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CHAPTER 2

Formal Proceedings Begin (late 1614–mid-February 1616)

Brother Thomas’s Stupidities

Tommaso Caccini (26 April 1574–1648) entered the Order of Preachers at San Marco in Florence at fifteen, changing his name from Cosimo to Tommaso after Thomas Aquinas.¹ An ambitious, possibly unstable man, Caccini made a perfect cat’s paw for what even his brother and chief sponsor Matteo called the “pigeons,” the conspiracy Galileo called the “pigeon league,” detailed in the previous chapter, aided and abetted by the man who had put Niccolò Lorini up to attacking the Jesuits in 1602, Giovanni de’ Medici.² Luigi Guerrini goes as far as to claim that everything in Caccini’s testimony against Galileo came from Raffaelo Delle Colombe and that he at least “favored” if not “promoted” Caccini’s anti-Galilean preaching.³

Caccini may have been among the first to preach against Galileo, including in Bologna during Lent 1611. This could have been the occasion when he literally had the police (birri) called on him by the legate of Bologna, Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani, who forced him to recant after an “escapade.”⁴ The opportunity to attack Galileo arose again in late 1614, and this time Caccini enjoyed greater success. On the fourth Sunday of Advent 1614, 21 December, in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence Caccini delivered a rousing reading on the book of Joshua 10.⁵ (The friars themselves seem not to have been impressed; they did not record the reading, and four years later when criticizing Caccini for preaching too freely, the Dominican general referred to his sermons in Bologna, not to this reading.)⁶ He focused especially on verses 12 and 13, “‘Sun, stand still over Gibeon, and moon, you also, over the Vale of Aijalon.’ And the sun stood still, and the moon halted, till the people had vengeance on their enemies.” Punning on Acts 1:11, Caccini converted the original addressees, “you inhabitants of Galilee,” into “Galileans,” meaning followers of Galileo, and supposedly thundered, “why stand you staring up into the heavens?”⁷ His audience could not miss the point of his play on the words Jesus had originally directed to “you men of Galilee.” Without quite putting his finger directly on the point, Caccini noted that a “similar opinion” to the sun’s movement as taught by Copernicus “had been held by the most serious authors to be dissonant from the Catholic faith.” This was a subtle turn of phrase that does not accord well with Caccini’s reputation for hot-headedness. Neither does his possible expectation that the more educated among his hearers might have remembered the anti-Copernican views put forward by another Dominican of Santa Maria Novella, Giovanni Maria Tolosani. Caccini later lectured on at least part of Tolosani’s book.⁸ What was wrong with Copernicus’s ideas according to Tolosani? They offended against scripture. This was exactly Caccini’s point.

With his lecture still smoking in his hand, Caccini set out for Rome on 14 or 15 February 1615 to try to nail down a prestigious teaching post, the bachelorate, at the Dominican “university” at Santa Maria sopra Minerva.⁹ The appointment became a tangled affair, and Caccini apparently never got the office, despite his claim to the title in his deposition against Galileo.¹⁰ (The significance of Caccini’s mistaken claim to the office remains to be worked out. In common law, a mistake in a deponent’s “extension,” or legal description of his or her status, might be enough to void his or her testimony. If the same holds true in civil law systems, this makes another point where Galileo hurt himself by refusing to engage an advocate in his defense.) Seizing the opportunity presented by Tommaso’s upcoming trip to Rome (his brother and manager Matteo had promised Cardinal [and Inquisitor] Agostino Galamini on 7 February that he would come “as soon as possible and immediately” [“quanto prima et subito”]), Caccini’s fellow conspirator Niccolò Lorini now hit on a more subtle gambit against Galileo and his followers than a public lecture, one much more likely to work.¹¹ Caccini was only too glad to help, despite strong criticism of his lecture by his brother and others and warnings to keep his head down.¹² Lorini gave Caccini two documents, a letter and its enclosure, to deliver to Cardinal Paolo Emilio Sfondrato. The letter served mainly to cover the enclosure that Lorini assured Sfondrato “runs here [Florence] in the hands of all these that are called Galileisti” and in which in “the judgment of these our fathers of the most religious convent of San Marco there are many propositions that appear either suspect or temerarious” especially for their treatment of the Bible.¹³ The fact that such ideas were “being sown throughout our city” scandalized Lorini even more.¹⁴

As the first sentence of his letter with its reference to Dominicans as “the white and black dogs of the Holy Office” suggests, Lorini probably chose Sfondrato because he was the most senior Inquisitor, appointed in 1591.¹⁵ It may not have hurt that he was also the head of the Congregation of the Index, but Lorini made no mention of that fact. Sfondrato would have appealed to Lorini in addition as a major benefactor of the Dominicans, to whom in 1608 he donated one of the churches dependent on his cardinal’s church in Rome, Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. Lorini may not have cared that Sfondrato, Gregory XIV’s cardinal nephew, had sunk a huge amount of money into Santa Cecilia. His investment jumped out especially in Stefano Maderno’s one masterpiece, an utterly realistic sculpture of the dead saint displaying the three wounds at the base of her neck through which she bled to death after a botched attempt to behead her. It sat directly above Sfondrato’s burial vault.

Nevertheless, Lorini’s choice was not an entirely obvious one, nor may it have been the best possible. He could have written other men in Rome, beginning with his fellow Dominican Agostino Galamini, recently general of the order, appointed cardinal and Inquisitor almost simultaneously three years earlier.¹⁶ Pope Paul V lavished favors on Galamini despite his professed reluctance to accept them.¹⁷ Lorini probably did not need to write the Dominican cardinal because he was already in Caccini’s corner, pushing hard for his appointment at Santa Maria sopra Minerva as we have seen. He certainly cooperated in Lorini’s scheme in other ways, or it may have been that he orchestrated it.¹⁸ Sfondrato far outranked Galamini, but not on the list of the pope’s favorite people. Lorini could not have known that the headstrong Sfondrato had lately crossed swords repeatedly with the pope.¹⁹ Paul had walked out on him in one consistory (a regular, usually once weekly formal meeting between the pope and cardinals) when Sfondrato refused to stop criticizing papal policy, and in another when Sfondrato had dared to object to the pope’s expenditures on the Quirinal palace, Paul had replied faulting Sfondrato for being absent from Rome for whole years at a time.

This was not quite fair. Sfondrato had resided in his bishopric of Cremona as the rules of Trent required him to do. Many cardinals were also bishops and therefore under the same obligation; in fact, popes regularly used it as a way to get rid of inconvenient cardinals. During his time in Cremona, Sfondrato cooperated unusually closely with its inquisitor, Lorini’s fellow Dominican Michelangelo Seghizzi, on the point of becoming the Inquisition commissary.²⁰ Sfondrato and Seghizzi made an effective team in the effort to bring the former notary of Cremona’s inquisition to justice, a marked contrast to Seghizzi’s always strained relationship with Sfondrato’s predecessor. Instead of the usual wrangling over jurisdiction between inquisitor and bishop, Seghizzi gladly added some of Sfondrato’s most important officials to his panel of experts. It looks as if someone was coordinating the attack on Galileo by moving it to Rome just when both Sfondrato and Seghizzi would be in place to take action. Sfondrato’s ruthless piety may also have attracted Lorini. Shortly before Sfondrato had come back to Rome in 1610, he had ordered a number of shops around Cremona’s cathedral torn down and the proceeds used to pay for a monastery he had founded.²¹

However well he had worked with Seghizzi, Sfondrato was undoubtedly spoiling for a fight, and on just Lorini’s grounds. He was frustrated by the Index’s ineffectiveness in the face of the Inquisition’s already great and constantly increasing power and was about to ask for permission to retire from Rome to his new suburban bishopric of Albano.²² Sfondrato’s ultimate appeal to Lorini was the deniability the cardinal could give him. As ranking member of both Index and Inquisition, Sfondrato could decide for himself whether to accept Lorini’s insistence that he did not want his letter taken as a “judicial deposition” against Galileo and instead as “a loving piece of news (avviso).”²³ In choosing this form of words, it seems likely that Lorini had in the back of his mind the contrast between a legal proceeding and the much milder “charitable admonition.”²⁴ The Congregation of the Index, unlike the Inquisition, had no judicial powers; all it could do was prohibit books, not punish their authors or those who read them. Given Sfondrato’s annoyance with the toothless Index, Lorini virtually goaded him into pursuing the first option. Lorini pushed Sfondrato further in the direction of a legal remedy by providing written evidence, the enclosure in his letter, which he had also shown Caccini. This was a copy of Galileo’s letter to his favorite pupil, Benedetto Castelli. Lorini set the letter in a false context by claiming it had been written in reaction to Caccini’s sermon when in fact it dated from exactly a year earlier. This was a stupid thing to do, since the copy had the correct date of 21 December 1613.

Galileo’s Letter to Castelli

Lorini had good reason to think the “Letter” might cause Galileo trouble. In it Galileo offered his most extended discussion of the relations between Copernicus’s ideas and scripture and, unlike in the case of his correspondence with Piero Dini, did so in a more or less public way, even if not in the medium of print.

The “Letter” arose out of a debate in the grand duke’s presence between Castelli, the grand duchess mother, the grand duke’s wife, and a few other members of their court. Reasonably subtly, Galileo sent Castelli more arguments he could (or should) have used in reply to objections the two women had made “especially about the verse in Joshua [10.12–13] proposed against the mobility of the earth and the stability of the Sun.”²⁵ His first point concerned the inerrancy of scripture. While agreeing with Castelli that scripture could never be wrong, Galileo maintained that “nonetheless its interpreters and expositors can err in various ways, among which would be a most serious and frequent one when they would want always to stop at the pure literal sense.” Galileo may have thought this a simple point, but, as we have seen, the literal sense was precisely where Galileo’s opponents thought they stopped, no matter how quickly they moved to metaphorical interpretation. Many things in scripture seemed not only contradictory but heretical and blasphemous when read at that level. “Therefore, since in the scripture there are many false propositions as far as the plain sense of the words, but which have been expressed in that manner in order to accommodate the incapacity of the many common people, thus for those few who deserve to be separated from the dull common people it is necessary that wise expositors of scripture extrapolate the true senses and add the particular reasons why such meanings are expressed in such words.”²⁶ Galileo drew the conclusion that “Since, therefore, sacred scripture in many places is not only susceptible of, but necessarily in need of expositions varying from the apparent sense of the words, it seems to me that in discussions of natural [philosophy] it ought to be reserved to the last place.” From its interpreters to the text of scripture evidently seemed a short step to Galileo, but falsity in the first case connoted mere human error, whereas in the second it could only mean a breakdown in the communication of the divine word and, worse, dethronement of what his opponents regarded as the most direct form of that communication.

