JULIUS II, Pope. - Giuliano della Rovere, b. at Albissola near Savona in 1445 of an obscure family. His youth was poor; he was, probably through the care of his paternal uncle, the Franciscan Cardinal Francesco della Rovere, a student in the Convent of St. Francis in Perugia. The fact that he then acquired a manuscript of the Institutes of Justinian suggests that he applied himself to legal studies, although he later said that he had devoted himself to letters. At Perugia he also entered the clergy; but he remained in the shadows until his uncle, having become Pope Sixtus IV, gave him first the bishopric of Carpentras, then, on 16 Dec. 1471, the purple with the title of St. Peter in Chains.
The cardinal then held, as titular, or in administration, or in commendam, for a longer or shorter time, a great number of bishoprics, abbeys and benefices: among the many, the abbey of Grottaferrata (from 1472), the bishopric of Bologna (1483-1502), the archbishopric of Avignon (1474-1503), the cardinalitial episcopal sees of Sabina (1479-83) and of Ostia and Velletri (1483-1503); from 1474 he was major penitentiary. And already from Sixtus IV he received assignments of great importance: he was legate in the Marca (1473); with a very firm hand he restored order in Umbria, at Todi, at Spoleto, at Città di Castello; legate in Avignon and in the Comtat Venaissin and in the whole Kingdom of France (1476), at a moment when relations between the Pope and Louis XI were strained, he succeeded in strengthening the papal dominion over the Comtat and yet in being considered « très cher et grant amy » of the King of France. And again he was legate a latere (1480-82) to restore peace between Louis XI and Maximilian of Austria, who were disputing the inheritance of Charles the Bold, and to promote the Crusade; if he did not succeed in the attempt, his fame grew thereby, and, on his return to Rome, he received unusual honor. Nevertheless, in the mind of Sixtus IV, more than the harsh and angular « Vincola », there could count first Cardinal Pietro Riario, another nephew of the Pope who died in 1474, then the latter's brother, the shrewd and ambitious Count Girolamo, an open rival of Giuliano. But, in the Conclave that followed the death of Sixtus IV (1484), Giuliano, while not shrinking from simoniacal machinations, succeeded in procuring the tiara for a creature of his, Giovan Battista Cibo: Innocent VIII, and for several years was « master » of the weak Pontiff, « papa et plus quam papa ». Fiercely opposed to Ferrante of Naples, perhaps for personal and family reasons, certainly because of the King's recalcitrant and threatening attitude toward the Church, he advised the Pope to go to war, taking occasion from the conspiracy of the barons; and he was, in a moment of very great danger, a courageous defender of Rome and of the Pope. He was indignant when the Pope, in his absence, concluded peace with the King (1486), and he seemed to have lost his authority over Innocent. But he soon regained it; and, even with a new passing eclipse of his fortune, he remained very powerful as long as the Pontiff lived. Significant in these years are his close friendship with Cardinal Marco Barbo, perhaps the best man then in the Curia, and the opposition of both « like south wind and north wind » to Rodrigo Borgia and Ascanio Sforza, exponents of the most worldly tendencies in the Sacred College: Giuliano already represented, even if not disinterestedly, the reaction against the corruption of the Church, against the weakening of pontifical power, against the prevalence of narrowly political interests.
In the Conclave of 1492, relying too openly on Ferrante, reconciled, also through his efforts, with the Church, he attempted to bring a cardinal of his faction to the pontificate; the intrigues of Ascanio Sforza and simony raised the Borgia to it, who became Alexander VI.
Giuliano too, at the last moment, had bowed to the election, obtaining compensations. But, despite an ephemeral reconciliation, in which he seemed to have become « second pope » (Aug. 1493), he remained not only a fierce opponent of the Borgia, when opposition could in many cases be justified, but an immoderate hater of him; and, staying now at Marino, land of the Colonna, now in his heavily fortified Ostia, he kept « the ways of an antipope ».
