The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [62]
Subsequent decrees, more concerned with silencing criticism than with reform, indicated that the scolding of preachers had begun to hurt. Henceforth preachers were forbidden to prophesy or predict the coming of Anti-Christ or the end of the world. They were to keep to the Gospels and abstain from scandalous denunciation of the faults of bishops and other prelates and the wrongdoing of their superiors, and refrain from mentioning names. Censorship of printed books was another measure intended to stop attacks on clerics holding offices of “dignity and trust.”
Few if any of the Council’s decrees ever left paper. A serious effort to put them into practice might have made an impression, but none was made. Considering that Leo X, the then presiding Pope, was engaged in all the practices that the rules forbade, the will was missing. Change of course must come either from will at the top or from irresistible external pressure. The first was not present in the Renaissance Papacy; the second was approaching.
In the battle of Ravenna the vital French commander Gaston de Foix had been killed and his forces, losing impetus, had failed to exploit their victory. D’Amboise had died, Louis was hesitant, support for the Council of Pisa, condemned as schismatic and null and void by the Pope, was leaking away. When 20,000 Swiss reached Italy the tide turned. Beaten at the battle of Novara outside Milan and compelled by the Swiss to yield the duchy, expelled by Genoa, forced backward to the base of the Alps, the French “vanished like mist before the sun”—for the time being. Ravenna and Bologna returned in allegiance to the Pope; all of the Romagna was reabsorbed into the Papal States; the Council of Pisa picked up its skirts and fled over the Alps to Lyons, where it soon faded and fell apart. Because of the underlying fear of another schism and the superior status and dignity of the Lateran, it had never had a firm foundation.
The indomitable old Pope had accomplished his aims. Rome exploded in celebration of the flight of the French; fireworks blazed, cannon boomed in salute from Castel Sant’ Angelo, crowds screaming “Giulio! Giulio!” hailed him as the liberator of Italy and the Holy See. A thanksgiving procession was staged in his honor in which he was represented in the guise of a secular emperor holding a scepter and globe as emblems of sovereignty, and escorted by figures representing Scipio, conqueror of Carthage, and Camillus, who saved Rome from the Gauls.
Politics still ruled. The Holy League was crippled when Venice turned around to ally herself with France against her old rival Genoa. The Pope in his last year pursued complex connections with the Emperor and the King of England, and it was not long after his death before the French returned and the wars began again. Nevertheless, Julius had succeeded in halting the dismemberment of papal territory and consolidating the temporal structure of the Papal States, and for this he has received high marks in history. In reference books he can be found designated as “true founder of the Papal State,” and even “Saviour of the Church.” That the cost had been to bathe his country in blood and violence and that all the temporal gains could not prevent the authority of the Church from cracking at the core within ten years are not reckoned in these estimates.
When Julius died in 1513, he was honored and mourned by many because he was thought to have freed them from the detested invader. Shortly after his death Erasmus offered the contrary view in a satiric dialogue called Julius Exclusus, which, though published anonymously, has been generally attributed to him by the knowledgeable. Identifying himself at the gates of Heaven to Saint Peter, Julius says, “… I have done more for the Church and Christ than any pope before me.… I annexed Bologna to the Holy See, I beat the Venetians. I jockeyed the duke of Ferrara. I defeated a schismatical Council by a sham Council