Scripture had to give way to nature because there was only one truth, and nature, unlike scripture, “is inexorable and immutable and does not care at all that its hidden reasons and means of proceeding may be or may not be fit for men’s capacity.” Then Galileo introduced his famous two-pronged mode of discerning nature’s intent, “sensory experience” (esperienza, which also means “experiment” in Italian) and “necessary [logical] demonstrations.”²⁷ The rigor of this approach combined with nature’s law-governed behavior meant that any passages in scripture that appeared to contradict a natural effect should never be allowed to raise questions about it. Galileo pushed the point into increasingly dangerous territory, drawing another corollary about scripture: “Indeed, if only for this reason, to accommodate the incapacity of the people, scripture has not abstained from perverting some of its most principal dogmas, attributing to God Himself conditions very far from and contrary to His essence.” Thus “wise expositors” had to find meaning in scripture that agreed with “those natural [philosophical] conclusions of which first the plain sense or general, indeed necessary, demonstrations have made us certain and sure.” First nature, then the Bible. Therefore, no interpreter should be forced to maintain a proposition drawn from the Bible that “those natural conclusions” do not support.

Then Galileo drew a distinction between kinds of biblical content. Articles about the faith had such “firmness” that there was no danger of contradicting them; therefore nothing should be added to them “unnecessarily.” Scripture existed solely to persuade humans “that those articles and propositions that, being necessary for their salvation and surpassing any human discourse, could not have made themselves believable by any other science nor any other means than by the mouth of the Holy Spirit itself.” Interpreters of the Bible could not be trusted, since one never knew whether they spoke by divine inspiration. Contrariwise, Galileo did not think God meant to deny humans the use of their senses in the investigation of natural phenomena, especially since the Bible contained almost nothing about them, “such as precisely is astronomy” (52). Repeating his claim that two truths could not contradict one another, Galileo concluded that those who had the right to investigate nature—meaning philosophers—should not be forced by threats to concede to those who could not avoid presenting sophistical and false arguments (53).

In order to demonstrate his point, Galileo turned to Joshua. Like his “adversary,” Galileo proposed to begin from the text’s literal sense. But he drew the opposite conclusion, “that this verse shows clearly the falsity and impossibility of the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic world system, and by contrast fits the Copernican very well.” True to his own method described earlier, Galileo immediately ignored the Bible and instead carefully constructed an argument grounded in sensory experience and necessary demonstrations. How many movements does the sun have, he asked? Two, annual and daily. Of these, only the first “belonged” to it; the Primum Mobile transmitted the second to it, which produced day and night. Galileo concluded rhetorically that prolonging a day meant stopping the Primum Mobile, not the sun. Indeed, stopping the sun would shorten the day. This was a clever sally against Ptolemaic and Aristotelian astronomers, unhorsing them, as Galileo might have said, with one of their own central concepts. Either Ptolemy was wrong about the Primum Mobile, or the literal sense of the scripture was in saying sun instead of Primum Mobile. Nor could God have stopped the sun alone, since that would have caused unnecessary disruption of “the entire course of nature,” that law-governed behavior on which Galileo had earlier insisted.

Instead Galileo offered in a few lines a simple Copernican solution. Since the sun gave movement to the earth, to stop the earth one had only to stop the sun, just as the Bible said (55). And that was that.

The matter was not so simple to Galileo’s opponents. Although we have no direct response to the “Letter” from any of them, we can infer from the underlining in the copy in Galileo’s dossier that Galileo’s science, including his alternative explanation of the text of Joshua, interested them not at all. Instead, his handling of scripture drew all their attention.

And quickly. Not ten days after Lorini’s letter, Galileo knew that a copy of the “Letter to Castelli” was circulating among his enemies, apparently including in Rome, who found “many heresies” in it and used it to “open a new field to injure me.”²⁸ Writing to Dini, whom he thought to be one of his closest allies in Rome, Galileo also casually, perhaps too casually, suggested that “whoever transcribed it [the ‘Letter to Castelli’]” had “inadvertently changed some words,” which, together with “a little disposition to censures, could make things appear much different from my intention.” He had also heard that Caccini had gone to Rome “to make some other attempt” against him. (Whatever he knew about Lorini’s actions, chronology makes it seem certain that Caccini’s departure triggered Galileo’s letter. The two events came at most two days apart.) As a prophylactic, Galileo enclosed a copy “in the right manner that I have written it.” He hoped Dini would show the correct version to the Jesuit mathematician Christoph Grienberger, Galileo’s “greatest friend and patron,” and, even better, Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino, “to whom these Dominican fathers have let it be understood that they intend to rally around” (“al quale questi Padri Domenicani si son lasciati intendere di voler far capo”). While it is not terribly surprising that Galileo knew Lorini had a copy, it does raise eyebrows that he thought it necessary to distribute others. Since one of the recipients was to be Bellarmino, an Inquisitor, and Galileo feared that Lorini was headed to the Inquisition, why worry about getting a copy directly to the cardinal? Did Galileo really fear that Lorini had altered the text, a charge nearly all historians have made? The letter exists in multiple versions, and the one Lorini sent differs in several significant ways from what Galileo claimed as his authentic text.²⁹ It may be coincidence, but the Inquisition’s anonymous expert assigned to read the letter singled out three of these differences in his report on the possible heresy in the document. This fact may seem to incriminate Lorini, but Galileo’s strategy for dissemination instead almost has to mean that Galileo and not Lorini altered the text. Thus Galileo told his first big lie and blamed it on Lorini. He did that a great deal.

In most of his letter, Galileo indulged in one of his specialties, giving at least as good as he got. Galileo complained about a verbal assault by the bishop of Fiesole, Baccio Gherardini, in front of some of his friends. Galileo fired back one of his best shots (in his eyes), accusing his enemy of thinking that he, Galileo, had written On the Revolutions of the Spheres. Besides, Galileo had defended its real author Copernicus on the extrinsic grounds that he was “not only a Catholic man, but a religious and a [cathedral] canon” (“uomo non pur cattolico, ma religioso e canonico”).

It may be that Galileo was right about what “the Dominican fathers” had planned and that Lorini was using Sfondrato as a conduit to his real target, Bellarmino, the recipient of Sfondrato’s complaint about the Index’s lack of power. Lorini may have thought it diplomatically inadvisable for a Dominican to approach a Jesuit directly in the wake of their orders’ violent and still unresolved dispute over the role of grace in salvation, not to mention his own difficulties with them in 1602. He may have known that Sfondrato had been among those trying to make Bellarmino pope in 1605.³⁰ He must have known that Bellarmino had severe doubts about Copernicus. Galileo’s friend and patron, Federico Cesi, founder of the Academy of the Lynxes, certainly was aware of Bellarmino’s views and made sure Galileo knew them. In the context of Caccini’s reading, Cesi wrote Galileo that Bellarmino had told him Copernicus’s ideas were heretical and the “motion of the earth without any doubt is against scripture.” Cesi added that, if the Index considered Copernicus’s book, it would be banned.³¹ He urged Galileo to proceed very carefully indeed in responding to Caccini and warned that the most Galileo could hope for was a private censure of the friar. Cesi knew what he was talking about and so did Bellarmino. He was in a position to consult some of the best scientists at the Jesuits’ Collegio Romano, as he did on several occasions. But not now. He had no need.

Bellarmino was not a scientist, but he already had his mind made up on the burning scientific question of the constitution of the universe before Lorini and Caccini hatched their plot.³² Even if he ever had, he no longer had the slightest interest in matters of science. No, his thoughts had turned all to his own mortality. Just before Caccini’s sermon, Bellarmino finished Ascent of the Soul to God.³³ As the title makes plain, this is an intensely mystical work. Not even the command of theology on which Bellarmino had once prided himself mattered any more.

The key point for Bellarmino, as for Caccini, was the role of scripture and its interpreters. It looks at first blush as if he changed his mind on this point right in the midst of things in March 1615. On 7 March, Dini passed to Galileo what amounted to an invitation from Bellarmino to lay out his interpretation of how scripture fit his case.³⁴ Bellarmino had carefully pointed out that any republication of Copernicus’s book would require a note added to it that his system was intended merely “to save the appearances,” that is, it was a theory, no more. Then came the implicit invitation. Bellarmino suggested that only one scripture verse caused trouble, and it was not the one in Joshua Caccini had used. Instead, Bellarmino pointed to Psalm 19.4–5: “[Yet] their voice goes out through all the earth, and their message to the end of the world. High above, he pitched a tent for the sun, who comes out of his pavilion like a bride-groom, exulting like a hero to run his race.” The problem to Bellarmino was that this passage appeared to say the sun had been permanently fixed in that “tent.” (Neither he nor Galileo seems to have had any problem with the verse representing the sun as a person.) Galileo, who had already risen to similar bait in his “Letter to Castelli,” seized the invitation and barely two weeks later fired off by express a much more succinct letter to Dini, responding directly and bluntly to the invitation.³⁵ Meanwhile, Bellarmino changed his mind, again in a talk with Dini, but reported at second hand by another of Galileo’s circle, Giovanni Ciampoli, that Galileo should not meddle in scripture because he lacked the proper qualifications as a theologian, more or less Cardinal Maffeo Barberini’s opinion, as Ciampoli summed up.³⁶ Did Bellarmino really change his mind, or does what he said depend on who reported it, especially since it could be that Ciampoli was describing the same conversation as Dini had earlier? If Bellarmino’s change of mind is real, the “Letter to Castelli” was precisely what changed it. In the version Lorini sent via Caccini, Bellarmino and five other Inquisitors—not including Sfondrato—had discussed it on 25 February in a meeting at his palazzo, Palazzo Gabrielli in via del Seminario at the end next to Piazza Macuto.³⁷ The day before Ciampoli’s letter, Caccini had testified before the Inquisition, although Bellarmino probably did not learn the content of his deposition until it was reported in the secret part of a congregation of 2 April, Sfondrato this time in attendance.³⁸ In that context, Galileo’s letter to Dini looked like more provocation, and in consultation with Cesi Dini decided to suppress it.³⁹

