The Warrior Pope who hired Michelangelo also led his own troops
Julius II commissioned Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel paintings and Raphael's famous rooms, founded the Vatican Museums and began rebuilding St. Peter's Basilica. He also personally led papal forces at the siege of Mirandola. He was nicknamed the Warrior Pope, and many suspect his chosen name honoured Julius Caesar rather than an earlier pope.
Giuliano della Rovere was born in 1443 near Savona, in the Republic of Genoa, to a noble but impoverished family, and was educated among the Franciscans by his uncle. As a young man he was described as rough and fond of bad language, and one historian, Paul Strathern, suggests his heroes were soldiers rather than theologians. When that uncle became Pope Sixtus IV in 1471, Giuliano was made a cardinal within months, an act of overt nepotism, and went on to hold an archbishopric and no fewer than eight bishoprics at once.
Elected pope in 1503, he arrived amid the Italian Wars, when France held Milan, Spain ruled Naples and foreign armies competed across the peninsula. Instead of the crusade and church council his electors had demanded, he set out to centralise the patchwork Papal States and, in his famous phrase, drive the barbarians out of Italy. He first dismantled the influence of the Borgia family of his predecessor, Alexander VI.
His alliances shifted with his goals. He joined the League of Cambrai against Venice to win back the Romagna coast, then reconciled with Venice and formed the Holy League in 1511 to expel the French. Despite heavy losses at Ravenna, the arrival of Swiss mercenaries forced the French back across the Alps. The papacy annexed Parma and Modena, and at the Roman Carnival of 1513 Julius styled himself the liberator of Italy.
In 1506 he also founded the Swiss Guard for his personal protection. To fund St. Peter's, he let those seeking indulgences donate money to the Church. After his death in February 1513, Erasmus mocked him in a satire, Julius Excluded from Heaven, in which Saint Peter turns away a drunken pope who then plots to build a rival paradise.
Source: Pope Julius II
