Their suppression was carried out with unexampled severity by Sixtus V. Sixtus was learned and prudent, and of remarkable self-control; he is also charged with being crafty and malignant. Not very accurately, he is commonly regarded as the author of much which was actually due to his predecessors; but his administration is very remarkable. Rigorous to the verge of cruelty in the enforcement of his laws, they were themselves commonly mild and conciliatory. He was energetic in encouraging agriculture and manufactures. Nepotism, the old ingrained vice of the popes, had been practised by none of his three immediate predecessors, though he is often credited with its abolition. His financial methods were successful immediately, but really accumulated burdens which became portentously heavy. The treatment of public buildings in Rome by Sixtus V., his destruction of antiquities there, and his curious attempts to convert some of the latter into Christian monuments, mark the change from the semi-paganism of the times of Leo X. Similarly, the ecclesiastical spirit of the time opposed free inquiry. Giordano Bruno was burnt. The same movement is visible in the change from Ariosto to Tasso. Religion had resumed her empire. The quite excellent side of these changes is displayed in such beautiful characters as Cardinal Borromeo and Filippo Neri. _III.--The Counter Reformation: First Stage_ Ever since the Council of Trent closed in 1563, the Church had been determined on making a re-conquest of the Protestant portion of Christendom. In the Spanish and Italian peninsulas, Protestantism never obtained a footing; everywhere else it had established itself in one of the two forms into which it was divided--the Lutheran and the Calvinistic. In Germany it greatly predominated among the populations, mainly in the Lutheran form. In France, where Catholicism predominated, the Huguenots were Calvinist. Calvinism prevailed throughout Scandinavia, in the Northern Netherlands, in Scotland, and--differently arrayed--in England. In Germany, the Augsburg declaration, which made the religion of each prince the religion also of his dominions, the arrangement was favourable to a Catholic recovery; since princes were more likely to be drawn back to the fold than populations, as happened notably in the case of Albert of Bavaria, who re-imposed Catholicism on a country whose sympathies were Protestant. In Germany, also, much was done by the wide establishment of Jesuit schools, whither the excellence of the education attracted Protestants as well as Catholics. The great ecclesiastical principalities were also practically secured for Catholicism.