Even with Bellarmino’s expected support, Lorini still did not have easy sledding, as his conspiracy began to mesh with the independent and more important “motor” of developments in Rome.⁴⁰ Galileo had powerful defenders there as he did in Florence. To begin with, a faction in Santa Maria Novella—home of the “moderate” Domenico Gori (see below)—opposed Lorini and Caccini and, unlike them, already had an agent in Rome, general preacher Luigi Maraffi. Maraffi was an old friend of Galileo and, even better, well enough placed to become an expert consultant to the Index in 1616, although not until after it had condemned Copernicus.⁴¹ Maraffi thus served as an excellent conduit for the latest news from Rome and might have been able to help Galileo especially well, that is, unless he was acting as a double agent. Even before Galileo wrote to warn him of it, Maraffi already had news of Caccini’s lecture, as well as of efforts to prevent it.⁴² Galileo could also hope for help from Caccini’s own family. Caccini’s reading horrified his brother Matteo, manager of its social-climbing operation in Rome, who blasted him for having acted like “a pigeon, testicle (coglione, i.e., with vulgar stupidity), or certain doves.”⁴³ Much more important, Cardinal Andrea Giustiniani was still angry with Caccini, and Matteo feared Caccini’s behavior would likely cost him his chance to bring his brother into the service of Cardinal Pompeo Arrigoni, former secretary of the Inquisition, now in residence in his archbishopric of Benevento.⁴⁴ Matteo Caccini, who held high office in Arrigoni’s household, put his brother forward as the cardinal’s theologian.⁴⁵

For all Maraffi’s encouragement to Galileo, his letter contained one worrying piece of news. The latest book of Galileo’s old Paduan friend, the Aristotelian philosopher Cesare Cremonini, had run into serious trouble. Galileo had talked about it to Maraffi at length (but, then, Galileo talked about everything at length). Maraffi was indeed a well-placed source, since the Inquisition’s records contain little about Cremonini at precisely this time. But in October 1614 just before Caccini’s lecture, there had been a burst of activity directed by Pope Paul against his De coelo.⁴⁶ When the Venetians tried to defend Cremonini in Rome, they met a flat condemnation from Arrigoni’s successor as secretary of the Inquisition, Cardinal Giovanni Garzia Millini. Cremonini offended by putting forward the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul’s mortality. The danger this idea posed to the Christian notion of salvation does not need emphasis. Cremonini and Galileo had been linked once before in the Roman Inquisition’s records when Pope Paul in 1611 ordered a search through them to see whether Galileo’s name appeared in Cremonini’s interminable case.⁴⁷ The Inquisition in Padua had jointly investigated the two men in 1604. Worse, Cremonini’s case had opened in 1598 with exactly the same treatment it would shortly give Galileo, a precept not to teach a particular doctrine. When it heated up again in late April, Cremonini’s file fell into first Bellarmino’s hands and then those of Caccini’s patron Galamini, the second of whom was specifically asked to consider the impact of the precept on Cremonini’s failure to observe it both in general and in the particular case of refusing to revise his book as ordered. Put in these terms, Cremonini faced exactly the same situation as Galileo would in 1632.

Trouble for one thus almost inevitably meant trouble for the other. Did Galileo miss a nudge and wink from Rome?

In this crisis Galileo relied most heavily not on Maraffi but on Dini, a man like Maraffi of the third tier in Rome, a professional lawyer but nowhere near the top of the legal heap. It is important to the story that Galileo did not read his carefully worded letters closely. Dini had been nominated by the grand duke for the Florentine slot on the Rota, the papal supreme court. Cardinal Nephew Scipione Borghese’s candidate landed the job instead, and Dini wound up with the ordinary consolation prize of “referendary of both signatures,” appointed to practice in the Courts (Signatures) of Grace and Justice, a notch below the Rota.⁴⁸ He was involved with Francesco Ingoli, one of Galileo’s sparring partners, and Cardinal Bonifazio Caetani in the translation of Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos.⁴⁹ He was also one of Galileo’s numerous supporters in the Academy of the Crusca, the Italian equivalent of the Académie Française, the central agency in the invention of modern Italian.⁵⁰ More even than their work together in the increasingly successful Florentine offensive to dominate Italian culture, what really attracted Galileo to Dini was his family. He was the nephew of another Florentine, Cardinal Ottavio Bandini. In his garden on the Quirinal, Bandini had hosted the most important of the parties in Rome in 1611 at which Galileo had demonstrated his telescope and talked about sunspots, the phenomenon that was about to get him in serious trouble.⁵¹ Bandini was also Cardinal Giustiniani’s brother-in-law. Although not yet an Inquisitor or quasi-papal nephew, as he would be under Paul’s successor Gregory XV, Bandini represented money in the bank, and his nephew automatically became a VIP in Rome. Dini’s official status scarcely mattered. He had entrée.

Galileo called up other soldiers of the Florentine mafia, including Michelangelo’s grand nephew.⁵² Much more important than Dini in the long term was Ciampoli, author of some of the most fawning letters Galileo ever got, which is saying a lot. Galileo ordered him and Dini to coordinate their efforts and decide jointly who else should get the “Letter to Castelli.”⁵³ Like Dini and Ciampoli, most of the rest of the Florentine establishment rallied strongly behind Galileo. This may not have been quite as good a thing as it sounds. For one, it produced a steady stream of reports, especially from Ciampoli in Rome and Castelli in Pisa, that Galileo had nothing to worry about. For another, its most powerful members, the cardinals who were in or close to a position to decide his case, were prepared to defend Galileo only within largely political limits, and not on the issues. If a theological argument could be made against him, politics would have to give way. In other words, if forced to choose between loyalty to the grand duke and to the pope, these men would choose the pope. One of them, Cardinal Francesco Del Monte, inherited his support of Galileo from his brother Guidobaldo who had gotten Galileo his first job; the cardinal had been among Galileo’s protectors in Rome in 1611.⁵⁴ He gladly hosted Galileo’s team of Dini, Ciampoli, and Maraffi.

Far the most potent backer beyond Bellarmino that Ciampoli tried to enlist was another Florentine cardinal, Maffeo Barberini, the third main protagonist of this tale as Pope Urban VIII, elected in 1623. He was a patron of choice, including of Ciampoli; Matteo Caccini had tried to attach Tommaso to his service.⁵⁵ Barberini may have lacked social cachet, his merchant family having recently arrived in the metropolis from the Florentine outback, but they had moved fast. Maffeo’s uncle Francesco, using the same platform as Dini, referendary of the Signatures, had built up a large fortune and cleared the way for Maffeo’s rapid ascent by buying him offices, opening doors, and making him his heir.⁵⁶ Uncles backing nephews (including when they were actually sons) is true nepotism, the way Rome worked. Rome also worked increasingly by the law, and that is what Maffeo studied, that is, after he had received his basic education from the Jesuits in both Florence and the Collegio Romano and made a start on writing poetry.⁵⁷ Among a vast output, Barberini wrote a poem praising Galileo’s astronomical discoveries. His career in papal service had gone swimmingly, including a highly successful legation to France that left him with a permanent case of Francophilia. That made him an odd man out in strongly pro-Spanish Florence. Paul V rewarded him with a cardinalate. He had then succeeded Cardinal Giustiniani as legate in Bologna, as well as holding one bishopric in partibus infidelium (the archdiocese of Nazareth, in Turkish hands) and the real see of Spoleto where he had made a show of implementing Trent’s decree about visiting his diocese to see what needed correction. When Ciampoli first spoke to him, Barberini, like Cesi, urged caution lest “physical or mathematical limits” be exceeded.⁵⁸ This remained his line. Galileo did not pay much attention, even after Barberini later told Dini that the matter would likely come before either the Index or the Inquisition.⁵⁹

Galileo’s begging letter to Dini arrived in Rome at almost the same time as Caccini. Galileo had also written Ciampoli, questioning the depth of his devotion, which Ciampoli took pains to demonstrate, calling Galileo among other things “infallible oracle.”⁶⁰ He, Dini, and Maraffi had been hard at work on Galileo’s behalf, and he assured Galileo that no one was making anything of the denunciations. Unfortunately for Galileo, Ciampoli was not the best-informed man in Rome, to put it mildly. His reports were often not quite right. For example, although he should have been keeping his ear as close to the Inquisition’s ground as possible and had at least a couple of times seen Inquisitor Bellarmino, he did not know the elementary fact that the Inquisition met at least twice a week, not once a month, a mistake he made after spending the entire day, so he claimed, with Maraffi who must surely have known better.⁶¹

That was a comparatively trivial mistake. When Ciampoli told Galileo all was well, he was dead wrong. Three days before he wrote, the Congregation of the Inquisition met in the palazzo of the most senior Inquisitor, Bellarmino. Millini, Galamini, and four other cardinals, but not Sfondrato (he usually avoided meetings at Bellarmino’s residence), considered Lorini’s letter, together with a report on the “Letter to Castelli.”⁶² The six Inquisitors present judged the second letter to contain “erroneous propositions about the meaning and interpreters of sacred scripture” and ordered the archbishop and inquisitor of Pisa to get Galileo’s original from Castelli and send it to Rome.⁶³

Ordering was one thing, but producing the letter proved to be quite another. As far as the records say, the inquisitor of Pisa never did anything more than acknowledge the order; in this, he was running true to the form of the rest of his career, as we shall see after he moved to Florence in a few months.⁶⁴ The archbishop, Francesco Bonciani, did better. He was an exceptionally smooth character even in an age full of them. He did not make the mistake of summoning Castelli to his presence. Instead, he waited until Castelli got back to Pisa and came to make the necessary courtesy visit. The archbishop smothered Castelli in kindness in an attempt to persuade him to abandon heliocentrism for his (and Galileo’s) own good. At one point, he took Castelli for a ride in his carriage. Eventually the archbishop said the idea that the earth moved was foolish, and Castelli replied in knee-jerk fashion that, no, the idea that it did not was. The archbishop naturally raised the level of his reply, saying that the belief in the earth’s movement needed to be condemned. Calming down, he finally asked Castelli for the “Letter.” Castelli replied that he had sent it back to Galileo.⁶⁵ The archbishop tried again a week later, attempting to win Castelli’s confidence by telling him that the cathedral preacher in Pisa had criticized Caccini’s “brutto termine” (displeasing, dangerous, or inopportune conclusion).⁶⁶ While that information may have been true, it failed to secure Castelli’s cooperation, so the archbishop tried a direct order. Castelli insisted he did not have the “Letter.”⁶⁷ The Inquisitors never got the original, nor do we have it now. The smoking gun disappeared.

