title: Jay Rockefeller

text: Rockefeller initially supported the use of force based upon the evidence presented by the intelligence community that linked Iraq to nuclear ambitions. After the Niger uranium forgeries, in which the Bush administration gave forged documents to U.N. weapons inspectors to support allegations against Iraq, Rockefeller started an investigation into the falsification and exaggeration of evidence for the war. Through the investigations, he became an outspoken critic of Bush and the Iraq war. As chair of the Intelligence committee, he presided over a critical report on the Administration's handling of intelligence and war operations.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: Rockefeller and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the final two pieces of the Phase II report on Iraq war intelligence on June 5, 2008. Rockefeller said, "The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein."


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: In July 2007, Rockefeller announced that he planned to introduce legislation before the August Congressional recess that would give the FCC the power to regulate TV violence. According to the edition of July 16, 2007, of Broadcasting & Cable, the new law would apply to both broadcast as well as cable and satellite programming. This would mark the first time that the FCC would be given power to regulate such a vast spectrum of content, which would include almost everything except material produced strictly for direct internet use. An aide to the senator said that his staff had also been carefully formulating the bill in such a way that it would be able to pass constitutional scrutiny by the courts.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: In 2007, Rockefeller began steering the Senate Intelligence Committee to grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies who were accused of unlawfully assisting the National Security Agency (NSA) in monitoring the communications of American citizens.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: This was an about-face of sorts for Senator Rockefeller, who had hand-written a letter to Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003 expressing his concerns about the legality of NSA's warrantless wire-tapping program. Some have attributed this change of heart to the spike in contributions from telecommunications companies to the senator just as these companies began lobbying Congress to protect them from lawsuits regarding their cooperation with the National Security Agency.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: Between 2001 and the start of this lobbying effort, AT&T employees had contributed only $300 to the senator. After the lobbying effort began, AT&T employees and executives donated $19,350 in three months. The senator has pledged not to rely on his vast fortune to fund his campaigns, and the AT&T contributions represent about 2% of the money he raised during the previous year.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: Although publicly deploring torture, Rockefeller was one of two Congressional Democrats briefed on waterboarding and other secret CIA practices in the early years of the Bush Administration, as well as the existence of taped evidence of such interrogations (later destroyed). In December 2007, Rockefeller opposed a special counsel or commission inquiry into the destruction of the tapes, stating "it is the job of the intelligence committees to do that."


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: On September 28, 2006, Rockefeller voted with a largely Republican majority to suspend habeas corpus provisions for anyone deemed by the Executive Branch an "unlawful combatant," barring them from challenging their detentions in court. Rockefeller's vote gave a retroactive, nine-year immunity to U.S. officials who authorized, ordered, or committed acts of torture and abuse, permitting the use of statements obtained through torture to be used in military tribunals so long as the abuse took place by December 30, 2005.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: Rockefeller's vote authorized the President to establish permissible interrogation techniques and to "interpret the meaning and application" of international Geneva Convention standards, so long as the coercion fell short of "serious" bodily or psychological injury. The bill became law on October 17, 2006.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: On February 29, 2008, he endorsed Barack Obama for president of the United States, citing Obama's judgment on the Iraq war and national security issues, and calling him the right candidate to lead America during a time of instability at home and abroad. This endorsement stood in stark contrast to the results of the state primary that was easily won by Hillary Clinton.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: On April 7, 2008, in an interview for "The Charleston Gazette", Rockefeller criticized John McCain's Vietnam experience:


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: The McCain campaign called for an apology from Senator Rockefeller and for Barack Obama, whom Rockefeller endorsed, to denounce the comment. Rockefeller later apologized for the comment and the Obama campaign issued a statement expressing Obama's disagreement with the comment. Senator Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina noted that "John didn't drop bombs from 35,000 feet. ... the bombs were not laser guided (in the 1960 and 1970s)".


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: On April 1, 2009, Rockefeller introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 - S.773 before Congress. Citing the vulnerability of the Internet to cyber-attacks, the bill makes provisions to turn the Department of Commerce into a public-private clearing house to share potential threat information with the owners of large private networks. It authorizes the Secretary of Commerce to sequester any information deemed necessary, without regard to any law.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: It would also authorizes the president to declare an undefined "cyber-emergency" which would allow them to shut down any and all traffic to what they considers to be a compromised server.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: On June 1, 2011, Rockefeller sponsored the fourth West Virginia Homeland Security Summit and Expo. The event ran two days and focused on homeland security with Rockefeller emphasizing cybersecurity.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: In 1997, Rockefeller co-authored the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) – a program aimed at giving low-income children health insurance coverage. Annually, CHIP has been successfully covering about 6 million children, who otherwise would have been uninsured. On September 30, 2007, the program expired, requiring Congress to reauthorize the legislation. On August 2, 2007, the vote for reauthorization passed legislation by a strong, bipartisan vote (68-31).


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: Rockefeller authored successful legislation that required the Department of Veterans Affairs, for the first time, to provide a wide range of extended care services—such as home health care, adult day care, respite care, and hospice care—to veterans who use the VA health care system.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: Rockefeller is also a strong supporter of the fight against Alzheimer's and neurological disease. The Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute (BRNI) was founded in Morgantown in 1999 by Rockefeller and his family to help advance medical and scientific understanding of Alzheimer's and other diseases of the brain. BRNI is the world's only non-profit institute dedicated exclusively to the study of both human memory and diseases of memory. Its primary mission is to accelerate neurological discoveries from the lab, including diagnostic tools and treatments, to the clinic to benefit patients who suffer from neurological and psychiatric diseases. A $30 million state-of-the-art BRNI research facility was opened at West Virginia University in Fall 2008. The approximately three-level building will house 100 scientists by 2012.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: On Healthcare Reform, Rockefeller has been a proponent of a public option, fighting with some Democrats on the finance committee, in particular Max Baucus, the chairman of the committee, who contended that there was not enough support for a public option to gather the 60 votes needed to prevent a filibuster. Baucus asked repeatedly for Rockefeller to stop speaking on the issue.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: On September 29, 2009 Rockefeller offered an amendment to the Baucus Health Bill in the Senate Finance Committee to add a public option. The amendment was rejected 15 to 8, with five Democrats (Baucus, Kent Conrad, Blanche Lincoln, Tom Carper, Bill Nelson) and all Republicans voting no.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: Rockefeller supported President Barack Obama's health reform legislation; he voted for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in December 2009, and he voted for the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: Since 1967, Rockefeller has been married to the former Sharon Lee Percy, the chief executive officer of WETA-TV, the leading PBS station in the Washington, D.C., area, which broadcasts such programs as "PBS NewsHour" and "Washington Week". She is a twin daughter of Senator Charles Harting Percy (1919—2011) and Jeanne Valerie Dickerson.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: John Davison "Jamie" Rockefeller V is married to Emily Rockefeller. She is the daughter of former National Football League (NFL) Commissioner Paul Tagliabue. They have two daughters, Laura Chandler Rockefeller (born c. 2000) and Sophia Percy Rockefeller (born c. 2002), and one son, John Davison Rockefeller VI (born c. 2007).


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: The Rockefellers reside in Northwest Washington, D.C., and maintain permanent residence in Charleston, West Virginia. They have a ranch in the Grand Teton National Park in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. President Bill Clinton, a friend of Rockefeller's, and the Clinton family vacationed at the ranch in August 1995.


title: Jay Rockefeller

text: Rockefeller is related to several Republican Party supporters and former officeholders: his paternal grandmother Abigail Greene "Abby" Aldrich (1874–1948) was a daughter of Rhode Island Senator Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich (1841–1915). John Davison Rockefeller Jr. (1874–1960) and Abby's youngest son was banker David Rockefeller (1915–2017). David's brother Winthrop Rockefeller (1912–1973) served as Governor of Arkansas (1967–71). Winthrop and David's brother Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (1908–1979) served as Governor of New York (1959–73) and as Vice President of the United States (1974–77) under President Gerald Ford. Jay is also a first cousin of Arkansas Lt. Governor Winthrop Paul Rockefeller (1948–2006).


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was an effort by abolitionist John Brown, from October 16 to 18, 1859, to initiate a slave revolt in Southern states by taking over the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (since 1863, West Virginia). It has been called the dress rehearsal for, or Tragic Prelude to the Civil War.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Brown's party of 22 was defeated by a company of U.S. Marines, led by First Lieutenant Israel Greene. Ten of the raiders were killed during the raid, seven were tried and executed afterwards, and five escaped. Several of those present at the raid would later be involved in the Civil War: Colonel Robert E. Lee was in overall command of the operation to retake the arsenal. Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart were among the troops guarding the arrested Brown, and John Wilkes Booth was a spectator at Brown's execution. Walt Whitman projected his poetic I as a silent spectator in his poem "Year of Meteors," although he was not actually present. John Brown had originally asked Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, both of whom he had met in his transformative years as an abolitionist in Springfield, Massachusetts, to join him in his raid, but Tubman was prevented by illness and Douglass declined, as he believed Brown's plan was suicidal.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: The raid caused more excitement in the United States than had been seen in many years. It was extensively covered in the press nationwide—it was the first such national crisis to be publicized using the new electrical telegraph. Reporters were on the first train leaving for Harpers Ferry after news of the raid was received, at 4 p.m. on Monday, October 17. It carried Maryland militia, and parked on the Maryland side of the Harpers Ferry bridge, just east of the town (at the hamlet of Sandy Hook, Maryland). As there were few official messages to send or receive, the telegraph carried on the next train, connected to the cut telegraph wires, was "given up to reporters", who "are in force strong as military". By Tuesday morning the telegraph line had been repaired, and there were reporters from "The New York Times" "and other distant papers".


