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CHAPTER 3

The Precept of 26 February 1616

Once the consultors finished their work, the stage was set for the Inquisition to move against Galileo. On 26 February 1616, he had a meeting with Inquisitor Roberto Bellarmino. What happened has generated controversy almost from that moment forward.¹ The discussion in this chapter and the next about precepts, and that in particular issued to Galileo in 1616, is long and complicated. This is necessary because so much past controversy over Galileo’s treatment and his trial has been conditioned by misunderstandings of the legal role of precepts, and the English language used in translations. In this chapter I shall deal with the textual evidence allowing a reconstruction of the event, and in the next with its legal meaning. I shall argue that Galileo received a precept that in all likelihood ordered him utterly to abandon Copernican ideas. Given improving knowledge of how the Inquisition worked, including how it produced and preserved its records, it becomes possible to create a consistent account of what happened in 1616.² A point of terminology: I have chosen to use the term “precept” instead of “injunction” because it comes closer to praeceptum (Latin) or precetto (Italian) and also avoids confusion with an injunction in common law, which it only partly resembles. The key difference is that a competent court must issue an injunction, while in canon law any superior with the proper authority (including private) may give a precept.³

Six documents bear directly on the episode in Bellarmino’s palazzo at San Macuto (the present via del Seminario No. 120). All are in the Inquisition’s files, four of them in Galileo’s dossier. The first three as minutes have the greatest authority:

No. 1. Paul V’s order on 25 February to Bellarmino and Commissary Michelangelo Seghizzi transmitted via the Inquisition’s secretary Cardinal Giovanni Garzia Millini (hereafter “Paul’s order”);⁴ No. 2. A precept dated the next day; there is also an abbreviated (and irrelevant) eighteenth-century copy of both 1 and 2 (“the precept minute”);⁵ No. 3. The report of a meeting of the Congregation of the Inquisition on 3 March 1616 found in the decree register of that year (“the decretum”).⁶

The other three texts probably descend from No. 2 and therefore say less about the events of 1616:

No. 4. Part of the particular congregation’s report of September 1632;⁷ No. 5. The “Summary” (Summarium) prepared by the Inquisition’s assessor near the end of Galileo’s trial in 1633, and the basis on which the Inquisitors passed sentence;⁸ No. 6. Galileo’s sentence.⁹

Most scholars have thought that the minute of 26 February recording the administration of the precept (No. 2) makes the most trouble. This is not the case. That honor instead belongs to the same kind of note of the Inquisition’s meeting a week later (the decretum of 3 March, No. 3). Nearly all commentators treat a seventh text, an affidavit (fede) from Bellarmino requested by Galileo and dated 26 May 1616 (“Bellarmino’s affidavit”), as if it is most important. In fact, it says nothing directly about what happened on 26 February and is largely insignificant.¹⁰

I shall save one final piece of evidence for separate treatment, Galileo’s deposition of 12 April 1633, mainly because it is the only one of these texts that offers a slanted view of what happened. Despite many interpreters’ deep suspicions, it is much more likely that Galileo fudged the truth in his testimony than that any of the other documents were falsified or otherwise manipulated. When carefully read, Galileo’s testimony agrees well with the interpretation argued here.

It is as well to admit immediately that any reconstruction will never meet the standards of legal proof. Not only did the Inquisition both generate and manage its records in ways guaranteed to produce problems, it was an institution run by men only some of whom were fully qualified. Some of the least well credentialed, the notaries, had the greatest impact on the quality of its records.¹¹ Nevertheless, it was their intervention alone that made an act authentic, as medieval legal commentators had long argued.¹² Many of the rest of the Inquisition’s personnel were lawyers who one might hope would do their job with precision. They too often did not. As one basic albeit largely insignificant indication, they failed to settle on a stable text of the strongest form of the precept even when allegedly quoting it directly.¹³

The Decretum of 3 March

The only serious discrepancy about what happened on 26 February 1616 arises from document No. 3 (the decretum). It has Bellarmino on 3 March report to the Congregation simply that Galileo had “agreed” to “abandon” heliocentrism after being “warned” to do so.¹⁴ This statement has often been taken to mean both that Galileo received only a warning and, more important, that Commissary Michelangelo Seghizzi never issued the precept. The other texts disagree. Paul’s order (No. 1), the one found in Galileo’s dossier but not the decreta, read that Seghizzi should proceed to the precept if Galileo “refused” to agree to the “warning.” It gave the text of the precept as ordering Galileo “to abandon completely teaching, defending or treating this doctrine [of the earth’s movement and the sun’s fixity],” which is almost identical to the wording of No. 2. No. 4 read that Galileo could “in no manner whatever hold, teach or defend [Copernicus’s ideas], in word or in writing” or he would be proceeded against, and that he promised to obey. No. 5 combines all these texts, perhaps sloppily, perhaps maliciously, and makes Bellarmino alone give Galileo the precept in its strongest form. To bring confusion full circle, No. 6, Galileo’s sentence, contains the most detailed account, having Bellarmino warn Galileo “benignly” before Seghizzi gave him the strongest form of the precept.¹⁵

Thus, except for the decretum of 3 March, all the texts agree that Galileo got the precept in full form, leaving a little unclear only from whom, a point that may be irrelevant. We are left with one crucial fact: No. 3 stands alone both in its content and, more important, in its status and location. The second point is vital to the second phase of Galileo’s trial. Since it was not in his dossier, the Inquisition staff in 1632–1633 could not have been expected to know about it unless someone had ordered them to search all the Inquisition’s voluminous and poorly indexed records.¹⁶ The absence of an order for such a search might mean that it was never handed down and that No. 3, therefore, never came into evidence¹⁷—hence the near-perfect consistency between the other two documents of 1616, the “Summary” and the sentence.

The decretum of 3 March might seem the most authoritative text since it records what happened at the Inquisition’s Thursday meeting with the pope, when it made its most important decisions.¹⁸ Inclusion in the decreta converted the act into a precedent, on which the Inquisition relied nearly as much as common lawyers do.¹⁹ Although both points have significance, neither bears as much weight as might at first appear. Above all, the decreta were frequently sloppily kept.²⁰ The minute of Paul’s order (No. 1), recording a direct if informal command from the pope via the Inquisition’s secretary to the two heads of its permanent staff, is a good example of the many notes in the decree registers scrawled in the margin or crammed in at the end of a meeting.²¹ Since it had not gone through the Congregation, the pope’s order need not have been recorded there at all, although more than a few similar acts were. As just one example, take the informational note exactly like No. 1 saying that Secretary Gian Garzia Millini “told me, the assessor, that the pope had ordered” that the Inquisition not accept recommendations, letters offering protection to suspects.²²

Next, the way the Inquisition noted its decisions produced an important weakness in its records bearing directly on the status of No. 3, the only one of these documents explicitly to identify itself as a second-hand summary. The notary said he had transcribed a text given to him by the assessor, the permanent head of the Inquisition staff, who had jotted down what Bellarmino had said during the secret part of the Inquisition meeting from which the notary was barred.²³ Quite apart from the strong suspicion that in some cases the assessor did no more than hand the notary the meeting agenda, perhaps with notes of action taken, perhaps in its original, unannotated form, so far as we know there was no procedure in place by which to check the accuracy of either the assessor’s jottings or the notary’s transcriptions of them.²⁴ In this case, we need look no farther than the next clause of the same document for evidence of the confusion this clumsy second-hand recording could produce. In it the same notary, again allegedly working from the assessor’s notes, entered the Congregation of the Index’s order that Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus and two other books had been “prohibited and suspended, respectively” and then reversed the sequence of those words followed again by “respectively” at the end of the note. By also listing the books incorrectly relative to which was prohibited or suspended, the assessor/notary created an insoluble mess.²⁵ There is every reason to think he/they did the same in No. 2, the precept minute. Besides, as its context shows, the decree of 3 March did not primarily concern Galileo, who appeared in it only as advance recipient of the Index’s action, so the notary (and maybe Bellarmino himself) worried less about getting what happened to him right. As Sergio Pagano also observes, Bellarmino was under no obligation in the first place to report in detail what had happened.²⁶

The Precept Minute: A Forgery?