When, on the eve of the descent of Charles VIII, the Pope drew close to the Aragonese, the « Vincola » involved them in the same hatred. Fearful, not wrongly, for his life, he fled from Ostia (23-24 Apr. 1494) and took refuge in France, where he became very influential; he urged Charles VIII to the enterprise of Naples and stood at his side in the descent, in the illusion, then common to not a few, even distinguished, men, that the King of France could promote the necessary reform of the Church. He drew close again to the Pope for a time (1498) and was instrumental in procuring for Cesare Borgia the hand of Carlotta d'Albret; but he soon fell out again with the Borgias because of their enterprises against his kinsman the Duke of Urbino and his nephew Francesco Maria della Rovere. And he remained far from Rome, now in France, from whose King, who considered him entirely his own, he received (1499) the rich abbey of Chiaravalle near Milan, now at Savona, where he was bishop, or in other lands of Italy, fearing and feared.
He returned to Rome after the death of Alexander, on 3 Sept. 1503; and, perhaps because of the painful experience of his long exile and of the untrustworthy foreign support, certainly interpreting the sentiment of a large part of the Italians, he said he wanted to be « bono italiano ». He succeeded in preventing the election as pope of the Frenchman Amboise, although he did not then obtain the tiara, which was given to the old Pius III. On the latter's death, he knew how to win, with promises that he neither could nor would keep, the support of Valentino, still strong; and, not without simoniacal machinations, he obtained by unanimous vote the election as pontiff (1 Nov. 1503). He took the name of J. II, almost to indicate his purpose of a work of restoration not unlike that which Julius Caesar had accomplished.
The ultimate goal of his unceasing labor was that religious restoration which was then in the first place necessary. He provided indeed for raising again the prestige and the spiritual authority of the pontificate and of the Church. With a bull, which he published in 1510 with the date of 14 Jan. 1505 and had reconfirmed in the Lateran Council on 16 Feb. 1513, he declared null the papal election made through simony and threatened loss of dignity and goods to whoever took part in it. With another bull, which renewed the Exsecrabilis of Pius II, he struck with excommunication whoever opposed the free exercise of pontifical power or appealed from the pope to a council. He reformed the bull In coena Domini, with which each year, on Maundy Thursday, the excommunicated were denounced; he resolutely upheld the rights of the Church in the face of the Catholic powers; he fought heresy, while also facilitating the conversion of heretics and seeking to moderate the severity of the Spanish Inquisition.
He gave support to the religious Orders and promoted their reform; he nourished devotion to the Most Holy Sacrament and to the Passion of Christ; he cared for the decorum of the sacred functions, and, for those celebrated in St. Peter's, he instituted the chapel of singers, which from him took the name Giulia. He erected dioceses in the lands beyond the ocean and favored the work of missionaries. He issued bulls against the duel and against the custom of appropriating objects brought to land by the waves. He also attempted a reform of the Curia, which the difficulties of the times and the resistance of men prevented from being carried out; and a radical reform he proposed as the aim of the Lateran Council opened on 3 May 1512, although the Council, absorbed by the not easy task of providing for the extinction of the schism and the abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction of France, could do little for reform. He spoke a great deal about the Crusade and thought about it seriously, collecting money and guarding it with jealous care, fitting out ships, promising to take part in it himself, although he did not believe the Crusade possible until peace had been re-established in the world.
A religious activity, certainly, not to be overlooked. But in an age in which political and cultural interests prevailed over religious ones, Julius II saw the salvation of the Church more in the affirmation of its political power and its external splendor than in a spiritual renewal of it: he wished to raise the temporal dominion of the papacy as a bulwark of its spiritual independence, to gather Italy around it against foreign greed, threatening both Italy and the Church, to make of himself, or rather of the papacy, "the dominus et maistro of the world" (M. Sanuto, Diari, X, Venice 1883, col. 80).
He labored therefore in the first place for the renewal, the security, and the enlargement of the Papal State. He held in check the turbulent barons, or bound them to himself by means of kinship with his natural daughter, or with his nephews and relatives; he gave Rome order and tranquility, availing himself also of the new institution (1506) of the Swiss Guard, firmly disciplined and commanded by captains chosen by the pope. To the senator, the conservators and the other city magistrates he left as much authority as seemed to them useful in the interest of the State, and he kept watch over their work by means of the governor and the vice-chamberlain, chosen by him. He strengthened the powers of the legates and castellans in the lands of the Patrimony; and in the various cities he labored, even personally, to make peace between the factions.