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: The label "raid" was not used at the time. A month after the attack, a Baltimore newspaper listed 26 terms used, including "insurrection", "rebellion", "treason", and "crusade". "Raid" was not among them.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Brown's raid was at first viewed as madness, the work of a fanatic. It was his words and letters after the raid and at his trial, "Virginia v. John Brown", aided by the writings of supporters including Henry David Thoreau, that turned him into a hero and icon for the Union.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: John Brown rented the Kennedy Farmhouse, with a small cabin nearby, north of Harpers Ferry, in Washington County, Maryland, and took up residence under the name Isaac Smith. Brown came with a small group of men minimally trained for military action. His group eventually included 21 men besides himself (16 white men, five Black men). Northern abolitionist groups sent 198 breech-loading .52-caliber Sharps carbines ("Beecher's Bibles"). He ordered from a blacksmith in Connecticut 950 pikes, for use by Blacks untrained in the use of firearms, as few were. He told curious neighbors that they were tools for mining, which aroused no suspicion as for years the possibility of local mining for metals had been explored. Brown "frequently took home with him parcels of earth, which he pretended to analyse in search of minerals. Often his neighbors would visit him when he was making his chemical experiments and so well did he act his part that he was looked upon as one of profound learning and calculated to be a most useful man to the neighborhood."


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: The pikes were never used; a few Blacks in the engine house carried one, but none used it. After the action was over and most of the principals dead or imprisoned, they were sold at high prices as souvenirs. Harriet Tubman had one, and Abby Hopper Gibbons another; the Marines returning to base each had one. When all had been taken or sold, an enterprising mechanic started making and selling new ones. "It is estimated that enough of these have been sold as genuine to supply a large army." Virginian Fire-Eater Edmund Ruffin had them sent to the governors of every slave state, with a label that said "Sample of the favors designed for us by our Northern Brethren". He also carried one around in Washington D.C., showing it to every one he could, "so as to create fear and terror of slave insurrection".


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: The United States Armory was a large complex of buildings that manufactured small arms for the U.S. Army (1801–1861), with an Arsenal (weapons storehouse) that was thought to contain at the time 100,000 muskets and rifles.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Brown attempted to attract more black recruits, and felt the lack of a Black leader's involvement. He tried recruiting Frederick Douglass as a liaison officer to the slaves in a meeting held (for safety) in an abandoned quarry at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. It was at this meeting that ex-slave "Emperor" Shields Green, rather than return home with Douglass (in whose house Green was living), decided to join with John Brown on his attack on the United States Armory, Green stating to Douglass "I believe I will go with the old man". Douglass declined, indicating to Brown that he believed the raid was a suicide mission. The plan was "an attack on the federal government" that "would array the whole country against us. ...You will never get out alive", he warned.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: According to Osborne Anderson, "the Old Captain told us, we stood nine chances to one to be killed; but, said the Captain at the same time[,] 'there are moments when men can do more dead than alive.'"


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: The Kennedy Farmhouse served as "barracks, arsenal, supply depot, mess hall, debate club, and home". It was very crowded and life there was tedious. Brown was worried about arousing neighbors' suspicions. As a result, the raiders had to stay indoors during the daytime, without much to do but study (Brown recommended Plutarch's Lives), drill, argue politics, discuss religion, and play cards and checkers. Brown's daughter-in-law Martha served as cook and housekeeper. His daughter Annie served as lookout. She remarked later that these were the most important months of her life. Brown wanted women at the farm, to prevent suspicions of a large all-male group. The raiders went outside at night to drill and get fresh air. Thunderstorms were welcome since they concealed noise from Brown's neighbors.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Brown did not plan to execute a quick raid and immediately escape to the mountains. Rather, he intended to use those rifles and pikes he captured at the arsenal, in addition to those he brought along, to arm rebellious slaves with the aim of striking terror in the slaveholders in Virginia. Believing that on the first night of action, 200 to 500 slaves would join his line, Brown ridiculed the militia and the regular army that might oppose him. He planned to send agents to nearby plantations, rallying the slaves, and to hold Harpers Ferry for a short time, with the expectation that as many volunteers, white and black, would join him as would form against him. He would then move rapidly southward, sending out armed bands along the way that would free more slaves, obtain food, horses, and hostages, and destroy slaveholders' morale. Brown intended to follow the Appalachian Mountains south into Tennessee and even Alabama, the heart of the South, making forays into the plains on either side.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: to a total of $600, to be his drillmaster. Forbes was an English mercenary who served Giuseppe Garibaldi in Italy. Forbes' "Manual for the Patriotic Volunteer" was found in Brown's papers after the raid. Brown and Forbes argued over strategy and money. Forbes wanted more money so that his family in Europe could join him. Forbes sent threatening letters to Brown's backers in an attempt to get money. Failing in this effort, Forbes traveled to Washington, DC, and met with U.S. Senators William H. Seward and Henry Wilson. He denounced Brown to Seward as a "vicious man" who needed to be restrained, but did not disclose any plans for the raid. Forbes partially exposed the plan to Senator Wilson and others. Wilson wrote to Samuel Gridley Howe, a Brown backer, advising him to get Brown's backers to retrieve the weapons intended for use in Kansas. Brown's backers told him that the weapons should not be used "for other purposes, as rumor says they may be". In response to warnings, Brown had to return to Kansas to shore up support and discredit Forbes. Some historians believe that this trip cost Brown valuable time and momentum.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Estimates are that at least eighty people knew about Brown's planned raid in advance, although Brown did not reveal his total plan to anyone. Many others had reasons to believe that Brown was contemplating a move against the South. One of those who knew was David J. Gue of Springdale, Iowa, where Brown had spent time. Gue was a Quaker who believed that Brown and his men would be killed. Gue decided to warn the government "to protect Brown from the consequences of his own rashness". He sent an anonymous letter to Secretary of War John B. Floyd:


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: He was hoping that Floyd would send soldiers to Harpers Ferry. He hoped that the extra security would motivate Brown to call off his plans.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Even though President Buchanan offered a $250 reward for Brown, Floyd did not connect the John Brown of Gue's letter to the John Brown of Pottawatomie, Kansas, fame. He knew that Maryland did not have an armory (Harpers Ferry is in Virginia, today West Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Maryland.) Floyd concluded that the letter writer was a crackpot, and disregarded it. He later said that "a scheme of such wickedness and outrage could not be entertained by any citizen of the United States".


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Brown's second in command John Henry Kagi wrote to a friend on October 15, the day before the attack, that they had heard there was a search warrant for the Kennedy farmhouse, and therefore they had to start eight days sooner than planned.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: On Sunday night, October 16, 1859, at about 11 PM, Brown left three of his men behind as a rear-guard, in charge of the cache of weapons: his son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppock, and Francis Jackson Meriam, and led the rest across the bridge and into the town of Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown detached a party under John Cook, Jr., to capture Colonel Lewis Washington, great-grandnephew of George Washington, at his nearby Beall-Air estate, free his slaves, and seize two relics of George Washington: a sword Lewis Washington said had been presented to George Washington by Frederick the Great, and two pistols given by Marquis de Lafayette, which Brown considered talismans. The party carried out its mission and returned via the Allstadt House, where they took more hostages and freed more slaves.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Brown's men needed to capture the Armory weapons and then escape before word could be sent to Washington. The raid was going well for Brown's men. They cut the telegraph line twice, to prevent communication in either direction: first on the Maryland side of the bridge; slightly later on the far side of the station, preventing communication with Virginia.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: A free Black man was the first casualty of the raid: Heyward Shepherd, a baggage handler at the Harpers Ferry train station. He was shot from behind when he by chance encountered the first of the raiders, refused to freeze, and headed back to the station. (See Heyward Shepherd monument.) That a black man was the first casualty of an insurrection whose purpose was to aid Blacks, and that he disobeyed the raiders, made him a hero of the "Lost Cause" pro-Confederacy movement. But in fact as he was dying, Shepherd said he did not know about the raid and thought the men were robbers. But the fact remains that Brown's men willingly gunned down a free black man, and did that first before all else.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: The shot and a cry of distress were heard by physician John Starry, who lived across the street from the bridge and walked over to see what was happening. After he saw it was Shepherd and that he could not be saved, Brown let him leave. Instead of going home he started the alarm, having the bell on the Lutheran church rung, sending a messenger to summon help from Charles Town, and then going there himself, after having notified such local men as could be contacted quickly.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Some of Brown's men were posted so as to control both the Potomac and the Shenandoah bridges. Others went into the town; it was the middle of the night and a single watchman was the only person at the Armory. He was forced to turn over his keys.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Brown had been sure that he would get major support from slaves ready to rebel; his followers said to a man that he had told them that. But Brown had no way to inform these slaves; they did not arrive, and Brown waited too long for them. The South, starting with Governor Wise, whose speech after Harpers Ferry was reprinted widely, proclaimed that this showed the truth of their old allegation, that their slaves were happy and did not want freedom. Osborne Anderson, the only raider to leave a memoir, and the only Black survivor, put the lie to this:


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: About 1:15 AM the eastbound Baltimore & Ohio express train from Wheeling—one per day in each direction—was to pass through towards Baltimore. The night watchman ran to warn of trouble ahead; the engineer stopped and then backed up the train. Two train crew members who stepped down to reconnoiter were shot at. Brown boarded the train and talked with passengers for over an hour, not concealing his identity. (Because of his abolitionist work in Kansas, Brown was a "notorious" celebrity; he was well known to any newspaper reader.) Brown then told the train crew they could continue. According to the conductor's telegram they had been detained for five hours, but according to other sources the conductor did not think it prudent to proceed until sunrise, when it could more easily be verified that no damage had been done to the tracks or bridge, and that no one would shoot at them. The passengers were cold on the stopped train, with the engine shut down; normally the temperature would have been around 5 °C (41 °F), but it was "unusually cold". Brown's men had blankets over their shoulders and arms; John Cook reported later having been "chilled through". The passengers were allowed to get off and they "went into the hotel and remained there, in great alarm, for four or five hours."


