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Introduction

As the popular historian Dava Sobel put it without much exaggeration, “no other process in the annals of canon or common law has ricocheted through history with more meanings, more consequences, more conjecture, more regrets” than Galileo’s.¹ And as Adriano Prosperi, a dean of historians of the Inquisition, well says that processo is “more intricate and problematic” than most historians think.² One of the most serious problems in understanding what happened to Galileo is that his trial has almost never been treated as a legal event. Without an understanding of both how the Roman Inquisition worked and how the law it applied was constantly modified, grasping how Galileo came to be condemned is impossible. Building on my earlier work on both points, this book marks the first full-length attempt to study Galileo’s trial as such, and one of a handful of any size

Galileo’s case resonates far outside academe. Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, like his Da Vinci Code, spins yarns about the Vatican’s inner workings. It also partly concerns Galileo’s trial. Although most of what Brown says about both is purely fictional, he agreed about the trial’s importance with no less an authority than Stephen Hawking. Like many others, both make Galileo an icon of modern Western culture, the heroic scientist martyred by a reactionary church for daring to claim that the earth moved and the sun did not. Even for those who do not draw the lines so starkly, Galileo stands at the watershed of the divide between science and religion, notably in Wade Rowland’s recent Galileo’s Mistake, a widely reviewed book and almost as fictional as Brown’s. To Brown, Hawking, and Rowland, Galileo’s trial lacks intrinsic interest. They are as wrong on that score as they are about its significance.

Method

There have been only a handful of previous studies of Galileo’s trial.³ This one differs in a number of ways from them as well as the hundreds (thousands?) about his case or affair.

This books rests on a simple philosophical premise. Humans make history. One of my central objects is to restore agency to all the individual actors involved, above all to Galileo, who has most often been left a passive victim, even in his own view. Thus I have followed a similar prosopographical approach to that used in The Roman Inquisition, providing capsule biographies where possible designed to help navigate the complicated world of Roman bureaucracy and courts.⁴ These biographies also sometimes contain sufficient detail to allow inferences about motives. That said, I do not dwell on them, preferring to lay out events, rather than contributing to the miasma of speculation about why Urban or Galileo or anyone else did what he did. In order to make such inferences more concrete, I have paid careful attention to detailed chronology, which at least allows the possibility of better guesses based on who was where, when, and doing what. While introducing faction as an element in Galileo’s trial certainly pushed its study in the direction of human actors, it has been both over- and underdone. Faction between religious orders, especially Dominicans and Jesuits, has become an almost universally accepted factor, with the two orders reversing positions relative to Galileo over the course of his trial. No doubt this interpretation has much value, but it almost always overlooks the fact that neither order had an agreed position about Galileo (Copernicus may have been another matter), that factions within orders could be as important as battles between them, especially at the origin of Galileo’s troubles, and that other orders should come into consideration. Similarly, the analysis of the outcome of Galileo’s trial as founded in infighting among the Cardinal Inquisitors has become almost as solid an article of faith, despite the fact that it is supported by precious little evidence, primarily the fact that only seven of ten Inquisitors signed Galileo’s sentence.⁵

This book differs most from other studies nominally about Galileo’s trial in that it treats his trial, not his case, nor his affair. Thus the second important element in my approach is a careful study of the law and procedures involved. For procedure, I draw on The Roman Inquisition, while the treatment of the law applied to Galileo is new. In this book I offer a detailed study of the device of the precept, the first since the 1940s, in particular, the Roman Inquisition’s jurisprudence and practice in its regard, which has never been given attention despite the precept’s centrality to the proceedings against Galileo. The precept given Galileo in 1616 has always been regarded as a singularity. In fact, the Inquisition handed them out quite frequently, along with the companion device of an admonition.

A Theory of the Trial in Context and a Summary of This Book

Galileo’s trial can be made simple. Its first phase began in 1616 and ended when he was given a precept utterly to abandon Copernicus’s principles. Seventeen years later in its second phase, he was found guilty of having violated that precept by publishing the Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems.

