The attendants who marched by the Pope's closed litter, as he returned to Rome on June 26, 1511, concluded from his unrestrained sobs and groans that his power, if not his life, approached its end. His health was ruined and his troops were scattered. But there was an energy mightier than that of Hildebrand in his worn frame, and with some improvement in his condition he raised his head once more. He had in the spring created eight new cardinals, to replace the seceders, and he now announced that a real Ecumenical Council would assemble at the Lateran on April 19, 1512. That was his answer to Pisa, and to the Papal aspirations of the Cardinal of Rouen and the Emperor-elect. He again fell dangerously ill—so ill that his death was confidently expected. Election-intrigue filled the corridors of the Vatican, and a band of democrats held a meeting in the Capitol and decided, at his death, to restore the republican liberty of Rome. In a few weeks the terrible old man rose from his bed, thin and white but with unbroken energy, and scattered the intriguers. He anathematized the schismatical cardinals, and announced (October 4th) that he had formed a Holy League with Ferdinand of Spain and Venice for the defence of the Church; Maximilian was presently induced to join the League, and before the end of 1511 Henry VIII. was persuaded, by a promise of assistance in his designs on France, to give it his adhesion. Only three months before Julius had apparently lain at the point of death, his new possessions utterly ruined. Now he once more commanded the situation. The schismatical Council of Pisa, which opened on November 1st, turned out a puny French conciliabulum, with fourteen bishops and five abbots to represent the universal Church.
The campaign which began in January need not be followed in detail. After a series of varying engagements the French won a crushing victory at Ravenna, and there was panic at Rome. The cardinals demanded peace with France, but Giulio de' Medici, cousin of Cardinal Giovanni, who had been captured by the French, now came to describe the exhausted condition of the French army, and Julius resolved to prosecute the war. He opened his General Council at the Lateran on May 3rd, and had at least the satisfaction of seeing seventy Italian bishops respond to his summons. Then, covering his preparations by a pretence of considering the terms which Louis XII. offered him, he engaged further troops, fired his commanders, and induced Maximilian to withdraw the four thousand Tirolese mercenaries from the French ranks. In a few weeks the French were driven out of Italy, the schismatics were forced to transfer their discredited Council to French soil, and the Pope found himself master of Bologna, Ravenna, Rimini, Cesena, Parma, Piacenza, and Reggio. In appraising Julius as founder of the Papal States one must bear in mind the history of this remarkable period. In October, 1511, Julius was stricken and apparently ruined; by the summer of 1512 he was master of the richest provinces of Italy. But he had not left Rome, and his personal action at this juncture was slight in comparison with those tremendous earlier exertions which had ended in disastrous failure.
Julius was far from satisfied, and his conduct in the hour of victory was at the low political level of the time. He assisted the Medici to impose themselves again on Florence, and the Sforza to recover Milan. He then made a lamentable effort to secure Ferrara. The Duke came to Rome, under a safe-conduct of the Papal General Fabrizio Colonna, and of the Spanish ambassador, to plead that he had acted only in honourable discharge of his engagements to France, Julius had approved the safe-conduct, but when the Duke refused to surrender his territory to the Church, the Pope affected to discover that he had committed crimes not covered by the safe-conduct and detained him. The Colonna redeemed the credit of Italy by cutting their way through the Papal guards and restoring Alfonso, after romantic adventures, to his duchy. When the poet Ariosto was afterwards sent by Alfonso to make peace with the Pope, he had to fly for his life; Julius, in one of his now frequent outbursts of violence, threatened to have him thrown into the sea.
To the end Julius pursued his tortuous diplomacy. Neither Spain nor Germany wished to see any increase of his power, and he was forced to abandon his designs on Ferrara. He then disrupted his Holy League, and made a fresh alliance with Maximilian against Venice and to the disadvantage of Spain. Julius was concerned about the growing power of Spain in Italy; and we shall hardly be unjust if we suspect that, as Alexander VI. had done, he dreamed of adding Naples to the Papal dominion. But he never entirely recovered his health, and his great schemes were closed by death on February 20, 1513. He was neither a great soldier nor a great statesman. There is no indication that his interference in the military operations was useful, and, as I pointed out, the one permanently successful campaign was fought while he directed an ecclesiastical Council at Rome. In the sphere of politics and diplomacy he relied on cunning and deceit rather than statesmanship, and, if he had not represented a spiritual power to which the nations were bound to return in the end, he would have been mercilessly crushed. He had, also, little ability to organize such possessions as he obtained, and his career is marred by violent outbursts and acts of treachery and cruelty. It is sometimes said that he was the greatest Pope since Innocent III. One imagines the shade of that great spiritual ruler shuddering; and one is disposed to agree with Guicciardini that, if Julius was great, a new meaning must be put on the word. He had wonderful energy, and by good fortune his aim was finally attained.