From the moment serious study of Galileo’s trial began in the late 1860s, document No. 2 has been the object of determined efforts to get rid of it because it does the most damage to Galileo.²⁷ It posed an even greater danger than previously realized. Incredibly enough two words in it, et constituto, that would by themselves have settled once and for all what happened have been overlooked.²⁸ They appear in the phrase recording Seghizzi’s action, “and afterward and incontinenti, in my and witnesses’ [presence], etc., still being then present the same illustrious lord cardinal [Roberto Bellarmino], the abovesaid father commissary [Seghizzi] ordered and ordered [sic] the aforesaid Galileo, still present et constituto” (“et successive ac incontinenti, in mei etc. et testium etc., praesenti etiam adhuc eodem illustrissimo Domino cardinali, supradictus Pater Commissarius praedicto Galileo adhuc ibidem praesenti et constituto praecepit et ordinavit”) to abandon his Copernican beliefs. Constitutus, literally “constituted,” is the vital term. It regularly appears at the beginning of a deposition or interrogation before the Inquisition and other courts and led to records of them being known as constituta. Galileo’s contemporary Sigismondo Scaccia unhelpfully said that definition arose because constitutus was their first word.²⁹ It also appears frequently in canon law in several senses. One of the most common occurs in the phrase in nostra [the pope’s] praesentia constitutus, which probably comes close to the sense it has in the precept and cannot mean simply “present,” unless “present in our presence” makes any kind of sense.³⁰ The precept’s text similarly couples praesenti to constitutus. The papal chancery might have filled its documents with unneccessary rhetorical flourishes, but the Inquisition did not. The use in the precept of two words (praecipere and ordinare) that both must be translated into English as “order” does not provide a counter-example. Legal commentators gave exhaustive treatment to a whole range of related terms for “to order,” all of which they apparently thought denoted or connoted slightly different meanings.³¹

Another common sense of constitutus in canon law helps explain the first meaning. This is the phrase in minoribus ordinibus constitutus (“constitutus in minor orders”) or the like, for example, in tua et Tolosana ecclesia est archidiaconus constitutus (“constitutus archdeacon in your church [cathedral] of Toulouse”), where the word signifies that a person holds an office. That sense becomes much clearer by the time Francisco Peña uses it several times in his commentary on Nicolau Eymeric’s Directorium Inquisitorum to refer to an inquisitor’s or his vicar’s establishment in power.³² The fact that other of the Inquisition’s judicial acts, including several of Galileo’s (for example, the interrogation of 12 April 1633 or his “defense” of 10 May [DV, nos. 37 and 40]), begin instead with vocatus may provide another clue to the meaning of constitutus. According to Francesco Beretta, vocatus signified that the suspect or witness had received the citatio verbalis, while constitutus meant more or less the same thing, that he or she had the required citation and had responded to it by making him- or herself available to the court. Above all, Beretta concluded, constitutus indicated that the act had taken place in a notary’s presence and was therefore both authentic and legally valid. He cites a passage in Francisco Peña’s “Introductio” setting constituuntur parallel to interrogantur.³³ Thus consitutus and vocatus mean nearly the same thing. The support Beretta offered for this conclusion may be a little thin, but it at least indicates the functional equivalence of the two terms as indicating that a person had become involved in a legal proceeding.

In order to incorporate this range of meanings, I suggest that constitutus is best translated as “established,” which has the advantage of being a plausible extension of its classical sense of “to cause to stand.”³⁴ In a legal document, then, it indicates a person’s change in status qua legal subject (but apparently usually stopping short of his transformation into witness or deponent, which happened only after taking the appropriate oath) and thereby indicates the legal nature of the proceeding. Its predicate in this phrase of the precept is Galileo and in tandem with adhuc ibidem praesenti, the key word being the adverb adhuc (“still”), it signifies that at least the notary regarded both Bellarmino’s and Seghizzi’s actions as part of the same legal proceeding. Furthermore, those two words exclude the possibility of a charitable admonition, an act that by design never had legal significance. This problem will receive more attention below and in the next chapter.

The attack on the precept minute followed two lines, advanced most influentially by Emil Wohlwill.³⁵ He maintained that it was a forgery and, even if not, legally illegitimate. Both criticisms turned on a key point, the lack of the witnesses’ signatures. Although the forgery thesis proved popular for a long time, only two historians still seriously entertain it, Francesco Beretta and Vittorio Frajese, the first much better informed than the second and oddly the man who has done most to demonstrate the unlikelihood of his contention. His case depends on neither palaeographical nor codicological grounds but on an argument lifted from Wohlwill without acknowledgment about the contradiction between No. 3 and No. 1, leading to the slippage between No. 2’s two actions. Beretta calls the “material authenticity” of its second half “very problematic,” before concluding that it was forged in 1632 in order to extricate from trouble the man who had licensed the Dialogue.³⁶

Beretta admits that the palaeographical and codicological evidence is against him. Thus, all of No. 2 “appears” to be in the hand of Andrea Pettini, the chief notary in 1616.³⁷ Furthermore, he concludes on formal grounds that the first half of the precept minute is authentic, and does not criticize the second in these terms.³⁸ He also disproves the theory that the document was interpolated into the dossier at a later date.³⁹ Finally, Beretta shows that witnesses’ signatures would not have been expected on a document like No. 2, an imbreviatura or minute.⁴⁰ Its authenticity derived not from those signatures but from the notary’s, which Beretta claims normally occurred only once per dossier, at the bottom of the front cover.⁴¹ Galileo’s file lacks such a signature. Beretta rather tendentiously maintains that either Pettini never signed it or his signature had already been torn off before Galileo was sentenced, making the outcome illegal. This point signifies little, since it is impossible to say when the damage occurred.⁴² Nor, given the loss of nearly all the Inquisition’s processi, can Beretta cite evidence for his description of normal practice in cases like Galileo’s. He seems instead to base himself on the files in Trinity College Dublin, MS 1232.⁴³ This comparison may not hold up, since these dossiers (1) concern suspects who appeared spontaneously before the Inquisition and, therefore, merited substantially different treatment from other accuseds, which may well mean that their records were handled differently; and (2) include multiple proceedings, not one.⁴⁴ Nor even on these dossiers is the (same) notary’s practice uniform. Some signatures appear to be autograph for example, fo. 1r), others fair copies probably written by a substitute notary (for example, fo. 9r). In short, neither the signatures of the witnesses—which would not have been expected—nor the notary’s—which, unlike the witnesses’s, may really be missing—effect No. 2’s authenticity.

Monitio caritativa or Fraternal Correction?