He reorganized the administration of justice: he maintained, it is true, according to the common procedure of the age, the causes of ecclesiastics, or of those who, even laymen, were attached to the Curia, distinct from those of other laymen, and subjected the former to the auditor of the Chamber, who was a high prelate; but he removed every other variety of jurisdiction, and gathered the cognizance of the causes of laymen into the hands of the "magistrates of the Capitoline Curia," whose sentences could be reformed by the new magistracy of appeals. For questions pertaining to salaries, the governor was given the power to cut short the ordinary procedure and to reserve the decision to himself. A severe audit at the end of each year, from which not even the governor was exempt, was to prevent or repress abuses. Julius also reorganized the college of notaries and provided for the regular discharge of their office and the custody of documents, creating a college of "scriptores archivi Curiae Romanae" with functions above all of oversight. For the tribunals and notarial offices he commissioned from Bramante the design and began the construction of a building of truly Roman grandeur: the palace on Via Giulia remained unfinished because of the Pope's death.
The same concept of a strong and firmly ordered State inspired Julius II's measures in the field of finances and the economy, even if some of these were determined by the prejudices proper to the age and not all appear worthy of praise. He restored the papal treasury, nearly exhausted by the extravagance of the Borgias, without however laying too heavy a hand with taxes, or resorting to extortion: when he became aware, and it was not always, of embezzlement, he struck inexorably. He implemented a rigid control of revenues and expenditures; he was sparing for himself and his household, prudent in saving, careful in spending. He increased ordinary revenues with a bold monetary reform, bringing the currency back to its real value and ordering that dues be paid with the new silver coins, for which Leonardo da Vinci gave advice and perhaps the design and which took from the Pope the name of "giuli." Extraordinary revenues were the inheritances of cardinals and high dignitaries of the Curia, the proceeds from confiscations and, according to a custom then common to all States, the sale of offices, which at times bordered on simony.
Even the frequent granting of jubilees and indulgences was too similar to a sale. By these means the Pope provided for the enormous expenses of wars, administration, and patronage; and nevertheless the papal treasury rose to perhaps half a million ducats, which the Pontiff destined for future Crusades.
Conscious that the fortune of the State is bound to the well-being of the citizens, he provided for these, attending in time of famine to the supply of grain (for which he created 141 "presidents of the annona"), the revival of agriculture, the development of industry, in particular that of alum, and the increase of commerce.
While he attended to this complex and, on the whole, happy work of internal reorganization, Julius II thought of restoring pontifical authority in those cities of the Papal State that depended on the Pontiff little more than in name. In the dissolution of Valentino's personal dominion, he reconquered some cities of Romagna for the Church; he wrested from the duke the fortresses that had remained faithful to him and did not give them back to the former lords; in the duchy of Urbino he assured the succession to his nephew Francesco Maria della Rovere. With an expedition conducted by him in person, he obtained, without fighting, the submission of Gian Paolo Baglioni, lord of Perugia (Sept. 1506), and forced Giovanni Bentivoglio to leave Bologna, entering it acclaimed as "liberator from tyranny" (11 Nov. 1506).
From the beginning of his pontificate, he had resolutely demanded from the Venetians the restitution of the lands occupied in Romagna at the fall of the Borgia; and for this he had also appealed to the foreign powers, whose armed intervention he did not however welcome, deluding himself perhaps that he could limit their action to diplomatic pressure and a threat. He recovered lesser lands, but not Rimini, nor Faenza, which cut the roads to the north, and, indignant also at the frequent violation of ecclesiastical privileges by the Most Serene Republic, after many vain insistences for an agreement and with great hesitation, he adhered (23 March 1509) to the league that the representatives of Louis XII of France and Maximilian of Austria had concluded to the detriment of the Republic, in Dec. 1508, at Cambrai; a league that would moreover have operated even without him, and in that case to his detriment. He then struck the Venetians with a most fierce bull of excommunication and interdict (27 Apr. 1509) and took part in the war. But when the Republic, defeated at Vailate (14 May) and reduced almost to the extreme, had restored to him the cities of Romagna, he saw the necessity that it be saved from imminent ruin; and after long negotiations he reached an agreement with it, on conditions very advantageous for the papacy, because the Republic renounced among other things its interference in ecclesiastical matters and its monopoly of navigation of the Adriatic, harmful to the coastal cities of the Papal State (15 Feb. 1510).
