First Interlude
Julius II, the Warrior Pope
Giuliano della Rovere, elected Pope in October 1503 on a "land reclamation ticket", was born in Albissola near Savona on December 5 1443. His childhood was very poor and Giuliano earned money by selling onions, leeks and beans in Genoa, shipping them round the coast in a tiny boat and earning the nickname of Bean King. He joined the Franciscans and studied for a law degree at Perugia. In 1471, when his uncle became Pope Sixtus IV, Giuliano was appointed Bishop and Cardinal and later became Papal Legate to France.
Contemporaries describe Giuliano as a quick-tempered, occasionally violent man consumed with energy, vision and vigour, a lover of fine wine and good food, a serious man who cracked only one joke in his ten year Papacy, a man who detested the Spaniard Pope Alexander VI and the Borgias in general almost as much as he detested the French. Bearing all these qualities in mind, only three of the thirty-eight cardinals who made up the conclave on October 31 1503 voted against him and in favour of French challenger Amboise.
When Julius ascended the Papal throne, Bologna and Perugia were in a state of rebellion against Rome and Faenza and Rimini were in the hands of the Venetian Republic. More disturbingly, within six weeks of Julius' election, the French lost the Kingdom of Naples to the Spaniards.
Julius decided that restoring authority over the rebel cities was a matter of priority. In 1506 he raised 500 cavalry and, instead of appointing a General to lead the campaign, he made himself the Commander-in-Chief in a move that created consternation around Europe. This was the first occasion on which a Pope had ridden from Rome at the head of an army. Indeed, the consternation was such that the rebel leader of Perugia, Gianpaolo Baglione, accused by Machiavelli of parricide and incest, lost his nerve and met Julius at Orvieto with his surrender and a levy of soldiers.
Julius marched on, through the snow-covered Apennine Mountains towards Bologna. Aged sixty-two, the Pope crossed rivers swollen and flooded through melting ice and climbed on foot over the rocks. The French King and the rebel leaders marvelled at his determination and, in spite of a promise to fight to the death made before 6000 armed troops in the main square of Bologna, the rebel leader, Giovanni Bentivoglio, quietly slipped away on November 1st 1506. Ten days later, greeted by wildly cheering crowds, Julius II entered the city. The military operation had been an unqualified success and Julius returned to Rome on Palm Sunday a conquering Caesar, riding through wooden arches inscribed with "Veni, Vidi, Vici" and "Tyrannorum Expulsori".
If putting down rebellion had turned out to be merely a matter of making a noise and a show, the recovery of Faenza and Rimini from the Venetians was to prove more difficult. Julius told Machiavelli that he would ally even with France to ruin the Venetians, and he did. In December 1508, he constructed the League of Cambrai, uniting France, Germany and Spain in an apparent campaign against the Turks. However, part of this campaign required a large French force to destroy the Venetian army at Cremona on 14 May 1509. Venice immediately handed the two Adriatic cities back to the Pope.
Having allied himself with the French, Julius now had to devise a scheme for their expulsion. Fiercely Italian, his sworn goal was to rid his country of foreign "barbarians" and war with the French was to become a personal trial of strength with King Louis XII whom Julius described as a "cock who wants all the hens to himself". After illness in Bologna, Julius rose from his sickbed, got on his horse and, on 2 January 1511, rode to attack Ferrara, saying:
"Let's see who has the bigger balls, me or the King of France."
In a heavy blizzard, Julius joined with his mainly Venetian army at Mirandola, a heavily fortified city 30 miles west of Ferrara itself, with 5000 inhabitants and 900 troops, part French, part Ferrarese. Julius laid siege to the city, patrolling the lines in snow reputed to be "half as high as a horse" dressed in a white cloak with a fur collar and a white sheepskin hood (The Mantuan Ambassador said he looked like a bear!), cursing the rebels and supervising the firing of the cannon personally. Twelve days later, Julius escaped injury when a cannonball smashed through his billet whilst he was asleep. He changed billet and sent the cannonball to Loreto where it remains to this day. When the English Ambassador arrived and asked why the Pope was fighting fellow Italians and not the Turks, Julius growled "We'll deal with the Turks when we've taken Mirandola."
