The new Pope lost no time in turning the papacy to the best possible account, in the manner which had for him the greatest attractions. And it so happened that he was singularly well supplied with the raw material from which the edifice of family greatness he was bent on raising was to be furnished forth. He had no less than nine nephews: five of them the sons of his three brothers, and four the sons of his three sisters!—a field for nepotism sufficiently extensive to satisfy the "high-spirited" ambition of even a Sixtus IV. But among all this wealth of nephews, the two sons of his eldest sister, Girolamo and Pietro Riario, were distinguished by him so pre-eminently, that a great many contemporary writers, thinking it strange that he should prefer them to those of his own name, have asserted that these young men were in fact his sons.[55] Giuliano della Rovere, the eldest of all the nine, who received a cardinal's hat from his uncle, but could obtain from him no further favour, was nevertheless destined, as Pope Julius II., to become by far the most important pillar of the family greatness. The course of Catherine's fortunes, however, will justify the present reader in confining his attention, as all Rome was doing in the year 1472, to the two fortunate young men on whom the pontifical sun shone brightest. Peter Riario was, like his uncle, a Franciscan monk, and was twenty-six years old when the latter was elected. Within a very few months he became Bishop of Treviso, Cardinal-Archbishop of Seville, Patriarch of Constantinople, Archbishop of Valentia, and Archbishop of Florence! From his humble cell, from his ascetic board, from his girdle of rope and woollen frock renewed yearly, and baked occasionally to destroy the vermin bred in its holy filth, this poverty-vowed mendicant suddenly became possessed of revenues so enormous, that his income is said to have been larger than that of all the other members of the Sacred College put together! The stories which have been preserved[56] of his reckless and unprecedented expenditure at Rome, would seem almost incredible were they not corroborated by the fact that he had in a very short time, besides dissipating the enormous wealth assigned to him, incurred debts to the amount of sixty thousand florins! He gave a banquet to the French ambassadors which cost twenty thousand crowns, a sum equal to more than ten times the same nominal amount at the present day. "Never," says the Cardinal of Pavia, "had pagan antiquity seen anything like it. The whole country was drained of all that was rare and precious; and the object of all was to make a display, such as posterity might never be able to surpass.[57] The extent of the preparations, their variety, the number of the dishes, the price of the viands served up, were all registered by inspectors, and were _put into verse_, of which copies were profusely circulated, not only in Rome, but throughout Italy, and even beyond the Alps."