Sixtus V

Italian pope (1585-1590)

• Born: December 13, 1521
• Birthplace: Grottamare, Ancona, Papal States (now in Italy)
• Died: August 27, 1590
• Place of death: Rome, Papal States (now in Italy)

Sixtus V reorganized the curia, increased the efficiency of the Vatican’s administrative offices, made improvements to the urban fabric of Rome, and brought law and order to the Papal States. These achievements, along with significant additions to St. Peter’s and the Vatican, Lateran, and Quirinal Palaces, enhanced the Papacy’s prestige.

Early Life

Sixtus V was born Felice Peretti in a small village on Italy’s Adriatic coast. Two generations earlier, his family had emigrated from Dalmatia because of the threat of Turkish invasion and settled in Montalto. They were dislocated further when the duke of Urbino’s troops sacked the town in 1518 during war with Leo X, forcing Felice’s father, Piergentile Peretto, to flee to the nearby borough of Grottamare, where Peretti was born.

The refugee family was of humble circumstances. Piergentile worked as a gardener or peasant farmer, and among other chores, Peretti tended the pigs as a young boy. Peretti’s uncle, Fra Salvatore, however, belonged to the (Franciscan) Minorite convent in Montalto, and the nine-year-old child was taken there to be educated.

At the age of twelve, Peretti became a novice in the order. Continuing his studies in Bologna and Ferrara, he earned a doctorate in theology. He was ordained at Siena in 1547, where he became rector of his convent three years later. Impressing those around him with his eloquence and administrative talents, he was soon patronized by a circle of powerful Counter-Reformationist clerics, including Cardinal Carafa (the future Paul IV), Cardinal Antonio Ghislieri (later Pope Pius V), Saint Philip Neri, and Saint Ignatius of Loyola. A high point in his early career as a preacher came in 1552, when he delivered the Lenten sermons in Rome. In 1553, he was named rector of the convent of San Lorenzo in Naples, and rector of the Frari in Venice in 1556. The next year, he was appointed as an inquisitor in Venice but proved so harsh that civic leaders succeeded in having him recalled from that post in 1560.

Life’s Work

For better or worse, rigor and autocratic severity remained Peretti’s hallmarks throughout his career. In 1565, he served as a papal legate accompanying Cardinal Ugo Buoncompagni (who would become Pope Gregory XIII) on a mission to investigate charges of heresy against Archbishop Bartolomé de Carranza of Toledo, but he alienated Buoncompagni and the two remained lifelong enemies. Nevertheless, Peretti retained his circle of powerful benefactors and received the bishopric of Sant’ Agata dei Goti in the Kingdom on Naples (1566) after his friend Ghislieri ascended to the throne of Saint Peter as Pius V. Pius named Peretti vicar-general of the Franciscans, and on May 17, 1570, he made him a cardinal with the titular church of San Simeone.

During the years of Gregory XIII’s pontificate, which followed Pius’s death in May, 1572, Cardinal Peretti, or Felice Peretti di Montalto, as he was known at that time, wisely distanced himself from public affairs, devoting himself to art collecting and study, most notably the works of Gratian and Saint Ambrose. During this period, he first employed Domenico Fontana in 1576 as architect for his Villa Montalto (now Villa Massimi) near Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.

Despite Peretti’s long absence from the counsels of state, the conclave that elected him pope on April 24, 1585, was relatively short, lasting only two weeks. During Gregory XIII’s last years, the treasury had languished on the verge of depletion, while the Papal States and Rome itself were rife with banditry, violence, and corruption. Indeed, the circumstances seemed to call for the fierce energies of a disciplinarian such as Peretti, who took the name Sixtus after his Franciscan predecessor, Sixtus IV. The new pope, Sixtus V, had little reason to love the Roman barons whose lawlessness had helped create the current conditions. His own nephew, Francesco, had been murdered in 1581 because one of them, Giordano Orsini, coveted Francesco’s famously beautiful wife. Not only did Sixtus confront and intimidate Orsini, but in order to suppress bands of armed brigands, often retainers of aristocratic clans, he began to enforce the prohibition against carrying deadly weapons. Vowing that “while I live, every criminal must die,” he ordered four young men hanged for such offenses in Rome on the day before his coronation.

