Julius II

The Papal States that Julius II inherited in 1503 existed mostly on paper. Local dynasties held Perugia, Bologna and much of the Romagna, Venice had taken papal towns along the Adriatic, and the temporal authority a pope needed to govern Rome independently of France or Spain had eroded to almost nothing. Julius chose to recover it in person. In 1506 he rode north at the head of an army, took the submission of Perugia, and entered Bologna in triumph after its ruling family fled, a campaign in which a pope in his sixties commanded troops in the field in a way no successor has done since.

He then built and dismantled alliances with the same directness. The League of Cambrai of 1508 joined France, the empire and Spain against Venice and stripped it of its mainland gains; when French power in Italy grew too great as a result, Julius formed the Holy League of 1511 against France with Venice now as an ally, declaring that he meant to drive the foreigners out of Italy. Erasmus, who had seen him enter Bologna, is generally taken to be the author of the anonymous satire Julius Exclusus, in which the dead pope arrives at the gate of heaven in armour and cannot get in.

The judgment on the temporal wars has always been divided, and it was divided at the time. They restored a papal state that survived until 1870 and gave his successors independence they would otherwise have lacked. They also spent the church's money and moral standing on siege trains, and they were among the abuses that Luther, arriving in Rome as a young friar in 1510, took home with him.

The basilica Constantine had raised over the tomb of Peter had stood for nearly twelve hundred years and was structurally failing. Julius II decided not to repair it but to replace it, and in April 1506 he laid the foundation stone of a new church to Bramante's design, accepting the demolition of the most venerable building in Western Christendom. The project outlasted him by more than a century and passed through Raphael, Michelangelo and Bernini, and paying for it drove the indulgence campaigns of the following decades, including the one that Martin Luther attacked in 1517.

His commissions in the Vatican are the reason his face is familiar. He set Michelangelo, a sculptor who protested that he was not a painter, to fresco the ceiling of his uncle's chapel between 1508 and 1512, and put Raphael to work on the papal apartments at the same time, where the School of Athens and the Disputation of the Sacrament were painted a few rooms away. He also commissioned his own tomb, a project that tormented Michelangelo for forty years and produced the Moses.

A quieter document of his reign reached further than any of them. In 1503 he issued a dispensation permitting Henry, prince of Wales, to marry Catherine of Aragon, the widow of his elder brother Arthur, setting aside the prohibition in Leviticus against marrying a brother's wife. Twenty-six years later Henry VIII argued that no pope had power to dispense from divine law, that his marriage had therefore never been valid, and that the papacy could not undo what it should never have granted. Clement VII refused to annul it, and the Church of England separated from Rome.