trial as founded in infighting among the Cardinal Inquisitors has become almost as solid an article of faith, despite the fact that it is supported by precious little evidence, primarily the fact that only seven of ten Inquisitors signed Galileo’s sentence.5
This book differs most from other studies nominally about Galileo’s trial in that it treats his trial, not his case, nor his affair. Thus the second important element in my approach is a careful study of the law and procedures involved. For procedure, I draw on The Roman Inquisition, while the treatment of the law applied to Galileo is new. In this book I offer a detailed study of the device of the precept, the first since the 1940s, in particular, the Roman Inquisition’s jurisprudence and practice in its regard, which has never been given attention despite the precept’s centrality to the proceedings against Galileo. The precept given Galileo in 1616 has always been regarded as a singularity. In fact, the Inquisition handed them out quite frequently, along with the companion device of an admonition.
A Theory of the Trial in Context and a Summary of This Book
Galileo’s trial can be made simple. Its first phase began in 1616 and ended when he was given a precept utterly to abandon Copernicus’s principles. Seventeen years later in its second phase, he was found guilty of having violated that precept by publishing the Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems.
I am the first to admit that this theory is a silly caricature. That said, the “precept interpretation” summarizes most of the case I shall argue. It is chronologically the second interpretation to arise. At the very beginning of Galileo’s trial, it had a competitor, the “heresy interpretation.”6 This theory lost out to the second at the end of the trial’s first phase and did not reappear, almost evanescently, until its final four months, with terminal consequences for Galileo. The two theories exist in a dialectic that frames the narrative parts of this book. While the first, the heresy interpretation, is replete with drama, the second superficially lacks the contingency of false starts, twists and turns, and plain blundering inherent in any legal process involving as many people, institutions, and ideas as Galileo’s did. Thus in most of this book I shall resort to narrative in order to explicate how a great, buzzing confusion became a conviction on simple grounds, if not necessarily clear ones. If that sounds like a paradox, so be it.
Despite extensive prepublication censorship of Galileo’s Sunspot Letters (1613) by the Inquisition, the work gave Galileo’s enemies in Florence an opening to attack him, in both the pulpit and the Inquisition (Chapter 1). The conspiracy against him in Florence had arisen almost as soon as he arrived from Venice in 1610. By 1614 it had moved into high gear, and early the following year two of its Dominican members were ready to denounce Galileo in Rome. The formal proceedings opened on the strength of their claims were aborted early in 1616, probably for lack of evidence, despite the condemnation of two propositions allegedly taken from Sunspot Letters. Instead, the Inquisition turned to a familiar device in its extensive arsenal, a precept. Acting with the full authority of the Congregation of the Holy Office and its sole head the pope, Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino first ordered Galileo through a “warning” to stop defending Copernicus’s sun-centered theory of the universe. At the same time, Galileo received a precept saying the same thing in even stronger terms. A few days later the Congregation of the Index, the chief Roman censor, suspended publication of Copernicus’s own book (Chapter 2).
The precept was a mild outcome. Not for the first nor last time did Galileo get special treatment because of his status as client of the grand duke of Tuscany. The nature and use of precepts especially by the Roman Inquisition are the subject of Chapters 3 and 4. As an interim measure that might also become permanent, a precept could allow for its removal in the future. Galileo had at least three chances to secure that result and thereby avoid condemnation and threw all of them away. The law gave Galileo both gentle treatment and a way to escape its rigors; Galileo failed to understand either point.
The first chance to get out from under the precept came at the beginning of Urban VIII’s reign. The new pope had allegedly opposed the censuring of Copernicus in 1616 and admired Galileo. Galileo had merely to tell him about Bellarmino’s order, and Urban could probably have made it disappear. Second, the pope might have been able to annul the precept had Galileo admitted its existence when seeking permission to publish the Dialogue (this may be why the draft bill of charges in summer 1632 insisted that Galileo had acted “fraudulently” in concealing the precept) (Chapter 5).
Even missing these two opportunitites did not doom Galileo. The particular congregation in summer 1632 that decided that his case had to go to the Inquisition homed in on the precept at the same time as it concluded that there was not all that much wrong with the Dialogue. It thereby gave Galileo an opening to negotiate, a tactic the Inquisition commonly used. Instead, Galileo made another key blunder and insisted on formal proceedings. Had he at least consulted a canon lawyer at this point, counsel could have done one or both of two things. He could have encouraged Galileo to negotiate, perhaps in just the way Galileo eventually did when it was too late, by offering to rewrite his book to make clear that he did not defend Copernicus. Or that canonist, moving in the direction of but stopping short of formally reopening Galileo’s trial, could have lodged the objection that a precept expired with the death of the man who issued it. Paul V, in whose name both Bellarmino’s order and the precept had been issued, died in 1621. Circumstances had changed dramatically by 1633, and legal arguments might not have worked as well then as earlier in Urban’s pontificate, but they could have. Galileo had at least two lawyers whom he might have used, his own in-law Giovanfrancesco Buonamici and Niccolò Gherardini, and rejected advice from both of them (Chapter 6).
No doubt but that Urban decided to punish his client Galileo. A lawyer, he chose the law as his instrument, bending it creatively when necessary, following it carefully when convenient. But Urban’s very dependence on the law dictated that the precept take center stage. This inadvertently magnified Galileo’s chance to escape. Not that Urban did not have powerful resources that in the end proved too much even for Galileo, his many friends in Rome, and his powerful political backers. Urban used the Inquisition against Galileo. After some disagreement about exactly how (or whether) to do that, its key personnel were changed in late 1632, probably for reasons having little to do with Galileo’s trial, but nonetheless with the effect of clearing the way to his conviction. The most important figure after the pope was Vincenzo Maculano, the Inquisition’s commissary or chief operating officer. Guided by the pope’s brother Cardinal Antonio Barberini, Sr., secretary of the Inquisition, and their nephew Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the papal secretary of state, Maculano brilliantly entrapped Galileo with a good deal of help from Galileo himself. He did so via the precept. It therefore figured centrally in the narrative of Galileo’s sentence, although it did not appear in the sentence proper. That oversight was remedied in Galileo’s abjuration on the same day, 22 June 1633, which began with and turned on the precept. Ideally, the Inquisition under Urban and his brother Antonio’s guidance would have done its work more carefully, removing a considerable amount of ambiguity about precisely of what Galileo was convicted (Chapter 6). That it did not should cause no surprise. In sloppiness, creative record-keeping, and inventive jurisprudence the Inquisition treated Galileo no differently than most of the rest of those who underwent trial before it.
How Many Trials?
Now we are in a position to answer one last question. How many trials did Galileo undergo? Most investigators say two, one in 1616, one in 1633, and only the second was serious. This is a mistake, grounded in misunderstanding of the precept. On another level this question is absurd,
