Julius II: The Warrior Pope by Christine Shaw

Abstract

Julius II: The Warrior Pope. By Christine Shaw. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell. 1993. Pp. vi, 360; 23 black and white plates. $39.95.) As the title of this book suggests, Christine Shaw views Julius II (ca. 1445-1513, pope from 150) as primarily a political figure whose preferred tools for achieving his primary goal of restoring the temporal authority of the pope over the Papal States were diplomacy and warfare. While her central thesis may seem to have come out of nineteenth-century historiography, her treatment is at times original because she has used new sources and challenged a number of oft-repeated dicta about this pope. Shaw's research has been conducted principally in contemporary diplomatic reports: mostly printed collections for Florence, Venice, Spin, France, and the Empire, and archival materials for Milan, Mantua, Ferrua, and Bologna. Her use of the previously neglected reports of the agents of the Sforzas and Gonzagas has allowed her to trace in detail Giuliano della Rovie's checkered career as a cardinal and to detect patterns of behavior that would continue into his pontcate. Because these reports concentrated on political affairs, the image of della Rovere that emerges is almost exclusively that of a political figure. Given h topic of the forty-two-year career of a cardinal and pope, her work in the Vatican Library and Archives is surprisingly limited-she provides only twenty references to five codices of papal briefs in the Vatican Secret Archives and cites not one of the over one-hundred Vatican Registers for the pontificate of Julius II. On the bass of firsthand diplomatic reports, Shaw is able to challenge some commonly held views about Julius II. She finds little evidence for the claim that as a young cardinal he was serious, studious, and sober, and notes instead his penchant for display, lack of academic interests, and affair with a mistress that begot his daughter Felice. While he later provided for Felice an Orslni husband and for a niece and nephew other Roman matches, he tempered his nepotism. He appointed never more than two nephews at a time to the Sacred College and was restrained in conferring on his ungrateful and disloyal nephew Francesco Maria delle Rovere fiefdoms in the Papal States. His relatives had little influence in shaping papal policy, and he seldom used them to win support for his plans. Nonetheless, his concern to further the interests of his family took precedence over his desire to free Italy of foreign domination The famous words, fuori i barbari, so often associated with Julius in history books, Shaw cannot find to have ever been spoken by him. Ironically, as Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, he had urged the French to invade Italy to depose Alarvlder VI and establish their rule in Naples. …