Piacenza, and by entering on the
heritage bequeathed to him by Cesare Borgia. At his death he transmitted
to his successors the largest and most solid sovereignty in Italy. But
restless, turbid, never happy unless fighting, Julius drowned the
peninsula in blood. He has been called a patriot, because from time to
time he raised the cry of driving the barbarians from Italy: it must,
however, be remembered that it was he, while still Cardinal di San
Pietro in Vincoli, who finally moved Charles VIII. from Lyons; it was he
who stirred up the League of Cambray against Venice, and who invited the
Swiss mercenaries into Lombardy; in each case adding the weight of the
Papal authority to the forces which were enslaving his country. Julius,
again, has been variously represented as the saviour of the Papacy, and
as the curse of Italy.[1] He was emphatically both. In those days of
national anarchy it was perhaps impossible for Julius to magnify the
Church except at the expense of the nation, and to achieve the purpose
of his life without inflicting the scourge of foreign war upon his
countrymen. The powers of Europe had outgrown the Papal discipline.
Italian questions were being decided in the cabinets of Louis,
Maximilian, and Ferdinand. Instead of controlling the arbiters of Italy,
a Pope could only play off one against another.

[1] 'Fatale instrumento e allora e prima e poi de' mali
d'Italia,' says Guicciardini, _Storia d'Italia_, vol. i. p. 84.
'Der Retter des Papstthums,' says Burckhardt, p. 95.

Leo X. succeeded Julius in 1513, to the great relief of the Romans,
wearied with the continual warfare of the old _Pontifice terribile_. In
the gorgeous pageant of his triumphal procession to the Lateran, the
streets were decked with arches, emblems, and inscriptions. Among these
may be noticed the couplet emblazoned by the banker Agostino Chigi
before his palace:

Olim habuit Cypris sua tempora; tempora Mavors
Olim habuit; sua nunc tempora Pallas habet.

'Venus ruled here with Alexander; Mars with Julius; now Pallas enters on
her reign with Leo.' To this epigram the goldsmith Antonio di San Marco
answered with one pithy line:

Mars fuit; est Pallas; Cypria semper ero:

'Mars reigned; Pallas reigns; Venus' own I shall always be.'

This first Pope of the house of Medici enjoyed at Rome the fame of his
father Lorenzo the Magnificent at Florence. Extolled as an Augustus in
his lifetime, he has given his name