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Several times, Brown later called this incident his "one mistake": "not detaining the train on Sunday night or else permitting it to go on unmolested".


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: The train departed at dawn, and at about 7 AM arrived at the first station with a working telegraph, Monocacy, near Frederick, Maryland, about east of Harpers Ferry. The conductor sent a telegram to W. P. Smith, Master of Transportation at B&O headquarters in Baltimore. Smith's reply to the conductor rejected his report as "exaggerated", but by 10:30 AM he had received confirmation from Martinsburg, Virginia, the next station west of Harpers Ferry. No westbound trains were arriving and three eastbound trains were backed up on the Virginia side of the bridge; because of the cut telegraph line the message had to take a long, roundabout route via the other end of the line in Wheeling, and from there back east via Pittsburgh, causing delay. At that point Smith informed the railroad president, John W. Garrett, who sent telegrams to Major General George H. Steuart of the First Light Division, Maryland Volunteers, Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise, U.S. Secretary of War John B. Floyd, and U.S. President James Buchanan.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: At about this time Armory employees began arriving for work; they were taken as hostages by Brown's party. Reports differ on how many there were, but there were many more than would fit in the small engine house. Brown divided them into two groups, keeping only the ten most important in the engine house; the others were held in a different Armory building. According to the report of Robert E. Lee, the hostages included:


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: All save the last were held in the engine house. According to a newspaper report, there were "not less than sixty"; another report says "upwards of seventy". they were detained in "a large building further down the yard". The number of rebels sometimes was inflated because some observers, who had to remain at a distance, thought that the hostages were part of Brown's party.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: As it became known that citizens had been taken hostage by an armed group, men of Harpers Ferry found themselves without arms other than fowling-pieces, which were useless at a distance.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Military companies from neighboring towns began to arrive late Monday morning. Among them was Captain John Avis, who would soon be Brown's jailor, who arrived with a company of militia from Charles Town.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Also according to the report of Lee, who does not mention Avis, the following volunteer militia groups arrived between 11 AM and his arrival in the evening:


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Expecting that thousands of slaves would join him, Brown stayed too long in Harpers Ferry. Harpers Ferry is on a narrow peninsula, almost an island; it is sometimes called "the Island of Virginia". By noon hopes of escape were gone, as his men had lost control of both bridges leading out of town, which because of the terrain were the only practical escape routes. The other bridge, of which not even the pillars remain (the visible pillars are from a later bridge), went east over the Shenandoah River from Harpers Ferry.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: The militia companies, under the direction of Colonels R. W. Baylor and John T. Gibson, forced the insurgents to abandon their positions and, since escape was impossible, fortify themselves in "a sturdy stone building", the most defensible in the Armory, the fire engine house, which would be known later as John Brown's Fort. (There were two fire engines; which Greene described as old-fashioned and heavy, plus a hose cart.) They blocked the few windows, used the engines and hose cart to block the heavy doors, and reinforced the doors with rope, making small holes on the walls and through them trading sporadic gunfire with the surrounding militia. Between 2 and 3 there was "a great deal of firing".


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: During the day four townspeople were killed, including the mayor, who managed the Harpers Ferry station and was a former county sheriff. Eight militiamen were wounded. But the militia, besides the poor quality of their weapons, were disorderly and unreliable. "Most of them [militiamen] got roaring drunk." "A substantial proportion of the militia (along with many of the townspeople) had become a disorganized, drunken, and cowering mob by the time that Colonel Robert E. Lee and the U.S. Marines captured Brown on Tuesday, October 18." The "Charleston Mercury" called it a "broad and pathetic farce". According to several reports, Governor Wise was outraged at the poor performance of the local militia.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: At one point Brown sent out his son Watson and Aaron Dwight Stevens with a white flag, but Watson was mortally wounded by a shot from a town man, expiring after more than 24 hours of agony, and Stevens was shot and taken prisoner. The raid was clearly failing. One of Brown's men, William H. Leeman, panicked and made an attempt to flee by swimming across the Potomac River, but he was shot and fatally injured while doing so. During the intermittent shooting, another son of Brown, Oliver, was also hit; he died, next to his father, after a brief period. Brown's third participating son, Owen, escaped (with great difficulty) via Pennsylvania to the relative safety of his brother John Jr.'s house in Ashtabula County in northeast Ohio, but he was not part of the Harpers Ferry action; he was guarding the weapons at their base, the Kennedy Farm, just across the river in Maryland.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Late in the afternoon President Buchanan called out a detachment of U.S. Marines from the Washington Navy Yard, the only federal troops in the immediate area: 81 privates, 11 sergeants, 13 corporals, and 1 bugler, armed with seven howitzers. The Marines left for Harper's Ferry on the regular 3:30 train, arriving about 10 PM. Israel Greene was in charge.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: To command them Buchanan ordered Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee, conveniently on leave at his home, just across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, to "repair" to Harpers Ferry, where he arrived about 10 PM, on a special train. Lee had no uniform readily available, and wore civilian clothes.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: At 6:30 AM Lee began the attack on the engine house. He first offered the role of attacking it to the local militia units, but both commanders declined. Lee then sent Lt. J. E. B. Stuart, serving as a volunteer aide-de-camp, under a white flag of truce to offer John Brown and his men the option of surrendering. Colonel Lee informed Lt. Israel Greene that if Brown did not surrender, he was to direct the Marines to attack the engine house. Stuart walked towards the front of the engine house where he told Brown that his men would be spared if they surrendered. Brown refused and as Stuart walked away, he made a pre-arranged signal—waving his hat—to Lt. Greene and his men standing nearby.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Greene's men then tried to break in using sledgehammers, but their efforts were unsuccessful. He found a ladder nearby, and he and about twelve Marines used it as a battering ram to break down the sturdy doors. Greene was the first through the door and with the assistance of Lewis Washington, identified and singled out John Brown. Greene later recounted what events occurred next:


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Quicker than thought I brought my saber down with all my strength upon [Brown's] head. He was moving as the blow fell, and I suppose I did not strike him where I intended, for he received a deep saber cut in the back of the neck. He fell senseless on his side, then rolled over on his back. He had in his hand a short Sharpe's cavalry carbine. I think he had just fired as I reached Colonel Washington, for the Marine who followed me into the aperture made by the ladder received a bullet in the abdomen, from which he died in a few minutes. The shot might have been fired by someone else in the insurgent party, but I think it was from Brown. Instinctively as Brown fell I gave him a saber thrust in the left breast. The sword I carried was a light uniform weapon, and, either not having a point or striking something hard in Brown's accouterments, did not penetrate. The blade bent double.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Two of the raiders were killed, and the rest taken prisoner. The hostages were freed and the assault was over. It lasted three minutes.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Colonel Lee and Jeb Stuart searched the surrounding country for fugitives who had participated in the attack. Few of Brown's associates escaped, and among the five who did, some were sheltered by abolitionists in the North, including William Still.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: All the bodies were taken out and laid on the ground in front. "A detail of [Greene's] men" carried Brown and Edwin Coppock, the only other white survivor of the attack on the engine house, to the adjacent office of the paymaster, where they lay on the floor for over a day. Until they went with the group to the Charles Town jail on Wednesday, there is no record of the location of the two surviving captured Black raiders, Shields Green and John Anthony Copeland, who were also the only two survivors of the engine house with no injuries. Green attempted unsuccessfully to disguise himself as one of the enslaved of Colonel Washington being liberated.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Five people, in addition to several reporters, came almost immediately to Harpers Ferry to interview Brown. He was interviewed at length as he lay there over 24 hours; he had been without food and sleep for over 48 hours. ("Brown carried no provisions on the expedition, as if God would rain down manna from the skies as He had done for the Israelites in the wilderness.") The first interviewers were Virginia Governor Wise, his attorney Andrew Hunter, who was also the leading attorney in Jefferson County, and Robert Ould, United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent by President Buchanan. Governor Wise having left—he set up a base in a Harpers Ferry hotel—Brown was then interviewed by Senator James M. Mason, from Winchester, Virginia, and Representatives Charles J. Faulkner, from Martinsville, Virginia, and Copperhead Clement Vallandigham, from Ohio. (Brown lived for years in Ohio, and both Watson and Owen Brown were born there.) Vallandingham was on his way from Washington to Ohio via the B&O Railroad, which of course would take him through Harpers Ferry. In Baltimore he was informed about the raid.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Up until this point, most public opinion in the North and West had seen Brown as a fanatic, a crazy man, attacking Virginia with only 22 men, of whom 10 were killed immediately, and 7 others would soon be hanged, as well as 5 deaths and 9 injuries among the Marines and local population. With the newspaper reports of these interviews, followed by Brown's widely reported words at his trial, the public perception of Brown changed suddenly and dramatically. According to Henry David Thoreau, "I know of nothing so miraculous in our history. Years were not required for a revolution of public opinion; days, nay hours, produced marked changes."


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Governor Wise, though firmly in favor of Brown's execution, called him "the gamest man I ever saw". Representative Vallandingham, described later by Thoreau as an enemy of Brown, made the following comment after reaching Ohio:


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Like Mason (see below), Vallandingham thought Brown could not possibly have thought of and planned the raid by himself.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Virginia Governor Wise, with a force of ninety men, who were disappointed that the action was already over, arrived from Richmond about 1 PM Tuesday. "Learning how quickly the Marines had crushed the raid, Wise 'boiled over', and said he would rather have lost both legs and both arms from his shoulders and hips than such a disgrace should have been cast upon it [Virginia, since Brown held off all the local militia]. That fourteen white men and five negroes should have captured the government works and all Harper's Ferry, and have found It possible to retain them for [even] one hour, while Col. Lee, with twelve marines, settled the matter in ten minutes."