Many commentators read No. 1 as ordering a two-phase proceeding, a “warning” by Bellarmino, followed by a precept from Seghizzi. No one before Beretta had tried to explain that “warning.” He identified it as a caritativa monitio recorded in the authentic part of No. 2. Bellarmino did not take even the next step, a denunciatio evangelica, much less administer or countenance the administration of a precept.⁴⁵ This assertion drives Beretta’s case for forgery.

As little as has been said about precepts in connection with Galileo’s trial, until Beretta’s thesis almost nothing had been entered into evidence about either admonition or “evangelical denunciation” (denunciatio evangelica).⁴⁶ His discussion draws mainly on three works, Sigismondo Scaccia’s Tractatus de iudiciis, Francisco Peña’s unpublished “Introductio, sive Praxis Inquisitorum,” and Prospero Farinacci’s Tractatus de haeresi. All are roughly contemporary with the beginning of Galileo’s trial, and all constitute reasonably weighty sources. The author of the first had experience as inquisitor of Malta, and Peña had sat for years as a consultor to the Roman Inquisition in his capacity as dean of the Rota.⁴⁷ Farinacci had never had any position in the Inquisition, but he had been for a long time the fiscal general (roughly chief prosecutor) for the city of Rome; his book was dedicated to the Congregation of the Inquisition, and he claimed that Bellarmino had read it.⁴⁸ All three agreed that the essence of a monitio caritativa was secrecy in order to protect the sinner; for just that reason, it preceded the denunciatio. They also all agreed that heresy did not require such a monitio because it was a public crime.⁴⁹ Beretta saves what looks like an unpromising situation by noting that prior to such an admonition ignorance excused misdeeds, but not afterward. Thus Galileo, charitably warned, amended his ways especially by protesting at the beginning of his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems that he always intended to submit to the Church’s judgment. Had he persisted in error after such an admonition, that would have constituted pertinacy that became heresy.⁵⁰ Thus by implication since Galileo got only an admonition, he could not have been accused (even tacitly) of heresy, and the entire proceeding was extrajudicial.

Unfortunately, Beretta is unlikely to be correct about Bellarmino’s action. As we shall see in the next chapter, the Inquisition used monitiones in exactly the way I think Bellarmino did, not out of charity but as a means to suspend or to conclude process, and therefore in almost exactly the same way it used precepts; by contrast, I have not found a single monitio in the decree registers qualified as charitable. Again in the next chapter we shall see that, while the jurists’ commentary on the use and nature of admonitions is nothing like as extensive as in the case of precepts (unsurprising, since they were not a legal device), there is more than enough to demonstrate against Beretta that what happened to Galileo was not a “charitable admonition,” and that in fact the kind of “warning” he got is virtually indistinguishable from a precept.

At more or less the same time as Beretta, Matthias Dorn, a geologist, also undertook to demonstrate that the precept minute, No. 2, had been forged.⁵¹ In addition to repeating Wohlwill’s twin claims (again, without acknowledgment), Dorn offered a quasi-scientific criticism based on observations by an apparently professional document examiner, G. Schöneberg.⁵² Almost certainly working at second hand from photographs supplied by Dorn, Schöneberg identified four differences in the hand of the first and second parts of the minute: (1) in the form of characters, especially “d”; (2) in the ductus, the general way in which a particular writer forms characters, especially Oberlän-genverzierungen, which I take to mean serifs on the ascenders; (3) in the size of the characters; and (4) in the ligature between magiscule “T” and “e.”⁵³ These results are all open to serious question. Above all, small, sometimes very small details best distinguish one hand from another, especially in the case of scripts as highly formalized as papal chancery hand. Many such will be hard to see in photographs. I have not been able to see the originals, but, on the basis not of the tiny prints reproduced in Dorn’s book but of Henri de L’Épinois’s much clearer (in part because more than a century older) photographic reproductions and the strength of professional training in palaeography and thirty years practice and teaching of it, I reject all Schöneberg’s points.⁵⁴ Neither of the most solid-looking ones, 1 and 4, is true. Any alleged difference in the characters’ size could easily be explained by the fact that the first half of the text is written into a smallish space at the bottom of a mostly full page, while the second half is at the top of a new, otherwise blank one. Schöneberg did not perform the surest test to distinguish two hands, including their ductus, the measurement of the characters’ slant. I do not detect any variation in slant from either set of plates. The second surest measure, differences in infrequently written characters, is impossible since there are none to compare.⁵⁵

Annibale Fantoli offers a number of extrinsic criticisms of Beretta’s forgery thesis. One of the best involves the witnesses’ names. How would a forger in 1632 have known them?⁵⁶ This objection has a possible answer. An especially clever man could have found them in a biography of Bellarmino published in 1624 and again in 1631. The first, the Cypriot Badino or Bandino de Nores, served as maestro di camera to both Cesare Baronio and Bellarmino.⁵⁷ The second, Agostino Mongardo, served Bellarmino as one of Nores’s subordinates (cubiculi administer).⁵⁸ In a note, Fantoli speculated that the public version of No. 2 is missing because it went into the now mostly lost series of Libri extensorum.⁵⁹ Fantoli adopts Beretta’s description of this formerly extensive set of volumes as “the registers of acts emitted in public form by the notary.”⁶⁰ Once again, Beretta painted a bit broadly on the basis of limited evidence. One of the few surviving such volumes I examined, ACDFSO, St.st.LL-5-g, contains no public instruments. Finally, like Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Fantoli pointed to the seeming contradiction between Nos. 1 and 2 to support the second’s authenticity, arguing that a forger would have tried to make his work agree with an authentic document.⁶¹ And one might add, especially since he had taken care to unearth the real witnesses.

Most recently, Frajese has revisited the precept leading to a rejoinder from Pagano who also criticizes other work from Wohlwill forward, both men recycling a number of earlier arguments, both adding a few original points.⁶² Frajese’s argument rests on a distinction between a “private and extrajudicial admonition” given by Bellarmino and Seghizzi’s “judicial precept.”⁶³ Instead of demonstrating the nature of Bellarmino’s action, Frajese rests his case on the claim that the precept minute is a forgery. In addition to most of the timeworn arguments dating back to Wohlwill, especially the allegation that the precept minute is an unicum, contradicting all the other documents, and that the putative original should have been signed by Galileo and the witnesses—a claim constantly repeated, even though, given the lack of any original precepts, one necessarily without evidence—he bases his conclusion on more or less original codicological and palaeographical grounds.⁶⁴ First, the minute is in an odd place, beginning on the verso of one sheet and continuing on the recto of another, the reverse of what should have happened according to the papal chancery’s customs.⁶⁵ The minute began in that spot because the notary Pettini had to work around a date already entered, which Frajese thinks was that of the presentation to the pope of the theologian consultors’ opinion condemning two propositions allegedly drawn from Galileo’s Sunspot Letters.⁶⁶ Instead of entering the pope’s decision about the opinion (because he took none), Pettini began the precept minute following Seghizzi’s orders.⁶⁷ Second, Frajese makes a great deal of changes in the hand over the course of the minute’s text. Although constantly qualifying the point with phrases like “if we are dealing with him,” Frajese seems to agree with Beretta that the whole of the minute is in Pettini’s hand, the only time it occurs in Galileo’s dossier.⁶⁸ Based on a change in the size of the text on the initial verso, he theorizes that the minute was not written continuously but in three separate blocks. He thinks it highly significant that the hand begins to shrink as it approaches the word successive and becomes smaller thereafter, a point once more adapted from Wohlwill. Therefore the text must originally have ended with the word “deserat.” After the interruption, the notary resumed with another pen or ink. Frajese concludes that Seghizzi ordered Pettini to enter the precept minute instead of leaving the two sheets blank; Bellarmino’s extrajudicial action should have left no record.⁶⁹ Third, a point about the document’s form. While allowing that the text is an imbreviatura, that fact deprives it of legal validity since such documents were intended only for internal use and in the absence of the proper signatures (again) lacked legal validity.⁷⁰ Finally, an argument from content. Frajese alleges that the precept minute was modeled—with suitable alterations to the truth—on the the text of Paul’s order located immediately before it in Galileo’s dossier.⁷¹ The notary had no choice but to do that, since he had “no real referent” (that is, a legitimate precept) to follow. From this, Frajese concludes that no original precept ever existed.⁷² The blame for all this falls on Seghizzi.⁷³

