Napoleon soon encamped before the almost impregnable fortress of Mantua. About twenty thousand men composed its garrison. As it was impossible to surmount such formidable defenses by assault, Napoleon was compelled to have recourse to the more tedious operations of a siege. The Austrian government, dissatisfied with the generalship of Beaulieu, withdrew him from the service and sent General Wurmser to assume the command, with a reinforcement of sixty thousand men. Napoleon's army had also been reinforced, so that he had about thirty thousand men with whom to meet the eighty thousand which would compose the Austrian army when united. It would require, however, at least a month before Wurmser could arrive at the gates of Mantua. Napoleon resolved to improve the moments of leisure in disarming his enemies in the south of Italy. The kingdom of Naples, situated at the southern extremity of the peninsula, is the most powerful state in Italy. A Bourbon prince, dissolute and effeminate, sat upon the throne. Its fleet had been actively allied with the English in the attack upon Toulon. Her troops were now associated with the Austrians in the warfare against France. The king, seeing the Austrians, and his own troops united with them, driven from every part of Italy except the fortress of Mantua, was exceedingly alarmed, and sent to Napoleon imploring peace. Napoleon, not being able to march an army into his territory to impose contributions, and yet being very anxious to detach from the alliance the army of sixty thousand men which Naples could bring into the field, granted an armistice upon terms so easy as to provoke the displeasure of the Directory. But Napoleon was fully aware of the impending peril, and decided wisely. The Pope, now abandoned by Naples, was in perfect consternation. He had anathematized republican France. He had preached a crusade against her, and had allowed her embassador to be assassinated in the streets of Rome. He was conscious that he deserved chastisement, and he had learned that the young conqueror, in his chastisings, inflicted very heavy blows. Napoleon, taking with him but six thousand men, entered the States of the Pope. The provinces subject to the Pope's temporal power contained a population of two and a half millions, most of whom were in a state of disgraceful barbarism. He had an inefficient army of four or five thousand men. His temporal power was nothing. It was his spiritual power alone which rendered the Pope formidable. The Pontiff immediately sent an embassador to Bologna, to implore the clemency of the conqueror. Napoleon referred the Pope to the Directory in Paris for the terms of a permanent peace, granting him however an armistice, in consideration of which he exacted the surrender of Ancona, Bologna, and Ferrara to a French garrison, the payment of four millions of dollars in silver and gold, and the contribution of one hundred paintings or statues and five hundred ancient manuscripts for the Museum