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Wise interviewed Brown while he, along with Stevens, was lying on the floor of the paymaster's office at the Arsenal, where they would remain until, over thirty hours later, they were moved to the Jefferson County jail. Brown, despite his wounds, was "courteous and afable". Andrew Hunter took notes, but there is no transcript of this interview. One exchange was as follows:


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: The paymaster's clerk at the Arsenal, Captain J.E.P. Dangerfield (not to be confused with Dangerfield Newby), was taken hostage when he arrived for work. He was present at this interview, and remarked that: "Governor Wise was astonished at the answers he received from Brown." Back in Richmond, on Saturday, October 22, in a speech widely reported in the newspapers, Wise himself stated:


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Wise also reported the opinion of Lewis Washington, in a passage called "well known" in 1874: "Colonel Washington says that he, Brown, was the coolest and firmest man he ever saw in defying danger and death. With one son dead by his side, and another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand and held his rifle with the other, and commanded his men with the utmost composure, encouraging them to be firm, and to sell their lives as dearly as they could."


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Virginia Senator James M. Mason lived in nearby Winchester, and would later chair the Select Senate committee investigating the raid. He also came immediately to Harpers Ferry to interview Brown. Congressmen Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, who called Brown "sincere, earnest, practical", Charles J. Faulkner of Virginia, Robert E. Lee, and "several other distinguished gentlemen" were also present. The audience averaged 10 to 12. Lee said that he would exclude all visitors from the room if the wounded men were annoyed or pained by them, but Brown said he was by no means annoyed; on the contrary, he was glad to be able to make himself and his motives "clearly understood".


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: A reporter-stenographer of the "New York Herald" produced a "verbatim" transcript of the interview, although it started before he arrived, shortly after 2 PM. Published in full or part in many newspapers, it is the most complete public statement we have of Brown about the raid.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Lee and the Marines, except for Greene, left Harper's Ferry for Washington on the 1:15 AM train, the only express east. He finished his report and sent it to the War Department that day.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: He made a synopsis of the events that took place at Harpers Ferry. According to Lee's report: "the plan [raiding the Harpers Ferry Arsenal] was the attempt of a fanatic or madman". Lee also believed that the Blacks in the raid were forced by Brown. "The blacks, whom he [John Brown] forced from their homes in this neighborhood, as far as I could learn, gave him no voluntary assistance." Lee attributed John Brown's "temporary success" to the panic and confusion and to "magnifying" the number of participants involved in the raid. Lee said that he was sending the Marines back to the Navy Yard.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: "Governor Wise is still [Wednesday] here busily engaged in a personal investigation of the whole affair, and seems to be using every means for bringing to retribution all the participators in it."


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: A holograph copy of Brown's Provisional Constitution, held by the Yale University Library, bears the handwritten annotation: "Handed to Gov. Wise by John Brown on Wed Oct 19/59 before he was removed from the U.S. grounds at Harpers Ferry & while he lay wounded on his cot."


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: On Wednesday evening the prisoners were moved by train from Harpers Ferry to Charles Town, where they were placed in the Jefferson County jail, "a very pretty jail, ...like a handsome private residence", the press reported. Governor Wise and Andrew Hunter, his attorney, accompanied them. The Jefferson County jail was "a meek-looking edifice, [which] must have been a respectable private residence". Brown wrote his family: "I am supplied with almost everything I could desire to make me comfortable". According to the "New York Tribune"'s reporter on the scene:


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Brown was hastily processed by the legal system. He was charged by a grand jury with treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, murder, and inciting a slave insurrection. A jury found him guilty of all charges; he was sentenced to death on November 2, and after a legally-required delay of 30 days he was hanged on December 2. (This execution was witnessed by the poet Walt Whitman and the actor John Wilkes Booth; Booth would later assassinate President Abraham Lincoln.) At the hanging and en route to it, authorities prevented spectators from getting close enough to Brown to hear a final speech. He wrote his last words on a scrap of paper given to his jailer Capt. John Avis, whose treatment Brown spoke well of in his letters:


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: [H]ad I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Southerners had a mixed attitude towards their slaves. Many Southern whites lived in constant fear of another slave insurrection; almost paradoxically, whites claimed that slaves were content in bondage, blaming slave unrest on Northern abolitionists. After the raid Southerners initially lived in fear of slave uprisings and invasion by armed abolitionists. The South's reaction entered the second phase at around the time of Brown's execution. Southerners were relieved that no slaves had volunteered to help Brown, as they were incorrectly told by Governor Wise and others (see John Brown's raiders#Black participation), and felt vindicated in their claims that slaves were content. After Northerners had expressed admiration for Brown's motives, with some treating him as a martyr, Southern opinion evolved into what James M. McPherson called "unreasoning fury".


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: The first Northern reaction among antislavery advocates to Brown's raid was one of baffled reproach. Wm. Lloyd Garrison called the raid "misguided, wild, and apparently insane". But through the trial and his execution, Brown was transformed into a martyr. Henry David Thoreau, in "A Plea for Captain John Brown", said, "I think that for once the Sharp's rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them", and said of Brown, "He has a spark of divinity in him." Though "Harper's Ferry was insane", wrote the religious weekly the "Independent," "the controlling motive of his demonstration was sublime". To the South, Brown was a murderer who wanted to deprive them of their property (slaves). The North "has sanctioned and applauded theft, murder, and treason", said "De Bow's Review". According to the "Richmond Enquirer", the South's reaction was "horror and indignation".


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: When examining the events which led to the Civil War, Brown's raid is the last major event (see sidebar, above). According to the "Richmond Enquirer", "The Harper's Ferry invasion has advanced the cause of Disunion, more than any other event that has happened since the formation of the Government; it has rallied to that standard men who formerly looked upon it with horror; it has revived, with tenfold strength[,] the desire of a Southern Confederacy."


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: His well-publicized raid, a failure in the short term, contributed to Lincoln's election in 1860, and Jefferson Davis "cited the attack as grounds for Southerners to leave the Union, 'even if it rushes us into a sea of blood. Seven Southern states seceded to form the Confederacy. The Civil War followed; Brown seemed to be calling for war in his last message before his execution: "the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood".


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: However, as put by David Reynolds, "The raid on Harpers Ferry helped dislodge slavery, but not in the way Brown had foreseen. It did not ignite slave uprisings throughout the South. Instead, it had an immense impact because of the way Brown "behaved" during and after it, and the way it was "perceived" by key figures on both sides of the slavery divide. The raid did not cause the storm. John Brown and the reaction to him did."


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Brown's raid, trial, and execution energized both the abolitionists in the North and the pro-slavers in the South, and brought a flurry of political organizing. Public meetings in support of Brown, sometimes also raising money for his family, were held across the North. "These meetings gave the era's most illustrious thinkers and activists an opportunity to renew their assault on slavery." It strongly reinforced Southern sentiment for secession.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Counting John Brown, there were 22 raiders, 15 white and 7 Black. 10 were killed during the raid, 7 were tried and executed afterwards, and 5 escaped. In addition, Brown was assisted by at least two local enslaved people; one was killed and the other died in jail.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Many of John Brown's homes are today small museums. John Brown is featured in an extremely large mural (11'6" tall and 31' long) painted in the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka, Kansas. In "Tragic Prelude," by Kansan John Steuart Curry, the larger-than-life figure of John Brown dominates a scene of war, death, and destruction. Wildfires and a tornado are backdrops to his zeal and fervor. The only major street anywhere named for John Brown is in Port-au-Prince, Haiti (where there is also an Avenue Charles Sumner). In Harpers Ferry today, the engine house, known today as John Brown's Fort, sits in a park, open to walk through, but without sign or attendant.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Just as in the town of Harpers Ferry, John Brown and the raid are downplayed at the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. Harpers Ferry and some surrounding areas were designated as a National Monument in 1944. Congress later designated it as the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in 1963. It is managed by the National Park Service. The park includes the historic town of Harpers Ferry, notable as a center of 19th-century industry and as the scene of the uprising.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: John Brown is buried on his farm near Lake Placid, New York. It is maintained as the New York John Brown Farm State Historic Site. His son Watson is also buried there, and the bones of his son Oliver and nine other raiders are buried in a single coffin.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: From 1859 until the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865, Brown was the most famous American. He was the symbol of the nation's polarization: in the North he was a hero, and the day of his execution a day of mourning; flags were flown at half mast in some cities. To white Southerners, he was an outlaw, a traitor, promoting slave insurrection, their worst nightmare; secession could no longer be avoided.


