Galileo's Dream

Chapter eight Parry Riposte

No one understood why the maestro was so anxious and melancholy after that night when Cardinal Barberini came through. It was true he had eaten and drunk too much at the banquet, and had then slept badly and eventually fallen into one of his syncopes, and come out of it too ill to attend the farewell breakfast the next morning. But none of that was particularly unusual for him, and the extremely warm letter from the cardinal should have more than reassured him about missing the send-off breakfast. Really, his anno mirabilis had lasted for almost three years now and was still going strong. He should have been happy.

But he wasn’t. His sleep was frequently broken by nightmares, and his days were irritable to him. “Something bad is going to happen,” he kept saying, looking through his telescope at Jupiter like a soothsayer. “Something monstrous wants to be born.”

One night he called Cartophilus to him. Staring at the old man over a cup of warmed milk brought to him to ward off the chill, he said suddenly, “Where is your master?”

“You are my master, maestro.”

“You know who I mean!”

“… He’s not here.”

Galileo contemplated this, frowning. Finally he said, “When I want him again, can you call him here?”

After another pause the old man nodded.

“Be ready,” Galileo warned him.

The ancient one slunk away. He knew why Galileo was afraid, better than Galileo himself. He bowed under the weight of it.

Galileo often wrote to Picchena asking for Cosimo’s permission to go to Rome. By the middle of 1613, the reasons for these requests became more evident. His detractors had grown more vehement in direct proportion to his growing fame. A good deal of this Galileo had brought on himself. A lot of people hated him for what they called his arrogance.

To his household that wasn’t quite right. They spent a fair amount of time discussing him, as one does any great power in one’s life. “He’s very defensive,” La Piera would say. “So defensive that he attacks people in self-defense, and thus he becomes offensive.”

To the other servants it was simpler than that: he was Pulcinella. All over Italy the figure of Pulcinella had begun appearing in the festivals and buffa plays, a loud fool constantly lying, cheating, fornicating and beating on people—in short, the very image of a certain kind of master, which every servant in the land recognized and laughed to see. Once when Galileo was snoring in his chair while wearing a white shirt, someone had put a black cloth over his head and the typical costume was thereby hilariously complete, and they all tiptoed in to look and treasure this knowledge ever after: they worked for the greatest Pulcinella of all.

Now this ham-fisted tendency was catching up to him, and his enemies were becoming remarkably numerous. Colombe for one had never slackened in his assault. Previously this Bible-quoting malevolence could be ignored or used as a foil, as he had had no patrons. But now he was being used by figures much higher than he, who were interested in the success of his tactic of accusing Galileo of contradicting Scripture. Joshua, these figures were now murmuring into higher ears, had ordered the sun to come to a halt, not the Earth. It was as clear as could be. Surely the Church had to respond? They could beat Galileo with this kind of stick forever, because no one outside the Church should have been talking about scriptural interpretation at all.

Galileo ignored that and tried to respond directly to his assailants. He pointed out that God stopping the sun in the sky for Joshua would entail stopping the celestial vault and all the stars as well, as Ptolemy said they were all affixed to each other, whereas if Copernicus were right, then all God would have had to do to fix the sun in the midday sky would be to stop the Earth’s rotation, a much easier task, as could be easily seen. That this was ingeniously argued did not keep it from being also ridiculous—so much so that some people took it to be a mockery of the very idea of biblical explanations of the skies. It was hard to tell; a deadpan sarcasm was one arrow in Galileo’s sling. But either way it would have been wiser not to venture into such territory at all.

Still, he persisted in doing so. He wrote a long “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,” explaining to her and to the letter’s wider readership the principles he thought should rule science’s relation to theology. In discussion of physical questions, we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages, but from sense experiences and necessary demonstration. God is known first through Nature, and then by doctrine; by Nature in His works, and by doctrine in His revealed word.

“And God would not lie to us!” This was what he said over and over, from the very first moment of the controversy, when out in the workshop he had shouted it while striking the anvil with a long pair of tongs. “God would not lie to us!”

This was logically and perhaps even theologically sound, but it didn’t matter. The attacks continued, and many of them sounded like the kind of thing that might be accompanied by a secret denunciation to the Holy Office of the Inquisition. There were rumors that had already happened.

Galileo kept defending himself, in print and in person, but he fell ill more and more often, with rheumatism, bleeding hernias, shaking spells, blinding headaches, insomnia, syncopes and catalepsies, hypochondria, and bouts of irrational fear. Whenever he was healthy, he begged Cosimo’s secretary Curzio Picchena to be allowed to go to Rome so he could defend himself. He was still confident he could demonstrate the truth of the Copernican hypothesis to anyone he spoke to in person. Picchena was not the only one who doubted this. Winning all those banquet debates had apparently caused Galileo to think that argument was how things were settled in the world. Unfortunately this is never how it happens.

