Rome was sacked on 6 May 1527 by the forces of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, resulting in Pope Clement VII's imprisonment in the Castel Sant'Angelo. His release was finally negotiated and on 6 December 1527 he left Rome for the Umbrian city of Orvieto, 120 km to the North. Abbot-elect Reid faced a winter journey to meet the Pope, probably in the furtherance of his position at Kinloss, and left Elgin, ostensibly for Rome, sometime after 10 November 1527 but it may have been in Orvieto that he met the Pontiff. Reid's return journey took him via Paris where he was introduced to the humanist scholar Giovanni Ferrerio by the Scottish scholar and Augustinian canon, Robert Richardson. Following his studies at Turin, the Piedmontese Ferrerio arrived in Paris in 1525 where he became a companion of not only Richardson but other Scottish scholars such as Hector Boece, George Buchanan and William Gordon. Ferrerio joined Reid back to Scotland to the court of King James V where he would spend the next three years. In Pope Clement VII's bull of 4 July 1528, he acknowledged having received Chrystall's request to resign, which he granted, and declared that the appointment of a successor to any monastery within the see of Moray lay solely with him and that he had therefore appointed Reid, Abbot of Kinloss. This was conditional on Reid accepting the Cistercian monk's habit within six months of taking up the rule of the abbey; he received the habit and blessing from the bishop of Aberdeen at a ceremony at the church of the Grey Friars in Edinburgh in the autumn of 1528. Crystal retired to the tower house that he had built in 1525, at Strathisla in the abbey estates, having retained the fruits of the abbey. Crystall lived on for a further six years when he died at Strathisla on 29 December 1535 and was buried the next day at Kinloss.