(Ist. Alinari)
Then, fearful of being reduced to the "chaplain" of the French (Sanuto, loc. cit., col. 631), who were lording it over Italy, he drew close to the Venetians in order to "free Italy from the barbarians," a program summed up in the famous cry, perhaps not his own, "out with the barbarians." He moved in person against Ferrara, "root of the French" (cf. A. Luzio, Isabella d'Este di fronte a G. II, in Arch. stor. lomb., 39 [1912, II], p. 120), of which he was the chief lord; he took Modena from the duke; but at Bologna, dangerously ill, he nearly fell into the hands of the French: the people saved him, whom he knew how to incite to resistance (Oct. 1510). Heedless of the danger of war and the rigors of winter, he besieged Mirandola, the key to the Ferrarese, and entered it through a breach (Jan. 20, 1511). But he had the grief of losing Bologna through the unpopularity or perhaps the treason of the legate Alidosi, all too dear to him, and of seeing him killed, almost before his eyes, by his own nephew, the duke of Urbino.
A grave political error by the king of France, who, having revived the ancient Gallican doctrine in the Synod of Tours (Sept. 1510), had agreed with the Emperor to convoke, in the name of certain rebellious cardinals, a Council at Pisa (May 16, 1511), gave the Pontiff the means to link the struggle against the "barbarians" with the defense of the unity and liberty of the Church. While he in turn convoked (July 25, 1511) a Council in the Lateran, he negotiated a league with Venice and Spain; and, strengthened more vigorously by an illness that seemed mortal, he concluded with them the "Holy League" (Oct. 4, 1511): England acceded to it; the Emperor lost interest in the Council of Pisa, which was unwelcome to the German prelates themselves.
The defeat of the League at Ravenna (Apr. 11, 1512) and the occupation of the Romagna by the French seemed for a moment to bring down the Pope, whom the schismatic Council, having moved from Pisa to Milan, declared suspended (May 21). But the indomitable G. soon recovered his vigor: on May 3 he opened the Council in the Lateran, in which the supreme authority of the Pontiff was reaffirmed. To the coin struck by the king of France with the motto "Perdam Babylonis nomen," he responded with a medal that portrayed him on horseback in the act of driving out the barbarians with a whip and trampling the arms of France. And indeed the French were driven back from the Romagna and shortly afterward from Italy: G. was able to raise a cry of triumph; the Romans rendered him honors such as "neither Caesar nor any other Roman captain" ever had (Sanuto, op. cit., XIV, Venice 1886, col. 458).
The congress of the League at Mantua (Aug. 1512) gave Milan to Massimiliano Sforza, as the Pope wished in order to save the Duchy from Spanish covetousness, and resolved on the return of the Medici to Florence, which was too closely tied to France. But to G. it seemed done "to his dishonor and harm" (A. Luzio, op. cit., p. 120), because it saved the duke of Ferrara and left the foreigners too powerful in Italy. He now wished to take Ferrara from the rebellious vassal, to limit Spanish power, "to see Italy in the hands of Italians" (op. cit., p. 136). But for this, and more to see the Council recognized by the Emperor, he was forced to sacrifice to imperial claims the interests of the Venetians, who were gradually drawing close again to France. Amid these designs death broke his strength, after a long resistance.
The same aim of glorifying the Church inspired his magnificent work as a patron. He was not a man of great culture, although he knew law and Latin letters and loved to have the Commedia read to him, perhaps because of some resemblance between his own nature and Dante's. But he was of great intelligence, of the finest taste, an excellent connoisseur and judge of artists and works of art. Still a cardinal, he had gathered a library, which he later transferred to the Vatican, and had had the basilicas of St. Peter in Chains and of the Sts. Apostles restored, the archiepiscopal palace of Avignon raised, and solid and magnificent fortresses built at Grottaferrata, Ostia and Chiaravalle. Having become Pope, he protected studies and the university; he founded at Fano the first Arabic printing press; he was on familiar terms with illustrious men of letters, such as Sadoleto and Bembo.
But above all he was a wonderful inspirer and protector of artists. From the spring of 1505 he commissioned from Michelangelo the gigantic sepulchral monument, which was very soon interrupted. He later entrusted him with the task of modeling his statue, which was placed in Feb. 1508 over the door of S. Petronio in Bologna and destroyed in 1511 by the fury of the rebellious Bolognese. But, with a singular intuition of a value unknown to the artist himself, he induced him, against his will, to represent on the vault of the Sistine (autumn 1508-Oct. 31, 1512) the gigantic poem of the ancient world straining in expectation of the coming of Christ. Raphael, who portrayed his virile features several times, expressed by G.'s will in the Stanze of the Vatican the great concept of the Christian Middle Ages, of the harmony between human and divine science, and celebrated in various episodes G.'s faith in divine help and his victory over the enemies of the Church and over the barbarians. Over the tomb of the first Roman Pontiff, G. wished that there should be raised, in place of the ancient Basilica, tottering but rich in treasures of faith and art, a great part of which was deplorably dispersed, the new dome designed by Bramante, which should surpass in grandeur and beauty every other house in the world; he laid its first stone on Apr. 18, 1506; he saw the arches already raised on the piers, over which the dome was to rise.
