In these circumstances the famous Sixtus V. mounted the Papal throne. Felice Peretti had been born at Grottamare, in the March of Ancona, on December 13, 1521. The unwonted vigour of his character is traced by some to the Dalmatian blood of his ancestors, who, in the preceding century, had fled before the Turks to Italy. They had preserved their robust health, and attained no fortune, by work on the soil, and there is not the least improbability in the tradition--which some recent writers resent--that Felice at one time tended his father's swine.[314] But at the age of nine he was sent to the friary at Montalto, where he had an uncle, and he proved a good student. He became so excellent a preacher that he was summoned to give the Lenten Sermons at Rome in 1552, and he attracted the notice of St. Ignatius and St. Philip Neri, and of some of the graver cardinals. After presiding over one or two convents of his Order, he was put in charge of the friary at Venice in 1556, and was in the next year made Counsellor to the Inquisition. His ardent nature and strict ideals caused him to use his powers with such harshness that both his brethren and the Venetian government attacked him. He was forced several times to retire, and in 1560 Rome was definitively compelled to withdraw him.
The fact that he had been thwarted by lax brethren and by an (from the Roman point of view) irreligious government commended the fiery monk still further to his reformer-friends. He received a chair at the Sapienza (Roman University) and was made Counsellor to the Holy Office. In 1565 Cardinal Buoncompagni was sent on a mission to Spain, and, apparently to the Cardinal's disgust, the learned friar was included in his train. The sincerely religious temper of Sixtus V. makes it difficult for some of his biographers to understand his very original character. In spite of his virtue he was quite clearly ambitious,--one must live in the ecclesiastical world to realize how the ambition of power and the ambition to do good fuse with each other in the clerical mind,--he had an atrocious temper, and he retained what higher-born prelates would call the rudeness of a peasant. He quarrelled with Buoncompagni, and, as the mission was never really discharged, he had no opportunity to distinguish himself. However, the new Pope (for whose election Buoncompagni returned prematurely to Rome) was the friendly Dominican colleague, Pius V. Padre Montalto was made Vicar Apostolic over the Franciscan Order--the General having died--and he made a drastic effort to reform the reluctant friars and nuns (1566-1568). For this he received the red hat (1570) and was entrusted with the task of editing the works of St. Ambrose.