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
