Background
Giuliano della Rovere, who became Pope Julius II, was born in December 1443 in Albissola near Savona, Italy. Giuliano della Rovere was the son of Rafaello della Rovere the brother of Francesco della Rovere (later Pope Sixtus IV).
Giuliano della Rovere, who became Pope Julius II, was born in December 1443 in Albissola near Savona, Italy. Giuliano della Rovere was the son of Rafaello della Rovere the brother of Francesco della Rovere (later Pope Sixtus IV).
He was educated among the Franciscans by his uncle, who took him under his special charge and later sent him to a Franciscan friary in Perugia with the purpose of obtaining knowledge of the sciences.
He was elevated to the cardinalate in December 1471 by his uncle Pope Sixtus IV. Giuliano rapidly became an influential member of the College of Cardinals and servant to both Sixtus IV and his successor, Innocent VIII. In 1492 Innocent VIII died, and Cardinal della Rovere was considered Innocent's logical successor. However, because of the greater wealth of the Spaniard Cardinal (Rodrigo) Borgia to purchase votes, the College of Cardinals elected Borgia, and he assumed the title Alexander VI.
The Borgias were vassals of Ferdinand of Aragon, and during Alexander's reign Giuliano resented this foreign influence in Italy and also opposed Alexander's nepotism. Because of his opposition to the Pope, Giuliano underwent much hardship. During most of Alexander's pontificate Giuliano felt it safer to absent himself from Rome.
Alexander VI died in August 1503, and his elderly successor, Pius III, died in October. In November Giuliano was elected pope and assumed the title Julius II.
In 1504 Julius confiscated the landholdings of Cesare Borgia in Italy and ordered his arrest. In the absence of Cesare Borgia and his military forces in the Romagna, Venice occupied the area, including the cities of Rimini, Faenza, Forli, and Cesena. Julius knew the defeat of this second rival to papal authority would require force of arms. In order to raise the money necessary to equip an army, Julius ordered the Dominicans in Germany to sell indulgences. In 1505 Julius marched out of Rome with a small army.
En route to the Romagna, Julius captured the cities of Perugia and Bologna in 1506. Julius then led his troops into Cesena and Forli, which had been evacuated by the Venetians in the face of a threat by Julius to lay an interdict upon Venice. However, Venice adamantly refused to evacuate Faenza and Rimini. Meanwhile, in 1507 the Genoese revolted against their overlord, Piero Soderini, ruler of Florence and a political puppet of France. The French believed Julius had engineered the revolt in order to force their withdrawal from Italy, and the French king, Louis XII, dispatched an army to smash the insurrection. This threat forced Julius to abandon his campaign against Venice and return to Rome.
The enmity between Louis XII and Julius increased when the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian I announced his intention of journeying to Rome in order to be crowned by the Pope. Louis XII feared that Julius had invited the Germans into Italy to participate in another effort to drive France from the peninsula. Since the Venetians also felt threatened by what they believed to be a papal-German alliance, France and Venice formed an alliance. In 1508 war broke out between the Germans and the Franco-Venetian alliance, and before the end of the year the alliance defeated the Germans.
Because of its assistance in this war, France expected to receive territory in northern Italy from Venice, but Venice relinquished no lands. Louis XII also realized Julius had not invited Maximilian into Italy. France, therefore, abandoned its alliance with the Venetians.
Julius took advantage of the Venetian isolation and created the military League of Cambrai to drive Venice from Faenza and Rimini. France and a number of independent city-states in northern Italy joined the league. Maximilian joined in order to revenge his defeat and win back territory in northern Italy which he had lost to the Venetians. Spain, which controlled the kingdom of Naples, also participated in order to drive the Venetians from Adriatic seaports which they held in that kingdom. In 1509 Julius placed an interdict on Venice, and the League of Cambrai declared war on the city-state.
Venice suffered a number of disastrous defeats on land and sea. The French insisted upon the total destruction of Venice as a power in Italy. But this would have upset the balance of power in northern Italy and would have removed a major obstacle to French domination of that area. Therefore, in 1510 Julius negotiated a separate peace with Venice. By the terms of the settlement, Venice surrendered the Romagna to the Pope, the Apulian seaports to the Spanish, and most of its possessions in northern Italy to the other members of the League of Cambrai. Because of this separate peace the members of the League of Cambrai ended hostilities against Venice. Thus, Julius saved the republic of Venice from annihilation.
