do so. He also refused to provide the French with a list of all the men in his diocese who would be suitable for service in the armed forces. The French arrested him in September 1808 for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the French invaders and was then exiled and cut off from his diocese. He was first sent to Novara but was sent in October 1809 to Milan where he spent the remainder of his exile as a guest of the Barnabites. He returned to his see in 1814 with vast crowds lining the route of his return. Pius VII had returned from his own exile and remarked:"This holy man overwhelms me".The invaders had left much damage in their wake - not just destruction to infrastructure - but a lax sense of morals and values which Strambi worked hard to rebuild. He instituted strict reforms that ended corruption to the point where he received some death threats. Strambi was also the spiritual director of Blessed Anna Maria Taigi - a friend - as well as Saint Gaspare del Bufalo and Saint Vincenzo Pallotti. But the French returned to Macerata in 1817, to set up their headquarters aiming to use that location to attack the Austrian forces. The people turned to Bishop Strambi for fear of what the French would do. His response was to gather priests and seminarians in his private chapel to beg for God's intercession and after one and a half hours he rose and declared that Macerata would be saved through the intercession of the Mother of God. The French were indeed defeated though the local people feared what would happen during their retreat. Strambi met with the leader of the French forces and begged him not to enter the town to which General Murat agreed. Strambi then secured the assurances of the Austrian generals that the French soldiers would not be slaughtered. He was a close friend of Carlo Odescalchi and was pleased to learn that the pope named him as a cardinal on 10 March 1823. Strambi tried several times to secure his resignation from Pius VII but on one occasion the pope reprimanded him for using ill health as a vain excuse and dismissed him. Strambi tried once again in 1823 in a letter to Cardinal Ercole Consalvi to the pope but the letter arrived in Rome when the pontiff