When this Pope ascended the chair of St. Peter he found an exhausted treasury, a starving people, a cramped and crowded city suffering from lack of water and from every means of hygienic living; and added to this there was such a condition of lawlessness in the States of the Church as made them a byword throughout Christendom. Within a year after his election the last great chieftain of the banditti had been destroyed, and the foreign ambassadors journeyed in safety to take up their abode in the Holy City. Within three years he had deposited in the Castle of St. Angelo great sums of money, which were to be used, however, only for the defense of the city, the purchase of lost papal territory, and wars against the Turks, with which last contingency his imagination was constantly at play. During these years he had also reconciled the feud of the Colonna and Orsini, had restored the disputed privileges of the nobility in the great cities, and had brought Venice once more into harmony with the papacy. It was by command of this Pope, Sixtus V, that the gardens, hills, wolds, and valleys of the States of the Church were planted with mulberry-trees, so that “where no corn grew the silk industry might flourish.” It was Sixtus V who encouraged woollen manufacture so that--to quote his own words--“the poor might have something.” In connection with this, it is interesting to see that he had fully intended to turn the Coliseum into an immense woollen factory. The streets of Rome resounded with the cheerful din of his architects and masons; and though the nobility and populace had reason enough to fear the entire destruction of their ancient monuments at the hands of this Franciscan, yet they could but admire the great triumphs of architecture and engineering which day by day raised the city to her lost pre-eminence and restored the pride of the Roman people. His first great public enterprise marked him at once as a born administrator. This was the introduction into Rome of a new supply of water. The work which the Pope determined should be worthy of imperial Rome was accomplished in spite of every obstacle and at a cost of two hundred and fifty-five thousand three hundred and forty-one scudi. By it he all but doubled the population of his city and reclaimed that great tract of land comprising the Viminal, Quirinal, and Esquiline Hills. This quarter had been a desert during eleven centuries; and yet, in the days of the Empire, it was the garden of Rome.