The cathedral preacher was Domenico Gori (1571–1620), Bonciani’s theologian, confessor, and uomo di fiducia, and also friar of Santa Maria Novella and its prior in 1618.⁶⁸ His position alone makes his criticism of Caccini important. A famous preacher and commentator on the Bible, he had a position like Lorini’s as both general preacher in his order and a favorite of the Medici court.⁶⁹ The grand duke visited him on his deathbed.⁷⁰ Granted an MA in 1598, he taught at Santa Maria sopra Minerva and in other Dominican convents and was a friend of at least two Inquisitors (Giovanni Battista Bonsi and Galamini) and of another principal in Galileo’s case, Cardinal Alessandro Orsini.⁷¹ Large numbers of his sermons and readings (lezioni) on scripture survive.⁷² Guerrini finds in them “an attempt at compromise and partial conciliation with the Galilean ‘party’” despite Gori’s firm allegiance to traditional biblical cosmology.⁷³ Guerrini rests his conclusion in part on Gori’s intervention against Caccini, which impressed Castelli. He had nothing but kind words for Gori in his next week’s letter to Galileo. He had visited him and found him in private a person di molto garbo (roughly “a very clever fellow”) and praised his sermons as “the word of God,” which he would never fail to attend. Nevertheless, Castelli had not wanted to bring up Caccini on this first visit. It seems he never did.⁷⁴ If nothing else, Gori provides more evidence that the Dominican order was not a monolith and had no official position on Galileo’s ideas.

Foscarini’s Letter on the Opinion of the Pythagoreans and Copernicus

With impressively bad timing, just at this moment the Carmelite friar Paolo Antonio Foscarini published his Letter on the Opinion of the Pythagoreans and Copernicus (Naples: Lazzaro Scorrigio, 1615). Foscarini suffered from the same kind of ambitions as Caccini. He changed his name from Scarini to make it appear that he belonged to a Venetian noble family instead of coming from an undistinguished one in the kingdom of Naples.⁷⁵ Like Caccini, he tried to make his career in part through preaching, which he was doing in Rome about the time his book appeared, as well as offering to debate all and sundry.⁷⁶ It might seem from the fact that it was the only book outright condemned the next year that he was a committed Copernican. He was not. His book represented a recent and incomplete conversion. Yes, it defended Copernicus, but Foscarini knew little of mathematics and less of recent astronomy.⁷⁷ Galileo and even more Castelli had serious reservations about how much use he could be to them, despite Foscarini’s determined efforts to curry favor with both.⁷⁸

Bellarmino had no doubts at all about the potential dangers in Foscarini’s book. He chose a subtle means of making his point. He wrote the author a letter in April 1615 in which he praised him for treating the Copernican system as merely the best hypothesis, a position to which Bellarmino stuck, while remaining certain that if taken as fact it was heretical.⁷⁹ Foscarini, who did not treat Copernicus as merely the best available theory, got the letter, but not the point. He replied to Bellarmino supporting himself and Copernicus on scriptural grounds, just the territory Bellarmino was determined to defend to the death.⁸⁰ Foscarini was not the only one to miss the point. Galileo also failed to get it.

Acting with its usual secrecy, the Inquisition’s machine continued to grind away. Among the results was a very tiny explosion in the form of an anonymous consultor’s opinion on the “Letter to Castelli.”⁸¹ The consultor failed to find much cause for complaint. The best he could do was to object mildly to three of Galileo’s statements: (1) although the claim that scripture contained many false propositions according to the “bare sense of the words” could be taken in a good sense, it was still not wise to bandy the label “false” in connection with scripture; (2) using “abstain” and “pervert” relative to scripture “sounds bad”; and (3) the treatment of Joshua could also “sound bad,” although once again it could also be well interpreted—otherwise, no complaints. This was not much, and it is almost surprising to find this short document near the beginning of Galileo’s dossier. The order to the consultor does not appear in the record, nor is there any sign of an official reaction to his report.⁸²

Caccini’s Deposition

The Inquisitors did not need either the opinion or the “Letter to Castelli.” They had something better: Caccini’s live testimony. Massimo Bucciantini argues that Caccini’s deposition combined with Foscarini’s Letter “determined” the decree of 5 March suspending De Revolutionibus. He therefore suggests reading Caccini’s testimony “with great caution” and not ‘rationally,’ dividing what is true from what is false or not yet sufficiently proved.” According to Bucciantini, Caccini went beyond a judicial act and attempted to “delineate the heterodox character contained in the philosophical and scientific conceptions sustained by the group of ‘sectarians’ led by the Tuscan scientist.” The deposition moved on two fronts: (1) the relation between “Copernicanism” and scripture depended on an analysis of Galileo’s writings, especially his “Letter to Castelli”; and (2) an effort to make Galileo a heresiarch founded on more circumstantial evidence, also perhaps on misinterpretations of that same “Letter.”⁸³ The deposition was carefully constructed, as one might expect of a witness like Caccini. Most people did not give evidence to the Inquisition on the recommendation of one of the Inquisitors. Caccini did.⁸⁴ His patron was his fellow Dominican Galamini.⁸⁵ Unlike many of the characters in this drama, Galamini came from humble origins. He still profited from nepotism, since his maternal uncle had been general of the Dominicans, the order Galamini entered at a typically young age. After education at the studio in Bologna and in Naples, he followed a typical career as an inquisitor, beginning first in the provinces, Brescia, Genoa, then Milan. With on-the-job training typical of what most inquisitors got, Galamini left them behind when he was summoned to Rome to become commissary in 1604. After an atypically short three years in that post, he made another reasonably typical move up, to master of the sacred palace, chief papal censor. As such he continued to attend Inquisition meetings, but only for a few months. Paul V had other plans for him, having the Dominicans elect him their general in 1608. When in Rome, he continued to attend the Inquisition. He was an active general and frequently absent from Rome, including on an extended visit to the Dominicans of France at royal request. This helped cement a political allegiance to France like Barberini’s. That made them members of the same faction in Rome. Once he became an Inquisitor, Galamini was among the most regular attenders at meetings including many occasions on which he was one of only two or three cardinals present. The other was often the secretary, Cardinal Millini who almost had to attend.⁸⁶

This was a typical career for a Dominican Inquisitor. Galamini’s intensity and zeal for religion were anything but typical, even in the overheated piety of baroque Rome. The commentators agreed unanimously in praising his sincerity and goodness, at the same time as they stressed his lack of concern for ordinary human considerations. They used on him the same adjective once used to describe the dreaded warrior pope Julius II: terribile, literally terrifying. They also called him “hard” and “courageous.” And rigid.⁸⁷ Such was Caccini’s new patron, stepping in for the ailing and absent Arrigoni, who nevertheless continued to cooperate with Galamini. The second took complete charge of Caccini’s move to Rome, orchestrating every step.⁸⁸ Galamini ordered Caccini there by coincidence—or perhaps his plan all along—just when Caccini already intended to do that. Galamini lobbied hard for him, on one occasion talking to “more than fifteen cardinals” on his behalf.⁸⁹ Even when it appeared that his competitor, backed by the cardinal nephew, had beaten him for the teaching post at the Minerva, Galamini did not give up.⁹⁰ Caccini’s testimony against Galileo came right in the middle of Galamini’s scheme to promote him.

On 20 March, the day immediately after Galamini reported that Caccini had information about Galileo’s errors and Pope Paul ordered him examined, “he appeared spontaneously” before the Inquisition’s new commissary, Seghizzi, and one of its notaries, perhaps even the chief, Andrea Pettini.⁹¹ The interrogation took place in the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio, immediately south of St. Peter’s where it still is. A new building was or would soon be under construction, but Caccini probably appeared in the old one “in the great hall of examinations.” He began by saying that Galamini had told him yesterday that he had no choice but to “depose judicially” against Galileo. Then he reported an edited version of his scriptural reading without its confrontational opening, skipping straight to the exposition of Joshua “first in the literal sense and then in the spiritual meaning for the salvation of souls,” sanctimoniously adding that he had spoken “with that modesty that is proper to the office [of reader in Scripture] that I held.” Before going on to say that he had cited other Bible verses as interpreted by all the fathers of the church, Caccini made one of the two most important points in his deposition. Somebody had coached him on exactly how to spin his testimony in legal terms. Often the commissary had to ask a witness about one of the key elements in what we would call the indictment, the “public reputation” or “public rumor” (publica fama) about an accused.⁹² Caccini spared Seghizzi the trouble by immediately saying that it was “most publicly known” (publichissima fama) in Florence that Galileo “held and taught” Copernicus’s opinion. Holding and teaching were two separate offenses. Held was bad, taught worse. How did Caccini know what was wrong with Galileo? Because he had read Nicholaus Serrarius, who had declared Copernicus’s views “contrary to the common opinion of almost all philosophers, all scholastic theologians and all the holy fathers.” Serrarius had added that “that doctrine could not be other than heretical.”⁹³ Poor Serrarius (who had recently died) has been mangled in scholarship, identified as Spanish, Italian, about anything other than what he really was, a German Jesuit.⁹⁴ The great church historian Cesare Baronio called him “the light of the church in Germany,” and his Bible commentaries were popular. But was he also attractive as a Jesuit when Caccini knew Bellarmino would see his evidence?

