre from the competition by excommunication, for having relapsed to the Protestant creed, and, on September 5, 1585, Sixtus issued against him and the Prince of Condé the Bull Ab Immenso. Henry of Navarre retorted cheerfully that the Pope was himself a heretic, and Henry III. angrily drove the Pope's new Nuncio from France; to which Sixtus retorted by expelling from Rome Henry's representative, the Marquis Pisani. To the great delight of Philip and the Catholic League, Henry III., feeble and distracted, humbly submitted, and was compelled to put pressure on the remaining Protestants. Sixtus, in fact, promised Henry a Spanish army from the Netherlands to assist in coercing the Huguenots, and urged him to co-operate with Philip and with the League (under Guise). In his exclusive, and entirely natural, concern for the orthodoxy of the country, Sixtus failed to understand in any degree its peculiar political condition or the utterly selfish designs of Guise and of Philip. He was impelling the country toward civil war.
In 1587 the Germans invaded France, and Henry of Navarre in turn confronted the troops of the League. Some small initial victories of the League led the Pope to congratulate the Duke of Guise in the most extravagant language, and it was only the fear of exasperating Philip that restrained him from bestowing on the Duke's son the hand of one of his grand-nieces. One cannot suppose that Sixtus failed to see that Guise had ambition, but he showed little penetration of character in admonishing the Duke to recover Paris for Henry III. and to assist that monarch to set up the Inquisition in France and exterminate heresy. The Nuncio's letters show that he was, under the Pope's instructions, absorbed in a futile effort to reconcile the Duke and the King, and it is said that Sixtus angrily advised the effeminate monarch either to make a friend of Guise or to destroy him. Even Henry III. showed more appreciation of the political situation.