As both a pope and a man, Julius had many faults. He was
impetuous—“so impetuous,” wrote the contemporary historian Francesco
Guicciardini, “that he would have been brought to ruin had he not been helped
by the reverence felt for the Church, the discord of the princes and the
condition of the times”—mercurial, vindictive, a poor organizer, and a
deplorable judge of character. Though an adept diplomatic tactician, he had
little sense of long-term strategy. Eaten up by worldly ambition, he was
utterly unscrupulous in the pursuit of his ends. Certain qualities, however, he
possessed in full measure. One was courage; another was indomitability of spirit.
On his journey back to Rome, at the age of nearly seventy, he was already
contemplating a new league, headed by himself and comprising Venice, Spain,
England, and if possible the empire, whose combined forces would drive the
French once and for all from the Italian Peninsula; and by the beginning of
July negotiations had begun.
These presented no serious problems. Ferdinand of Spain had
already gained all he could have hoped for from the League of Cambrai and had
no desire to see any further strengthening of the French position in Italy. In
England, Ferdinand’s son-in-law Henry VIII willingly agreed to keep his rival
occupied in the North while his allies did the same in the South—although he
was obliged to point out to the pope, while accepting his proposals, that it
would have been better if they had not been carried by an obvious double agent
(recommended, it appears, by the late Cardinal Alidosi), who was regularly
reporting all developments to King Louis. Venice, which throughout the
negotiations was fighting hard—and on the whole successfully—to resist French
offensives in the Veneto and Friuli, asked nothing better. Maximilian, as
usual, dithered; but even without him, the new league promised to be a force to
be reckoned with.
One reason, apart from his natural temperament, for the
emperor’s ambivalent attitude was the proposed Church Council at Pisa which he
and King Louis had jointly sponsored. Already Louis was beginning to regret the
idea, and support for it was rapidly falling away. After two short sessions,
local hostility was to force its removal to Milan; and there, although under
French protection, it was openly ridiculed to the point where a local
chronicler forbore to record its proceedings because, he claimed, they could
not be taken seriously and anyway he was short of ink.
Meanwhile the pope, having almost miraculously recovered
from an illness during which his life had been despaired of, was able to
proclaim the Holy League on October 4 and begin preparations for war. He soon
found, however, that King Louis also held an important new card in his hand:
his nephew Gaston de Foix, Duc de Nemours, who at the age of twenty-two had
already proved himself one of the outstanding military commanders of the day.
Courageous, imaginative, and resourceful, this astonishing young man could make
a decision in an instant and, having taken it, could move an army like
lightning. A dash from Milan in early February 1512 was enough to thwart an
attempt by a papal army to recover Bologna; unfortunately, it also suggested to
the citizens of Bergamo and Brescia that with the French forces away on
campaign this was an opportune moment to rise in revolt and return to their old
Venetian allegiance. They were quickly proved wrong. Marching night and day in
bitter weather—and incidentally, smashing a Venetian division which tried to
intercept him in a battle fought by moonlight at four in the morning—Nemours
was at the walls of Brescia before the defenses could be properly manned, and
he and his friend Bayard led the assault, fighting barefoot to give themselves
a better grip on the sloping, slippery ground. Brescia was taken by storm, the
leader of the revolt was publicly beheaded in the main square, and the whole city
was given over to five days’ sack, during which the French and German troops
fell on the local inhabitants, killing and raping with appalling savagery. It
was another three days before the 15,000 corpses could be cleared from the
streets. Bergamo hastily paid 60,000 ducats to escape a similar fate, and the
revolt was at an end.
The campaign, however, was not. Nemours, determined to give
his enemies no rest, returned to Milan to gather fresh troops and then
immediately took the field again. With an army that now amounted to some
25,000, he marched on Ravenna and laid siege to the town. As a means of drawing
out the papal army, the move was bound to succeed. Its commander, the Spanish
viceroy in Naples, Ramón de Cardona, could not allow a city of such importance
to be captured under his nose without lifting a finger to save it. And so on
Easter Sunday, April 11, 1512, on the flat, marshy plain below the city, the
battle was joined.
Of all the encounters recorded in Italy since Charles VIII
had taken his first, fateful decision to establish a French presence in the
peninsula nearly twenty years before, the Battle of Ravenna was the bloodiest.
When at last the papalists fled from the field they left behind them nearly
10,000 Spanish and Italian dead. Several of the leading Spanish captains, some
of them seriously wounded, were in French hands, as was the papal legate,
Cardinal de’ Medici. Ramón de Cardona himself, who had taken flight rather
earlier in the day—he is said not to have drawn rein until he reached Ancona—was
one of the few to survive unharmed. But it had been a Pyrrhic victory. The
French losses had also been considerable, and, worst of all, Nemours himself
had fallen at the moment of triumph, in a characteristically impetuous attempt
to head off the Spanish retreat. His place was taken by the elderly Seigneur
Jacques de La Palice, who was possessed of none of his speed or panache. Had
the young man lived, he would probably have rallied what was left of the army
and marched on Rome and Naples, forcing Julius to come to terms; but La Palice
was cast in a more cautious mold. He contented himself with occupying Ravenna,
where he was unable to prevent an orgy of butchery and rape which surpassed
even that suffered by the Brescians a few weeks before.