Caccini described his reading’s force as “a loving admonition” (caritativa ammonitione).⁹⁵ As a friar used to seeing that disciplinary tool applied to his fellows, he had to know that the talk could have been no such thing, since that kind of warning depended on secrecy to give the sinner a chance to amend his ways before more serious (and more public) measures were taken against him (see Chapter 4 below). Caccini aimed to demonstrate how nobly he had acted in the face of Galileo’s “disciples,” who had asked the official preacher of the cathedral of Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore, to reply to Caccini, who in his turn had complained to Inquisitor Lelio Marzari. At this point, Caccini did not say whether anything came of either action. Later he admitted that the cathedral preacher, a Neapolitan Jesuit whose name he claimed not to know, had been talked out of attacking him by another Jesuit, Emanuele Ximenes (see previous chapter).⁹⁶ Ximenes was probably a member of a wealthy Marrano banking family transferred to Florence in the fifteenth century, many of whose members opposed Galileo.⁹⁷ By labeling his talk an “admonition,” Caccini also set the stage for the next step after it failed, as this one clearly had, a precept. Once again, somebody had to have coached Caccini in just how to put his testimony in legal terms. Now Caccini named his first witness against Galileo, Ferdinando Ximenes, shortly to be Arrighi’s official substitute as Dominican provincial and probably some kind of cousin of Emanuele, whom Caccini said would testify that the Galileisti held three propositions, two of them about God: that it was not a substance but an accident (almost equivalent to saying God did not really exist) and that it was “sensitive,” apparently meaning that it had senses like humans, only divine; and that miracles done by saints were false.⁹⁸ After noting that Lorini had shown him a copy of the “Letter to Castelli,” Caccini ended his “spontaneous” testimony by noting once more Galileo’s “public reputation” and his two dangerous propositions. There was nothing spontaneous about his performance. It was a speech carefully crafted according to the rules of rhetoric, designed to persuade its audience (however small) to take action on the facts alleged.

Seghizzi began his questioning by asking how Caccini knew about Galileo’s propositions. Caccini, never one to use subtlety where a sledge hammer would work, trotted out Galileo’s reputation for the third time, and then named names. The bishop of Cortona, Filippo Bardi dei Verni, had warned him twice about Galileo, first when they were together in Cortona in 1611 and then again in Florence.⁹⁹ The bishop would have been a dangerous witness since he and his brothers were among the cultural kingpins of Florence, yet he was never called to testify. Then Caccini adduced a friendly witness, a “sectarian” of Galileo, one Attavanti, the man he had surprised and silenced in Santa Maria Novella, although without knowing exactly who he was.¹⁰⁰ This unsubtle move also implicitly labeled Galileo as the worst kind of heretic, a founder of a sect and therefore an inventor of heresies, a heresiarch. Caccini had also read Galileo’s Sunspot Letters, which Ferdinando Ximenes had lent him. In other words, Caccini knew what he was talking about. Next Seghizzi asked how Galileo was regarded in Florence. Caccini had to reply that many thought him a good Catholic, before hurrying on with a completely gratuitous accusation that could have ruined Galileo no matter what he thought about cosmology or astronomy or anything else. Caccini said that “others” (who turned out to be Lorini) had severe doubts because he was known as a friend of “that Fra Paolo, Servite, so notorious in Venice for his impieties,” with whom Galileo still exchanged letters.¹⁰¹ This of course is Paolo Sarpi, whom Paul V would gladly have assassinated.¹⁰² This specific accusation was not pursued, any more than the similar one of association with Cremonini, but in both cases the damage had been done. Caccini also vaguely noted that Ferdinando Ximenes thought ill of Galileo. “Oh, yes,” added Caccini again spontaneously, Galileo belongs to the Academy of the Lynxes and writes letters to Germany about sunspots, naturally if only by implication, to Lutheran heretics. Whatever the truth value of the rest of Caccini’s testimony, this point was false since the dedicatee of the Sunspot Letters, Mark Welser, was not only a city father of the thoroughly Catholic Augsburg but also an informer for the Roman Inquisition.¹⁰³

Then, as often happened, the examination began to go in circles, the interrogator returning to the same central points from several different directions. How did Ximenes know what he had told Caccini? Attavanti told him. Where did Ximenes talk to Attavanti? In Santa Maria Novella, replied Caccini. Finally, Seghizzi got around to asking whether Caccini had “enmity” against Galileo or any of his disciples. Caccini piously replied indeed not, in fact, he prayed for them. Seghizzi had to ask and Caccini had to answer because, under Inquisition rules, the testimony of mortal enemies was inadmissible or at least severely discounted.¹⁰⁴ With Caccini safely, if to our eyes rather oddly, qualified as neutral, all was well. Again because the rules said he had to, Seghizzi asked Caccini for details about Galileo. Not only could he not have recognized Galileo on the street, but Caccini thought he was more than sixty (instead of barely fifty), had no idea whether he taught, and although alleging that he had so many followers they had a name (the Galileisti, on whom he may have punned at the beginning of his lecture), the only one he ever produced was the semi-anonymous Attavanti. Caccini’s testimony, at least after his opening mini-sermon, was less than compelling. Nevertheless, when his deposition was read in the Inquisition’s meeting of 2 April, Paul ordered a copy immediately dispatched to Florence for further investigation. The packet went off two days later.¹⁰⁵

The pressure stayed on in Rome. Only Dini seems to have noticed. He continued to write Galileo regularly, almost always reporting his intention to see Bellarmino as soon as possible. Alas, Dini had come down with life-threatening laryngitis and never did quite get to the cardinal.¹⁰⁶ Somehow he managed to talk just fine to Cesi, Ciampoli, and at least several other people whom he named to Galileo. He, Cesi, and Ciampoli had more or less agreed, if likely for different reasons, that there was no reason to mount a defense.¹⁰⁷ In Dini, Galileo was relying on a cautious man, the kind of courtier who could go far and one to whom he would have been well advised to listen. It is odd that, despite Galileo’s rampant paranoia, he paid more attention to the pollyanna Ciampoli than either of the worrywarts Dini and Cesi.

Cardinal Millini and Paul V

By the end of April the situation in Rome seemed to have improved markedly. Dini wrote Galileo that Grienberger’s compagno (perhaps meaning official substitute) had told him on the way to mass how happy he was that Galileo’s case was “accommodated.”¹⁰⁸ Galileo himself seems to have developed a measure of discretion. He drafted, but for a change did not fire off, a reply to Bellarmino’s letter to Foscarini.¹⁰⁹ He did write Foscarini, and so should have been glad to hear the news that he, now under Cardinal Millini’s protection, was thinking of reprinting his book.¹¹⁰ Millini’s position as secretary of the Inquisition by itself indicates the extent of this cardinal’s power.¹¹¹ Millini was physically striking, tall and graceful, with a big head and nose, wide forehead, long, thin arms, hands, and fingers, a pale complexion, and chestnut hair. A native Roman noble, he was born in Florence where his father had been exiled. His mother was a cousin of the short-lived Urban VII, who when still a cardinal had taught Millini law. He had gotten his start in Rome in 1591 as an auditor of the Rota, the position Dini failed to get.¹¹² As soon as he left that job in 1607, he was almost immediately made cardinal and, with dizzying speed, four days later appeared as an Inquisitor, before again, almost as immediately, leaving on a diplomatic mission to Germany. Like Barberini in France just a little earlier, Millini met with great success.

On his return, Millini became Arrigoni’s assistant as secretary of the Inquisition, before quickly but briefly serving as bishop of the bandit country of Imola (where he cooperated with the legate Giustiniani and was peripherally involved in Rodrigo Alidosi’s case [see SI, Chapter 5]). On his return, the pope made Millini vicar of Rome, his personal representative in the government of the bishopric, as well as adding him to numerous particular congregations. Right from the first, Millini was numbered among Paul’s most trusted advisors. Except for the cardinal nephew, no one was more powerful in Rome. There was also no one harder to read, as even his admiring nephew had to admit in the authorized biography. Thus Millini’s blunt speech about the evils in Cremonini’s book should have carried double weight, and Galileo should have been doubly warned by his friend’s example. Although some complained that Millini moved slowly, he was a hard worker, in the habit of holding lengthy meetings of the Inquisition in his palace in Piazza Navona (now engulfed by the Brazilian embassy) in the heat of August to clear its docket. Since there were no manuals from which he could learn how to be Inquisition secretary, he taught himself by studying its files. What theology he knew, he picked up from Bellarmino in the congregations on which both served, in the same way Bellarmino got law from Millini such that they “made a beautiful concerto,” as the official biography put it.

There can be no doubt that anything Millini said, the pope said. So how could Paul have protected Foscarini by proxy at the same time that Bellarmino unsubtly warned him to watch his step? The answer is simple. The papal government was a sprawling, disjointed institution; especially at the top, differences of direction frequently arose, even among cardinals as close to one another as Millini and Bellarmino. As between the two, Bellarmino was the more likely to make policy, Millini to execute it. Chance cannot be overlooked as a factor, either. Given how quickly opinions changed, a cardinal missing one key meeting (as Millini would that deciding the ban on Foscarini) could have enormous consequences.

Millini’s master, Paul V, is a difficult pope to come to grips with.¹¹³ Anyone who has ever seen the monumental inscription on the façade of St Peter’s or the only slightly smaller one on the new fountain he built on top of the Janiculum in Rome knows Paul had a big ego. His portraits, especially his funeral monument, on the other hand, make him look almost embarrassingly kindly, playing down his height and regal bearing, which a goatee also helped to offset. He had a slightly different family background from other recent popes. He came from a legal dynasty and was himself a lawyer, but his father, Marcantonio Borghese, had distinguished himself not in papal service as an Inquisitor, for example, but as a high-profile defense attorney. Among his clients was Cardinal Giovanni Morone, one of the Inquisition’s most important sixteenth-century targets.¹¹⁴ Marcantonio had moved the family from Siena to Rome, making them arrivistes and explaining the gigantic “Romanus” after Paul’s name on St. Peter’s. Camillo Borghese, as he then was, rejected his father’s ladder to success and instead worked his way up the other side of the legal hierarchy in Rome until he became secretary of the Congregation of the Holy Office, an excellent springboard to pope.

