The sudden and unanimous election of Giuliano to succeed Pius III.--which we have elsewhere narrated--may well be deemed marvellous, considering the various interests that distracted the conclave, and the influence still ostensibly possessed in it by Valentino, the arch-foe of the Rovere race. There could be no more convincing proof that all parties were tired of the recent system, nor of their resolution to put an end to similar enormities. His morals, though hitherto far from immaculate, were pure in comparison with those which prevailed around him; above all, his lapses were neither matter of bravado, nor of open scandal.[227] His errors were of a loftier range, and if more directly perilous to the public, they belonged to a nobler category, and sprang from generous and praiseworthy impulses, and tended to public objects and the elevation of the papacy. Ascending a throne shaken by complicated convulsions, succeeding to a treasury drained for selfish ends, and to an authority waning under long-established abuses, it was his bounden duty to beware _ne aliquid detrimenti respublica capiat_. But, not content with resisting such further "detriment to the commonwealth," and with recovering the ground recently lost, his conscience, more perhaps than his ambition, urged him to new triumphs. He was a great pontiff after the mediæval estimate of the papacy. Little occupying himself with the bulwarks of a faith which he presumed impregnable, or the dogmas of a church still paramount over Christendom, he considered the temporal sovereignty and aggrandisement of the Keys to be his special vocation. Like the early Guelphs, he regarded Italy as St. Peter's patrimony, to be vindicated from all intruders: to establish her nationality, and extirpate the barbarian invaders, were merely steps to that end. Italian unity, though not as yet proposed for political aspirations or utopian dreams, was the result towards which this policy would probably have led both Julius and his successor, had the former been longer spared, and had the narrow views with which the latter pursued it not involved him in continual difficulties, and accelerated the decline of papal ascendancy. [Footnote 227: He had certainly two natural children, and Bernardo Capello alludes to the inroads upon his constitution, occasioned by gout and _morbus Gallicus_ (Ranke, App., sect. i., No. 6); the latter term seems, however, to have been often in that age completely misapplied.]