Pagano has disposed of most of Frajese’s points, while operating within the same undemonstrated opposition between an “admonition” and a “formal precept.”⁷⁴ Like Frajese, he makes assumptions about the Inquisition’s record-keeping practices, especially that it was normal for its notaries to write up documents later. This point happens to be true, but Pagano infers it from a couple of sixteenth-century examples of Holy Office officials visiting suspects at their houses.⁷⁵ He further alleges without evidence that the Inquisition often used the resulting minute (which following Beretta he calls an imbreviatura or matrix seu originale instrumentum) during an informative process, a point he then contradicts by incorrectly claiming that Galileo did not undergo such an investigation in 1615–1616.⁷⁶ More substantial criticisms of Frajese follow. First, Pagano easily disproves Frajese’s largest codicological claim. The precept minute’s location is not unusual: Pagano cites a number of instances of documents in Galileo’s dossier beginning on the reverse of sheets and in the middle of the page.⁷⁷ Next, he almost as easily quashes Frajese’s palaeographical evidence. Pagano sees no change in the hand’s size on the initial verso, calling the allegation “unconvincing” and the supposed change in the ink as due to the degradation of oak gall ink over time.⁷⁸ The abbreviations Pettini used and to which Frajese pointed as evidence of the writing’s compression are also found throughout the dossier and are those usually found in documents generated by the papal bureaucracy.⁷⁹ Thus Pagano sees no evidence of any interruption. Nevertheless, he thinks it “very possible” that Seghizzi directed Pettini, while absolving the commissary of malicious intent.⁸⁰ Pagano also makes at least one large mistake in his criticism of Frajese. He alleges that Paul’s order of 25 February is not found in the decree register because no actions taken in the secret part of corams were recorded there. This is not true.⁸¹

Bellarmino’s “Certificate”and Evidence from the Second Phase of Galileo’s Trial in 1633

In his reports on what happened, Galileo failed altogether to refer to the precept.⁸² Since he also made light of the Index’s decree of 5 March against Copernicus, it might seem that Galileo took neither event seriously.⁸³ Indeed he did, especially when he learned of rumors that he had been forced to abjure.⁸⁴ Those rumors gave rise to the seventh document. Galileo asked Bellarmino for an affidavit (fede) that he had not abjured or suffered other punishment.⁸⁵ The cardinal, apparently acting as a member of the Index rather than as an Inquisitor, agreed. He wrote at least one draft of his text before settling on the final form.

The fede is dated 26 May 1616 and reads as follows:

We, Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino, having understood that Signor Galileo Galilei is being slandered or accused of having abjured in our hands, and also of being “penanced” [punished] for this with salutary penances, and having been sought out about the truth, we say that the said Signor Galileo has not abjured in our hands nor in those of others in Rome, nor anywhere else that we know, any opinion or doctrine, nor even more has he received salutary penances nor of any other sort, but has only had announced to him the declaration made by Our Lord [the pope] and published by the Sacred Congregation of the Index, in which is contained that the doctrine ascribed to Copernicus that the earth moves around the sun and the sun is at the center of the world without moving from east to west is contrary to Holy Scripture and therefore cannot be defended nor held. And in testimony of this we have written and signed this document with our own hand.⁸⁶

The text manifests Bellarmino’s skill as a rhetorician. While carefully avoiding assigning responsibility for the precept, he also smoothly, almost casually noted the warning specifically to Galileo not to defend or hold either of the two condemned propositions. And he changed the draft’s link between its first and second sections to take away some of the force of what he was about to say, or perhaps he was trying to keep the Inquisition’s action secret by deflecting attention from it. Instead of the original “of any other sort ma si bene,” which literally means “but although,” he switched to “ma solo” (“but only or merely”).⁸⁷ So, condemned in terms of the Index decree, or maybe not, Bellarmino left it to the reader to decide. Galileo read the text in one way, his judges in 1633 in another. Galileo perhaps naturally enough concentrated on those two little words “ma solo,” whereas his judges looked past them to Bellarmino’s statement that Galileo knew all about the Index decree, whatever else Bellarmino and Seghizzi might have ordered him to do. Galileo’s judges in 1633 took this passage as further incriminating him. In doing so, they forced the sense of Bellarmino’s fede in the opposite direction that many modern historians do. Neither can safely draw on it, since it says nothing directly about the event of 26 February.⁸⁸

The last piece of evidence is Galileo’s deposition of 12 April 1633, on which those same historians have often relied almost as heavily as on Bellarmino’s document, and even more unwisely. None have allowed for its obvious nature as a self-interested statement. Even without such an allowance, as Pagano and I more clearly have demonstrated, Galileo’s testimony supports the reconstruction argued here.⁸⁹

After an opening that may have been meant to steer his interrogator away from the precept, Galileo quickly produced a copy of Bellarmino’s fede.⁹⁰ Even as he did so, he tried to change its meaning by glossing it in light of Bellarmino’s letter of 12 April 1615 to Paolo Antonio Foscarini. While the fede drawing on the consultors’ opinion correctly said that Copernicus’s ideas were “contrary to Holy Scripture and therefore cannot be defended nor held,” the earlier letter read instead that Foscarini could safely defend Copernicus only hypothetically. Galileo alleged that was also what Bellarmino had told him in 1616.⁹¹ Introducing Bellarmino’s fede and thereby contradicting his testimony proved to be a serious mistake. “In any manner whatsoever” (as the precept minute reads) almost becomes redundant.⁹²

Galileo’s interrogator continued with a series of questions about the interview with Bellarmino. Asked whether anyone else had been present and whether they or anyone else had also given him a precept, he replied, “It could be that some precept was given to me that I not hold nor defend the said opinion, but I do not remember because this is a matter of some years ago.”⁹³ Damaging as this admission was, Galileo quickly made his situation worse in his reply to a question whether he would remember the precept’s content were it read to him: “I do not claim not to have broken that precept in any way.” After having been told what the precept said, he once more exacerbated matters by saying, “I remember that the precept was that I could not hold nor defend, and it could be that there was also nor teach. I also do not remember that there was that detail, in any fashion, but it could be that it was there.” In short, he admitted that he might have received the precept in the strongest wording including quovis modo. The “Summary” (No. 5) recorded Galileo’s statement with scrupulous accuracy: “he confesses the precept.”⁹⁴