Paul and even more his nephew Scipione Caffarelli who took the name Borghese were together about as grasping as any papal family ever. Scipione had no less than four palaces all to himself, the smallest and least grand of which was the spectacular one now known as Giraud-Torlonia in via della Conciliazione between St. Peter’s and the Tiber. The Villa Borghese, one of Rome’s most important museums, was intended to be even larger than the grand duke’s nearby establishment at Trinità dei Monti and contained even more art. Scipione also built nearly from scratch a huge villa at Frascati, surrounded by even more extensive grounds than the Villa Borghese.¹¹⁵ Paul also undertook a gargantuan building project at the Quirinal Palace, which he almost entirely rebuilt and vastly enlarged, the one to which Sfondrato objected.¹¹⁶ The family defined conspicuous consumption.

After these outward clues to Paul’s character, things become more difficult. The Tuscan ambassador, probably for reasons of his own, made the pope out to be an ignoramus.¹¹⁷ That he was not. A glance into his funeral chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore will knock that notion on the head.¹¹⁸ If one looks a little harder, one will also see that Paul was very much up to date. Not only did he bring in the best artists to decorate his chapel, among them Galileo’s close friend Ludovico Cigoli, but he also let Cigoli pay homage to Galileo’s telescopic discoveries by painting in its cupola a moon with blemishes.¹¹⁹ Paul had a great deal of work done on the church, including erecting a small plaque in honor of St. Francis, which almost appears to be a joke in light of Francis’s notorious insistence on apostolic poverty. Beyond these hints from his patronage, just how Paul used his brain poses more problems. He was not as lucky as Urban VIII in having a relatively factual official biography in eight massive volumes. Instead, he got a sprawling puff piece almost as long and almost completely useless.¹²⁰ The official printed biography by Dominican historian Abraham Bzowski at least contains information, but it is so suffocatingly pious as to tell us next to nothing about Paul the man.¹²¹ Nor does the comparison to other popes numbered V help much!

Bzowski does say two things of great interest. First, no one was harder than Paul on heretical books—as Bzowski should have known since his own continuation of Cardinal Baronio’s history of the church had encountered difficulties with the Inquisition. Second, the pope never did anything without carefully taking advice. Other commentators agree in making caution Paul’s defining characteristic. That makes sense for a lawyer, but it happens not to be true. Paul was perfectly prepared to shoot from the hip, whether by airily ordering an entire new street to be built because his carriage had been forced to take a small detour or—much more important—without consulting anyone at all, slapping the interdict on Venice in 1606 that just about wrecked the papacy.¹²² He acted in much the same hasty fashion in Galileo’s case. He is alleged never to have taken any step without calculating its political impact, especially when it came to the grand duke, to whom he owed a big leg up into the papal chair. His handling of Galileo’s case raises doubts about this claim, too. He was not a man to be pushed around.

Florence Gets a New Inquisitor

Despite Paul’s prodding, the investigation into Galileo in Florence was not making much headway. Its inquisitor, Cornelio Priatoni, reported on 11 May that he could not question Ximenes since he was still in Milan, and Priatoni thought it best not to talk to anyone else first.¹²³ Since the inquisitor in Milan reported soon after that Ximenes had returned to Florence, one or the other inquisitor may have been passing the buck.¹²⁴ Priatoni never did manage to interview Ximenes. (Meanwhile the inquisitor of the frontier post at Belluno was asked to look for the “Letter to Castelli” on a rumor that its dean had a copy of one of Galileo’s writings, which one not specified. The Inquisition could be both incredibly thorough and incredibly sloppy.)¹²⁵ Priatoni found himself in an almost impossible situation.¹²⁶ Immediately after Caccini’s lecture, he tried to resign. Rome refused to let him step down until the middle of 1615 on the face-saving pretext of ill health.

Lelio Marzari, the inquisitor of Pisa, wound up replacing Priatoni.¹²⁷ Marzari’s arrival at this precise moment cannot be coincidence. Priatoni’s foot-dragging may well have been meant to help Galileo, who was probably being leaked information about the progress of his case.¹²⁸ Marzari’s arrival therefore looked doubly menacing. Galileo ignored the signals and wrote a more inflammatory letter than the one to Castelli. This time he addressed himself directly to the grand duke’s mother, Grand Duchess Christina.¹²⁹ His central point was that scientists should not start their investigations from the Bible. Whether he meant this as a defense of separate spheres for science and religion or to save the Bible from possible attack by less devout scientists—or a number of other possibilities—the danger arose in his liberal citation of scripture to support his argument, as well as trotting out an arsenal of citations from the fathers of the church. Not that Galileo had suddenly developed expertise in patristics. Instead, he probably got the whole set of texts from the Bible commentary of Spanish Jesuit Benito Pereyra that an unknown monk, probably a Barnabite (possibly Pomponio Tartaglia, who knew Castelli in Pisa), had sent him.¹³⁰

On new orders from Rome, Marzari rummaged around in the files and found the earlier instructions to Priatoni and, on 13 November, finally interviewed Ximenes, who had probably returned to Florence no later than early July.¹³¹ Ximenes had recently arrived there from Portugal, perhaps following his brother, a canon of its cathedral.¹³² He would sing the mass in 1629 in Rome for the canonization of the Florentine saint Andrea Corsini.¹³³ Conveniently enough, the Florentine inquisition sat in Ximenes’s own convent of Santa Maria Novella, so he need not leave the building. Marzari asked questions, and the Florentine inquisition’s chancellor took down the answers. As always happened, the first question to Ximenes was whether he knew the cause of his summons.¹³⁴ No, Ximenes said, possibly a little disingenuously since the next question was whether he knew Galileo. Marzari did not waste time getting to the point. No, answered Ximenes again, nor could I recognize him, but I do hear rumors that he thinks the earth moves and “the heaven” stands still, and such belief is “diametrically opposed to true theology and philosophy.” Why? prodded Marzari. A. I heard some of his students say that “the heaven” does not move, that God is an accident and has no substance, that everything is a quantity made of a vacuum, that God laughs and cries. But I do not know whether this is just their opinion or whether Galileo believes all this, too. Q. Did you hear anyone say Galileo thought miracles were not really miracles, pressed Marzari. No, responded Ximenes. Q. From whom did you hear these things? A. From Giannozzo Attavanti, parish priest of Castel-fiorentino, in the presence of Ridolfi, a knight of St. Stephen (the noble order founded by Cosimo I).¹³⁵ It happened in my room last year, many times, but I cannot give the month, much less the day, and in addition to Ridolfi there were sometimes friars in attendance—but Ximenes could not remember who. Ximenes’s testimony was becoming dangerously vague, and it got worse. Marzari: can you conjecture whether Attavanti was speaking as if he believed these things? Ximenes: I do not think so; he was putting an argument and referred all to the Church’s judgment. Q. What else do you know about him? A. He has no training in theology or philosophy and does not have a degree, but he has some experience with both and was probably expressing Galileo’s views rather than his own. The question arose while we were discussing cases of conscience (in other words, while Ximenes was training Attavanti how to hear confessions). Some of Caccini’s readings came up, especially about Joshua and the sun.¹³⁶ I reprimanded Attavanti harshly, Ximenes asserted piously. Then came the standard closing question about whether he was an enemy of either Galileo or Attavanti. Ximenes repeated that he could not pick Galileo out of a lineup if he had to and at worst was Attavanti’s friend. Ximenes was sworn to silence and signed his deposition, and the interview ended.

The next day Marzari deposed Attavanti.¹³⁷ He was described as “a noble Florentine, thirty-three years old” and in minor orders (very minor; he had no more than the tonsure, the initial sign of clerical status).¹³⁸ After the usual opening question, Marzari asked whether Attavanti had studied “letters” in Florence. Yes, under two Dominicans whom Attavanti named, then two more teachers (possibly also Dominicans), as well as with Ximenes who taught him cases of conscience. Q. Did you study with Galileo? A. No, I discussed philosophy with him as I do with all learned men. Then Marzari made a huge blunder, just what we would expect given his checkered career. He asked a leading question. If there was one rule on which the Roman Inquisition constantly harped, it was under no circumstances, ever, ever, feed the witness his lines.¹³⁹ In his day the Inquisition had not quite figured out that learning on the job without much (or any) supervision was not the best imaginable way to prepare inquisitors. Only later did it begin circulating once a year copies of its general decrees and bringing inquisitors to Rome for short, total immersion courses during which they sat in on parts of the Congregation’s sessions.¹⁴⁰ So Marzari did his best. Did you ever hear Galileo say anything “repugnant” to scripture or the faith? No, I did not, huffed Attavanti. I only heard him say, following Copernicus, that the earth moved, as he wrote in his Sunspot Letters, to which I refer you. Marzari kept on leading Attavanti. Did Galileo ever interpret scripture, “maybe badly?” A. He interpreted Joshua, but Attavanti ignored the rest of the question. Then Marzari turned to the more solid evidence Ximenes had given. Attavanti gave a much more precise answer about his discussions with his former teacher than Ximenes had, volunteering the circumstances including Caccini’s presence (his cell was next door), while insisting that the whole thing was a disputation that Caccini might have misunderstood. That was probably what happened on another occasion when Caccini had interrupted to condemn heliocentrism as heretical. About miracles, Attavanti knew nothing and about God’s nature only what Aquinas taught. Marzari’s next question went over the same ground, asking about the circumstances under which Attavanti had gained his information. Attavanti could not resist pointing out that he had already testified to them. What is your opinion about Galileo, asked Marzari? I think him a very good Catholic, otherwise he would not be in the grand duke’s service, rejoindered Attavanti. Then Marzari asked another odd question, about Attavanti’s “enmity” not with Galileo but with Caccini. Attavanti contradicted himself by saying he did not even know Caccini’s name, after having given it twice before. And that was it.

With commendable speed, Marzari expressed the transcripts to Rome. Just ten days later, meeting in Sfondrato’s palace in the Via Giulia (the present Palazzo Sacchetti, one of the grandest in Rome, which shortly afterward sold for the colossal sum of 55,000 scudi), the Inquisition ordered Sunspot Letters examined but took no other action.¹⁴¹ Now, after all this rush, nothing happened until February 1616, that is, except for Galileo’s decision to go to Rome.

