The grandson of a fisherman from Liguria in northern Italy, he was proud of his humble birth and much given to boasting of his poverty-stricken childhood and of having sailed down the coast with cargoes of onions. His plans to pursue a career in commerce had been dramatically cut short in 1471 when, at the age of twenty-seven, he was made a cardinal by his uncle Sixtus IV.
A tall, rough, impulsive, and handsome man, talkative, arrogant, and restless, he had a fiercely commanding expression and a very short temper. He habitually carried a stick with which he beat men who annoyed or provoked him, and he would hurl anything at hand, including his spectacles, at messengers who brought him unwelcome news. He had had many mistresses in the past, from one of whom he had contracted syphilis, and as a cardinal he had fathered three daughters. But he had thereafter shown no interest in women, concentrating his sensual appetites on food and drink, which he enjoyed to the full. He relished game and suckling pig and the strong wines of Greece and Corsica; and during Lent, like many others who could afford to do so, he made do with large dishes of lampreys, prawns, caviar, and tunny fish. He paid no attention to his doctors’ words of caution, and when ill, treated his indisposition by chewing quantities of strawberries and plums, which he believed had curative properties.
He was no scholar, he used to say with defensive pride; he was more suited to the life of a soldier. Indeed, he sometimes said that he ought to have been a soldier; and certainly when he personally led his armies out of Rome to compel the obedience of rebel cities in the Papal States and to recover lost territories for the church, he displayed a taste for hard campaigning that dismayed the less robust cardinals whom he obliged to accompany him. It was Julius II who, unwilling to rely upon capricious and often irresolute mercenaries, decided to form a professional papal army; and this decision led in 1506 to the creation of the Swiss Guards, who remained a fighting force until 1825, when they became a smaller domestic bodyguard, though still retaining their old uniform of slashed doublets, striped hose, and rakish berets, as well as their pikes and halberds.
When a sculptor asked him what should be placed in the hand of a statue of him, he replied, ‘Put a sword in my hand, not a book.’ As a soldier he wore full armour, with a tiara taking the place of a helmet. One contemporary likened him to a ship guided neither by compass nor by charts. ‘No one has any influence over him, and he consults few or none,’ the Venetian ambassador wrote; ‘anything that he has been thinking about during the day has to be carried out immediately,’ the envoy added. ‘Everything about him is on a magnificent scale, both his undertakings and his passions.’
One of his overpowering passions was a deep hatred of the Borgia family. As a cardinal, and fearing assassination, he had fled to France, where he had encouraged Charles VIII to invade Italy and had accompanied him on his campaign. He had failed in his attempt to have a council appointed to depose the pope for simony; but, deprived of the satisfaction of dethroning Alexander VI, ‘that Spaniard of accursed memory,’ he determined to pursue Alexander’s son to the death, to reestablish the church’s rule in the Papal States, and to restore the temporal power of the papacy, which he knew to be essential to his authority.
As Machiavelli wrote, Julius II’s hatred of Cesare ‘was notorious; and it is not to be supposed that the Pope will so quickly have forgotten the ten years of exile which he had had to endure under Alexander VI.’ In a conversation with Giustinian, the new pope said, ‘We do not want [the duke] to be under the illusion that we will favour him, nor that he shall have even one rampart in the Romagna, and although we have promised him something, we intend that our promise shall only extend to the security of his life and of the money and goods that he has stolen.’ For the moment, however, he was prepared to give the impression that the past enmity, which had characterized the relationship between himself and ‘that detested family,’ was now to be modified.
The new pope, having at last achieved the position for which he had yearned for so long, seemed disposed to abide by the undertakings he had given Cesare before the conclave. The Florentines were told to grant the duke and his troops free passage through their territory to the Romagna; while so long as Cesare stayed in Rome, he was free to leave the dark rooms in Castel Sant’Angelo and to occupy apartments in the Vatican. Julius II also promised to confirm Cesare in his appointment as captain-general, and, initially at least, he continued to show respect for Cesare, going so far as to refer to him as ‘our beloved son’ in a brief to Faenza written within days of his election.
Cesare’s duchy had begun to disintegrate in the aftermath of Alexander VI’s death: ‘Only the states of the Romagna stood firm,’ Francesco Guicciardini observed, and they did so because the government had been entrusted by Cesare ‘to the hands of men who ruled with so much justice and integrity that he was greatly loved by them.’ Other writers maintained that, in the words of the Perugian chronicler Matarazzo, ‘the people remained quiet from fear rather than contentment’; while the Venetians generally believed that his subjects were ‘full of discontent because of the tyranny and violence practised by the officials of the Duke Valentino.’
Now Cesare could only count on the loyalty of his Spanish governors in Cesena, Imola, and the fortress of Forlì, but he could rely on the strength of these newly built fortifications. Julius II, however, despite the earlier promises reported by Machiavelli, had no intention of allowing Cesare to retain control of them. ‘We want the states to return to the Church,’ he declared. ‘It is our intention to recover them,’ and although ‘we made certain promises to the Duke,’ he explained, ‘we intended merely to guarantee his personal safety and his fortune, even though, after all, it was stolen from its rightful owners.’
Julius II was an old hand at playing the long game. Fully aware that by depriving Cesare of his duchy in the Romagna, he would create a dangerous political vacuum into which Venice would be the first to step, he needed at all costs to avoid the expansion of an already-powerful Venetian republic in order to preserve his own authority in the Papal States. Equally, he needed to ensure that he did not give Cesare the opportunity to reestablish his own position in the Romagna. He needed, in other words, to tread with considerable care.
It was not long before it became clear that Cesare was, indeed, overconfident in his belief that Julius II would favour him, even to the limited extent that he had been led to believe was his due; and the more clearly he realised that the pope was deceiving him, the more angry he became. When Machiavelli was granted an interview with him early in November, he found him in an unusually emotional mood, angry and resentful, rambling on at length ‘with words full of poison and anger.’ Cesare was no longer the forceful and competent leader Machiavelli had met eighteen months earlier in Urbino.
Other observers gave similar descriptions of ‘an angry, broken man, out of his mind and not knowing what he wanted to do.’ Francesco Soderini described him as ‘inconstant, irresolute, and suspicious, not standing firm in any decision.’ Machiavelli reported that his plans were uncertain:
No one knows whether or not he intends to stay in Rome. Some people seem to think he will go to Genoa, where he is said to have deposited large sums with the merchants there, and from Genoa to go on to Lombardy to raise troops for an advance on the Romagna. He can do this apparently because he had 200,000 ducats deposited with the Genoese merchants. Others believe he will stay in Rome for the Pope’s coronation when, as promised, he will be proclaimed Gonfalonier of the Church.