Galileo also was ignoring new complications that mattered. The general of the Jesuits, Claudio Aquaviva, had ordered his people to teach only the Aristotelian philosophy. Then also there was a doctored copy of Galileo’s “Letter to Castelli” being passed around Rome that made his positions sound even more radical than they were.

Worst of all, it was said that Bellarmino had recently ordered an investigation of the Copernican position as put forth by Galileo. This was a secret investigation, but everyone knew about it. A trial had therefore begun—a secret trial that was not actually secret. That was the Inquisition for you; rumors were part of their method, part of their terror. Sometimes they liked to apply pressures that might cause a panicked mistake.

Galileo fell ill again, very conveniently. He took to his bed for most of the winter, miserable and sleepless. In Rome Cesi made inquiries on his behalf to Bellarmino himself, asking what His Eminence thought Galileo should do. Bellarmino told Cesi that Galileo should stick to mathematics, avoid any assertions about the nature of the world, and avoid in particular any scriptural interpretations.

“Happy to do so!” Galileo shouted hoarsely from his bed, shaking Cesi’s fisted letter at his servants. “But how? How can I do that, when these ignorant vipers use Scripture to attack me? If I can’t reply in kind then I can’t defend myself!”

Which was of course the point. They had him. Being thus garotted in a double bind, naturally he choked on it. His stomach too went bad, and he could keep nothing down. He had to remain in his bed. His fear and anger were palpable, a sweaty stink that filled his room. Broken crockery littered the floor, and one had to step carefully to serve him, toe the shards aside and pretend everything was fine, even while dodging things thrown at one. We all knew things were not fine.

“I have to go to Rome,” he would say, repeating it like a rosary. “I have to go to Rome. I must go.” At night, watching the moons of Jupiter, taking notes as he hummed one of his father’s old tunes, falling asleep on his stool, he would murmur: “Help me, help me, help me. Get me to Rome.”

Finally Cosimo approved the visit. He wrote to his Roman ambassador to say that Galileo was coming to defend himself against the accusations of his rivals. The ambassador was to provide Galileo with two rooms in the Villa Medici, because he needs peace and quiet on account of his poor health.

Guicciardini, that same ambassador who had taken over during Galileo’s last stay in Rome, was still unimpressed by the astronomer. He wrote back to Cosimo, I do not know whether he has changed his theories or his disposition, but I know this: certain Dominican friars who play a major role in the Holy Office, and others, are ill disposed toward him. This is no place to come and argue about the Moon and, especially in these times, arrive with new ideas.

And yet that’s what he did. A ducal litter carried him south to Rome as before, and after the arduous week of the journey he came into the city with Federico Cesi, rolling through the ever-more-crowded outskirts of the great city, to the Pincian Hill in the northeast quarter. The hill rose out of squalid warrens crawling with people, all the poor souls who had migrated to the City of God hoping for succor either mundane or supernatural. Now Galileo made one more.

The villa Medici occupied the very top of the Pincian Hill, which was also known as the Hill of Gardens—and deservedly so, as the few villas on it stuck out like ships on a billowing wave of vineyards. The Medici villa was the vast white hulk at the top, with a tall and nearly blank stucco façade facing the city center. Newer galleries extended away from the main building into the great gardens surrounding it, where one could wander among the hedges and the magnificent collection of antiquities that the family had bought from the Capranicas a generation before.

The ambassador, Piero Guicciardini, met Galileo on the broad front terrazzo of the villa. He was an elegant man with a finely trimmed black beard, rather cool in his welcome, and so Galileo was likewise. They got through the diplomatic necessities as quickly as possible, after which Guicciardini turned him over to his master of the house, Annibale Primi. Primi proved to be a cheerful man, a tall sanguine figure whose head was set a little before his body. He led Galileo and his contingent to the “two good rooms” Cosimo had ordered him to be provided with. And when Galileo had seen them, and arranged with Cartophilus their disposition, Primi led him through the gardens and up to the high point of the fifty-foot-tall man-made mound.

“This mound is dirt piled onto the nymphaeum of the ancient Acilian gardens. It’s just the extra height you need to get a view over the other hills, see? People often say it’s the best vista in the city.”

The other six hills at their various distances blocked a complete bird’s-eye view of Rome, but the prospect still gave them an almost overwhelming sense of the city’s tumbling vastness—a entire province of rooftops, it seemed to Galileo, like a million inclined planes set up for some supremely complicated experiment, with the Tiber a tin gleam here and there in the smoky expanse. All the other big hills were likewise occupied by great villas, and so appeared as mostly green islands sticking up out of tile-clad waves, the vineyards and cypresses on them creating lines horizontal and vertical.