In his brief defense of 10 May, Galileo first denied that he had received a precept (twice called a comandamento) and then claimed to have an oral order from Bellarmino that did not contain “in any manner whatsoever,” in both cases relying again on Bellarmino’s fede. He concluded that “when the said two details [teach, and quovis modo] are removed, and only the two noted in the present affidavit are retained [that is, not defended or held], there is no point in doubting that the command given in it is the same precept given in the Sacred Congregation of the Index’s decree.”⁹⁵ But as Pagano points out, in between Galileo made another damaging admission, or at least accepted without demur a serious point his interrogator had made. The “command” had been “given to me and registered.”⁹⁶ That last word can only refer to the precept minute, which, of course, contains the strongest form of the order to Galileo. In his last interrogation on 21 June he spoke of “that precept” he had received as the watershed in his intellectual life, after which he scrupulously and sincerely adhered only to Ptolemy’s cosmology, as he continued to maintain throughout the balance of this interrogation he had always done.⁹⁷ Galileo’s sentence the next day brims with the charge that he had violated the precept. so it is no surprise that he confessed to doing so in his abjuration the same day, saying that he had been properly condemned for having published the Dialogue “after having been judicially warned with a precept by the same [Holy Office] that I was completely to leave the false opinion that the sun is the center of the world and immobile and that the earth is not the center of the world and moves, and that I could not hold, defend nor teach in any way whatsoever, orally or in writing, the said false doctrine.”⁹⁸

Thus, except in his defense of 10 May, Galileo admitted that he received a precept, probably from Bellarmino, and at least left open the possibility that it took the strong form. Galileo’s own testimony isolates document No. 3 all the more.

Successive ac incontinenti

Now that the precept minute has been established as authentic, one phrase in it demands careful attention, mainly because it has been taken to mean that Seghizzi violated his instructions to give Galileo a chance to accept whatever Bellarmino had said, going on successive ac incontinenti.

The words “successive ac incontinenti” are linked by “et” to the last word in the warning Bellarmino gave, “deserat” (“abandon”). Right from the first, the phrase has been translated as linking the two actions without any temporal interval between them whatsoever. Wohlwill, while translating the phrase in various ways, “und darauf folgend und sofort” (“and thereafter and immediately”), “ohne ihm [Galileo] zur Antwort Zeit zu lassen” or “ohne Pause” (“without giving Galileo time to reply” or “without a break”), and “unmittelbar darauf” (“immediately thereafter”), never allowed it to include even an extra moment.⁹⁹ Wohlwill’s contemporary and competitor Karl von Gebler similarly rendered it as “gleich darauf ohne Unterbreching” (“immediately thereafter without interruption”).¹⁰⁰ It has usually been translated into English as “immediately thereafter.” Fantoli gives the most elaborate translation-cum-gloss: “an intervention that immediately followed Bellarmine’s warning, apparently without Galileo having had time to display his acquiescence.”¹⁰¹ The conclusion from such translations follows that Seghizzi violated the contingency in Paul V’s instructions that he was to act only if Galileo “refused to obey” (“recusaverit parere”).

Neither Wohlwill nor von Gebler tried to establish what successive ac incontinenti might have meant in the seventeenth century. Several of their contemporaries did better, including Philippe Gilbert and Franz Reusch. Both turned to inquisitorial manuals, Gilbert to the Repertorium Inquisitorum (1575) and Reusch to Eliseo Masini’s widely used text for provincial inquisitors, Sacro arsenale (first edition 1621 and frequently reprinted). Quintiliano Mandosio added a note to a passage in the Repertorium that left incontinenti almost without limits as to how much time was meant.¹⁰² Masini gave instances of actions linked by successive ac incontinenti, as well as more with only the first word.¹⁰³ In one with the whole phrase, Masini paralleled it to immediatamente, a word seemingly as strong as its modern English cognate.¹⁰⁴ Yet this cannot be what Masini meant, since he joined two actions that could never occur strictly “immediately” after one another: fetching a suspect from prison (even if in the same building) in order to confront another suspect. Thus on Masini’s evidence successive can signify no more than “after,” perhaps “as soon as possible after” or better “directly” in both a temporal and procedural sense. This comes close to Beretta’s gloss of “in continuity with the previous event,” that is, part of the same legal proceedings, even if he continues to use the temporal meaning of “immediately.”¹⁰⁵

Uses found in Peña’s “Introductio” (written before his death in 1612), as well as in inquisition records, support the same meaning. Thus, Peña once wrote of asking the same questions “successive in the same or another examination.”¹⁰⁶ At least three times it has the simple meaning “after” in the Holy Office’s own records, including indicating a prison visitation that must have begun sometime later than the first event indicated.¹⁰⁷ It also occurs in the records of peripheral tribunals. In Naples, we find it several times in Tommaso Campanella’s processo, for example, twice to link the examination of two witnesses, once to introduce the swearing in of another after an interval.¹⁰⁸ Likewise, it occurs in Romagna in a similar sense a number of times in the records of Rodrigo Alidosi’s trial when witnesses successive “appeared.”¹⁰⁹ The two words and the joint phrase were also known in the governor of Rome’s court.¹¹⁰

The entry in Du Cange makes successive seem a fifteenth-century neologism since it cites only a letter of Pius II of 1459.¹¹¹ Most dictionaries have equally thin entries for it. The only other textual citation in any yet found, Andreas Stübelius’s Thesaurus latinitatis, quotes a bad reading from Aelius Spartianus on Caracalla taken from Robert Constantin’s Supplementum linguae latinae, which should be emended to successisse.¹¹² The full title of Constantin’s work underscores the word’s rarity: Supplementum linguae Latinae, seu dictionarium abstrusorum vocabulorum.¹¹³ Johann Matthias Gesner cited the same passage without correction in his slightly later Novus Linguae et Eruditionis Romanae Thesaurus.¹¹⁴ Although certainly rare, a number of uses of the word come up in a search of the Patrologia latina database covering patristic and medieval writing before 1215.¹¹⁵ The interval between then and the seventeenth century still needs investigation, but, by the later period, the word appears fairly frequently, for example, two or three times in Melchior Adam, Vitae Germanorum iureconsultorum et politicorum.¹¹⁶ Since successive need not mean much more than “after,” by itself it says nothing about whether Galileo had a chance to respond.

Perhaps because they found its meaning obvious, successive did not interest the jurists, unlike its mate incontinenti. While still far from a common word, the second has a substantially richer history. Along with the then more usual ex continenti, it appeared a number of times in Justinian’s Code with such a variety of possible meanings as to generate a substantial amount of jurisprudential commentary.¹¹⁷ Alberico da Rosate (ca. 1290–1360) offered one of the most detailed discussions in his Dictionarium iuris tam civilis, quam canonici, which went through many editions.¹¹⁸ He gave an almost bewildering number of definitions, most in the temporal sense from statim onward, and a number of cognates (all meaning at first glance “immediately”), extending all the way to three days as the time limit for revoking an attorney’s errors (citing C. 2. 9 and his own discussion in Commentariorum iuris utriusque summi practici Domini Alberici de Rosate Bergomensis pars prima super codice).¹¹⁹ His gloss on confestim, one of the synonyms he suggested for incontinenti, defined it again as sometimes statim, but sometimes ten days. The word also had nontemporal meanings, especially continuus, without any “extraneous acts.” In this case, the time period might be left entirely undefined; Alberico again suggested the figure of ten days. In his third entry he gave the example of merchants going off in search of a notary or a celebratory drink at the conclusion of a deal, both (especially the second) denoting a possibly protracted interval of time. Other commentators often cited Alberico’s three days in the case of a man who died that long after being wounded.¹²⁰ Others stretched the time indefinitely, for example, the great late fifteenth-century canonist Felino Sandeo, who left it up to the judge’s decision how long an heir had to prove his claim incontinenti.¹²¹ The eminent late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century jurist Giacomo Menochio did the same in his most popular work, throwing out “one day,” “three days” or “two months” as possibilities.¹²² He also offered almost exactly the same definition as Beretta, citing Bartolo Da Sassoferrato: “before it [the trial] can be diverted to extraneous acts” (“antequam ad actus extraneos divertatur”).¹²³ The exhaustive note in Repertorium Inquisitorum said virtually the same thing, although in the specific case of ratification of a confession given under torture it was much more restrictive, saying incontinenti meant “intra diem,” “within a day.”¹²⁴ In short, the general opinion was that the word “receives a varying interpretation according to the matter … and we [in this case Bernabé Brisson, but it could be any of a number of commentators] interpret it with some modest space of time.”¹²⁵ German commentators introduced a distinctive subtlety, saying the term should not be interpreted literally but instead civiliter, moraliter leaving its precise temporal component to the judge’s discretion, as Sandeo and Menochio had thought.¹²⁶

