The ambition was perhaps common, but the ability with which he pursued these aims for upward of sixty years was not common, and their complete achievement was little short of the marvellous. It took him forty years to reach St. Peter's chair, and he occupied it only fifteen; but before he died one of his grandsons had married a daughter of Charles V, the Emperor of Austria; another was betrothed to the daughter of the King of France; and two more were cardinals and multimillionaires. Later on, his descendants married into the royal houses of Portugal and Spain, and the Farnese family passed out of existence only by being merged by marriage into the royal house of the Neapolitan Bourbons. One grandson, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese II, was the chief art patron of his time, and this in an age when there were many such men; and one great-grandson was that Duke of Parma whose fame as a great cap­tain is written in what were, until the second decade of the twentieth century, the bloodiest annals of the Netherlands. To provide a suitable setting for this princely family, the Pope, some five years before his death, began this Farnese Palace. Antonio da San Gallo, the younger, Giacomo della Porta, and Michelangelo designed its fagades and cornice. The great structure was completed long after the Pope's death by Alessandro Farnese II. It was recognized at once to be the most sumptuous of the Roman palaces. It stands upon the site of the old Palazzo Ferriz, which was at one time the residence of the Spanish ambas­sador, and had passed into the possession of the Augustine monks of the Piazza del Popolo. The old Ferriz Palace had been on the Tiber bank, for it was not until Julius II's time that the Strada, or Via Giulia, was cut through, thus separating the palace from the river. Where these fountains now stand as the ornaments of a spacious piazza, there was at that time nothing but a collection of hovels extending as far as the Campo de' Fiori. The farsighted young cardinal - the Farnese were thrifty, for all their magnificence - bought the old palace from the monks, and lived there in ever-increasing splendor under the successive pontificates of Julius II, Leo X, and Adrian VI.