LITMIR.BIZ

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foot over rocky slopes, but he would get up at dawn to lead the next day’s march. His energy was such that even the French king responded to his curt call for help against a rebel. Giovanni Bentivoglio, the rebel in question, reviewed his 6000 troops in the main square of Bologna and promised to fight to the death. But steadily the warrior Pope advanced, with his 500 cavalry and the aura of success at Perugia. It was too much for Bentivoglio. On 1 November 1506 he secretly slipped away, and ten days later Julius entered Bologna amid wildly cheering crowds. The following Palm Sunday the Pope returned to Rome, where he was welcomed by arches modelled on that of Constantine, decorated with statues and pictures. True, the arches were only of wood, but their inscriptions left nothing to be desired: ‘Tyrannorum expulsori’, ‘Custodi quietis’ and ‘Veni, vidi, vici.’

      Julius next turned to Faenza and Rimini. First he tried diplomacy, but when he asked to see Venice’s title deeds to the two Adriatic cities, the Venetian ambassador replied with cool insolence: ‘Your holiness will find them written on the back of Constantine’s donation to Pope Sylvester of the city of Rome and the Papal State.’ Julius was furious and confided to Machiavelli, ‘To ruin the Venetians, I’ll join with France, with the Emperor, with anyone.’ This in fact is what he did. In December 1508 he united France, Germany and Spain in the League of Cambrai, ostensibly against the Turk, in fact against Venice, and on 14 May 1509 a powerful French army routed the Venetians near Cremona. Venice immediately handed over Faenza and Rimini to Julius.

      The hardest part of Julius’s task now remained: to expel the French. Julius would repeatedly say how he longed for ‘Italy to be freed from the barbarians.’ If the term ‘barbarians’ savours more of the Roman Emperors than of a Pope, the concept of freeing Italy as a whole—not only the Papal States—was large-minded, and well in advance of most political thinking of the day.

      Julius decided to join with Venice and attack the French through their main ally, Ferrara. He saw the war as a personal trial of strength between himself and Louis XII, ‘a cock who wants all the hens’. After wintering in Bologna, where he was struck down by serious illness and for a time lay delirious, Julius rose from his sickbed, mounted his horse and on 2 January 1511 rode out of the town in high spirits: ‘Let’s see who has the bigger testicles, the King of France or I.’

      In a heavy snowstorm Julius joined his mainly Venetian army outside Mirandola, a key town of 5000 inhabitants 30 miles west of Ferrara, and defended by powerful walls, a moat and 900 troops, part French, part Ferrarese. Julius took command. Wearing armour under a white cloak with a fur collar, his head muffled in a sheepskin hood—‘he looks like a bear,’ wrote the Mantuan ambassador—Julius toured the lines in snow ‘half as high as a horse’, set up his nine cannon, and cursed the enemy: ‘Rebels! Robbers! That swine of a duke!’ He talked of nothing but capturing the town. Returning to his billet in a convent kitchen near the front line, he would chant over and over, ‘Mirandola! Mirandola!’, bringing a smile of admiration even to his half-frozen aides.

      Twelve days later Julius was lying asleep when the convent kitchen received a direct hit from an iron cannon-ball ten inches in diameter. Two of his grooms were wounded but Julius was unhurt. He calmly changed his billet and sent the cannon-ball to the sanctuary of Loreto, where it is still preserved. When the second billet also came under fire, he moved back to the first. Meanwhile the English ambassador arrived and with all the innocence of a newcomer asked why Julius was fighting his compatriots and not the Turk. ‘We’ll talk about the Turk,’ Julius replied, ‘when we’ve taken Mirandola.’

      Everything had to bend to the Pope’s iron will, even his gout-weakened body. In weather so cold that the Po had frozen hard, he was everywhere at once, cheering on his men, directing the cannon. At last the thick walls were breached. On 20 January the commander of Mirandola surrendered to Julius and was obliged to pay 6000 ducats for exemption from pillage. Not waiting to have the gates unbarred, Julius eagerly clambered in through the breach on a wooden ladder.