An Elegant but Wrong Solution

In 1987, Thomas Kurig, now an intellectual property lawyer, proposed a radically new translation as a solution to the problem. His argument depended on two grammatical points. “Immediately” (“gleich darauf” in German) is mistaken and ignores “ac incontinenti.” “Successive” should be translated not in a temporal sense but as “following thereon (expressing the papal will),” while “ac incontinenti” is a causal dative modifying “Galileo” and the phrase should therefore be rendered as “since Galileo was unwilling” or “being impudent.”¹²⁷ The first of these at least raises a question about the usual translation. No doubt because of the incorrect linkage to “incontinenti,” “successive” lost its simple meaning of “after” with no necessary implication of “right after.” Kurig’s second point appears even more vital, if not as original as he claims; it had been made if not published already in 1964.¹²⁸ By almost literally translating “si recusaverit” of No. 1, “incontinenti” would remove the most important contradiction between it and No. 2. That contradiction has been overdrawn even without the correct translation of “incontinenti,” because “recusaverit” need not mean “refuse.” “Recusare” principally means “to object,” but it also has the sense “to be reluctant” or “unwilling.” I do not need to belabor the point that this last meaning agrees exactly with “incontinenti” as translated by Kurig. Thus Galileo would not have had to do anything more than hesitate to obey or give some sign of annoyance, and Seghizzi would have thought himself within his rights to give the precept.

Unfortunately, Kurig’s elegant solution is wrong. I have found no other instances of incontinenti used in the way he suggests, in a search of the Patrologia latina database, a less systematic survey of other medieval and early modern writing, or, most important, among lawyers. Nowhere in their extensive attention to the word is a definition like Kurig’s so much as hinted at. More curiously yet, none of the commentators I have checked discuss the phrase successive ac incontinenti.

Thus we know much more about the meaning of incontinenti than of successive. Unfortunately, we know least of all about the phrase successive ac incontinenti. Wohlwill correctly identified successive ac incontinenti as a “formula” that he translated in a number of ways.¹²⁹ As far as anyone now knows, it appears for the first time in the precept minute and might therefore have been invented specially for Galileo.¹³⁰ (I hasten to add that I make this point facetiously to underscore another crucial gap in our knowledge.) The only evidence I have found in sources generated by the Roman Inquisition comes from Trinity College, Dublin, MS 1232, which postdates Galileo’s trial.¹³¹ Unlike most of these volumes, it is composed of case files rather than sentences. Beretta looked it over, but confined himself to the two instances of successive ac incontinenti, ignoring other terms used in similar ways that may help to define the phrase. The first of the two occurrences he did discuss is much like the one in Masini in which a prisoner confronted another prisoner; that is, some indeterminate interval of time must have intervened between two acts. The phrase follows the accused’s signature at the end of a verbale with the note that he was returned to prison and successive ac incontinenti searched.¹³² The other case is even less help, except that there are two other phrases on the same page that appear to serve the same function. The passage begins with “successive et immediate ubi coram S. fuit ei dictum per Dominum an velit repeti testes examinatos in presenti causa quia dabuntur, etc.” (“successive ac immediate where in the presence of his Holiness the lord [cardinal] said to him whether he wished the witnesses examined in the present case to be reexamined”), to which the accused replied in the negative: “Successive et incontinenti supradictus D. fuit ipsi (?) assignatus terminus decem dierum ad faciendum suas defensiones” (successive et incontinenti the abovementioned lord [cardinal] had assigned him [the suspect] a term of ten days to making his defenses), which he also declined: “Deinde mandavit dominus reponi ad locum suum” (“Then the lord [cardinal] ordered him put back in his place”).¹³³ Thus we have incontinenti parallel to immediate but also to deinde, which simply means thereafter, almost the same thing as successive. There are many cases where deinde or even more basically tunc (then) do the work that successive ac incontinenti sometimes do.¹³⁴ In an intensive and extensive search in other sources, I have found all of three occurrences in addition to the three just cited. One instance, missing any conjunction, comes between the end of one deposition and the beginning of the next in a processo in Archivio di Stato, Venice, Santo Uffizio, b. 71, an unnumbered and unfoliated piece dated 4 October 1651 at the head. The other two have a conjunction, in the first case of 1630 in the middle of the conferral of a laurea in philosophy at La Sapienza, the second between the first and second questions of the suitability hearing of an auditor of the Rota dating from 1632.¹³⁵ In short, the translation of successive ac incontinenti as “immediately thereafter” is open to doubt.

Seghizzi’s Career and Its Reflection on His Administration of Galileo’s Precept

The legal impropriety hypothesis demands as a corollary that Seghizzi acted illegally and to say the least incautiously. None of those who defend this thesis have investigated Seghizzi’s tenure as commissary or the rest of his career.¹³⁶ His tombstone in the cathedral of Lodi encapsulates his success as an inquisitor, calling him “hammer of heretics.” Of course, a hammer can be wielded in any number of ways, including by a homicidal maniac. This was not Seghizzi’s style. Quite the contrary. He was a stickler for proper procedure, of which he had a good deal of experience, beginning as socio of the commissary in Rome from 1601 to 1603.¹³⁷ Then he was made inquisitor of Cremona and six years later promoted to the the Roman Inquisition’s highest-ranking provincial tribunal, Milan.¹³⁸ While there, he engaged in a similar procedure to giving a precept (see the next chapter) and was ordered to “gravely warn” (“graviter monere”) a Cassinese Benedictine monk in 1612.¹³⁹ In both places he peppered the Congregation with questions, many of which led to the elaboration of general principles.¹⁴⁰ However that may be, they demonstrated his pronounced caution. The Congregation evidently wanted such a man as commissary, which he became just about a year before he gave Galileo his precept.¹⁴¹ Commissary was an important post that often led to higher office, and it would be natural to think that Seghizzi had the kind of ambition that many other of its holders displayed. While he did not have much experience by early 1616, it seems likely that he would have been inclined to handle Galileo’s case with extreme care, especially in Bellarmino’s presence, lest he damage his prospects. Besides, acting in the reckless fashion often attributed to him would be completely out of line with his previous career.