“This is great,” Galileo said, wandering inside the high point’s circular wall as if on a Venetian altana. “What a city this is. We’ll have to bring up a telescope.”

“I would like that.” Primi pulled a big bottle of wine from his shoulder bag and held it up for Galileo’s inspection, a grin on his face.

“Aha,” Galileo said, bowing slightly. “A man after my own heart.”

“I assumed as much,” Primi said, “given what people say about you. And here we are, after all—on top of the world. You might as well celebrate when you get to a place like this.”

“So true.”

The two men sat on the low wall ringing the summit of the mound, and Primi uncorked the fiasco of wine. He poured tin cups full, and they toasted the day and sat and talked while they drank. Primi was the son of an innkeeper and reminded Galileo of his artisans—a quick man who had seen a lot and knew how to do a lot of things. He told Galileo about the greenhouses and the new galleries, and then they sat and looked at the city and drank. There was a noise to the city as well as smoke, a general grumbling hum. Galileo could see across the roofs to the Janiculum, where just four years before he had triumphantly talked to the pope and displayed his telescope to all the Roman nobility. So much had changed. “It’s a hell of a town,” he said, gesturing at it helplessly. He could not keep his fear entirely at bay, but the wine did loosen the strain of it in a comforting way. He breathed in that bracing effect, straightened up. Here he was, after all. At least now he could fight!

Primi rattled on about the villas on the other hilltops. In the smoky sunset the city turned umber and orange, like a thing of granite under a cloudless sky.

Primi was a very active master of the house; he even helped them each morning to choose which jackets and doublets and tights would be most appropriate for whatever meetings Galileo had that day. He arranged for the traps and drivers, giving the drivers instructions to take particular ways to their destinations so that Galileo would see things in the city that Primi thought he should see.

So out he would go, dressed in his finest tights and one of his best jackets. And the nobles and prelates would meet with him, but they were less enthusiastic. Meetings ended in an hour, other engagements were pled. Something was going on, which was of course the rumor of Bellarmino’s interest. That was enough to put a chill on anyone.

In his bustle and bluster it was not easy to tell if Galileo noticed this, but it seemed certain he must have, and was just trying to pretend all was well. It was either that or else he was even more oblivious than anyone had hitherto suspected. But it seemed more likely that he knew. Every afternoon he would return and drag himself wearily out of the trap and into the villa, having spent the day proclaiming the same thing to everyone: “I am a devout Catholic. My work is to reconcile Copernicanism and the Holy Church. It is an attempt to help the Church, which otherwise will soon find itself contravening obvious facts of God’s world, quite visible to all. That can’t be good for Her! We have to help Her in this hour of need.”

And everyone would have listened to him thinking, Bellarmino. Don’t be where Bellarmino is looking had been a saying in the city for over twenty years. And so when he got back to the villa, and the ambassador would be nowhere to be seen, Annibale Primi’s appearance in the big garden doorway, with a lumpy shoulder bag under his arm and a big grin on his face, would cause Galileo to bow gratefully, and after changing his clothes he would walk up the spiral gravel path to the top of the garden mound, and often stay out there until the stars were twinkling overhead, eating and drinking, and, after calling for his telescope, viewing the city and the stars. On many mornings after these dissolute nights he could barely move, and yet he had new appointments to keep that day. Sometimes we had to dress him like a scarecrow or a tailor’s dummy.

Then off he would go again, slapping himself in the face and drinking cinnamon concoctions, making his rounds every day like a tinker or a mendicant, crisscrossing that immense smoky city of the world, meeting anyone who would give him an invitation, or receive one from Cesi. Sometimes he had little successes; a few new potential allies and supporters met with him at Cesi’s palazzo one day, including a newly appointed cardinal, young Antonio Orsini, who was a Galilean and a potentially important ally. But mostly people kept their distance. Don’t be where Bellarmino is looking.

Thus it was a shock but not really a surprise when one afternoon a papal messenger came to the Villa Medici with an order. Galileo was to meet with Cardinal Bellarmino in the Vatican, on the very next morning.

That night the mood in the villa was tense and foreboding. Galileo did not go up to the mound with Primi, but stayed in his rooms. Twice in the night he called for Cartophilus to fetch him refreshment: first mulled wine, then warmed milk. It did not appear to Cartophilus that he slept at all that night. And so of course Cartophilus got very little also.

In the morning, two of Bellarmino’s inquisitorial officers of arrest showed up at the villa to convey Galileo and Cartophilus to Bellarmino’s house, on the river side of the Vatican grounds. On the way there Galileo said nothing, though he seemed cheerful enough, face ruddy and eyes bright. Time at last for action, his manner seemed to say. He glanced up frequently at the sky, which was flecked by flat, small gray clouds.