By vigorous prosecution, Sixtus made his territories the safest in Christendom. Gaining the cooperation of neighboring states, he prevented outlaw armies from finding refuge across those borders. Then he began to exterminate them ruthlessly. At the same time, Sixtus rebuilt the Papacy’s wealth by confiscating lands held by dubious claims, by heavy taxation with strict collection methods, by debasing the coinage, by floating loans, and by perfecting the art of selling appointments to ecclesiastical office. Despite huge engineering and architectural expenditures, he left the papal treasury the wealthiest in Europe, with an estimated 4.6 million gold and silver crowns. Shortly before his death, he disbursed 500,000 crowns for the relief of the Roman poor, but his treasure kept so much local money out of circulation that it caused a deep recession. Along with his severity, this made him so hated that after his death, the Roman people pulled down his commemorative statue.

Within the Vatican, Sixtus’s love of order led him to reform the College of Cardinals into a more efficient administrative body. On December 3, 1586, he issued the bull Postquam verus, limiting the administration to a maximum of seventy persons and dividing them into fifteen congregations, each overseeing some aspect of faith, instruction, and observance, or charged with supervising some temporal matter within the Papal States. Other clerical measures included regularly inspecting monasteries and requiring bishops to appear periodically at the Vatican to account for their administration. The only exception to Sixtus’s stringency was his indulgence of his own family, especially his granting cardinalship to his grand-nephew Alessandro Damasceni Peretti, then just fifteen years old, which angered many.

Sixtus’s construction projects rivaled his administrative achievements. Employing Fontana, Giacomo della Porta, and others, he commissioned aqueducts and fountains that brought water to Rome’s undeveloped districts, set about draining the Pontine marshes near the city, laid out a network of straight thoroughfares connecting several of the most important churches in Rome, built a new Vatican Library, completed the dome of St. Peter’s to the lantern, and relocated ancient obelisks to adorn Christian sites, most notably in the piazza of St. Peter’s.

Rebuilding Rome as the glorious capital of Christendom was part of Sixtus’s international policy, a way of responding to the dual challenges posed by the power of Protestantism and Islam. His family having suffered from Turkish expansion, he dreamed of recapturing the Holy Land but was unable to interest King Philip II of Spain in a crusade. Cautiously, he supported Philip’s Spanish Armada, which was sent to invade Queen Elizabeth I’s Protestant England in 1588. Whereas France was torn by religious strife, however, Sixtus’s final act was to resist Philip’s plans for replacing the Protestant king Henry IV of France (whom had previously been declared a heretic), with a Spanish partisan.

Significance

The loss of France to Protestantism would have been a grave blow to the Catholic Church, but Sixtus clung to the hope that the capable Henry would embrace the Roman faith, which he did after the pope’s death in 1590. Sixtus’s final opposition to Philip II helped to save Europe from eventual Habsburg domination, since an independent France remained to check the overweening power of Spain.

At home, by curbing the power of local barons, standardizing the rule of law, and imposing uniform observance of ordinances, weights, measures, and trade practices throughout the Papal States, he undermined the feudal mentality by introducing the concept of unified, centralized state authority. Indeed Sixtus’s curia, organized rationally and operating with consistency and relative speed, provided a model for bureaucratic administration in the newly emerging secular nation-states.

Although Sixtus’s urban plans were only partly realized, they established a prototype for the layout of grand capital cities such as Paris and Washington, D.C., with broad avenues creating impressive vistas and converging on important focal points.

Bibliography

Anker, Andrew. “II Papa e II Duce: Sixtus V’s and Mussolini’s Plans for Rome, Capital of the World.” Journal of Urban Design 1, no. 2 (June, 1996): 165-178. Examines the ideological strategy behind Sixtus’s alterations and relocations of ancient monuments. Compares this with Mussolini’s urban interventions.

Giedion, Sigfried. “Sixtus V and the Planning of Baroque Rome.” Architectural Review 111 (April, 1952): 217-226. Concise overview stressing Sixtus’s awareness of Rome as a “complex organism in which aesthetic and social factors were inseparably interlocked.”

Hall, Marcia. “Sixtus V.” In After Raphael. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Focuses on Sixtus’s approach to using ancient remains and classicizing art for asserting the primacy of Christian Rome and the popes.

Mandel, Corinne. Sixtus V and the Lateran Palace. Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1994. Gives careful analysis to the frescoes Sixtus commissioned for the Lateran, arguing that they refer to his ideals as pope and to his own “good works.”

Pastor, Ludwig. History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages. 40 vols. Edited and translated by Ralph Kerr. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1932. Volume 21 remains the most thorough, richly annotated biography of Sixtus.

Polverini Fosi, Irene. “Justice and Its Image: Political Propaganda and Judicial Reality in the Pontificate of Sixtus V.” Sixteenth Century Journal 24, no. 1 (1993): 75-95. Questions the real effectiveness of Sixtus’s juridical measures and examines the internal contradictions in his policies.