Not long after Seghizzi gave Galileo his precept, an odd thing happened. Negotiations began for his return to his birthplace of Lodi as its bishop. The holder was allowed to resign on 22 May, and Seghizzi underwent the examination required of a prospective bishop two days later.¹⁴² He was “elected” on 25 May and provided by the pope on 13 June.¹⁴³ The process went remarkably quickly. Unfortunately, Seghizzi died shortly after taking up his new post, making it difficult to interpret the move. It might seem that he had been rusticated for violating orders in Galileo’s case (a point the legal impropriety theorists have never made). Two other interpretations seem much more likely: (1) he went home to acquire seasoning for further promotion, a bishopric often coming in the cursus honorum of an Inquisitor; or (2) he was forced out to make way for his more highly favored successor, Desiderio Scaglia. The second possibility is supported by the fact that Scaglia’s socio, Deodato Seghizzi da Lodi, had already taken office on 7 September.¹⁴⁴ Since he almost had to have been Seghizzi’s relative, this looks like a quid pro quo. Even better for Seghizzi, his own socio, Jacopo Tinti, became inquisitor of Casale in August 1616, whence he quickly moved to Como.¹⁴⁵ Since ordinarily it seems that the commissary named his own socio, the fact that Scaglia did not, together with Tinti’s appointment and Seghizzi’s own to his hometown see, makes it look as if these were bribes intended to induce him to make way for Scaglia.¹⁴⁶

The Precept of 26 February 1616

With a better understanding of the documents recording the event and of the role and character of the Roman Inquisition’s principal agent on that day, we are in a position to make better sense of what happened when Galileo met Cardinal Bellarmino and Commissary Seghizzi on 26 February 1616.

Seghizzi received his orders indirectly from Paul V on 25 February.

The¹⁴⁷ Most Illustrious Lord Cardinal [Gian Garzia] Millini [secretary of the Inquisition] notified the Reverend Fathers Assessor [Paolo Emilio Filonardi] and Commissary of the Holy Office [Seghizzi] that the censure of the Father theologians on the propositions of Galileo, mathematician, having been reported, that the sun is the center of the world and immobile by local motion and [that] the earth moves even with a daily motion, His Holiness ordered the Most Illustrious Lord Cardinal [Roberto] Bellarmino to summon to his presence the said Galileo and warn him to abandon¹⁴⁸ the said opinion; and if he refused¹⁴⁹ to obey, the Father Commissary, in the presence of a notary and witnesses, should give him a precept that he completely abstain from teaching or defending this sort of doctrine and opinion, or dealing with it; if indeed he should not agree, he will be imprisoned.

The next day, summoned to Bellarmino’s palazzo, Galileo was probably brought into the cardinal’s innermost public chamber on the piano nobile, the second floor. Bellarmino, Seghizzi, and probably some Dominican friars awaited him, along with a notary. Bellarmino first “warned” Galileo. Galileo objected in some way, perhaps in so mild a fashion as looking grumpy. That “refusal” authorized Seghizzi to take the second action in Paul’s order, and he duly gave Galileo a precept “completely” to abandon Copernicus’s ideas and never again to deal with them in any way, shape or form. Or as the record in Galileo’s dossier has it:

In¹⁵⁰ the palace, the said Most Illustrious Lord Cardinal Bellarmino’s usual residence and in his lordship’s rooms, the same lord cardinal, the above-mentioned Galileo having been summoned, and the same being in the said cardinal’s house, in the presence of the Very Reverend Father Brother Michelangelo Seghizzi of Lodi, Order of Preachers, Commissary general of the Holy Office, warned the aforesaid Galileo of the error of the abovesaid opinion [Copernicus’s] and that he should abandon it; and thereafter and immediately, in my [presence], etc. and of witnesses, etc. the same lord cardinal still besides being present, the abovesaid Father Commissary, the aforesaid Galileo still also present and established, enjoined and ordered him in His Holiness the pope’s own name and of the whole Congregation of the Holy Office that he completely give up the abovesaid opinion that the sun is the center of the universe and immobile and that the earth moves, nor hold, teach or defend the same otherwise in any manner in word or writing; otherwise, he will be proceeded against in the Holy Office. To which precept the same Galileo agreed and promised to obey. Above which, etc. Done at Rome as above, the Reverend Badino Nores of Nicosia in the kingdom of Cyprus and Agostino Mongardo of the place of the abbey of Rosa in the diocese of Montepulciano, familiars of the said lord cardinal being present, witnesses, etc.

In short, Galileo received both a warning and a precept, a common combination as we shall see in the next chapter, and agreed to the second, which was administered and recorded in the proper form. He was completely to abandon his belief in Copernicus’s core beliefs, which he had publicly made his own in Sunspot Letters of 1613, and under no circumstances teach, defend, or deal with them. If he did, he would be imprisoned or proceeded against by the Holy Office, two more or less equivalent threats (see the next chapter). Galileo the Copernican had been silenced.

The Aftermath

Bellarmino stayed busy the next week. First, again on Paul’s orders, he put three books before the Index, Foscarini’s, Copernicus’s, and Diego Zuñiga’s Commentary on Job (1584).¹⁵¹ Foscarini’s book, despite Millini’s protection of its author, was to be condemned and the other two suspended.¹⁵² All of them got into trouble because of Galileo, including the relatively obscure Zuñiga whom Galileo had cited in his “Letter to Christina.” That Millini, one of the two most powerful cardinals in Rome, could not protect his client Foscarini emphasizes how poorly advised Galileo had been to rely on Alessandro Orsini. Millini missed this critical meeting altogether, maybe taken by surprise, since there is no sign the Index had previously considered any of these books.¹⁵³ The discussion may have been quite lively, since two of Galileo’s most powerful backers, Cardinals Maffeo Barberini and Bonifazio Caetani, allegedly tried to prevent the banning of Copernicus.¹⁵⁴ Their resistance may have led to his book’s being only implicitly labeled heretical and to its suspension “pending correction.” It may be that Galileo’s victim Francesco Ingoli, although not yet a consultor of the Index, advised his long-time patron Caetani to go easy on Copernicus.¹⁵⁵ Not too far into the future, Ingoli would be assigned to revise Copernicus’s book, which he argued was useful to mathematicians.¹⁵⁶ No matter how violent or lengthy or careful the debate, the important part of the final draft decree is almost identical to the original proposal. Then that same day, Thursday 3 March, Bellarmino announced to the Inquisition and the pope both what he had done to Galileo and almost in the same breath (both items appear in the same entry in the decree register) the Index’s proposed decree.¹⁵⁷ Six other cardinals attended, including Millini, Agostino Galamini, and Ferdinando Taverna, but, as on nearly all previous important occasions, neither Paolo Emilio Sfondrato nor, perhaps more important to Galileo, Giovanni Battista Bonsi. Unlike Sfondrato, Bonsi usually attended regularly, including on the last occasion of significance to Galileo when his Sunspot Letters had been sent to the censor; Bonsi may have been sulking after he had been frozen out when Millini originally delivered the order to Bellarmino a week earlier. After Bellarmino reported, Paul ordered the master of the sacred palace to issue the decree as drafted.

