Sixtus had no cause to spare the memory of his predecessor, and he turned with truculence to the remedy of this disorder. Before the end of April he had four young men belonging to high Roman families hanged on gibbets, like common murderers, for carrying firearms in spite of the decree. At the Carnival he erected two gibbets, one at each end of the Corso, to intimidate roysterers from the use of the knife. On April 30th he, in his Bull _Hoc Nostri_, enacted the most drastic punishment for brigands and all who should support or tolerate them; and on June 1st he caused the Roman government to put a price on their heads. The nobles of Rome, who had included these picturesque criminals in their suites, were ordered, under the direst penalties, to yield or dismiss them, and even cardinals were threatened with imprisonment if they retained servants of that character. Such was the amazement of Rome that the wits are said to have dressed the statue of St. Peter for a journey and put into its mouth the reply, when St. Paul was supposed to ask the meaning of his travelling costume, that he feared that Sixtus was about to prosecute him for cutting off the ear of the high-priest's servant. From Rome the terror spread throughout the Papal States. Thousands--including renegade monks and mothers who prostituted their daughters--were executed or slain, and the bands fled to neutral territory. Thither the merciless hand of the Pope pursued them, and a few liberal concessions to the other Italian Powers induced them to fling back the banditti upon the arms of the Papal troops or the knives of those who sought blood-money.
That Sixtus pursued this very necessary campaign with absolute truculence and a disdain of delicacy in the use of means cannot be questioned, but, though the fact does not adorn his character, we know too well the licentious condition of Italy to waste our sympathy on his victims. The most stubborn and audacious outlaws fell in a few years before his attack. At Bologna, for instance, the Pepoli and the Malvezzi had for years sustained one of those terrible feuds which had so long disgraced the central State of Christendom. They laughed at Papal injunctions. Sixtus had Count Pepoli treacherously seized, tried (in his absence) at Rome, and decapitated. His followers, and those of the Malvezzi, scattered in alarm, and Bologna was not merely relieved of oppressive criminals, but was adorned with new buildings and enriched with educational institutions by the triumphant Pope. Later, in order to extinguish the embers of animosity, he promoted one of the Pepoli to the cardinalate. The feuds of the Gaetani, the Colonna, and other old families were similarly trodden out, or healed by marriages with grand-nieces of the Pope, and Italy became more sober and more prosperous than it had been for ages. Unhappily, the reform died with Sixtus and anarchy returned.