In the Vatican Palace, likewise on a design by Bramante, the courtyards of S. Damaso and of the Belvedere were begun; and in the latter were gathered the Apollo, the Venus, the Laocoön, the first nucleus of the future Museum. A new Rome was rising with its straight streets, flanked by rich buildings, the Giulia more beautiful than any other. The church of S. Maria del Popolo, dear to the della Rovere, was adorned with the frescoes of Pinturicchio and the sculptures of Andrea Sansovino. Truly Rome appeared, as G. wished it to be, the center of the world. Outside the city, Civitavecchia had from Bramante its mighty fortress; Loreto the portico of the Basilica, the apostolic Palace, the marble facing of the S. Casa; churches, palaces, fortresses attested to G.'s munificence.
G. was of tall stature, round head, prominent cheekbones, large dark eyes, a deep and severe gaze, tightly closed lips; the beard, with which he is customarily portrayed, he wore only for a year and a half (late 1510 - Apr. 1512), as a sign, it was said, of his firm will to defeat the French. He seemed, even physically, of "a nature stronger than all others" (Sanuto, op. cit., XI, Venice 1884, col. 741); but he subdued great sufferings with an iron will. He had no slight defects of character: to a Florentine who knew him in his youth he seemed "capricious and little prudent" (cf. Picotti, op. cit., p. 180); he was impetuous, choleric, often violent, intemperate or rather immoderate in eating and drinking, whence he had the reputation, perhaps unjust, of a "drunken old man" (A. Luzio, loc. cit., p. 29, n. 1). Morally he was not, at least in his youth, incorrupt, and perhaps to this must be attributed a dishonorable disease that tormented him to his last years; but he was better than most, even prelates or pontiffs, were in his age; what was said of a most shameful vice of his, when he was already old and Pope, was very probably unfounded malice.
But he had a "great heart and spirit" (A. Luzio, loc. cit., p. 110), a blunt candor, an unshakable tenacity, a prodigious activity, a physical and spiritual energy that was "terrible" (Sanuto, loc. cit., col. 725, and elsewhere repeatedly), that is, as the epithet was understood at the time, beyond the ordinary; which was not, however, divorced from delicacy of feeling and, in his better hours, from a festive pleasantness. Although his enemies cast shadows even upon his orthodoxy, he was a man of firm faith and genuine piety: his motto "Dominus mihi adiutor : non timebo quid faciat mihi homo" was a sincere testimony to his unshakable trust in God.
Shortly before Julius II, on the night of 20-21 February 1513, met death "with such devotion and contrition that he seemed a saint" (A. Luzio, loc. cit., 416), the Roman people had celebrated him as liberator of Italy and conqueror of the schism; to him in death were paid honors such as perhaps to no other pontiff: even his adversaries wept for him with abundant tears because he had torn all Italy, all Christendom from the yoke of the French and the barbarians. He himself, in his conversations with his master of ceremonies Paride de Grassi, said he had been plus quam martyr because he had fought and suffered for Christ.
One may doubt whether that titanic effort of his to drive one foreigner out of Italy with another foreigner was not in vain; one may lament that he too often exchanged the means for the end and made the spiritual authority of the pontificate serve temporal interests, an authority he wished to strengthen by human means; one may consider exaggerated the praise given him by Burckhardt and by others down to Pastor, of "savior of the papacy," since by quite other ways Providence willed that the papacy should find salvation in the imminent storm; one may even think that of this storm he bore some responsibility with that involving of the papacy in incessant earthly quarrels. He nonetheless remains before history a man of upright intentions, of the strongest temper. A great prince and a great Italian, if not a great Pontiff; a gigantic figure, such as Michelangelo idealized marvelously in the Moses of his sepulchral monument. - See pl. LIV.
Bibliography10 works
Giovanni Battista Picotti