The next day, Tuscan ambassador Piero Guicciardini reported on all this activity.¹⁵⁸ Despite his bias against Galileo, he at first made the situation appear much more favorable than it was. He opened his letter by saying that he, Cardinal Francesco del Monte, and “more, the cardinals of the Holy Office” had “persuaded” Galileo to quiet down and keep his opinion to himself lest it appear that he had come to Rome “to be scarred.” The ambassador did not think that Galileo would suffer personally “because as a prudent man he will want and believe what holy church wants and believes.” Guicciardini did not really believe that. Instead, he stressed how dangerous Rome was for Galileo, especially under a pope “who abhors learning and these clever men and cannot stand to listen to these novelties and subtleties.” Everybody tried to accommodate his ideas to the pope’s and, if he had any brains, say the opposite of what he thought. Galileo in particular faced a number of friars who were constantly intriguing to destroy him. Galileo should therefore immediately cut short his stay in Rome. Then the ambassador implicitly threatened the grand duke, reminding him obscurely about what had happened in similar Florentine cases of interest to the Inquisition in the past. One of those was surely Rodrigo Alidosi’s, which was still running, although it had nothing whatsoever to do with ideas.¹⁵⁹ I see no reason to run such risk, harped Guicciardini, merely to satisfy Galileo. His “passion” threatened to bring down anyone who supported him. Guicciardini meant the new Cardinal Carlo de’ Medici, about to come to Rome. It would do incalculable damage if he failed to endorse the proceedings of the Inquisition, “the foundation and base of religion and the most important congregation in Rome.” Guicciardini then revealed the depth of his own ignorance—as well as his negative attitude to “clever men”—by warning that anybody who dabbled in matters “astrological or philosophical” would get into big trouble, again because Paul was such an anti-intellectual blockhead and everybody tried to imitate him. Neither Guicciardini’s characterization of the pope nor that of his court came anywhere near reality. True, the books stuffing the pope’s new apartments in the Quirinal Palace may have been about the law, but they were still books. And all those cardinals hosting Galileo’s extravaganzas were hardly trying to act like “fat-headed ignoramuses,” in Guicciardini’s crude phrase. Nevertheless, his point sank in, and the letters from Florence took on a much more cautious tone.

Gucciardini sent his dispatch just a moment too soon. The next day, Saturday 5 March, the Index publicly handed down its judgment against Copernicus.¹⁶⁰ This directly violated Paul’s order of 3 March that the master of the sacred palace issue the decree. That official did not even sign it. Instead it bore the signatures of Sfondrato in almost his last appearance in the congregation’s records, together with that of the Index’s brand-new secretary. Perhaps as a result of the rivalry between secretary and master (as well as Sfondrato’s indifference), the text of the decree of 5 March looks as if it were put together during a boxing match. Its syntax leaves in doubt the fate of the other two books bracketed with Foscarini’s. The only certainty came at his expense, a point driven home when his printer was chased down by the Inquisition a few months later.¹⁶¹

Otherwise, there was a great deal of confusion over who had done the deed and what deed it was. Most people decided the Inquisition had issued both the order to Galileo (right) and the decree banning Copernicus (wrong), and quite a few collapsed one into the other (also wrong).¹⁶² Again, what mattered was perception; on that ground putting the Inquisition in charge and making its principal target Galileo was exactly accurate. Antonio Querenghi offered one of the most graphic accounts of what happened, writing that Galileo’s ideas had gone up in “the smoke of alchemy” in the face of the “infallible dogmas” expressed in the Index decree.¹⁶³ Everyone whose heads had been set spinning by the controversy could relax and no longer worry about being “so many ants on a big ball going through the air.” Galileo had once written satire with Querenghi, and it shows in his friend’s sarcasm now. Galileo’s original attacker Niccolò Lorini copied out the decree and triumphantly waved it around Florence. His leader Ludovico Delle Colombe gleefully put out the same news.¹⁶⁴ Yet at the same time Galileo and his supporters brushed off what happened.¹⁶⁵ In a letter the day after the Index acted, Galileo blithely ignored his interview with Bellarmino and Seghizzi, offhandedly telling the Florentine secretary of state that he had not put a letter into the last weekly post because there was nothing to report!¹⁶⁶ Instead, Galileo crowed that Tommaso Caccini had suffered another defeat. None of this has anything to do with me, he added. Galileo was always good at seeing things his way, but this interpretation is nothing short of weird. He must have begun to worry his handlers in Florence, since he continued that he was expecting Cardinal de’ Medici’s arrival to clear everything up. With transparent alarm, the secretary of state replied by ordering Galileo back home.¹⁶⁷ The Florentine authorities could be forgiven if they began to wonder just what their men in Rome were drinking when two of their cardinals, Orsini and del Monte, both reported that Galileo had triumphed unreservedly.¹⁶⁸

Five days later Galileo went to see the pope.¹⁶⁹ He told Paul the story of his coming to Rome, complete with juicy details of his enemies’ plotting. He acted worried. Paul assured him that neither he nor “the whole congregation [of the Inquisition]” believed a word of those allegations. The pope guaranteed Galileo that he would be safe as long as he, Paul, lived, repeating this “consolation” several times. In case the pope was not good enough, Galileo also noted that Federico Cesi favored him. What parallel universe had Galileo moved into? Since there is no other evidence of his meeting with the pope, it is not impossible that he at the very least heavily embroidered it if he did not invent it. And how he could think that Cesi, a mere marquess albeit a smart one, could in any way be on the same level as the pope beggars the imagination. Ten days later Galileo serenely pronounced the matter closed, expecting the quick republication of the revised Copernicus.¹⁷⁰ He may have got this news from the man charged with correcting the book, Caetani, who may have been suffering from a lower grade form of the same optimistic psychosis as Galileo. In actual fact it was four years before the revision was ready, and a new edition was never published. Shortly after Galileo’s letter, back in the real world, the Index cranked out letters to all Inquisitors ordering them to publish the decree, and Bellarmino published another book that made crystal clear where his thoughts were.¹⁷¹ It was called De aeterna sanctorum felicitate (On the Eternal Salvation of the Saints).¹⁷² Together with On the Mind’s Ascent to God, it could not be more obvious that Bellarmino was concentrating all his energies on heaven as the reward of the just, not as an astronomical phenomenon.

And what of Caccini? His brother Matteo, last seen being terrified that Tommaso would ruin the family’s prospects, now vaunted the great reputation he had made by besting Galileo.¹⁷³ Matteo probably got this assessment straight from Tommaso, but he did check carefully with others about the extent of his brother’s success. It included at least one tangible reward. By late summer Cardinal Nephew Scipione Borghese had got him the job of penitentiary of Santa Maria Maggiore, the church on which Paul V lavished particular attention and of which Millini was archpriest.¹⁷⁴ The post paid 400 scudi a year (about half what Galileo got as the grand duke’s mathematician). Tommaso was also in good odor with the Dominican general.

Caccini had not finished with Galileo. In October 1616 Matteo feared that Caccini meant to publish a book, possibly about the stars.¹⁷⁵ In early 1619 the news or at least rumor was worse. Under guise of a preaching assignment, Caccini had actually resurrected his “intrigues” against Galileo, as another Florentine friar told Matteo.¹⁷⁶ A few months later Matteo thought Caccini meant to return to Florence in order to “terrebbe qualche persona più a segno,” which odd phrase Antonio Ricci-Riccardi interpreted as keeping surveillance on Galileo.¹⁷⁷ The last we hear of Caccini “persecuting” Galileo is in a letter from Benedetto Castelli condoling with Galileo over the news that Caccini was going about saying Galileo had escaped only because of the protection of princes.¹⁷⁸ Although he would never be a second Aquinas (to put it mildly), Caccini eventually became a client of Urban VIII’s cardinal nephew, Francesco, one of the key actors in the second phase of Galileo’s trial. He also published several books, mostly pastiches of other authors’ work, including Storia del primo concilio niceno (History of the First Nicene Council) (Lucca: Pellegrino Bidelli, 1637) that he sent Barberini.¹⁷⁹