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: Doubt has been raised as to whether Brown believed his implausible, undermanned attack could succeed, or whether he knew it was doomed yet wanted the publicity it would generate for the abolitionist cause. Certainly he "fail[ed] to take the steps necessary" to make it succeed: he never called on nearby slaves to join the uprising, for example. According to Garrison, "His raid into Virginia looks utterly lacking in common sense—a desperate self-sacrifice for the purpose of giving an earthquake shock to the slave system, and thus hastening the day for a universal catastrophe." Brown's Provisional Constitution, of which he had stacks of copies printed, "was not just a governing document. It was a scare tactic".


title: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

text: As Brown wrote in 1851: "The trial for life of one bold and to some extent successful man, for defending his rights in good earnest, would arouse more sympathy throughout the nation than the accumulated wrongs and suffering of more than three millions of our submissive colored population." According to his son Salmon, fifty years later: "He wanted to bring on the war. I have heard him talk of it many times." Certainly Brown saw to it that his arrest, trial, and execution received as much publicity as possible. He "ask[ed] that the incendiary constitution he carried with him be read aloud." "He seemed very fond of talking." Authorities deliberately prevented spectators from being close enough to Brown to hear him speak during his short trip to the gallows, but he did give what became his famous final message to a jailer who had asked for his autograph.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Pope Julius II (; ; born Giuliano della Rovere; 5 December 144321 February 1513) was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 1503 to his death in February 1513. Nicknamed the Warrior Pope or the Fearsome Pope, he chose his papal name not in honour of Pope Julius I but in emulation of Julius Caesar. One of the most powerful and influential popes, Julius II was a central figure of the High Renaissance and left a significant cultural and political legacy. As a result of his policies during the Italian Wars, the Papal States remained independent and centralized, and the office of the papacy continued to be crucial, diplomatically and politically, during the entirety of the 16th century in Italy and Europe.


title: Pope Julius II

text: In 1506, Julius II established the Vatican Museums and initiated the rebuilding of the St. Peter's Basilica. The same year he organized the famous Swiss Guards for his personal protection and commanded a successful campaign in Romagna against local lords. The interests of Julius II lay also in the New World, as he ratified the Treaty of Tordesillas, establishing the first bishoprics in the Americas and beginning the catholicization of Latin America. In 1508, he commissioned the Raphael Rooms and Michelangelo's paintings in the Sistine Chapel.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Julius II was described by Machiavelli in his works as an ideal prince. Pope Julius II allowed people seeking indulgences to donate money to the Church which would be used for the construction of Saint Peter's Basilica. He was fiercely satirized after his death by Erasmus of Rotterdam in "Julius Excluded from Heaven", in which the drunken pope, denied entry by St Peter, justifies his worldly life and threatens to found his own paradise.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Julius II became pope in the context of the Italian Wars, a period in which the major powers of Europe fought for primacy in the Italian peninsula. Louis XII of France controlled the Duchy of Milan, previously held by the Sforzas, and French influence had replaced that of the Medici in the Republic of Florence. The Kingdom of Naples was under Spanish rule, and the Borja family from Spain was a major political faction in the Papal States following the reign of Alexander VI. The Archduke of Austria Maximilian I was hostile to France and Venice, and desired to descend into Italy in order to obtain the Papal coronation as Holy Roman Emperor. The conclave capitulation preceding his election included several terms, such as the opening of an ecumenical council and the organization of a crusade against the Ottoman Turks. Once crowned, Julius II proclaimed instead his goal to centralize the Papal States (in large part a patchwork of communes and "signorie") and "free Italy from the barbarians".


title: Pope Julius II

text: In his early years as Pope, Julius II removed the Borjas from power and exiled them to Spain. Cesare Borgia, Duke of Romagna, shared the same fate and lost his possessions.


title: Pope Julius II

text: He joined an anti-Venetian league formed in Cambrai between France, Spain, and Austria, with the goal of capturing the coast of Romagna from the Venetian Republic. Having achieved this goal, he formed an anti-French "Holy League" with Venice following the defeat of the latter at the Battle of Agnadello. His main goal was now again to "expel the barbarians" ("Fuori i Barbari!"). Julius II brought the Catholic Ferdinand II of Aragon into the alliance, declaring Naples a papal fief and promising a formal investiture.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Having previously declared that the Imperial election was sufficient for Maximilian to style himself as Holy Roman Emperor, he later obtained Habsburg support against France as well. Julius II personally led the Papal armed forces at the victorious Siege of Mirandola and, despite subsequent defeats and great losses at the Battle of Ravenna, he ultimately forced the French troops of Louis XII to retreat behind the Alps after the arrival of Swiss mercenaries from the Holy Roman Empire.


title: Pope Julius II

text: At the Congress of Mantua in 1512, Julius II ordered the restoration of Italian families to power in the vacuum of French rule: the Imperial Swiss led by Massimiliano Sforza restored Sforza rule in Milan, and a Spanish army led by Giovanni de Medici restored Medici rule in Florence. The Kingdom of Naples was recognized as a papal fief. The Venetians regained their territories lost to France, and the Papal States annexed Parma and Modena. The conciliarist movement promoted by foreign monarchs was crushed, and Julius II affirmed ultramontanism at the Fifth Lateran Council. This is often presented in traditional historiography as the moment in which Renaissance Italy came the closest to unification after the end of the Italic League of the 15th century. However, Julius II was far away from the possibility to form a single Italian kingdom, if that was his goal at all, since foreign armies were largely involved in his wars and the French were preparing new campaigns against the Swiss for Milan. Naples, even if recognized as a papal fief, was still under Spain and in fact Julius II was planning to end Spanish presence in the south. Nevertheless, by the end of his pontificate, the papal objective to make the Church the main force in the Italian Wars was achieved. At the Roman Carnival of 1513, Julius II presented himself as the "liberator of Italy".


title: Pope Julius II

text: Julius planned to call for a crusade against the Ottoman Empire in order to retake Constantinople, but died before making official announcements. His successor, Pope Leo X, along with Emperor Maximilian, would re-establish the status quo ante bellum in Italy by ratifying the treaties of Brussels and Noyon in 1516; France regained control of Milan after the victory of Francis I at the Battle of Marignano, and Spain was recognized as the direct ruler of Naples.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Giuliano della Rovere Albisola was born near Savona in the Republic of Genoa. He was of the House of della Rovere, a noble but impoverished family, the son of Raffaello della Rovere and Theodora Manerola, a lady of Greek ancestry. He had three brothers: Bartolomeo, a Franciscan friar who then became Bishop of Ferrara (1474–1494); Leonardo; and Giovanni, Prefect of the City of Rome (1475–1501) and Prince of Sora and Senigallia. He also had a sister, Lucina (later the mother of Cardinal Sisto Gara della Rovere). Giuliano was educated by his uncle, Fr. Francesco della Rovere, O.F.M., among the Franciscans, who took him under his special charge. He was later sent by this same uncle (who by that time had become Minister General of the Franciscans (1464–1469)), to the Franciscan friary in Perugia, where he could study the sciences at the University.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Della Rovere, as a young man, showed traits of being rough, coarse and given to bad language. During the late 1490s, he became more closely acquainted with Cardinal de’ Medici and his cousin Giulio de’ Medici, both of whom would later become Pope, (i.e. Leo X and Clement VII, respectively). The two dynasties became uneasy allies in the context of papal politics. Both houses desired an end to the occupation of Italian lands by the armies of France. He seemed less enthused by theology; rather, Paul Strathern argues, his imagined heroes were military leaders such as Frederic Colonna.


title: Pope Julius II

text: After his uncle was elected Pope Sixtus IV on 10 August 1471, Giuliano was appointed Bishop of Carpentras in the Comtat Venaissin on 16 October 1471. In an act of overt nepotism he was immediately raised to the cardinalate on 16 December 1471, and assigned the same titular church as that formerly held by his uncle, San Pietro in Vincoli. Guilty of serial simony and pluralism, he held several powerful offices at once: in addition to the archbishopric of Avignon he held no fewer than eight bishoprics, including Lausanne from 1472, and Coutances (1476–1477).


title: Pope Julius II

text: In 1474, Giuliano led an army to Todi, Spoleto, and Città di Castello as papal legate. He returned to Rome in May in the company of Duke Federigo of Urbino, who promised his daughter in marriage to Giuliano's brother Giovanni, who was subsequently named Lord of Senigallia and of Mondovì. On 22 December 1475, Pope Sixtus IV created the new Archdiocese of Avignon, assigning to it as suffragan dioceses the Sees of Vaison, Cavaillon, and Carpentras. He appointed Giuliano as the first archbishop. Giuliano held the archdiocese until his later election to the papacy. In 1476 the office of Legate was added, and he left Rome for France in February. On 22 August 1476 he founded the "Collegium de Ruvere" in Avignon. He returned to Rome on 4 October 1476.


title: Pope Julius II

text: In 1479, Cardinal Giuliano served his one-year term as Chamberlain of the College of Cardinals. In this office he was responsible for collecting all the revenues owed to the cardinals as a group (from "ad limina" visits, for example) and for the proper disbursements of appropriate shares to cardinals who were in service in the Roman Curia.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Giuliano was again named Papal Legate to France on 28 April 1480, and left Rome on 9 June. As Legate, his mission was threefold: to make peace between King Louis XI and the Emperor Maximilian of Austria; to raise funds for a war against the Ottoman Turks; and to negotiate the release of Cardinal Jean Balue and Bishop Guillaume d'Harancourt (who by then had been imprisoned by Louis for eleven years on charges of treason). He reached Paris in September, and finally, on 20 December 1480, Louis gave orders that Balue be handed over to the Archpriest of Loudun, who had been commissioned by the Legate to receive him in the name of the Pope. He returned to Rome on 3 February 1482. Shortly thereafter the sum of 300,000 ecus of gold was received from the French in a subsidy of the war.


title: Pope Julius II

text: On 31 January 1483 Cardinal della Rovere was promoted suburbicarian Bishop of Ostia, in succession to Cardinal Guillaume d'Estouteville who had died on 22 January. It was the privilege of the Bishop of Ostia to consecrate an elected pope a bishop, if he were not already a bishop. This actually occurred in the case of Pius III (Francesco Todeschini-Piccolomini), who was ordained a priest on 30 September 1503 and consecrated a bishop on 1 October 1503 by Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere.


title: Pope Julius II

text: On 3 November 1483, Cardinal della Rovere was named Bishop of Bologna and Papal Legate, succeeding Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, who had died on 21 October. He held the diocese until 1502. On 28 December 1484, Giuliano participated in the investiture of his brother Giovanni as Captain-General of the Papal Armies by Pope Innocent VIII.


