The passage of the French through the Papal States, like a blight of caterpillars, brought famine into the country districts. In the Fifteenth Century, armies were not encumbered by a commissariat. They robbed right and left, living on the produce of the land in which they were, paying for nothing, and invariably leaving utter desolation and destitution in their rear. Distress and discontent ravaged Rome. Winter storms brought Tiber down in flood and the City was under water. So the year 1495 ended. At the beginning of the new year, Don Virginio Orsini joined the French in Naples, against the King Don Ferrandino II, the Pope and Venice. At Atella the French were defeated, and the Holy League grew powerful. England joined it. The Lord Alexander P.P. VI, who, with His magnificent ability for doing many things, had been superintending the decoration of the quire of Santa Maria _del Populo_ by the Flaminian Gate which opens on the great north road, (the nearest gate to England), went, with a solemn cavalcade, to hold a papal chapel for publishing the Bull of Alliance with King Henry VII Tudor. France had no friend save Florence, where the Signoria had taken upon itself to remove the inhibition from Fra Girolamo Savonarola. That incontinent friar preached a course of Lenten sermons defending himself, violently denouncing Rome, particularizing certain vices which everywhere were general. His incorrigible attitude appears like “the rage of a man who knows that he has chosen the lower when he might have chosen the higher.” He was in open revolt, not against the Catholic Faith, but against the laws of the land, and the Rule of the Religion of St Dominic to which, voluntarily, under no compulsion whatever, he had chosen to swear allegiance on the Sacrament of the Lord’s Body. To make things easy for him, the Pope’s Holiness proposed to erect a new Dominican Congregation which he might be willing to obey, under Cardinal Carafa who already had given evidence of his sympathy with the friar. But Fra Girolamo intractably refused to hear: and it must be said that the minacity and violence, with which he attacked his superiors, form a bitter contrast to the patience and moderation which the Lord Alexander P.P. VI extended to him, in this—and let this be noted—the third year of his disgraceful extravagance and disloyalty. * * * * * At the Fourth Consistory of the twenty-first of January 1496, the Lord Alexander P.P. VI named one cardinal, who was The Lord Philippe de Luxembourg; Cardinal-Presbyter of the Title of San Marcellino e San Pietro. * * * * *