Carlo Borromeo was a scion of the great patrician family of that name in Milan, founded far back in the mists of mediæval antiquity by a certain pilgrim, the _buon romeo_ from whom it took its name. The House was conspicuous in the story of the city, and was foremost in consequence and in wealth in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Carlo was born in the ecclesiastical purple. His uncle, Pius IV., of the Milanese House of Medici, created him a cardinal in 1559, at the age of nineteen, and heaped benefices upon him. In 1560 he became Archbishop of Milan on the retirement of Cardinal Ippolito II. d’Este, who had occupied the See for a great number of years in succession to his uncle Ippolito I. The young Cardinal was now wealthier than any other prince of the Church. A few years later, however, he renounced all his benefices, _which having he was great, and casting away, greater_, as his biographer observes. He retained the Archbishopric only, and taking up his abode in the city, he devoted himself to the government of his diocese, with an immense zeal and fervour of reform. The Jesuits, the Teatini, and other of the new and reformed orders which sprang up in obedience to the religious impulse of the time, were introduced by him into Milan, and he suppressed the immensely wealthy and influential order of the Umiliati, and alienated its revenues to the support of the new communities and to the furtherance of his great schemes. An ascetic of purest and most exemplary life, he indulged as representative of the Church in a boundless pride and pomp. He was a despot, and his despotism opposed itself to all independence of thought. He extended his ecclesiastical jurisdiction to its utmost limits, and seizing delinquents almost under the nose of the civil authorities, filled the dungeons of the episcopal palace with them. His imperious will came into conflict with the governors, but his powerful influence in the bigoted Court of Spain gave him supremacy, and he was in fact the ruler of Milan. His splendid temper of Milanese patrician vented itself in grandiose schemes for the building, restoration and ornamentation of churches and religious institutions. But as his authority was exerted to suppress all individuality and spontaneity in literature and thought, so his rich patronage was lent only to the decadence in art. A nobler manifestation of the man was seen during the pestilence of 1576, when, with heroic self-forgetfulness, he fulfilled his duty as chief pastor of the afflicted people, succouring them by every means in his power. His exalted figure, with cross borne high, leading processions of penitent and supplicatory citizens through the streets, is one of the saintly pictures of history.