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
