Pope Julius II

Giuliano della Rovere was born on December 5, 1443, in Albisola Superiore, a small town near Savona in the territory of the Republic of Genoa ^[1]. His family was of modest standing, and little in his childhood suggested the extraordinary career ahead. The della Rovere fortunes changed abruptly in 1471, when his uncle Francesco della Rovere, a Franciscan theologian, was elected pope as Sixtus IV ^[2].

Giuliano had received his education under Franciscan supervision, reportedly studying at Perugia, and he entered the clergy along the path his uncle had cleared ^[1]. Sixtus IV practiced nepotism on a grand scale, and his nephew was among the chief beneficiaries. Within months of the election, Giuliano was made a cardinal, taking the same titular church of San Pietro in Vincoli that his uncle had held ^[2].

The young cardinal accumulated benefices at a pace remarkable even by the standards of the fifteenth century. He held the archbishopric of Avignon along with a string of bishoprics including Lausanne, Coutances, Viviers, Mende, Ostia, and Bologna, drawing revenues that made him one of the wealthiest members of the Sacred College ^[1]. This financial base, combined with a forceful temperament that observers described as impatient and domineering, gave him political weight in Rome for three decades before he wore the papal tiara.

Anyone asking who was Pope Julius II before his election must reckon with a long apprenticeship in diplomacy and intrigue. Under Sixtus IV, Cardinal della Rovere served as legate to France from 1480 to 1482, negotiating between Louis XI and the Habsburgs and sharpening the political instincts he would later deploy as pope ^[1]. After his uncle's death in 1484 he engineered the election of Innocent VIII, a pliable Genoese through whom della Rovere exercised substantial influence over papal policy ^[2].

The election of 1492 reversed his fortunes. His great rival Rodrigo Borgia won the tiara as Alexander VI, and the two men detested one another. Fearing for his safety, della Rovere fled Rome in 1494 and took refuge at the French court, where he encouraged Charles VIII to invade Italy and press for a council that might depose the Borgia pope ^[1]. The invasion came, but the council never did, and the cardinal spent most of the Borgia pontificate in exile, waiting.

Alexander VI died in August 1503. His successor, Pius III, reigned for only twenty six days before dying himself. In the conclave that followed, della Rovere secured election in a single day, one of the shortest conclaves on record, aided by lavish promises to fellow cardinals and a reported accommodation with Cesare Borgia, whom he soon discarded ^[2]. On November 1, 1503, he became Pope Julius II, choosing a name that recalled the first Julius but that critics soon linked to Julius Caesar.

Julius II inherited a Papal State fragmented by decades of misrule. Venice had seized towns in the Romagna after the collapse of Cesare Borgia's duchy, and local lords ruled Perugia and Bologna in defiance of Rome. Julius resolved to recover everything, and unlike his predecessors he was prepared to lead armies in person ^[1]. In 1506 he marched north at the head of papal troops, entered Perugia, and then took Bologna, expelling the Bentivoglio family. Contemporaries were startled by the sight of a pope in the field, and Erasmus, who witnessed the triumphal entry into Bologna, later satirized the spectacle ^[3].

Venice proved a harder problem. In 1508 Julius joined the League of Cambrai, an alliance with France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire directed against the Venetian Republic. The allied victory at Agnadello in 1509 forced Venice to surrender the disputed Romagna towns, and Julius lifted the interdict he had laid on the city ^[1].

Having used France, he then turned against it. Alarmed by French power in northern Italy, Julius formed the Holy League in 1511 with Venice, Spain, England, and the Swiss, proclaiming the aim of driving the barbarians out of Italy ^[2]. The campaign brought humiliations, including the loss of Bologna and a battlefield defeat at Ravenna in April 1512, but French losses and Swiss intervention forced a withdrawal from Milan that same year. By his death, the Papal States were larger and more secure than they had been in generations, a central fact in any Pope Julius II biography ^[1].

Among Pope Julius II achievements, none has proved more durable than his patronage of the arts. In 1506 he laid the foundation stone of a new St. Peter's Basilica, ordering the demolition of the thousand year old Constantinian church and entrusting the design to Donato Bramante, whose centralized plan set the project on the course that would occupy architects for the next century ^[4]. The decision was audacious and expensive; the indulgences later sold to fund the construction became a grievance that helped ignite the Reformation after his death.

