He paid all salaries promptly--a striking departure, it would seem, from what had been usual under his predecessor--and the effect of his improved and strenuous legislation was shortly seen in the diminished prices of commodities. He was crowned Pope on August 6, on the steps of the Basilica of St. Peter, by the Cardinal-Archdeacon Piccolomini. The ceremony was celebrated with a splendour worthy of the splendid figure that was its centre. Through the eyes of Michele Ferno--despite his admission that he is unable to convey a worthy notion of the spectacle--you may see the gorgeous procession to the Lateran in which Alexander VI showed himself to the applauding Romans; the multitude of richly adorned men, gay and festive; the seven hundred priests and prelates, with their familiars the splendid cavalcade of knights and nobles of Rome; the archers and Turkish horsemen, and the Palatine Guard, with its great halberds and flashing shields; the twelve white horses, with their golden bridles, led by footmen; and then Alexander himself on a snow-white horse, “serene of brow and of majestic dignity,” his hand uplifted--the Fisherman’s Ring upon its forefinger--to bless the kneeling populace. The chronicler flings into superlatives when he comes to praise the personal beauty of the man, his physical vigour and health, “which go to increase the veneration shown him.” Thus in the brilliant sunshine of that Italian August, amid the plaudits of assembled Rome, amid banners and flowers, music and incense, the flash of steel and the blaze of decorations with the Borgian arms everywhere displayed--or, a grazing steer gules--Alexander VI passes to the Vatican, the aim and summit of his vast ambition. Friends and enemies alike have sung the splendours of that coronation, and the Bull device--as you can imagine--plays a considerable part in those verses, be they paeans or lampoons. The former allude to Borgia as “the Bull,” from the majesty and might of the animal that was displayed upon their shield; the latter render it the subject of much scurrilous invective, to which it lends itself as readily. And thereafter, in almost all verse of their epoch, writers ever say “the Bull” when they mean the Borgia. CHAPTER IV. BORGIA ALLIANCES At the time of his father’s election to the throne of St. Peter, Cesare Borgia--now in his eighteenth year--was still at the University of Pisa.