Whilst Battista Spagnuolo, of Mantua, General of the Carmelite Order, and one of the most celebrated Latin poets of the fifteenth century, vainly endeavoured to reform his ill-disciplined monks, St. Bernardine of Sienna (1380–1446), more fortunate if not more gifted, set a practical example by joining the order of St. Francis, with the intention of introducing the needed reforms. He founded three hundred houses of the Brethren of the Stricter Observance, which were urgently needed at a period when Europe was being devastated by three scourges--the plague, famine, and the sword. At about the same epoch, St. Colette of Corbie succeeded, by the exercise of an angelic sweetness, in correcting the abuses which had found their way into the convent of the St. Clare and many other female congregations, more recently formed under the Franciscan rules; St. Francis, of Romagna, instituted the Collatine order (1425), and St. Jeanne de Valois, daughter of Louis XI. (1464–1505), founded the community of the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, at Bourges, where her husband, the Duke of Orleans, had banished her, previous to repudiating the marriage. This virtuous princess was guided by the counsels of the Calabrian, St. Francis of Paula, the celebrated founder of the order of the Minimi (1416–1507), who, when summoned to France by Louis XI., and resident in Touraine under the eye of that most suspicious and mistrustful of monarchs, had so far won his confidence as to induce the king to prepare for death like a Christian. The Barnabites, and other religious institutions of more or less importance, which had principally in view the conversion of heretics by preaching, date from the close of the fifteenth century, and the origin of many of them was due to the spirit of morality and philanthropy then in vogue. Thus the first house of the Penitents, founded at Paris in 1496 by a Gray Friar under the name of Tisseran, afterwards became celebrated for its wholesome example amid the dissolute morals of the sixteenth century. [Illustration: Fig. 262.--St. Theresa, the Reformer of the Carmelites, who died in 1582.--From a Portrait of the period engraved in the “Iconografia Española” of M. Carderera.] [Illustration: Fig. 263.--The Great Martyrdom of Nangasaki (Sept. 10, 1622), in which twenty-two missionaries and native Christians were burnt to death, and thirty others, including several women and children, beheaded, in presence of a vast crowd.--From a Japanese water-colour Drawing of the period, preserved in the Gésu Convent at Rome.--Pope Pius IX. commemorated this event by the beatification of two hundred and five martyrs, which was decreed at Rome on the 7th of July, 1867.]