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Five is a number dense with theological significance Five are the books of the Torah, five the wounds of Jesus, five the pillars of Islam and the elements of the universe according to Aristotle The Pythagoreans called the star with five corners, the Pentagram, ‘health’, and used it as a secret sign by which to identify themselves On the fifth day God created the creatures of the sky and of the oceanic abysses and ‘He saw that it was good’ Multiply five by one hundred, the secular number par excellence, and you get 500 February 1513, February 2013: five centuries that close upon themselves   In the last days of February 1513 – halfway through the 500 years of the Little Ice Age – an old, feverish man was meeting his end in a Vatican palace It is recounted that as he lay on his deathbed a fierce wind blew through the streets of Rome He was Julius II, the ‘Pope dressed in armour’, the warrior Pontifex who had spent his life fighting to ‘push back the barbarians’ – that is, the French superpower – and to create an independent Italian kingdom Having succeeded the weak Pius III, who ruled for only three weeks before being poisoned by his own attendants, Julius II was well aware of the perils of his position   He would go down in history as one of the most intrepid figures of the Italian Renaissance, a visionary politician and patron of the arts as well as a supremely corrupted Pope, quick to anger and plagued with syphilis He showed little interest in theology, but he understood his job better than most of his predecessors or successors: he knew that the Vatican seat was an imperial throne, and dared to act accordingly Having started his career as a Franciscan, the order most devoted to poverty, he had no ideological difficulty in seeing through the religious pretensions of the Church to its essential nature as an instrument of power: the steel blade that cuts through