In view of this strenuous campaign for the recovery of the Papal States, we can expect only a slender record of strictly Pontifical work. Julius attended to the propagation of the faith in the new lands beyond the seas, and he impelled the Inquisitors to check the spread of heresy. That he restrained the Spanish Inquisition, and supported its exclusion from Naples, was not due to humane feeling, but to its exorbitant claims of independent authority. He forbade duelling, and endowed a college of singing for the maintenance of the Papal Choir. His Lateran Council was, of course, a political expedient, but there is evidence that when death closed his career Julius was turning more seriously to plans of reform. In spite of his own Bull against simony, the Curia remained as corrupt as ever, and money was raised in all the evil ways known to it. It is, however, curious and creditable to have to place one great reform to the merit of Julius. He passed so drastic a decree against corruption at Papal elections that the rivals who gathered in Rome after his death did not dare to employ bribery.
Julius is probably most deserving of esteem for his artistic work. The literary parasites who swarmed about his successor have associated the glory of late mediæval Rome with the name of Leo X., but discriminating research is convincing historians that Leo did not even sustain the great work of his predecessor. The bold scheme which Julius adopted was due to his artists rather than to his own inspiration, yet he has the distinction—no mean distinction for one immersed, as he was, in an exacting policy—of reflecting at once the vast ideas which were put before him. The new St. Peter's which he was compelled to think of building was not intended at first to be of great dimensions, but he accepted Bramante's design of a church far larger even than the St. Peter's of today, and, in spite of his costly wars, he enabled the architect to employ 2500 workers. He accepted Bramante's designs for a new Vatican and for the Cortile di Damaso. He engaged Michael Angelo to carve a princely marble tomb for himself—his one great luxury—and, when his interest was transferred to the less selfish task of building St. Peter's, he set the artist to the execution of his immortal work on the roof of the Sistine Chapel. Michael Angelo made also, as I have noted, a great statue of Julius at Bologna, but this was destroyed at the return of the Bentivogli. There were many quarrels between the two men, but Michael Angelo found in Julius a manliness and a greatness of conception, if not a feeling for art, the lack of which he bitterly criticized in Leo X.
Cristoforo Romano, Sansovino, Perugino, Signorelli, Pinturicchio, and other great artists were enlisted in the work of making the ecclesiastical quarter of Rome the artistic centre of the world. Some of the finest of the old Greek sculptures which were then being sought in the rubbish of mediæval Italy were bought for the Belvidere, and painters of distinction were richly encouraged. New frescoes and new tombs were ordered in the churches of Rome; the walls and aqueducts were repaired; handsome new streets were laid out; and the cardinals and wealthier citizens were moved to co-operate with the Pontiff in his plans for the exaltation of Rome. We may deplore that the money for these plans was largely obtained by the sale of spiritual offices and indulgences, and we must resent the fact that money obtained by these means was diverted to the purposes of war. But the magnificence of the design and the generosity with which Julius prosecuted it as long as he lived seem to be a more solid and enduring merit than his good fortune—for in the decisive stage it was little more—in recovering a rich dominion which would but serve to enhance the frivolity of his successor.
FOOTNOTES:
[287] Burchard, Diarium, iii., 293.
[288] Guicciardini's Storia d'Italia and Burchard's Diarium are the chief authorities, supplemented by the dispatches of the Italian ambassadors. There is a slight and somewhat antiquated biography by M.A.J. Dumesnil (Histoire de Jules II., 1873) and an abler study by M. Brosch (Papst Julius II., 1878). J.F. Loughlin has a candid account, chiefly based on Brosch, of his early career in The American Catholic Quarterly Review. Special treatises will be noticed in the course of the chapter, but there is little dispute about the facts I give. Full references will be found in the very ample, if somewhat lenient, study of Dr. Pastor (vi.), and in the works of Creighton, Gregorovius, and von Reumont.