WE must now return to the events belonging to the summer of 1471. A fortnight after the death of Pope Paul II. the Cardinal of S. Pietro in Vincoli was chosen as his successor. Francesco della Rovere, who took the name of Sixtus IV., was descended from an obscure family in the market-town of Albizzola, near Savona. Their possible relation to the Piedmontese Della Rovera, lords of Vinovi, was first claimed when the tiara had lent a splendour to the name far outshining that of ancient nobility. He belonged to the Franciscan order, and had dedicated his years to the study and teaching of theology, as well as to disputation and preaching, before Paul II. granted him the red hat, and thus fixed him at Rome, where he became one of the most active and influential members of the sacred college. He continued to lead a monastic life even in the cardinal’s purple. In his lodgings at the Esquiline, near the church which gave him his title, and whence he overlooked a great part of the ancient and modern city—which last had not then encroached upon those heights, with their grand ruins of baths and temples—scientific and ecclesiastical questions were discussed, while politics were excluded. And yet this Pope, who had grown up in the cloister, went farther than any of his predecessors in secularising the pontificate, and drawing it into the whirl of a restless policy. Under Sixtus IV. nepotism began to assume a form of aggrandisement, which, instead of being, as hitherto, restricted to the bestowal of fiefs and personal property, extended to the formation of sovereign States, dependent on the Church only in name.