Michael Hone

Julius II Michael Hone

Francesco Guicciardini, the great Florentine historian, remembered Julius II ''as a soldier in a cassock; he drank and swore heavily as he led his troops; he was willful, coarse, bad-tempered and difficult to manage. He would ride his horse up the Lateran stairs to his papal bedroom and tether it at the door.'' French ambassador d'Amboise wrote that he was a white-haired fury who took personal command of the soldiers, as he did before the walls of Mirandola, through the snows of December, and when the fortress agreed to surrender, Julius quibbled over the clause that he would spare their lives! For Michelangelo, Julius was a bullying tyrant who threatened to beat him with his staff, while the great artist, on his knees, tried to explain why the completion of the Sistine Chapel was taking so long. On another occasion Julius shouted, ''You want me to have you thrown off that scaffolding!''Julius ended the reign of the Borgia, Pope Alexander VI and his son Cesare. He allowed Henry VIII to marry Catherine of Aragon, the first step in the eventual destruction of the Catholic church in England. He commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Last Judgment and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He was present during the two greatest scandals of the Renaissance, the Pazzi plot against the life of Lorenzo de' Medici and the attempt to replace Henry VII by an imposter, which literally had kings and queens on the edges of their thrones. He was omnisexual, the reason for a full coverage of Renaissance sexuality. And Julius loved being called the Warrior Pope.