title: Pope Julius II

text: By 1484 Giuliano was living in the new palazzo which he had constructed next to the Basilica of the Twelve Apostles, which he had also restored. Pope Sixtus IV paid a formal visit to the newly restored building on 1 May 1482, and it may be that Giuliano was already in residence then.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Sixtus IV died on 12 August 1484 and was succeeded by Innocent VIII. After the ceremonies of the election of Pope Innocent were completed, the cardinals were dismissed to their own homes, but Cardinal della Rovere accompanied the new Pope to the Vatican Palace and was the only one to remain with him. Ludwig Pastor quotes the Florentine ambassador as remarking, "[Pope Innocent] gives the impression of a man who is guided rather by the advice of others than by his own lights." The ambassador of Ferrara stated, "While with his uncle [Della Rovere] had not the slightest influence, he now obtains whatever he likes from the new Pope." Della Rovere was one of the five cardinals named to the committee to make the arrangements for the Coronation.


title: Pope Julius II

text: In 1485 Pope Innocent and Cardinal della Rovere (as the Pope's new principal advisor) decided to involve themselves in the political affairs of the Kingdom of Naples, in what was called the "Conspiracy of the Barons". On Palm Sunday, 20 March, Cardinal della Rovere, concealing his activities from his principal rival, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia (later Pope Alexander VI), rode out of Rome and departed by sea from Ostia, intending to head for Genoa and Avignon to prepare to wage war between the Church and the King of Naples, Ferdinand I (Ferrante). On 28 June the Pope sent back to Naples the token gift of a palfrey which symbolized the King of Naples' submission and demanded the full feudal submission of the Kingdom of Naples to the Roman Church according to long-standing tradition. In a second attempt to overthrow the Aragonese monarchy, the Prince of Salerno Antonello II di Sanseverino, on the advice of Antonello Petrucci and Francesco Coppola, gathered together several feudal families belonging to the Guelph faction and supporting the Angevin claim to Naples. Antonello de Sanseverino was the brother-in-law of Cardinal della Rovere's brother Giovanni, who was a noble of Naples because of his fief of Sora. The principal complaints of the barons were the heavy taxation imposed by Ferdinand to finance his war against the Saracens, who had occupied Bari in 1480; and the vigorous efforts of Ferrante to centralize the administrative apparatus of the kingdom, moving it away from a feudal to a bureaucratic system. The barons seized L'Aquila and appealed to the Pope for assistance as their feudal overlord. Genoa and Venice supported the Papacy, while Florence and Milan opted for Naples. In Rome, the Orsini allied themselves with Ferrante's son Alfonso, and therefore the Colonna supported the Pope in the street fighting that ensued. Ferrante reacted by seizing the fiefs of the barons, and, when the two parties met to negotiate a settlement, Ferrante had them arrested, and eventually executed. The prestige of the della Rovere family was seriously damaged, and in an attempt to exculpate himself Pope Innocent began to withdraw his support for them. Peace was restored in 1487, but Innocent VIII's papacy was discredited.


title: Pope Julius II

text: On 23 March 1486, the pope sent Giuliano as Papal Legate to the Court of King Charles VIII of France to ask for help. A French entourage arrived in Rome on 31 May, but immediately relations broke down with the pro-Spanish Cardinal Rodrigo. But Ferrante's army decided the pope's humiliation, Innocent backed down and on 10 August signed a treaty. Innocent looked for new allies and settled on the Republic of Florence.


title: Pope Julius II

text: On 2 March 1487, Giuliano was appointed legate in the March of Ancona and to the Republic of Venice. He encouraged trade with the sizable Turkish community at these ports. But urgent reports arrived from the King of Hungary that the Ottoman Sultan was threatening Italy. He returned on 8 April 1488, and again took up his residence in the Palazzo Colonna next to the Basilica of the XII Apostles.


title: Pope Julius II

text: In the Conclave of 1492, following the death of Innocent VIII, Cardinal della Rovere was supported for election by both King Charles VIII of France and by Charles' enemy King Ferrante of Naples. It was reported that France had deposited 200,000 ducats into a bank account to promote della Rovere's candidature, while the Republic of Genoa had deposited 100,000 ducats to the same end. Della Rovere, however, had enemies, both because of the influence he had exercised over Pope Sixtus IV and because of his French sympathies. His rivals included Cardinal Ardicio della Porta and Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, both patronized by the Milanese. Kellogg, Baynes & Smith, continue, a "rivalry had, however, gradually grown up between [della Rovere] and [then-Cardinal] Rodrigo Borgia, and on the death of Innocent VIII in 1492 Borgia by means of a secret agreement and simony with Ascanio Sforza succeeded in being elected by a large majority, under the name of Pope Alexander VI." Della Rovere, jealous and angry, hated Borgia for being elected over him.


title: Pope Julius II

text: On 31 August 1492 the new Pope, Alexander VI, held a consistory in which he named six cardinal legates, one of whom was Giuliano della Rovere, who was appointed Legate in Avignon. Cardinal Giuliano was increasingly alarmed by the powerful position assumed by Cardinal Ascanio Sforza and the Milanese faction in the Court of Alexander VI, and after Christmas Day in December 1492 chose to withdraw to his fortress in the town and diocese of Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber River. In that same month, Federico of Altamura, the second son of King Ferdinando (Ferrante) of Naples was in Rome to pay homage to the new pope, and he reported back to his father that Alexander and Cardinal Sforza were working on establishing new alliances, which would upset Ferrante's security arrangements. Ferrante, therefore, decided to use Della Rovere as the center of an anti-Sforza party at the papal court, a prospect made easier since Ferrante had prudently repaired his relations with Cardinal Giuliano after the War of the Barons. He also warned King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain that Alexander was intriguing with the French, which brought an immediate visit of a Spanish ambassador to the Pope. In June Federico of Altamura was back in Rome and held conversations with Della Rovere, assuring him of Neapolitan protection. On 24 July 1493, Cardinal della Rovere returned to Rome (despite the warnings of Virginius Orsini) and dined with the Pope.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Della Rovere at once determined to take refuge from Borgia's wrath at Ostia. On 23 April 1494, the Cardinal took ship, having placed his fortress at Ostia in the hands of his brother Giovanni della Rovere, and traveled to Genoa and then to Avignon. He was summoned by King Charles VIII to Lyons, where the two met on 1 June 1494. He joined Charles VIII of France who undertook to take Italy back from the Borgias by military force. The King entered Rome with his army on 31 December 1495, with Giuliano della Rovere riding on one side and Cardinal Ascanio Sforza riding on the other. The King made several demands of Pope Alexander, one of which was that the Castel Sant'Angelo be turned over to French forces. This Pope Alexander refused to do, claiming that Cardinal della Rovere would occupy it and become master of Rome. Charles soon conquered Naples, making his triumphal entry on 22 February 1495, but he was forced to remove most of his army. As he was returning to the north, his army was defeated at the Battle of Foronovo on 5 July 1495, and his Italian adventure came to an end. The last remnants of the French invasion were gone by November 1496. Ostia, however, remained in French hands until March 1497, causing difficulties in the provisioning of the city of Rome.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Back in Lyon in 1496, Charles VIII and Giuliano della Rovere were planning another war. Giuliano was traveling back and forth from Lyon to Avignon, raising troops. It was being reported in France by June 1496, moreover, that King Charles intended to have a papal election in France and to have Cardinal della Rovere elected pope.


title: Pope Julius II

text: In March 1497 Pope Alexander deprived Cardinal della Rovere of his benefices as an enemy of the Apostolic See, and Giovanni della Rovere of the Prefecture of Rome. His action against the Cardinal was done not only without the consent of the cardinals in consistory, but in fact over their vigorous objections. By June, however, the Pope was in negotiations with the Cardinal for reconciliation and return to Rome. His benefices were restored to him after an apparent reconciliation with the Pope in August 1498.


title: Pope Julius II

text: King Charles VIII of France, the last of the senior branch of the House of Valois, died on 7 April 1498 after accidentally striking his head on the lintel of a door at the Château d'Amboise. When Cesare Borgia passed through southern France in October 1498 on his way to meet King Louis XII for his investiture as Duke of Valentinois, he stopped in Avignon and was magnificently entertained by Cardinal della Rovere. They then moved on to meet the King at Chinon, where Cesare Borgia fulfilled one of the terms of the treaty between Louis and Alexander by producing the red hat of a cardinal, which had been promised for the Archbishop of Rouen, Georges d'Amboise. It was Cardinal della Rovere, the Papal Legate, who placed the hat on Amboise's head.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Louis wanted an annulment from Queen Joan so he could marry Anne of Brittany, in the hope of annexing the Duchy of Brittany; Alexander, in turn, wanted a French princess as wife for Cesare. Della Rovere, who was trying to repair his relations with the House of Borgia, was also involved in another clause of the treaty, the marriage between Cesare Borgia and Carlotta, the daughter of the King of Naples, who had been brought up at the French Court. Della Rovere was in favor of the marriage, but, according to Pope Alexander, King Louis XII was not, and, most especially, Carlotta was stubbornly refusing her consent. Alexander's plan of securing a royal throne for his son fell through, and he was very angry. Louis offered Cesare another of his relatives, the "beautiful and rich" Charlotte d'Albret, whom Cesare married at Blois on 13 May 1499.


title: Pope Julius II

text: The marriage produced a complete "volta facie" in Pope Alexander. He became an open partisan of the French and Venice, and accepted their goal, the destruction of the Sforza hold on Milan. On 14 July, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, della Rovere's sworn enemy, fled Rome with all his property and friends. Meanwhile, the French army crossed the Alps and captured Alessandria in Piedmont. On 1 September 1499 Lodovico "Il Moro" fled Milan, and on 6 September the city surrendered to the French. Cardinal Giuliano was in the King's entourage when he entered Milan on 6 October.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Pope Alexander then turned his attention, stimulated by the Venetians, to the threat of the Osmanli Turks. In the autumn of 1499, he called for a crusade and sought aid and money from all Christendom. The rulers of Europe paid little attention, but to show his sincerity Alexander imposed a tithe on all the residents of the Papal States and a tithe on the clergy of the entire world. A list of cardinals and their incomes, drawn up for the occasion, shows that Cardinal della Rovere was the second-richest cardinal, with an annual income of 20,000 ducats.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Another break in relations between Pope Alexander and Cardinal Giuliano came at the end of 1501 or the beginning of 1502 when Giuliano was transferred from the Bishopric of Bologna to the diocese of Vercelli.


