Pope Julius at the start of his…

Pope Julius at the start of his reign had desired seriously to bring about a reform of the Catholic Church and to reconvene the Council of Trent, but very little will actually be achieved during his five years in office; apologists ascribe the inactivity of his last three years to severe gout.

At the request of the Emperor Charles V, he had consented in 1551 to the reopening of the council of Trent and entered into a league against the duke of Parma and Henry II of France (1547–59), but soon afterwards had made terms with his enemies and in 1553 suspends the meetings of the council.

Discouraged by his dealings with the emperor, Julius increasingly contents himself with interfering in Italian politics alone.

He has retired to his luxurious palace at the Villa Giulia which he had built for himself close to the Porta del Popolo.

From here he passes the time in comfort, emerging from time to time to make timid efforts to reform the Church through the reestablishment of the reform commissions.

He is a friend of the Jesuits, to whom he grants a fresh confirmation in 1550; and through a Papal Bull of August 1552 he had founded the Collegium Germanicum, and granted an annual income.

Catholicism during his pontificate is in 1553 provisionally restored in England under Queen Mary.

Julius sends Cardinal Reginald Pole as legate with powers that he can use at his discretion to help the restoration succeed.

The particular failures of Pope Julius III are his nepotism and favoritism.

One notable scandal surrounds his adoptive nephew, Innocenzo Ciocchi Del Monte, a thirteen- or fourteen-year old beggar-boy whom the future Pope had picked up on the streets of Parma some years earlier.

On being elected to the Papacy in 1550, Julius had raised the now seventeen-year old but still uncouth and quasi-illiterate Innocenzo to the cardinalate, appointed him cardinal-nephew, and showered the boy with benefices—Abbot commendatario of the abbeys of Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, S. Zeno in Verona, June 1552, later of the abbeys of S. Saba, Miramondo, and of Grottaferrata, Frascati, and other appointments—to the point where his income approaches one of the highest in Europe.

Gossip calls the boy Julius's "Ganymede", and the Venetian ambassador reports that Innocenzo shares the pope's bedroom and bed.

The relationship is to become a staple of anti-papal polemics for over a century: it was said that Julius, awaiting Innocenzo's arrival in Rome to receive his cardinal's hat, showed the impatience of a lover awaiting.

In 1553 also, the reform-minded Julius, convinced that the Talmud attacks Christianity, burns thousands of volumes of the Talmud in Rome, …