CHAPTER 1

      The Florentine Opposition

      The Roman Inquisition showed interest in Galileo several times before formal proceedings began in 1615. His mother may have denounced him to the Holy Office in Florence for calling her names.¹ Next, one of his household servants in Padua denounced him for practicing judicial astrology. The Venetians quashed the proceedings.² In 1611 during its protracted investigation of Galileo’s Paduan friend the Aristotelian philosopher Cesare Cremonini, the Congregation ordered its archives searched to see what it had against Galileo.³ The Inquisition’s most serious interest came in 1612–1613 when it somewhat unusually subjected Galileo’s Sunspot Letters to prepublication censorship. It objected most seriously to Galileo’s attempt to interpret scripture.⁴ As always, Galileo paid the Inquisition’s interventions only as much heed as he had to and seems to have taken away nothing whatever by way of a lesson. The pattern for his trial was set.

      The Florentine Opposition

      Almost as soon as Galileo arrived in Florence from Padua in 1610, opposition arose to him and his ideas. It reached critical mass about eighteen months after the publication in 1613 of Sunspot Letters, its target. The conspiracy grew among a tight-knit group of Florentine Dominicans, probably with ramifications to the top of the Florentine social and economic hierarchy. The conspirators used two basic approaches: preaching, the Dominicans’ forte; and denunciation to the Inquisition in Rome, an institution they dominated.

      Raffaello Delle Colombe

      Pride of place in launching the campaign from the pulpit against Galileo has always gone to Tommaso Caccini (see the next chapter), but priority probably belongs to his fellow Florentine Dominican Raffaelo delle Colombe (1563–1627).⁵ Luigi Guerrini calls Delle Colombe “the most important Dominican active in Florence in the first two and a half decades of the seventeenth century” as well as “one of the principal collaborators” of Archbishop Alessandro Marzi Medici in both his general efforts to control Florentine culture and more specifically to rein in Galileo.⁶ His brother Ludovico delle Colombe, a more obscure figure, has usually been taken as the ringleader of the Florentine cabal.⁷ Raffaello Delle Colombe entered the Dominican order on 6 November 1577 at Santa Maria Novella, studying theology in Perugia before preaching there, in Rome, and elsewhere in the Roman province.⁸ He authored or contributed to three books, all of them about saints.⁹ He probably spent considerable time in Santa Maria Novella before taking up permanent residence in 1612.¹⁰ Elected prior in 1620, he resigned in 1623. The convent’s library benefited greatly from monetary donations he arranged from his brothers and the 7,000 books Archbishop Francesco Bonciani of Pisa bequeathed in late 1619.¹¹

      Between 1613 and 1627, Delle Colombe published five large volumes of sermons, all by the Florentine house of Sermartelli. The first, dedicated to Marzi Medici’s nephew, Delle prediche sopra tutto gli Evangeli dell’anno (Sermons on all the Gospels of the Year), appeared in 1613 (IT\ICCU\RLZE\034354) (2nd ed. 1619; IT\ICCU\UM1E\004084), although its permissions date from 1609 and 1610, including one from Emanuele Ximenes, S.J., a prominent member of the opposition to Galileo, as we shall see in the next chapter.¹² Next came Prediche della Quaresima (Lent Sermons) (IT\ICCU\BVEE\056825), published in 1615, although all the approvals are of 1613. They are in themselves of interest. The first of 3 July 1613 is by Dominican Michele Arrighi (1567–1634), then prior of Santa Maria Novella and teacher and friend of Giacinto Stefani, the man who would review Galileo’s Dialogo in Florence.¹³ The Jesuit Claudio Seripando’s opinion at Archbishop Marzi Medici’s request is dated 31 August 1613; the archbishop’s own approval “if so it pleases the reverend master father inquisitor” rests on Seripando’s.¹⁴ Seripando had been involved with Rodrigo Alidosi during Alidosi’s legation to Prague in 1605–1607 and later cooperated with Lelio Medici, the inquisitor of Florence, in a proposed abjuration of one of Alidosi’s Bohemian Lutheran clients.¹⁵ Then “by order of the Holy Office,” comes an opinion dated 2 September 1613 “del nostro Collegio della Compagnia di Giesù,” Emanuele Ximenes again. All in all, a nicely balanced set of licenses. The second edition of 1622 (IT\ICCU\UM1E\004089) was dedicated to Federico Borromeo and included a third volume, Prediche aggiunte a quella della Quaresima [Sermons added to those for Lent] (IT\ICCU\TO0E\028863), dedicated to Desiderio Scaglia, another Dominican but much more important an Inquisitor. Volume 4, Prediche sopra le solennità della beatissima madre di Dio [Sermons for the Solemnities of the the Most Blessed Mother of God] (1619; IT\ICCU\CFIE\016595), was dedicated to another Dominican and Inquisitor Agostino Galamini, the man who directed Galileo’s prosecution in 1616. These two dedications cannot have been casual. Last came Dupplicato avvento di prediche [Doubled Advent Sermons, one set for religious, the other for the laity] (1627; IT\ICCU\CFIE\016608).¹⁶

      Delle Colombe’s preaching campaign had two phases according to Guerrini. Between 1608 and 1610 when Galileo arrived in Florence, he attacked Copernicans in general.¹⁷ In a sermon dating from before 1613, Delle Colombe broadened his criticism of worldly wisdom into harsh criticism of a long list of fools, ending with “Copernicans”:

      The¹⁸ men of the world are so far from this humility that there is nothing they study more than to hide than their ignorance nor to show than “science;” and indeed human “science” if it is not tempered with the water of divine wisdom is nothing other than a drunkenness…. Pride has disturbed their vision…. Thus if whoever drinks the wine of the world’s science, if he does not mix some water of which it is written “she … will give him the water of wisdom to drink” [Ecclesiasticus 15.3] will give into a delirium and commit insanities. What greater insanity than to deny God as Pythagoras [did] or divine providence as Ibn Rush [did], and similar things? What greater foolishness than to make the soul mortal, as Galen [did]? … What [is] more reasonable than to see “You [Yahweh] have made the world, firm, unshakeable” [Ps. 92/3.2] and with all this that the Copernicans [Copernici] say that the earth moves and the heavens stay still, because the sun is the center of the earth, for which reason it can be said of these that they have dizziness, “On them Yahweh has poured out a spirit of giddiness … as a drunkard slithers in his vomit” [an edited version of Isaiah 19.14]

      Beginning in 1612, Delle Colombe’s target became Galileo and—as Guerrini notes—specifically his ideas about sunspots.¹⁹ On at least two occasions, Delle Colombe inserted direct criticisms of them into his sermons, one explicit, the other thinly veiled.²⁰ The first came in a sermon for the second day of the first week of Lent, probably—given the dates of all the permissions for the volume of Lent sermons listed above—26 February 1613, just before Sunspot Letters appeared, suggesting a highly organized campaign.²¹ The printed version highlighted the target with a heavy-handed marginal reference to “Galileo in On Sunspots.” The passage comes near the sermon’s end, rhetorically its most important section:

      While²² the world lasts our ignorance also lasts, we know little