Galileo Goes to Rome

It may be coincidence, but, within a week of the Inquisition’s decree on 25 November 1615 calling for review of his Sunspot Letters, Galileo was collecting letters of recommendation and preparing to leave for the eternal city.¹⁴² It seems likely that his principal concern remained the effect his “Letter to Castelli” was having, although the proximate trigger may well have been the Florentine depositions in his case, about which Attavanti likely told him.¹⁴³ It may also be that continuing echoes of Lorini’s letter motivated his trip.¹⁴⁴ Galileo probably reached Rome on or about 11 December.¹⁴⁵ He stayed at the Villa Medici, rather than in the Tuscan embassy in Palazzo Firenze. That would have been more convenient but much less pleasant. His visit did not please the Tuscan ambassador, Piero Guicciardini. As soon as he got wind of Galileo’s proposed trip, he fired off a long letter to the secretary of state complaining that he had not been consulted, which was true if irrelevant, and that the visit was a really bad idea.¹⁴⁶ About the second point he may well have been right. He was not the only one to make it. Bellarmino told Guicciardini more or less the same thing, warning him that, if Galileo overstayed his (short) welcome, action would have to be taken about Copernicus. Of course, that was just what Galileo wanted. Guicciardini did not. He added ominously that he thought Bellarmino had heard something objectionable, perhaps even in the ambassador’s residence, and that influential Dominican Inquisitors did not care for Galileo at all. As we have seen, this is certainly true at least in Cardinal Galamini’s case.

Speaking of influential Dominicans, there was still Caccini to contend with. Galileo took care to try to neutralize him, enlisting the aid of the balìa, the chief executive of the city government of Florence, to write the highest-placed member of the Caccini family asking him to keep Tommaso under control while Galileo justified himself to Tommaso’s fellows.¹⁴⁷ Matteo, with Cardinal Arrigoni in Naples, lamented Tommaso’s involvement and suggested that he get Lorini to cease and desist, too.¹⁴⁸ Galileo, as usual when he had chosen to take action, exuded confidence, that is, when he was not muttering darkly about the enemies who laid traps for him everywhere.¹⁴⁹ He even thought Lorini had come to Rome because his denunciation had run into difficulties. The friar had not, but he had been to see the grand duchess, which was almost as bad, even if the secretary of state, eavesdropping, thought they had spoken about another matter.¹⁵⁰

Paranoia might have suited Galileo better than cockiness, both because discretion would have served his purposes well and because there were good reasons for worry, including Lorini’s continued efforts. Galileo found himself in early January forced to combat a bruit in Rome that he had been disgraced at home.¹⁵¹ In a city that worked as much by rumor as by reality, there was plenty of danger reflected in a report sent about the same time by one of his friends from Paduan days, Antonio Querenghi, and mirrored back to Galileo by his Venetian intimate Giovanni Sagredo.¹⁵² Querenghi was considered cardinal material a bit earlier in Paul’s reign, so he would have had a pretty good idea what was going on or rumored to be going on in Rome. He wrote his employer that Galileo had not come to Rome voluntarily and would be called to account for his notions “completely contrary to holy scripture.” Galileo did not see fit to keep his head down, instead making the rounds of Roman salons arguing the truth of Copernicus’s ideas, as Querenghi regularly reported. Galileo called it breaking lances, as if he were one of the knights in his beloved Orlando Furioso.¹⁵³ Among those he disputed was Francesco Ingoli, a client of Cardinal Caetani, one of Galileo’s potentially most important backers, another well-placed and wealthy Roman.¹⁵⁴ The debate took place before Cardinal Barberini’s right-hand man.¹⁵⁵ Annoying Ingoli in that context did not represent a victory.¹⁵⁶

Yet, as January wore on, the worrying rumors began to die down. Almost as soon as he arrived, Galileo heard that his stay might be cut short on the strength of “a few words” that could be taken as orders to return and asked for reassurance that he had not been recalled. No, no, everything is fine, replied the secretary of state.¹⁵⁷ On some days it was. Querenghi made light of Galileo’s facility with words and gradually sent more and more cheerful (and funny) reports of his derring-do, taking on fifteen or twenty opponents and making monkeys of all of them.¹⁵⁸ But he still failed to convince them. By the end of the month even Querenghi was half-persuaded, enough so to pass on Galileo’s offer to come to Modena to prove his propositions.¹⁵⁹

Despite his gallivanting around Rome unhorsing his opponents, Galileo knew the battle would be won in back rooms where he had to go carefully. It frustrated him both that he was forced to put his case in “dead writings” instead of in “live voice” and also that he could not deal directly with the people he needed to see because that would embarrass an unnamed friend and those people in turn could not approach him without “incurring the most severe censures.”¹⁶⁰ In order to reach the right people, he had to work through third parties who tried to bring his case up casually, as if the decision makers had thought of it themselves. He meant men at least close to if not in the Inquisition. Despite setbacks, he remained certain that he could convince “those on whom the decision depends” not least because God was on his side. But did Galileo really think Ingoli and others who dealt with those very men (and their God) on a daily basis could not and did not talk to them more easily and with more authority than he did? What friend could trump them? The supporters Galileo had collected in 1611 in Rome were mostly still there, including Maraffi at the Minerva and Cardinal Bandini, but neither was in quite the right position to help.

The man Galileo did single out to represent him in the papal court seems an odd choice. This was Ciampoli’s original recruit, Alessandro Orsini, the almost ridiculously young, twenty-three-year-old, brand-new cardinal, just given the right to vote on 11 January 1616.¹⁶¹ Not that Orsini did not have a glittering lineage as a member of one of the oldest Roman baronial families, the son of the duke of Bracciano, the grand duke’s most southerly vassal, and a bulwark against the papal states.¹⁶² He was still a politically questionable choice for Galileo, since, after Alessandro’s father’s unexpected death in September 1615, his brother, the new duke, had broken with Florence and tried to strike an alliance with France.¹⁶³ As a result, the grand duke almost withdrew Orsini’s nomination as cardinal. Possibly as a quid pro quo for saving it, the new duke promised his full protection to Galileo.¹⁶⁴ That may have patched things up in Florence; it did nothing to defuse a tense situation in Rome. The Orsini, like many such families, were in difficult financial straits and had pulled off a marriage alliance with Paul V’s fabulously wealthy family.¹⁶⁵ The Borghese were after a real noble title (not the ones Paul had invented for them) and were happy to part with some real estate to sweeten the deal. They were, however, considerably less than excited by the bride’s wish to become a nun. Cardinal Alessandro had the same problem, having to be talked out of entering the Jesuits once already and eventually succumbing to the temptation of the religious life.¹⁶⁶ At this moment he temporarily behaved as a new cardinal should, making the rounds of banquets, including with Cardinal Caetani, going hunting, leading parades, and, oh yes, being seen at mass in St. Peter’s.¹⁶⁷ A little less typically, he also became Galileo’s protégé, the addressee of his most dangerously Copernican work yet, “The Discourse on the Flux and Reflux of the Tides,” sent (or handed) to him on 8 January 1616; it allegedly arose from conversations in Rome between the two.¹⁶⁸ By that act, Galileo anointed Orsini his official champion.

By the end of January Galileo had become so confident in his success that, in addition to dismissing Caccini as a continuing threat, he generously offered to intercede to protect his accuser from punishment for his denunciations.¹⁶⁹ On 6 February, Galileo announced to Florence that the people in charge assured him “my business is completely wound up as far as my person is concerned,” since they had seen both his innocence and the “malignity” of his enemies. He could go home.¹⁷⁰ This may sound like the end of a letter; in fact, it is only the first sentence. This is the second time we have seen Galileo’s “business” finished. It was not the first time in early 1615, nor was it now. Why not? Because Galileo had no idea how to leave well enough alone. He rushed on to demand not only that he be cleared but also that all other followers of Copernicus had to be, too, and heliocentrism accepted as true. Getting that job done was wearing him out, but, as “a zealous and Catholic Christian” pursuing a “just and religious end,” he was determined to overthrow those who for their own selfish reasons opposed the truth. It is typical of Galileo as a man of the seventeenth century to trivialize and personalize his opponents. Manifesting contempt for one’s opponents is never a compelling persuasive tactic, and it did not work well for Galileo, either, not if we consider that all this is the prologue to a report on a lengthy meeting with Caccini that Galileo was forced to admit left the Dominican completely unconvinced.

On 5 February, one month before Copernicus’s book would be suspended, Caccini came to visit Galileo.¹⁷¹ They began by spending half an hour alone. Caccini begged Galileo to believe that he had not “been the motor of that other noise here [in Rome, in addition to his reading in Florence].” Then five other people, most of them Florentines, showed up, two of them dependents of one of the Inquisitors to whom Galileo later claimed to have talked during this visit, Giovanni Battista Bonsi: his favored nephew Domenico Bonsi and his auditor Francesco Venturi.¹⁷² All three were lawyers. The Florentine Cardinal Bonsi had spent much of his career in France before coming to Rome in mid-1615 to represent French interests.¹⁷³ He became an Inquisitor on 21 July 1615 and later served as deputy secretary, although there is little sign of his impact as such or as a representative of Florence. The appearance of two of Bonsi’s familiars in Galileo’s room was no accident. They had come to witness Caccini’s submission to Galileo in case evidence was needed in the future. Bonsi has to have been one of the men on whom Galileo relied. If so, he did not help much. It is a great irony that Galileo or his backers tried to give Caccini exactly the same treatment he would himself receive shortly. Caccini probably had the last laugh. It is likely that he was spying on Galileo and gleefully reported finding him as determined as ever to defend Copernicus.

Galileo closed his report with one of the most accurate things he said throughout this episode: “Now the discussion has become more open, considering it in a certain way a public matter, even if in respect to the other courts this one [the Inquisition], including in these actions, is very secretive.”¹⁷⁴ Since things were going so well, Galileo had decided to present the grand duke’s recommendation to Cardinal Nephew Borghese on the following Tuesday, 9 February. He also decided to activate Orsini, first of all as his means of access to Borghese. Borghese effusively promised full support.¹⁷⁵ Orsini was jumping up and down with excitement at the important job he had been given. Just in case, Galileo asked for another recommendation from the grand duke to him.¹⁷⁶ It was dispatched as soon as Galileo’s letter reached Florence, despite the distractions of Carnival, including the rehearsal of an equestrian ballet that was proving difficult because there was so much ice.¹⁷⁷ Borghese’s interest was great news. Orsini’s was not.

