A pope leads his armies into battle. Crowds exalt him; satirists mock the "warrior pope" in anonymous verses. From streets to print shops, a media war rages across Europe. Who controls the narrative?

The Warrior Pope plunges you into the noisy world of sixteenth-century European political communication. Drawing on unstudied vernacular ballads, ephemeral prints, broadsheets, Latin treatises, and rare woodcuts, Massimo Rospocher reconstructs the media war surrounding Julius II's papacy (1503–1513). From Roman streets to Parisian theatres, from Venetian diplomats to English propagandists, this book traces how competing images of the most controversial Renaissance pope traveled across an intermedial system of oral, visual, manuscript, and printed communication.