points in his sermons were not directed, even implicitly, at Copernicus, and certainly not at Galileo, given the sermons’ early date, they serve to explain how Lorini could become violently opposed to both men’s ideas. He soon had help from Caccini.
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