Pope from 1503-1513, Julius was known as "the warrior pope" because his pontifical career was spent almost entirely in trying to regain and to enlarge the temporal powers of the papacy.
In the first decade of the 16th Cent, Italy had become victim of the rivalries and ambitions of the monarchies in the West who coveted the immence wealth of the peninsula. Julius II was at the forefront of these imperialistic endeavours. In 1511 he founded the Holy League with Spain, Venice, and later England, to fight against the French. In response, Louis XII of France tried to convene a Council at Pisa to dispose of the Pope. To counter this, Julius convened the Fifth Lateran Council, intended as much as a show of papal authority as it was an attmept to placate the increasingly vocal calls for reforms in the church.
Aside from, or perhaps as part of, his effort to establish the Papacy on a grand scale, Julius was also an ardent patron of Renaissance arts. It was he who bullied — once hitting the artist with a cane, and threatening, on another occasion, to throw him off the scaffold — Michelangelo to paint the now famous ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. To raise fund for the building of St Peter's Basilica he issued a "Jubilee Indulgence" (which his successor Leo X renewed), the sales of which provoked Luther to publish the 95-Theses.
One of the most dazzling examples of the worldly corruption into which the Western church had fallen, Julius II was often the target of ridicule among those who desperately sought to reform the church. Probably the most popular and famous of these was the anonymous pamphet Julius Exclusus published in 1513 (the year of his death), which quite openly asserts that Peter would not open the gate of heaven to the pope.
©ALBERITH