In Italy the chronicles of the Society tell of slow advance chequered by fits of hostility. By the year 1567 the Roman college had more than a thousand pupils, but the provinces were beginning to murmur at the burden of supporting this establishment, and the next congregation would restrict its growth. In Genoa, Siena, and other cities, the fathers struggled with poverty; in one place a college had to abandon the struggle and die. In most parts, however, the Society flourished and adapted its work to the circumstances. At Palermo we hear, in 1567, of a weird pageant, known as "The Triumph of Death," arranged by the Jesuits. Sack-clothed men bearing candles, a huge figure of Christ in a coffin, and two hundred flagellants, stimulated to their ghastly exercise by a troop of choristers dressed as hermits, went before a car containing a monstrous skeleton, higher than the roofs of the houses, with a mighty scythe in its hand. In the north the appeal was to princes. Borromeo still favoured the Society at Milan, while at Ferrara and Florence the Jesuits directed the consciences of princesses. The daughters of the Emperor who had married the Duke of Ferrara and Francis de Medici insisted on retaining their Jesuit confessors; and, when Borgia would refuse permission, the confessors themselves pleaded that the fair ladies could not possibly be abandoned to strange influences. Borgia reluctantly consented. He saw, and regretted, that one of the sternest rules of the Society was being sacrificed to expediency, but his counsellors seemed to have overruled him. Ignatius had sanctioned the first royal confessor: now there were four.
From his survey of the provinces, in which he saw much to distress his austere feelings, Borgia returned, exhausted, to Rome. He died a few weeks afterwards (1st October 1572), and Polanco, one of the ablest administrators at the Roman centre, was appointed Vicar-General. He fixed the election for April, and in the early spring the most famous officers of the army began to come in from their remote battlefields. Auger was occupied in so congenial a task in France that he would not come to Rome; he was with the Catholic troops besieging the Huguenots in La Rochelle. But there was an impressive gathering of the veterans of the Society. Salmeron and Bobadilla were still there to tell the story of their humble beginning on the flanks of Montmartre thirty years before; Ribadeneira, Miguel de Torres, Canisius, Possevin, Manares, Leo Henriquez, Miron, Polanco, and other fathers, before whom kings would bow, came in from the frontiers to the eternal city, as the commanders of legions had done before them. And of this brilliant group one of the lowest in ability and distinction, Father Everard Mercurian, was chosen to be General.