I am the first to admit that this theory is a silly caricature. That said, the “precept interpretation” summarizes most of the case I shall argue. It is chronologically the second interpretation to arise. At the very beginning of Galileo’s trial, it had a competitor, the “heresy interpretation.”⁶ This theory lost out to the second at the end of the trial’s first phase and did not reappear, almost evanescently, until its final four months, with terminal consequences for Galileo. The two theories exist in a dialectic that frames the narrative parts of this book. While the first, the heresy interpretation, is replete with drama, the second superficially lacks the contingency of false starts, twists and turns, and plain blundering inherent in any legal process involving as many people, institutions, and ideas as Galileo’s did. Thus in most of this book I shall resort to narrative in order to explicate how a great, buzzing confusion became a conviction on simple grounds, if not necessarily clear ones. If that sounds like a paradox, so be it.

Despite extensive prepublication censorship of Galileo’s Sunspot Letters (1613) by the Inquisition, the work gave Galileo’s enemies in Florence an opening to attack him, in both the pulpit and the Inquisition (Chapter 1). The conspiracy against him in Florence had arisen almost as soon as he arrived from Venice in 1610. By 1614 it had moved into high gear, and early the following year two of its Dominican members were ready to denounce Galileo in Rome. The formal proceedings opened on the strength of their claims were aborted early in 1616, probably for lack of evidence, despite the condemnation of two propositions allegedly taken from Sunspot Letters. Instead, the Inquisition turned to a familiar device in its extensive arsenal, a precept. Acting with the full authority of the Congregation of the Holy Office and its sole head the pope, Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino first ordered Galileo through a “warning” to stop defending Copernicus’s sun-centered theory of the universe. At the same time, Galileo received a precept saying the same thing in even stronger terms. A few days later the Congregation of the Index, the chief Roman censor, suspended publication of Copernicus’s own book (Chapter 2).

The precept was a mild outcome. Not for the first nor last time did Galileo get special treatment because of his status as client of the grand duke of Tuscany. The nature and use of precepts especially by the Roman Inquisition are the subject of Chapters 3 and 4. As an interim measure that might also become permanent, a precept could allow for its removal in the future. Galileo had at least three chances to secure that result and thereby avoid condemnation and threw all of them away. The law gave Galileo both gentle treatment and a way to escape its rigors; Galileo failed to understand either point.

The first chance to get out from under the precept came at the beginning of Urban VIII’s reign. The new pope had allegedly opposed the censuring of Copernicus in 1616 and admired Galileo. Galileo had merely to tell him about Bellarmino’s order, and Urban could probably have made it disappear. Second, the pope might have been able to annul the precept had Galileo admitted its existence when seeking permission to publish the Dialogue (this may be why the draft bill of charges in summer 1632 insisted that Galileo had acted “fraudulently” in concealing the precept) (Chapter 5).

Even missing these two opportunitites did not doom Galileo. The particular congregation in summer 1632 that decided that his case had to go to the Inquisition homed in on the precept at the same time as it concluded that there was not all that much wrong with the Dialogue. It thereby gave Galileo an opening to negotiate, a tactic the Inquisition commonly used. Instead, Galileo made another key blunder and insisted on formal proceedings. Had he at least consulted a canon lawyer at this point, counsel could have done one or both of two things. He could have encouraged Galileo to negotiate, perhaps in just the way Galileo eventually did when it was too late, by offering to rewrite his book to make clear that he did not defend Copernicus. Or that canonist, moving in the direction of but stopping short of formally reopening Galileo’s trial, could have lodged the objection that a precept expired with the death of the man who issued it. Paul V, in whose name both Bellarmino’s order and the precept had been issued, died in 1621. Circumstances had changed dramatically by 1633, and legal arguments might not have worked as well then as earlier in Urban’s pontificate, but they could have. Galileo had at least two lawyers whom he might have used, his own in-law Giovanfrancesco Buonamici and Niccolò Gherardini, and rejected advice from both of them (Chapter 6).

