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the reign of Gregory XIII, who had been his opponent, the energies of this indefatigable man were divorced from public life. When he received the tiara they gushed forth again as might a fountain once covered over by a fallen wall.

The Pope swept the Papal States clean of grafters with an iron broom. On the very day he was crowned, four young persons paid the penalty for carrying small-arms, which had long since been for- bidden, on the gallows at San Angelo's. Neither they nor any of the countless others whose heads were seen dangling from poles, trees and fountain monuments in fields and forests, towns and castles, were helped aught by the intercession of the great or the lowly. Similarly he cut in half the army of Sbirri, paid robbers whom his predecessors had mustered; for he invented a system by means of which he cap- tured bandits with bandits. If one of them turned over a fellow in crime to Papal justice, he himself went scot free; and if he then con- tinued his trade either the same fate was meted out to him by another of his tribe, or he was caught in the meshes of the Sistine police. The Pope had set a price on the head of every robber, and this the family or the community to which the criminal belonged had to pay. More- over the towns and magistrates in which damage was done had them- selves to make this good. Thus the inhabitants of the Papal States were mobilized in their own interest, and agreements reached with bordering states rendered it impossible for the bandits to escape. This ruthless system of justice created order and security inside of two years, and the Pope was greatly pleased when ambassadors passing through the Papal States praised both newly acquired assets.

Sixtus obtained the moneys required for the building he did in the Eternal City from fields that were again peaceful, from the resurrected practice of selling offices in the Curia and in the State (which practice the Council arid the theologians combatted in vain), from taxes in- creased to the breaking-point, and from the great savings that accrued from transforming the Papal court into a domicile of monastic sirrt- plicity. He had found the treasury empty because the sums ex- pended by his predecessors for buildings and wars, for the Catholic cantons of Switzerland, for the Jesuit foundations in Rome and throughout Europe, and for help against the Huguenots from the Kings of France (nothing more could be expected from Spain after

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