A week later Galileo sent another letter to Florence.¹⁷⁸ This time a passage he may have meant as rhetorical exaggeration came, unbeknownst to him, even closer to the truth than his last letter. Now he wrote that his three principal enemies, “ignorance, envy, and impiety” (“ignoranza, invidia et impietà,” a nice piece of assonance in Italian), wanted to “annihilate” the Copernicans. He could not have been more right.

Probably about this time one of Galileo’s oddest backers weighed in.¹⁷⁹ The Dominican Tommaso Campanella had been imprisoned for almost twenty years in Naples (and had more than another decade to go before being released), yet Cardinal Caetani thought it worth asking him for an opinion about Copernicus and Galileo.¹⁸⁰ Caetani was a member of the Index, not the Inquisition, so his move may be another instance of one hand not knowing what the other was doing. It is hard to believe that Caetani knew how much Paul V hated Campanella. Campanella’s little Apologia pro Galileo would probably not have been much help, even if it had arrived in time. It did not really defend Galileo, since Campanella did not accept heliocentrism, nor was he comfortable with the moral implications of Galileo’s proposed divorce between science and religion (despite all Galileo’s protestations of loyalty to holy mother church).¹⁸¹ Campanella took up Caetani’s invitation for two reasons: to defend “the liberty of philosophizing” for all philosophers, not just Galileo, and to make a case, not unlike Galileo’s, against the continued blending of Aristotle and Christian theology. While Campanella was writing, Caccini’s leader, Cardinal Galamini, was reviewing one of Campanella’s prides and joys, “Atheismus triumphatus” (Atheism conquered) written a decade earlier against Niccolò Machiavelli; Galamini was still working on the book a decade later—the Inquisition could drag its feet with the best of them.¹⁸² Galamini’s opinion was then highly valued, and in May 1616 he would get Cremonini’s most recent publication to critique.¹⁸³ Alas, we do not know what if anything Galamini said about Campanella’s book. A review by the Inquisition was not necessarily the kiss of death, but it was rarely a good thing. Given the Inquisition’s tendency to rely heavily on guilt by association, trouble for Campanella (and Cremonini) was likely to spill over onto Galileo and vice versa.

“Not without my prior information”: The Approach to the Precept

After a lull of about three weeks, matters came to a head. At this point, it was still only a rumor that the Holy Office had summoned Galileo, but it was about to. The crisis began around February 20, when Galileo reported to Florence that he had given Orsini the second recommendation from the grand duke and that the young cardinal could not wait to talk to Cardinal Borghese and the pope himself about “the public case.”¹⁸⁴ Galileo had primed Orsini about its importance and how much he needed to find “an extraordinary authority” against those who were trying to trick “the superiors.” Galileo devoutly asserted that God was still on his side and would prevent “any scandal for holy church.” Although he found himself alone against his enemies’ skull-duggery, he had no fear of putting everything in writing, unlike his sneaky opponents who worked by whisper and innuendo. This is classic Galileo. He had also changed his mind about Caccini, whom he now once again thought not only completely ignorant but also “full of poison and empty of charity,” a man to stay well away from. Of course, he hurried on to write, there are plenty of “good” Dominicans. Then he said something strange, at least for him: “I am in Rome where the air [the weather] is constantly changing, just as the negotiations are always fluctuating.” Maybe this pessimistic judgment arose from a bad turn in his health, or maybe this time, when he said he could not put anything more in writing, he knew how bad things were becoming. The same packet to Florence included an ominously gushing letter from Orsini to the grand duke about his eagerness to help Galileo.¹⁸⁵

The day before, 19 February, the Inquisition’s theologian experts received copies of Sunspot Letters.¹⁸⁶ Now the pace picks up. In the early morning of 23 February, they held a meeting at which they tabled two propositions “to be censured”: “that the sun is the center of the world and consequently immovable by local motion” and “that the earth is not the center of the world nor immovable, but that it moves by itself, including by a daily motion.” Those two propositions were identified as coming from the book, first, in the summarium drawn up near the end of Galileo’s trial and on which his sentence rested and then unsurprisingly in the sentence itself.¹⁸⁷ Paul V’s order of 25 February 1616 to silence Galileo also identified the two propositions as Galileo’s, without giving their precise source.¹⁸⁸ It is nevertheless well known that the propositions as quoted do not appear in Sunspot Letters. The closest passage I have found in any of Galileo’s writing comes from a letter of 16 July 1611 to Gallanzone Gallanzoni, maestro di camera to Cardinal François de Joyeuse, the man who had mediated the end of the Interdict crisis with Venice, where Galileo wrote that “the earth moves with two motions … that is the diurnal in itself around its own center … and the annual motion.”¹⁸⁹ I am unable to suggest how this letter could have reached the Inquisition or Galileo’s enemies in Florence.¹⁹⁰ It is often suggested that the propositions came from Caccini’s deposition, but it is worth raising the possibility that they really arose from the censoring of Galileo’s book and that Caccini got his evidence from his sponsors in the Inquisition, not from Ximenes.¹⁹¹

Even had they met straight through until the next day, the consultors did not take long over their decision. They had help moving as fast as they did. Before they made their judgment, Orsini had taken up the cudgels for Galileo. With the enthusiasm of the raw youth given his first big assignment, he barged into the consistory of Wednesday 24 February, stoutly defending Galileo, perhaps even waving around “Discourse on the Tides.”¹⁹² Paul replied that it would be well for Orsini to tell Galileo to give up his opinion. Orsini persisted and Paul, visibly annoyed, snapped back, chopping off further discussion (as the Tuscan ambassador put it) by bluntly saying the matter had been turned over to the Inquisition. After Orsini left, Paul summoned Bellarmino, and together the two of them (again, according to the ambassador) decided Galileo’s opinion was “erroneous and heretical.” Of course, the pope should not have done that, even in consultation with Bellarmino, and probably he did not. Nevertheless, things moved with as much speed as if done by a single man. Would Paul have acted so quickly—by himself, with Bellarmino, or through the Inquisition—if Orsini, on Galileo’s instructions, had not egged him on?¹⁹³

The theologians handed down their brief opinion on 24 February.¹⁹⁴ To the first point “everybody said the aforesaid proposition was foolish and absurd in philosophy and formally heretical, in that it expressly contradicts the opinions of Holy Scripture in many places according to the proper sense of the words and the common exposition and sense of the holy fathers and doctors of theology” (“Omnes dixerunt dictam propositionem esse stultam et absurdam in philosophia et formaliter haereticam, quatenus contradicit expresse sententiis Sacrae Scripturae in multis locis secundum proprietatem verborum et secundum communem expositionem et sensum Sanctorum Patrum et theologorum doctorum”). Number 2 (“2.a Terra non est centrum mundi nec immobilis, sed secundum se totam movetur, etiam motu diurno”) fared little better. Again unanimously, the theologians decided that it had the same philosophical status as no. 1 and theologically was “at least erroneous.” Eleven experts signed the opinion. They have usually been dismissed as dunderheads. No generalization could be further from the truth. No, they did not know much about arithmetic, but they knew plenty about theology.

They were the following:¹⁹⁵

(1) Peter Lombard, the archbishop of Armagh and primate of Ireland (not to be confused as incredibly enough has sometimes happened with his twelfth-century namesake, one of the inventors of scholastic theology), a prolific writer and almost as well regarded as a theologian in Rome as Bellarmino, his comrade-in-arms against James I of England;¹⁹⁶

(2) Giacinto Petronio, Dominican, master of the sacred palace, chief papal censor, later Urban VIII’s point man in the effort to force the Roman Inquisition on the Spanish kingdom of Naples, one of the irritants in the background of the second phase of Galileo’s trial;¹⁹⁷

(3) the Aragonese Raphael Riphoz, the number-three man in the Dominican hierarchy on the cardinal nephew’s recommendation;¹⁹⁸

(4) Seghizzi;¹⁹⁹

(5) Girolamo da Casalmaggiore (whose surname was apparently Cappello), Conventual Franciscan, appointed consultor of the Holy Office just about a year earlier;²⁰⁰

(6) Tomás de Lemos, O.P., one of the most distinguished Spanish theologians of the early seventeenth century and a major figure in the dispute about grace between the Dominicans and the Jesuits;²⁰¹

(7) the Portuguese Augustinian Gregorio Nuñez Coronel, another member of the papal commission about grace and a consultor by this time for almost twenty years;

(8) Benedetto Giustiniani, S.J., a protégé but perhaps not a relative of Cardinal Giustiniani and once Caetani’s theologian, as well as Bandini’s teacher at the Collegio Romano, deeply involved with Bellarmino in responding to Venetian attacks on the Interdict in 1606;²⁰²

(9) Raphael Rastellius, Theatine, doctor of theology, about whom little is known before this moment and who would later lose his job as consultor and have other troubles with the Inquisition over his books;²⁰³

(10) Michele da Napoli, a member of Castelli’s order of Cassinese Benedictines and the most obscure of the lot;²⁰⁴ and

(11) Jacopo Tinto, Seghizzi’s socius and his relative, who went on to have a distinguished career as a provincial inquisitor, including in their hometown of Lodi.²⁰⁵

It is hard to miss the Inquisition’s dominance of this panel, seven of whose members also served it as consultors, experts who attended nearly all its meetings. Five were Dominicans, all but one of the total a member of a religious order. The panel was probably carefully chosen to represent a broad range of opinion to make its decision that much more solid. The Inquisition had its grounds for silencing Galileo. The fact that two witnesses agreed about Galileo’s Copernican allegiance, that both propositions documenting it were condemned, and yet the Inquisition still decided noli prosequi confirms that Copernicanism was not the real issue and was instead a smokescreen, intended to deflect the more serious charge of interpreting scripture.²⁰⁶