Now there suddenly occurred one of those extraordinary
changes of political fortune which render Italian history as confusing to the
reader as it is infuriating to the writer. When the news of Ravenna reached
him, Julius, foreseeing an immediate French advance on Rome, prepared for
flight. Just before he was due to leave, however, he received a letter from his
captive legate, whom La Palice had unwisely permitted to correspond with his
master. The French, wrote Cardinal de’ Medici, had suffered losses almost as
great as those of the League; they were tired and deeply demoralized by the
death of their young leader; their general was refusing to move without
receiving instructions and confirmation of his authority from France. At about
the same time the Venetian ambassador in Rome sought an audience with the pope
to assure him that, contrary to widespread rumors, the republic had not
accepted any French proposals for a separate peace and had no intention of
doing so.
At once Julius took new courage. Overpowered, at least
temporarily, in the military field, he flung all his energies into the Church
Council that he had summoned for May 1512. This had now become more necessary
than ever, since King Louis’s renegade Council of Milan had taken advantage of
the victory of Ravenna to declare the pope contumacious and suspend him from
office. It was true that even in Milan itself few people took the findings of
so transparently political a body very seriously; nonetheless, this open split
in the Church could not be allowed to go unchecked or unanswered. On May 2,
with all the state ceremonial of which the papal court was capable, the Supreme
Pontiff was borne in his litter to the Lateran, followed by fifteen cardinals,
twelve patriarchs, ten archbishops, fifty-seven bishops, and three heads of
monastic orders: a hierarchical show of strength that made the handful of
rebels in Milan seem almost beneath notice, precisely as it was intended to do.
At its second session this Lateran Council formally declared the proceedings of
the Council of Pisa/Milan null and void and all those who had taken part in it
schismatics.
On that very same day Pope Julius also proclaimed the
adhesion of the Emperor Maximilian to the Holy League, and Maximilian now gave
orders that all subjects of the empire fighting with the French army should
immediately return to their homes on pain of death. To La Palice, this was
disastrous news. He had already suffered a serious depletion of his French
troops, most of whom had been recalled to deal with the impending invasion of
Henry VIII in the north; the precipitate departure of his German mercenaries
now left him in the ridiculous position of a general without an army—or at
least without any force capable of holding the Swiss and Venetians whom he
suddenly found ranged against him. Meanwhile, the Spanish and papal forces were
also back in the field and, although only a shadow of what they had been before
their recent defeat, were able to advance virtually unopposed on all fronts. By
the beginning of July the pope had not only regained all his territories but
had even extended them to include Reggio Emilia, Parma, and Piacenza. La
Palice, with what was left of his army, had no choice but to return to France,
where Louis XII, who only three months before might have had the entire
peninsula within his power, now saw all his hopes annihilated.
Pope Julius II died on February 21, 1513, of a fever,
probably brought on by the syphilis from which he had suffered for many years.
There had been little of the priest about him apart from his dress and his
name. His pontificate had been dominated by politics and by war; his strictly
ecclesiastical activities had been largely confined to routine matters, though
it was he who had issued the fateful dispensation which authorized Henry VIII
to marry Catherine of Aragon, the widow of his elder brother, Arthur.
By far Julius’s most important legacy was as a patron of the
arts. He had a passion for classical statuary, enriching the Vatican
collections with masterpieces such as the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoön.
(The latter had been accidentally unearthed in 1506 by a man digging in his
vine
yard.)
But he is nowadays chiefly remembered for his decision to replace the old
Basilica of St. Peter with a new building, infinitely more magnificent than its
predecessor. The plans for this he eventually entrusted to Donato Bramante,5
who, abandoning his original design for a Greek cross-in-square church with the
tomb of St. Peter directly beneath a vast dome, eventually decided on a more
traditional Latin basilica with nave and aisles, together with a portico
derived from the Pantheon. Away went the ancient mosaics, the icons, the huge
medieval candelabra; it was not long before the architect had acquired a new
nickname, Il Ruinante. The work on St. Peter’s alone would have kept him fully
employed for the rest of his life, but Julius also made him responsible for a
radical redesign of the Vatican Gardens.
The pope also gave encouragement and employment to the
twenty-six-year-old Raphael, whom he commissioned to fresco his own
apartments—he refused absolutely to inhabit those of the hated Alexander—and to
Michelangelo, whom, as we know, he had to bully mercilessly (“I’m a sculptor,
not a painter,” the artist protested) into painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
It has been suggested that, despite the bullying, the two men were lovers.
Both, certainly, were homosexual, and Julius, although he had engendered three
daughters while still a cardinal, was widely accused of sodomy. On the whole,
the idea seems improbable; but we shall never know.
Excessive modesty was never one of the failings of Pope
Julius II, and as early as 1505 he also commissioned Michelangelo to design his
tomb. This was originally intended to stand thirty-six feet high and to contain
forty statues, all of them over life size; according to Vasari, the principal
reason for his decision to rebuild St. Peter’s was in order to provide suitable
accommodation for it. Unfortunately, the money ran out and the project had to
be radically revised. A far more modest version can now be seen in San Pietro
in Vincoli in Rome; but Julius was actually buried in what there was of his new
St. Peter’s—as, doubtless, he would have wished.