Julius drew Michelangelo to Rome in 1505 to design a colossal tomb, a project that shrank over decades but eventually yielded the celebrated Moses. In 1508 the pope redirected the sculptor to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, built by his uncle Sixtus IV. Michelangelo worked on the frescoes until 1512, producing the cycle of Genesis scenes that remains among the most famous paintings in the world ^[5]. In the same years Julius brought the young Raphael to the Vatican to fresco his private apartments, the rooms now known as the Raphael Stanze, which include the School of Athens ^[4].

He was also, in effect, the founder of the Vatican Museums. Around 1506 he installed his collection of ancient sculpture, including the newly unearthed Laocoon group and the Apollo Belvedere, in the Belvedere courtyard designed by Bramante, opening classical antiquity to artists and scholars ^[6]. Raphael's portrait of the aged pope, painted around 1511 and now in the National Gallery in London, fixed the image of the bearded, brooding pontiff for posterity ^[7].

Julius II was famous in his own time for terribilita, an untranslatable Italian word suggesting awe inspiring force of will. Ambassadors described a man who shouted, threatened, and drove projects forward with relentless energy, even when crippled by gout and fever ^[1]. He grew a beard during the campaign of 1510 to 1511 as a vow connected to the war against France, becoming the first pope in centuries to be portrayed bearded ^[7].

His private conduct before his election reflected the loose norms of the Renaissance hierarchy. As a cardinal he fathered at least one daughter, Felice della Rovere, born around 1483, whom he later married into the Orsini family; she became one of the most influential women in Rome ^[8]. As pope, however, he showed little of the dynastic favoritism that had disgraced the Borgia court, and contemporaries credited him with keeping papal finances in order despite constant war and building ^[2].

He was not a theologian and made no pretense of learning. His faith expressed itself in institutions and stone: fortresses, roads, the new basilica, and a reorganized papal administration. In 1506 he also founded the Swiss Guard, recruiting soldiers from the cantons as a permanent papal bodyguard, a corps that still serves the Vatican today ^[6].

The final phase of the pontificate mixed military crisis with institutional reform. In 1511 a group of dissident cardinals, backed by King Louis XII of France, convened a schismatic council at Pisa aimed at deposing Julius. The pope answered by summoning a general council of his own, the Fifth Lateran Council, which opened in Rome in May 1512 and outlived him, continuing until 1517 ^[2]. The council condemned the Pisan assembly and took up questions of church reform, though its results proved modest.

Julius also issued one of the most consequential rulings on papal elections. His bull against simony, published in 1510 and confirmed by the Lateran Council, declared any papal election obtained by bribery null and void, a direct response to the corrupt conclave of 1492 and, by many accounts, to his own promises in 1503 ^[1].

Worn out by campaigns, illness, and a decade of ceaseless activity, Julius II died in Rome on the night of February 20 to 21, 1513, at the age of sixty nine ^[1]. Romans mourned him in unusual numbers; whatever his faults, he was seen as a pope who had defended Italy and restored the dignity of the papal office. He was buried in St. Peter's, though the grand tomb Michelangelo had designed was never completed as planned; the reduced monument stands in San Pietro in Vincoli ^[5].

Historians have judged Julius II in sharply different registers, and the contrast itself is one of the essential Pope Julius II facts. Machiavelli analyzed him in The Prince as a ruler whose impetuosity happened to suit his times, succeeding where caution would have failed ^[3]. Erasmus mocked him anonymously in the satire Julius Excluded from Heaven, imagining Saint Peter refusing the armored pope entry at the gates. Critics then and since have asked what a fisherman's successor was doing at the head of an army.

Yet the achievements were real and lasting. He rebuilt the Papal States into a viable political entity that endured until 1870, reformed the machinery of papal elections, and founded institutions, from the Swiss Guard to the Vatican's sculpture collections, that survive five centuries later ^[6]. His name is stamped on the Via Giulia in Rome, one of the straight streets he drove through the medieval city as part of an ambitious program of urban renewal ^[4].

Above all, his patronage defined the High Renaissance. Without Julius there would be no Sistine ceiling as we know it, no Raphael Stanze, and no new St. Peter's on Bramante's scale. The paradox endures: a pope remembered less for sanctity than for willpower, whose wars are half forgotten but whose commissions draw millions of visitors to Rome every year ^[5].