(Summarium) prepared by the Inquisition’s assessor near the end of Galileo’s trial in 1633, and the basis on which the Inquisitors passed sentence;8 No. 6. Galileo’s sentence.9
Most scholars have thought that the minute of 26 February recording the administration of the precept (No. 2) makes the most trouble. This is not the case. That honor instead belongs to the same kind of note of the Inquisition’s meeting a week later (the decretum of 3 March, No. 3). Nearly all commentators treat a seventh text, an affidavit (fede) from Bellarmino requested by Galileo and dated 26 May 1616 (“Bellarmino’s affidavit”), as if it is most important. In fact, it says nothing directly about what happened on 26 February and is largely insignificant.10
I shall save one final piece of evidence for separate treatment, Galileo’s deposition of 12 April 1633, mainly because it is the only one of these texts that offers a slanted view of what happened. Despite many interpreters’ deep suspicions, it is much more likely that Galileo fudged the truth in his testimony than that any of the other documents were falsified or otherwise manipulated. When carefully read, Galileo’s testimony agrees well with the interpretation argued here.
It is as well to admit immediately that any reconstruction will never meet the standards of legal proof. Not only did the Inquisition both generate and manage its records in ways guaranteed to produce problems, it was an institution run by men only some of whom were fully qualified. Some of the least well credentialed, the notaries, had the greatest impact on the quality of its records.11 Nevertheless, it was their intervention alone that made an act authentic, as medieval legal commentators had long argued.12 Many of the rest of the Inquisition’s personnel were lawyers who one might hope would do their job with precision. They too often did not. As one basic albeit largely insignificant indication, they failed to settle on a stable text of the strongest form of the precept even when allegedly quoting it directly.13
The Decretum of 3 March
The only serious discrepancy about what happened on 26 February 1616 arises from document No. 3 (the decretum). It has Bellarmino on 3 March report to the Congregation simply that Galileo had “agreed” to “abandon” heliocentrism after being “warned” to do so.14 This statement has often been taken to mean both that Galileo received only a warning and, more important, that Commissary Michelangelo Seghizzi never issued the precept. The other texts disagree. Paul’s order (No. 1), the one found in Galileo’s dossier but not the decreta, read that Seghizzi should proceed to the precept if Galileo “refused” to agree to the “warning.” It gave the text of the precept as ordering Galileo “to abandon completely teaching, defending or treating this doctrine [of the earth’s movement and the sun’s fixity],” which is almost identical to the wording of No. 2. No. 4 read that Galileo could “in no manner whatever hold, teach or defend [Copernicus’s ideas], in word or in writing” or he would be proceeded against, and that he promised to obey. No. 5 combines all these texts, perhaps sloppily, perhaps maliciously, and makes Bellarmino alone give Galileo the precept in its strongest form. To bring confusion full circle, No. 6, Galileo’s sentence, contains the most detailed account, having Bellarmino warn Galileo “benignly” before Seghizzi gave him the strongest form of the precept.15
Thus, except for the decretum of 3 March, all the texts agree that Galileo got the precept in full form, leaving a little unclear only from whom, a point that may be irrelevant. We are left with one crucial fact: No. 3 stands alone both in its content and, more important, in its status and location. The second point is vital to the second phase of Galileo’s trial. Since it was not in his dossier, the Inquisition staff in 1632–1633 could not have been expected to know about it unless someone had ordered them to search all the Inquisition’s voluminous and poorly indexed records.16 The absence of an order for such a search might mean that it was never handed down and that No. 3, therefore, never came into evidence17—hence the near-perfect consistency between the other two documents of 1616, the “Summary” and the sentence.
The decretum of 3 March might seem the most authoritative text since it records what happened at the Inquisition’s Thursday meeting with the pope, when it made its most important decisions.18 Inclusion in the decreta converted the act into a precedent, on which the Inquisition relied nearly as much as common lawyers do.19 Although both points have significance, neither bears as much weight as might at first appear. Above all, the decreta were frequently sloppily kept.20 The minute of Paul’s order (No. 1), recording a direct if informal command from the pope via the Inquisition’s secretary to the two heads of its permanent staff, is a good example of the many notes in the decree registers scrawled in the margin or crammed in at the end of a meeting.21 Since it had not gone through the Congregation, the pope’s order need not have been recorded there at all, although more than a few similar acts were. As just one example, take the informational note exactly like No. 1 saying that Secretary Gian Garzia Millini “told me, the assessor, that the pope had ordered” that the Inquisition not accept recommendations, letters offering protection to suspects.22
Next, the way the Inquisition noted its decisions produced an important weakness in its records bearing directly on the status of No. 3, the only one of these documents explicitly to identify itself as a second-hand summary. The notary said he had transcribed a text given to him by the assessor, the permanent head of the Inquisition staff, who had jotted down what Bellarmino had said during the secret part of the Inquisition meeting from which the notary was barred.23 Quite apart from the strong suspicion that in some cases the assessor did no more than hand the notary the meeting agenda, perhaps with notes of action taken, perhaps in its original, unannotated form, so far as we know there was no procedure in place by which to check the accuracy of either the assessor’s jottings or the notary’s transcriptions of them.24 In this case, we need look no farther than the next clause of the same document for evidence of the confusion this clumsy second-hand recording could produce. In it the same notary, again allegedly working from the assessor’s notes, entered the Congregation of the Index’s order that Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus and two other books had been “prohibited and suspended, respectively” and then reversed the sequence of those words followed again by “respectively” at the end of the note. By also listing the books incorrectly relative to which was prohibited or suspended, the assessor/notary created an insoluble mess.25 There is every reason to think he/they did the same in No. 2, the precept minute. Besides, as its context shows, the decree of 3 March did not primarily concern Galileo, who appeared in it only as advance recipient of the Index’s action, so the notary (and maybe Bellarmino himself) worried less about getting what happened to him right. As Sergio Pagano also observes, Bellarmino was under no obligation in the first place to report in detail what had happened.26
The Precept Minute: A Forgery?
From the moment serious study of Galileo’s trial began in the late 1860s, document No. 2 has been the object of determined efforts to get rid of it because it does the most damage to Galileo.27 It posed an even greater danger than previously realized. Incredibly enough two words in it, et constituto, that would by themselves have settled once and for all what happened have been overlooked.28 They appear in the phrase recording Seghizzi’s action, “and afterward and incontinenti, in my and witnesses’ [presence], etc., still being then present the same illustrious lord cardinal [Roberto Bellarmino], the abovesaid father commissary [Seghizzi] ordered and ordered [sic] the aforesaid Galileo, still present et constituto” (“et successive ac incontinenti, in mei etc. et testium etc., praesenti etiam adhuc eodem illustrissimo Domino cardinali, supradictus Pater Commissarius praedicto Galileo adhuc ibidem praesenti et constituto praecepit et ordinavit”) to abandon his Copernican beliefs. Constitutus, literally “constituted,” is the vital term. It regularly appears at the beginning of a deposition or interrogation before the Inquisition and other courts and led to records of them being known as constituta. Galileo’s contemporary Sigismondo Scaccia unhelpfully