title: Pope Julius II

text: On 21 June 1502, Pope Alexander sent his secretary, Francesco Troche (Trochia), and Cardinal Amanieu d'Albret (brother-in-law of Cesare Borgia) to Savona to seize Cardinal della Rovere by stealth and bring him back to Rome as quickly as possible and turn him over to the Pope. The kidnapping party returned to Rome on 12 July, without having accomplished its mission. On 20 July 1502, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Ferrari died in his rooms at the Vatican Palace; he had been poisoned, and his property was claimed by the Borgia. On 3 January 1503, Cardinal Orsini was arrested and sent to the Castel Sant'Angelo; on 22 February he died there, poisoned on the orders of Alexander VI.


title: Pope Julius II

text: A veteran of the Sacred College, della Rovere had won influence for the election of Pope Pius III with the help of Florentine Ambassador to Naples, Lorenzo de' Medici. In spite of a violent temper della Rovere succeeded by dexterous diplomacy in winning the support of Cesare Borgia, whom he won over by his promise of money and continued papal backing for Borgia policies in the Romagna. This election was, in Ludwig von Pastor's view, certainly achieved by means of bribery with money, but also with promises. "Giuliano, whom the popular voice seemed to indicate as the only possible pope, was as unscrupulous as any of his colleagues in the means which he employed. Where promises and persuasions were unavailing, he did not hesitate to have recourse to bribery." Indeed, his election on 1 November 1503 took only a few hours, and the only two votes he did not receive were his own and the one of Georges d'Amboise, his most vigorous opponent and the favourite of the French monarchy. In the end, as in all papal elections, the vote is made unanimous after the leading candidate has achieved the required number of votes for election.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Giuliano Della Rovere took the name Julius, only used by a single fourth-century predecessor, Julius I, and was pope for nine years, from 1503 to 1513. From the beginning, Julius II set out to defeat the various powers that challenged his temporal authority; in a series of complicated stratagems, he first succeeded in rendering it impossible for the Borgias to retain their power over the Papal States. Indeed, on the day of his election, he issued a "damnatio memoriae", declaring: Others indicate that his decision was taken on 26 November 1507, not in 1503. The Borgia Apartments were turned to other uses. The "Sala de Papi" was redecorated by two pupils of Raphael by order of Pope Leo X. The rooms were used to accommodate Emperor Charles V on his visit to the Vatican after the Sack of Rome (1527), and subsequently, they became the residence of the Cardinal-nephew and then the Secretary of State.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Julius used his influence to reconcile two powerful Roman families, the Orsini and Colonna. Decrees were made in the interests of the Roman nobility, in whose shoes the new pope now stepped. Being thus secure in Rome and the surrounding country, he set himself the task to expel the Republic of Venice from Faenza, Rimini, and the other towns and fortresses of Italy which it occupied after the death of Pope Alexander. In 1504, finding it impossible to succeed with the Doge of Venice by remonstrance, he brought about a union of the conflicting interests of France and the Holy Roman Empire, and sacrificed temporarily to some extent the independence of Italy to conclude with them an offensive and defensive alliance against Venice. The combination was, however, at first little more than nominal, and was not immediately effective in compelling the Venetians to deliver up more than a few unimportant places in the Romagna. With a campaign in 1506, he personally led an army to Perugia and Bologna, freeing the two papal cities from their despots, Giampolo Baglioni and Giovanni II Bentivoglio.


title: Pope Julius II

text: In December 1503, Julius issued a dispensation allowing the future Henry VIII of England to marry Catherine of Aragon; Catherine had previously been briefly married to Henry's older brother Prince Arthur, who had died, but Henry later argued that she had remained a virgin for the five months of the marriage. Some twenty years later, when Henry was attempting to wed Anne Boleyn (since his son by Catherine of Aragon survived only a few days, and two of her sons were stillborn, and therefore he had no male heir), he sought to have his marriage annulled, claiming that the dispensation of Pope Julius should never have been issued. The retraction of the dispensation was refused by Pope Clement VII.


title: Pope Julius II

text: The Bull entitled "Ea quae pro bono pacis," issued on 24 January 1506, confirmed papal approval of the "mare clausum" policy being pursued by Spain and Portugal amid their explorations, and approved the changes of the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas to previous papal bulls. In the same year, the Pope founded the Swiss Guard to provide a constant corps of soldiers to protect the pope. As part of the Renaissance program of reestablishing the glory of antiquity for the Christian capital, Rome, Julius II took considerable effort to present himself as a sort of emperor-pope, capable of leading a Latin-Christian empire. On Palm Sunday, 1507, "Julius II entered Rome ... both as a second Julius Caesar, heir to the majesty of Rome's imperial glory, and in the likeness of Christ, whose vicar the pope was, and who in that capacity governed the universal Roman Church." Julius, who modeled himself after his namesake Caesar, would personally lead his army across the Italian peninsula under the imperial war-cry, "Drive out the barbarians." Yet, despite the imperial rhetoric, the campaigns were highly localized. Perugia voluntarily surrendered in March 1507 to direct control, as it had always been within the Papal States; it was in these endeavors he had enlisted French mercenaries.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Urbino's magnificent court palace was infiltrated by French soldiers in the pay of the Duke of Gonzaga; the Montefeltro Conspiracy against his loyal cousins earned the occupying armies the Pope's undying hatred. Julius relied upon Guidobaldo's help to raise his nephew and heir Francesco Maria della Rovere; the intricate web of nepotism helped secure the Italian Papacy. Moreover, the Pope's interest in Urbino was widely known in the French court. Julius left a spy at the Urbino Palace, possibly Galeotto Franciotti della Rovere, Cardinal of San Pietro, to watch the Mantua stables in total secret; the secular progress of the Papal Curia was growing in authority and significance. In Rome, the Pope watched from his private chapel to see how his court behaved. This was an age of Renaissance conspiracy.


title: Pope Julius II

text: In addition to an active military policy, the new pope personally led troops into battle on at least two occasions, the first to expel Giovanni Bentivoglio from Bologna (17 August 1506 – 23 March 1507), which was achieved successfully with the assistance of the Duchy of Urbino. The second was an attempt to recover Ferrara for the Papal States (1 September 1510 – 29 June 1512). In 1508, Julius was fortuitously able to form the League of Cambrai with Louis XII, King of France, Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor (proclaimed without coronation as Emperor by Pope Julius II at Trent in 1508) and Ferdinand II, King of Aragon. The League fought against the Republic of Venice. Among other things, Julius wanted possession of Venetian Romagna; Emperor Maximilian I wanted Friuli and Veneto; Louis XII wanted Cremona, and Ferdinand II desired the Apulian ports. This war was a conflict in what was collectively known as the "Italian Wars". In the spring of 1509, the Republic of Venice was placed under an interdict by Julius, In May 1509 Julius sent troops to fight against the Venetians who had occupied parts of the Romagna, winning back the Papal States in a decisive battle near Cremona. During the War of the Holy League, alliances kept changing: in 1510 Venice and France switched places, and by 1513, Venice had joined France. The achievements of the League soon outstripped the primary intention of Julius. In one single battle, the Battle of Agnadello on 14 May 1509, the dominion of Venice in Italy was practically lost to the pope. Neither the King of France nor the Holy Roman Emperor was satisfied with merely effecting the purposes of the Pope; the latter found it necessary to enter into an arrangement with the Venetians to defend himself from those who immediately before had been his allies. The Venetians, on making humble submission, were absolved at the beginning of 1510, and shortly afterward France was placed under papal interdict.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Attempts to cause a rupture between France and England proved unsuccessful; on the other hand, at a synod convened by Louis at Tours in September 1510, the French bishops withdrew from papal obedience and resolved, with the Emperor's co-operation, to seek dethronement of the pope. With some courage Julius marched his army to Bologna and then against the French to Mirandola. In November 1511, a council met at Pisa, called by rebel cardinals with support from the French king and the Empire; they demanded the deposition of Julius II at Pisa. He refused to shave, showing utter contempt for the hated French occupation. ""per vendicarsi et diceva ... anco fuora scazato el re Ludovico Franza d'Italia"."


title: Pope Julius II

text: Whereupon Julius entered into another Holy League of 1511: in alliance with Ferdinand II of Aragon and the Venetians he conspired against the Gallican liberties. In a short time, both Henry VIII, King of England (1509–47), and Maximilian I also joined the Holy League of 1511 against France. Ferdinand of Spain now recognized Naples as a papal fief, invested in 1511, and therefore Julius II now regarded France as the main foreign power in the Italian peninsula hostile to Papal interests. Louis XII defeated the alliance at Battle of Ravenna on 11 April 1512. When a desperate battle felled over 20,000 men in a bloodbath the Pope commanded his protege, a newly released young Cardinal Medici to re-take Florence with a Spanish army. The rescue of the city on 1 September 1512 saved Rome from another invasion, ousting Soderini, and returning the dynastic rule of the Medici. Julius had seemingly restored "fortuna" or control by exercising his manly "vertu", just as Machiavelli wrote. This re-asserted a strong relation between Florence and Rome, a lasting legacy of Julius II. Yet Machiavelli and his methods would not outlast Julius' Papacy.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Julius hired Swiss mercenaries to fight against the French in Milan in May 1512, causing the French army to withdraw across the Alps into Savoy. The papacy gained control of Parma and Piacenza in central Italy. With the French out of Italy and Spain recognizing Naples as a papal fief, a Congress was held in Mantua by Julius II to declare the liberation of the peninsula. Nevertheless, although Julius had centralized and expanded the Papal States, he was far from realizing his dream of an independent Italian kingdom. Italy was not at peace either. The French were preparing new campaigns to reconquer Milan, and Julius II confessed to a Venetian ambassador a plan to invest his counselor Luigi d'Aragona with the kingdom of Naples in order to end Spanish presence in the south. In fact, after the death of Julius, war would resume and the treaties of Noyon and Brussels in 1516 would again divide much of Italy between French and Spanish influence.