No doubt but that Urban decided to punish his client Galileo. A lawyer, he chose the law as his instrument, bending it creatively when necessary, following it carefully when convenient. But Urban’s very dependence on the law dictated that the precept take center stage. This inadvertently magnified Galileo’s chance to escape. Not that Urban did not have powerful resources that in the end proved too much even for Galileo, his many friends in Rome, and his powerful political backers. Urban used the Inquisition against Galileo. After some disagreement about exactly how (or whether) to do that, its key personnel were changed in late 1632, probably for reasons having little to do with Galileo’s trial, but nonetheless with the effect of clearing the way to his conviction. The most important figure after the pope was Vincenzo Maculano, the Inquisition’s commissary or chief operating officer. Guided by the pope’s brother Cardinal Antonio Barberini, Sr., secretary of the Inquisition, and their nephew Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the papal secretary of state, Maculano brilliantly entrapped Galileo with a good deal of help from Galileo himself. He did so via the precept. It therefore figured centrally in the narrative of Galileo’s sentence, although it did not appear in the sentence proper. That oversight was remedied in Galileo’s abjuration on the same day, 22 June 1633, which began with and turned on the precept. Ideally, the Inquisition under Urban and his brother Antonio’s guidance would have done its work more carefully, removing a considerable amount of ambiguity about precisely of what Galileo was convicted (Chapter 6). That it did not should cause no surprise. In sloppiness, creative record-keeping, and inventive jurisprudence the Inquisition treated Galileo no differently than most of the rest of those who underwent trial before it.

How Many Trials?

Now we are in a position to answer one last question. How many trials did Galileo undergo? Most investigators say two, one in 1616, one in 1633, and only the second was serious. This is a mistake, grounded in misunderstanding of the precept. On another level this question is absurd, since, once the Inquisition opened a dossier, all subsequent investigations went into it, thereby creating a single “trial.” An ambiguity in Latin and Italian usage that is difficult to capture in English compounds the problem. Both languages have one word for both “dossier” and “trial,” processus in Latin, processo in Italian. Nevertheless, any trial by the Inquisition went through a fairly regular set of phases, as did Galileo’s (see the Conclusion). The only apparent difficulty in sorting out Galileo’s trial is once more the precept. Sigismondo Scaccia’s claim that an emergency, extrajudicial precept—one possible understanding of Galileo’s—could initiate process provides legal rather than administrative grounds for speaking of a single trial (see Chapter 4). Alternatively, taking the precept out of the proceedings leaves a straightforward, single trial. Orio Giacchi first put forward this argument in 1942.⁷ Building on the synthetic and rather ahistorical work of Pio Fedele on precepts in canon law, Giacchi argued that a precept was an administrative, not a judicial act. and that its effect was therefore not condemnation but suspension of judicial process.⁸ Galileo’s most crucial blunder was to think his trial had ended in 1616 while, in fact, it had merely been put on hold.⁹

A Note on Key Terms

Originally meaning “meeting” and still used in that sense by the Inquisition, “congregation” had been routinized into the name for the central organs of papal government especially after Sixtus V’s reforms of 1585.¹⁰ I shall use it in both senses; with a lower-case “c” it denotes a meeting of the Congregation of the Holy Office, which is always given with an upper-case “C” in order to distinguish the two. A congregation with the pope, always on Thursday, is called a coram. Any congregation without him, usually on Wednesday, is a non-coram. One other kind of congregation is centrally important, a particular congregation. This was an ad hoc body assigned to consider a “particular,” or detail, a single point. The Inquisition used them frequently.¹¹ Inquisitor with a capital “I” means a cardinal of the Congregation; “inquisitor” with a small “i” means any inquisitor not a member of the Congregation. Inquisition with a capital “I” always signifies the Roman Inquisition. Inquisition with a lower case “i” indicates a local tribunal.