At last, in weather so severe the River Po had frozen over, the city walls gave way. On 20 January 1511 Mirandola surrendered. Julius himself led the troops through the breach in the wall via the siege ladder.
The capture of Mirandola sent a signal to the rest of Europe that the Pope was determined to drive the French from his land. The end of the war came in 1513. 18,000 Swiss soldiers shattered the French at the Battle of Novara. The remains of Louis' army struggled home whilst the Papal troops swept through the Po Valley.
The war against the French brought glory to the Papacy. Parma and Piacenza, abandoned in the French retreat, declared their wishes to become papal cities, Parmese poet Grapaldi writing -
Te Regem, dominum volumus, dulcissime Juli:
Templa Deis, leges populis, das ocia ferro:
(Sweet Julius, we want you to be our king.
Instead of war, you bring peace, religion and law)
On 27 June 1512, the Romans celebrated the Liberation of Genoa with fireworks and the thunder of cannon from the Castel San Angelo. The Warrior Pope returned to the Vatican in a torchlit procession whilst the crowds chanted "Julius, Julius." The Venetian envoy compared the event with the return of a Roman general.
Not everyone joined in the celebration, however. Michelangelo commented in a sonnet that "Chalices are turned into helmets and swords, Christ's cross and thorns to spears and shields" whilst Erasmus of Rotterdam (or Gerhard Gerhards), studying Greek in Bolgona in 1506 and thus a witness to Julius' triumphal entry, hammered the shedding of Christian blood by Christian priests in The Praise of Folly.
On the political front, Julius' summoning of the Fifth Lateran Council in April 1512, a move aimed at countering a council called by the French under the decree Frequens of the1417 Council of Constance with the specific purpose of undermining Julius' authority, strengthened his position considerably. The war in Northern Italy prevented the attendance of many non-Italian bishops and, backed by his new personal Praetorian Guard of 200 Swiss soldiers, Julius controlled the Lateran Council completely, forbidding foreign ambassadors from addressing bishops without his prior permission and stripping the General Council of its power to issue decrees under its own name. All decrees would now take the form of Papal Bulls signed by Julius.
To both Julius and the Curia, this was a victory but it deprived the Council of a very necessary power, the power to limit that of the Pope and to restrain his influence. It ceased to be a platform for debate and became instead a Papal instrument and a target for the anger of German reformists who just five years later would hail the Wittenburg rebel Martin Luther and his 95 theses as saviours of the church. In the action of strengthening the Pope's individual hand were sown the seeds of its destruction.
However, with some prescience, Julius gathered around him in the Lateran council chamber a loyal band of supporters headed by Cardinal Giordano, a young and spirited man from Rimini. The League of Julius formed at Lateran in June 1512 was dedicated to fostering a Catholic spirit of tolerance, to preserve and protect the spirit of independent humanist enquiry and to support the patronage of the arts.
The League took as its symbol the Jay Bird and as one of its principal relics the Rosary carried by Pope Julius through his winter campaign against Mirandola. The rosary was given to Giordano, who became Keeper of the Beads. Julius told his followers that the quest for knowledge and truth was like Jason's Quest for the Golden Fleece and that the members of his League, the artists, thinkers and preachers, should liken themselves to latter day Argonauts engaged in such a quest. The movement adopted the name of the Greek Hero in recognition of the symbol of the golden fleece as standing for know
ledge and truth.
Whilst the initial impetus for the movement was alarm at the strict and repressive Calvinist Consistory operating in Geneva, it continued to flourish as Rome staggered under the weight of Luther, scandal, the backlash of the Inquisition, the split with England and the destruction of Rome by German and Swiss troops in 1527. As secret head of this secret league, Julius patronised artists such as Michelangelo, Raphael and Bramante. His favourite pastimes included sailing, fishing and gardens. It was he who laid out behind the Vatican the first Roman garden of any consequence since ancient times with aviaries, ponds, laurels, orange and pomegranate trees. He liked poetry, classical sculpture and architecture and spent some 70,653 ducats on the rebuilding of St Peter's.
Extracts from From the Vatican to Janiculum: Politics, the Papacy and the Reformation (Jackdaw Press), pages 42-45
by Jurat Jarkman
(reproduced with the author's permission)
Part Two:
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