Julius now had to deal with the final threat to papal supremacy in Italy, the French. In August 1510 Louis XII called all French prelates to a synod at Orléans. Here, Louis declared that papal authority extended only over spiritual matters. He proclaimed his right as a prince and protector of the Church on earth to call a council in order to punish a worldly pope such as Julius and reform the Church. Louis thus hoped to frighten Julius into abandoning his plans to drive France from Italy.
In 1511 Louis XII issued the call for a Church council. By May a small number of cardinals had gathered at Pisa. Louis promised these cardinals rich rewards for their participation. Support for the council also came from Germany, where the 16th-century voices of reform assailed the worldliness of a papacy which seemed more concerned with Italian politics than with religion. The Germans resented the financial burdens placed upon them by the Pope in order to pay for his wars in Italy.
In the face of disaster Julius acted with characteristic audacity. He issued the call for Western Christendom to gather in ecumenical council at the Lateran Basilica in Rome. This bold action won for Julius the religious and political support of the Spanish and the English. These powers, along with the Swiss and the Venetians, in 1511 joined Julius in the Holy League. In fear of this new military alliance, Louis XII withdrew his support of the schismatic Council of Pisa, and at the beginning of 1512 the council ended in failure.
In June 1512 the Holy League attacked the French in northern Italy. The Swiss captured the French-controlled city of Pavia, and the Spanish captured Florence. By the end of the summer the league drove the French out of Italy.
The defeat of the French was a Pyrrhic victory for Julius, for now the Spanish were in control of much of northern Italy. Julius began preparing new alliances to drive them from Italy. But the energy expended through long years of warfare and in manipulating the complicated balance of power in Italy physically and mentally overtaxed Julius. On February 21, 1513, Julius II died.
From the start of his pontificate it became clear that Julius intended to make the papacy the dominant political and military force in Italy and to drive all rivals of papal authority out of the peninsula. In 1503 there were three rivals to papal authority. The first was Cesare Borgia, the son of Alexander VI and conqueror of the richest of the Papal States, the Romagna, in northern Italy. The other rivals were Venice and France. France controlled several important cities in northern Italy, among them Florence and Pavia.
Quotations: "Self-negation is noble, self-culture beneficent, self-possession is manly, but to the truly great and inspiring soul they are poor and tame compared with self-abuse."
Pope Julius long before he became pope had a violent temper. He often treated subordinates and people who worked for him very badly. His manner was gruff and coarse, just as his peasant-like sense of humour. Others suggest that Julius had little sense of humor.
To most historians Julius was manly and virile, an energetic man of action, whose courage saved the Papacy. There was a sense that war caused him serious illness, exhaustion and fatigue, that most popes could not have withstood. To many Julius II has been described as the best in an era of exceptionally bad popes: Alexander VI was evil and despotic, exposing the future Julius II to a number of assassination attempts that required tremendous fortitude.
Physical Characteristics: Julius II is usually depicted with a beard, after his appearance in the celebrated portrait by Raphael, the artist whom he first met in 1509. However, the pope only wore his beard from 27 June 1511 to March 1512, as a sign of mourning at the loss of the city of Bologna by the Papal States. He was nevertheless the first pope since antiquity to grow facial hair, a practice otherwise forbidden by canon law since the 13th century. The pope's hirsute chin may have raised severe, even vulgar criticism, as at one Bologna banquet held on 1510 at which papal legate Marco Cornaro was present. In overturning the ban on beards Pope Julius challenged Gregorian conventional wisdom in dangerous times. Julius shaved his beard again before his death, and his immediate successors were clean-shaven; nonetheless Pope Clement VII sported a beard when mourning the sack of Rome. Thenceforward, all popes were bearded until the death of Pope Innocent XII in 1700.
Quotes from others about the person
Ludwig von Pastor wrote, "Paris de Grassis, his Master of Ceremonies, who has handed on to us so many characteristic features of his master's life, says that he hardly ever jested. He was generally absorbed in deep and silent thought...."
As Belford-Clarke's unauthorized Americanized [version of] Encyclopædia Britannica (1890) states, "He does not appear to have joined the order of St. Francis, but to have remained one of the secular clergy until his elevation in 1471 to be bishop of Carpentras [in France], shortly after his uncle succeeded to the papal chair."
Julius was not the first pope to have fathered children before being elevated to high office, and is believed to have had a daughter born to Lucrezia Normanni in 1483 - after he had been made a cardinal.
Despite producing an illegitimate daughter (and having at least one mistress), it was suggested that Julius may have had homosexual lovers - although there is little evidence that the pope was ever sexually active.