      Julius’s success at Mirandola had a symbolic value out of all importance to the strategic value of the town. It showed that he was in deadly earnest about driving the French from Italy. He was thus able to secure allies. The end came in 1513, when 18,000 Swiss pikemen routed the French at the battle of Novara. The remnants of Louis’s army straggled home, while papal troops swept up the Po valley.

      Julius had cleared Italy of the French and re-established his authority over the Papal States—two very important achievements. Furthermore, among the city-states abandoned earlier by the French were Parma and Piacenza, both rich, flourishing and strategically placed. Taking the measure of this new Pope who always seemed to win, they declared their wish to become papal cities. The Parmese ambassador addressed a speech to the consistory in which, with more emotion than logic, he recalled that Parma had originally been named Julia Augusta by Julius Caesar, and so ought to belong to the Pope, while a Parmese poet, Francesco Maria Grapaldi, made the same point hexametrically:

       Te Regem, dominum volumus, dulcissime Juli:

       Templa Deis, leges populis, das ocia ferro:

       Es Cato, Pompilius, Cesar, sic Cesare major,

       Sit qualis quantusque velit …

       Julia Parma tua est merito, quae Julia Juli

       Nomen habet, sed re nunc Julia Parma …

       Sweet Julius, we want you for our king,

       Instead of war you bring peace, religion and law:

       Cato you are, Pompilius, a greater than Caesar,

       Be whatever you choose to be …

       Parma which once bore the name of Julius

       Justly belongs to Julius the second …

      —verses which won Grapaldi a laurel wreath from the Pope.

      By annexing Parma and Piacenza Julius considerably strengthened the Papal States, while by expelling the French he brought a glow of pride to all Italians and especially to the Romans. On the evening of 27 June 1512 they celebrated the liberation of Genoa from French rule. The whole city burst into a flood of light. Fireworks shot up and cannon thundered from S. Angelo. The warrior Pope returned to the Vatican amid a procession of torches, while crowds shouted ‘Julius! Julius!’ ‘Never,’ said the Venetian envoy, ‘was any Emperor or victorious general so honoured on entering Rome as the Pope has been today.’

      There were some, however, who refrained from cheering. They believed that by strengthening the Papacy in the things that are Caesar’s, Julius had weakened it in the things that are God’s. Michelangelo wrote a sonnet lamenting that ‘Chalices are turned into helmets and swords, Christ’s cross and thorns to spears and shields’, while Erasmus of Rotterdam, studying Greek in Bologna, had watched Julius’s triumphal entry in 1506 and described his feelings in The Praise of Folly, a book which was to be widely read in Germany:

       Although in the Gospel the apostle Peter says to his divine Master: ‘We have forsaken all to follow you,’ the Popes claim that they possess a patrimony consisting of estates, towns, taxes, lordships; and when, driven by truly Christian zeal, they use fire and sword to hold on to this dear patrimony, when their holy, fatherly arm sheds Christian blood on all sides, then, elated at having humbled these wretches whom they call enemies of the Church, they boast of fighting for that same Church and defending the bride of Christ with apostolic courage.

      The question was as old as the Papacy itself—should the Bishop of Rome imitate the lamb or the lion? If the former, he endangered the truth he had been commissioned to preserve; if the latter, he endangered Christian charity. Julius considered it imperative to preserve his political and economic independence, even by force of arms; others, like Erasmus, considered that the real challenge to the Papacy came over things that are God’s, and that the Pope should shame aggressive princes by turning the other cheek.

      This, however, was not the only grievance to arise from Julius’s temporal and spiritual roles. Shortly after the Pope’s capture of Mirandola five of his cardinals—two Spaniards and three Frenchmen—rode away to join the French king. The fruits of their defection appeared

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