title: Pope Julius II

text: In May 1512 a general or ecumenical council, the Fifth Council of the Lateran, was held in Rome. According to an oath taken on his election to observe the Electoral Capitulations of the Conclave of October 1503, Julius had sworn to summon a general council, but it had been delayed, he affirmed, because of the occupation of Italy by his enemies. The real stimulus came from a false council which took place in 1511, later called the "Conciliabulum Pisanum", inspired by Louis XII and Maximilian I as a tactic to weaken Julius, threatening to depose him. Julius' reply was the issuing of the bull "Non-sini gravi" of 18 July 1511, which fixed the date of 19 April 1512 for the opening of his own council. The Council actually convened on 3 May 1512, and Paris de Grassis reports that the crowd at the basilica was estimated at 50,000. It held its first working session on 10 May. In the third plenary session, on 3 December 1512, Julius attended, though ill; but he wanted to witness and receive the formal adhesion of Emperor Maximilian to the Lateran Council and his repudiation of the "Conciliabulum Pisanum". This was one of Julius' great triumphs. The Pope was again in attendance at the fourth session on 10 December, this time to hear the accrediting of the Venetian Ambassador as the Serene Republic's representative at the council; he then had the letter of King Louis XI (of 27 November 1461), in which he announced the revocation of the Pragmatic Sanction, read out to the assembly, and demanded that all persons who accepted the Pragmatic Sanction appear before the Council within sixty days to justify their conduct. This was directed against the current French King Louis XII.


title: Pope Julius II

text: The fifth session was held on 16 February, but Pope Julius was too ill to attend. Cardinal Raffaele Riario, the Dean of the College of Cardinals and Bishop of Ostia, presided. The Bishop of Como, Scaramuccia Trivulzio, then read from the pulpit a papal bull, "Si summus rerum", dated that very day and containing within its text the complete bull of 14 January 1505, "Cum tam divino". The bull was submitted to the Council fathers for their consideration and ratification. Julius wanted to remind everyone of his legislation on papal conclaves, in particular against simony, and to fix his regulations firmly in canon law so that they could not be dispensed or ignored. Julius was fully aware that his death was imminent, and wished to establish a major reform in his final days. Though he had been a witness to a good deal of simony at papal conclaves and had been a practitioner himself, he was determined to stamp out this abuse. The reading of the bull "Cum tam divino" became a regular feature of the first day of every conclave.


title: Pope Julius II

text: On the Vigil of Pentecost in May 1512, Pope Julius, aware that he was seriously ill and that his health was failing, despite comments on the part of some cardinals about how well he looked, remarked to Paris de Grassis, "They are flattering me; I know better; my strength diminishes from day to day and I cannot live much longer. Therefore I beg you not to expect me at Vespers or at Mass from henceforth." Nonetheless, he continued his restless activities, including Masses, visits to churches, and audiences. On the morning of 24 June Paris found the Pope "debilem et semifebricantem". On Christmas Eve, Julius ordered Paris to summon the College of Cardinals and the Sacristan of the Apostolic Palace, "quia erat sic infirmus, quod non-speraret posse diu supravivere." From then until 6 January he was confined to bed, and most of the time with a fever; he had lost his appetite, but the doctors were unable to diagnose his languor. On 4 February he had an extensive conversation with Paris concerning the arrangements for his funeral.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Pope Julius was reported to be seriously ill in a dispatch received in Venice on 10 February 1513. He received Holy Communion and was granted the plenary indulgence on the morning of 19 February, according to the Venetian Ambassador. On the 20th, according to Paris de Grassis, he received Holy Communion from the hands of Cardinal Raffaele Riario, the Camerlengo. He died of a fever in the night of 20–21 February 1513.


title: Pope Julius II

text: On the evening of 21 February, Paris de Grassis conducted the funeral of Julius II, even though the Canons of the Vatican Basilica and the "beneficiati" refused to cooperate. The body was placed for a time at the Altar of Saint Andrew in the Basilica and was then carried by the Imperial Ambassador, the papal Datary, and two of Paris' assistants to the altar of the Chapel of Pope Sixtus, where the Vicar of the Vatican Basilica performed the final absolution. At the third hour of the evening, the body was laid in a sepulcher between the altar and the wall of the tribune.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Despite the fact that the so-called "Tomb of Julius" by Michelangelo is in San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, Julius is in fact buried in the Vatican. Michelangelo's tomb was not completed until 1545 and represents a much-abbreviated version of the planned original, which was initially intended for the new St. Peter's Basilica. His remains lay alongside his uncle, Pope Sixtus IV, but were later desecrated during the Sack of Rome in 1527. Today both men lie in St. Peter's Basilica on the floor in front of the monument to Pope Clement X. A simple marble tombstone marks the site. Julius II was succeeded by Pope Leo X.


title: Pope Julius II

text: In 1484 Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere had begun negotiations to persuade Marquis Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua to allow Andrea Mantegna to come to Rome, which finally bore fruit in 1488; Mantegna was given the commission to decorate the chapel of the Belvedere for Pope Innocent VIII, on which he spent two years.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Beyond Julius II's political and military achievements, he enjoys a title to honor in his patronage of art, architecture, and literature. He did much to improve and beautify the city.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Early in his papacy, Julius decided to revive the plan for replacing the dilapidated Constantinian basilica of St. Peter's. The idea was not his, but originally that of Nicholas V, who had commissioned designs from Bernardo Rossellino. Other more pressing problems distracted the attention of Nicholas and subsequent popes, but Julius was not the sort of person to be distracted once he had settled on an idea, in this case, for the greatest building on earth, for the glory of Saint Peter and himself. In the competition for a building plan, the design of Rossellino was immediately rejected as being out of date. A second design was submitted by Giuliano da Sangallo, an old friend of Julius, who had worked on several projects for him before, including the palazzo at S. Pietro in Vincoli, and who had left Rome with Julius when he fled the wrath of Alexander VI in 1495. Through Cardinal della Rovere, Sangallo had presented Charles VIII a plan for a palace, and in 1496 he had made a tour of the architectural monuments of Provence, returning to his native Florence in 1497. His proposals for S. Peter's, however, were not accepted despite what he believed to be a promise, and he retired in anger to Florence.


title: Pope Julius II

text: On 18 April 1506 Pope Julius II laid the foundation stone of the new St. Peter's Basilica for the successful architect, Donato Bramante. However, he also began the demolition of the old St. Peter's Basilica, which had stood for more than 1,100 years. He was a friend and patron of Bramante and Raphael, and a patron of Michelangelo. Several of Michelangelo's greatest works (including the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel) were commissioned by Julius. In the framework of Rome's urban renewal ("Renovatio Romae"), the pope commissioned to Bramante the creation of two new straight streets respectively on the left and right bank of the Tiber: the Via Giulia and the Via della Lungara.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Long before he became Pope, Julius had a violent temper. He often treated subordinates and people who worked for him very badly. His manner was gruff and coarse, just as his peasant-like sense of humour. Others suggest that Julius had little sense of humor. Ludwig von Pastor wrote, "Paris de Grassis, his Master of Ceremonies, who has handed on to us so many characteristic features of his master's life, says that he hardly ever jested. He was generally absorbed in deep and silent thought."


title: Pope Julius II

text: To most historians Julius was manly and virile, an energetic man of action, whose courage saved the Papacy. There was a sense that war caused him serious illness, exhaustion, and fatigue, that most popes could not have withstood. To many Julius II has been described as the best in an era of exceptionally bad popes: Alexander VI was evil and despotic, exposing the future Julius II to a number of assassination attempts that required tremendous fortitude.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Julius II is usually depicted with a beard, after his appearance in the celebrated portrait by Raphael, the artist whom he first met in 1509. However, the pope only wore his beard from 27 June 1511 to March 1512, as a sign of mourning at the loss of the city of Bologna by the Papal States. He was nevertheless the first pope since antiquity to grow facial hair, a practice otherwise forbidden by canon law since the 13th century. The pope's hirsute chin may have raised severe, even vulgar criticism, as at one Bologna banquet held in 1510 at which papal legate Marco Cornaro was present. In overturning the ban on beards Pope Julius challenged Gregorian conventional wisdom in dangerous times. Julius shaved his beard again before his death, and his immediate successors were clean-shaven; nonetheless Pope Clement VII sported a beard when mourning the sack of Rome. Thenceforward, all popes were bearded until the death of Pope Innocent XII in 1700.


title: Pope Julius II

text: The frescoes on the ceiling of Stanza d'Eliodoro in the stanze of Raphael depict the traumatic events in 1510–11 when the Papacy regained its freedom. Although Raphael's original was lost, it was thought to relate closely to the personal iconography of Stanza della Segnatura, commissioned by Pope Julius himself. The Lateran Council that formed the Holy League marked a high point in his personal success. Saved by an allegory to the Expulsion of Helidorus, the French gone, Julius collapsed once again in late 1512, very seriously ill once more.


title: Pope Julius II

text: Julius was not the first pope to have fathered children before being elevated to high office, and had a daughter born to Lucrezia Normanni in 1483 – after he had been made a cardinal. Felice della Rovere survived into adulthood. Shortly after Felice was born, Julius arranged for Lucrezia to marry Bernardino de Cupis, Chamberlain to Julius's cousin, Cardinal Girolamo Basso della Rovere.