Once inside Bellarmino’s antechamber, the two arresting officers made their bows to Galileo and left. Only servants then remained, standing against the wall—the cardinal’s and Galileo’s, side by side.

Then the cardinal himself entered the room. Galileo went to one knee and found he was nevertheless still taller than the cardinal. Roberto Bellarmino was a very short man.

He was around seventy years old. His neat goatee was white, his hair a salted brown. Dressed in his cardinal’s red, he made a handsome and impressive sight, despite his diminutive size, which made him resemble a clock statue come to life. He greeted Galileo in a quiet, urbane voice. “Rise, great astronomer, and speak with me.”

By comparison, Galileo with his rough baritone felt large and loud and somehow rustic. “Many thanks, Glorious Lord Eminence. I kiss your sandal.” He huffed as he got awkwardly to his feet, then looked down at the little man, one of the chief intellects of their time. Bellarmino regarded him with a quizzical smile, seemingly friendly. Of course he would be used to looking up at people.

Then there came a murmured interruption from one of the servants, and another inquisitor from the Holy Office entered the room: “Commissary General of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, Father Michelangelo Segizzi,” announced the servant, with a few members of his staff, all Dominicans, as well as two tall men whom Segizzi did not bother to introduce.

“We are here to serve as notary to the meeting,” Segizzi declared in a hard voice, meeting Bellarmino’s eye boldly. “Thus there will be an official record for His Holiness to read.”

The little cardinal’s face reddened a bit. They were in Bellarmino’s own home, and if he had not expected these men to join the meeting, it was an impudent thing.

But he said nothing to Segizzi, except to invite him and all the rest of them into his study. The group filed through the tall door into the sunny room dominated by Bellarmino’s big desk, located under the north window.

Bellarmino then ignored Segizzi, and said to Galileo in a calm and kindly voice, “Signor, you must abandon the error of Copernicanism, if, indeed, you hold the opinion. It has been found by the Holy Office to be erroneous.”

Galileo had been expecting something less drastic. He said nothing; he grew as pale as Bellarmino was flushed. It was as if they had traded complexions. Twice he started to speak, hesitated, stopped. Ordinarily his only response to opposition was to whip it into submission by way of relentless argument. He had no other response in him.

In the charged silence, Commissioner Segizzi lowered his head like a bull and began to read loudly from a written proclamation he held out before him: “You, Galileo Galilei, are commanded and enjoined, in the name of His Holiness the Pope and the whole Congregation of the Holy Office, to relinquish altogether the said opinion that the sun is the center of the world and at rest, and that the Earth moves. Nor are you ever henceforth to hold, teach, or defend it in any way, verbally or in writing. Otherwise proceedings will be taken against you by the Holy Office.”

Again Galileo had nothing to say. Cardinal Bellarmino, looking startled, even angry, glared at Segizzi as sharply as any ordinary man.

“You must acquiesce to this order,” Segizzi told Galileo. “Otherwise there will be another meeting, and not here.”

There was a long silence. Finally: “I acquiesce,” Galileo said tightly. “I promise to obey the order.”

Bellarmino, distracted, still red-faced, waved a hand and brought the meeting to an end without adding anything more. He looked at his desk, frowning slightly, glancing once at Segizzi, then at his desk again.

Thus concluded the first trial of Galileo.

“What was that all about?” Galileo said as they walked behind the Medici carriage sent to carry them back up to the villa. He had been too agitated to sit inside the thing.

It was a rhetorical question, as he was busy examining his memory to secure his sense of what had been said, but Cartophilus offered up tentatively, “Cardinal Bellarmino did not seem to expect those Dominicans to join the meeting.”

“Really?” Galileo frowned.

“Really.”

“But what does that mean?”

“I don’t know, maestro.” The ancient one shook his head, confused.

Late that night Cartophilus slipped out into the garden of the villa and went to the servant’s gate at the bottom of the orchard. There he met a friend of his named Giovanfrancesco Buonamici. He told him what had happened that day at the Vatican.

Buonamici sucked on his teeth. He was tall and, under a voluminous dark cape, as lithe as a weasel. He chewed a fingernail thoughtfully for a while. “That could be bad,” he said. “They could produce a witness now who would claim that he tried to talk about Copernicus after this warning, maybe use what he’s been saying all this last month against him by postdating it, or something like that. It could happen fast. I’ll get word of this to the father, and see what he thinks we ought to do.”

“Yes, good. Because that was something strange today, I don’t know what.”

“If anyone knows, he will.”

“I hope so.”

Galileo was very lucky, given the power of his enemies, and the situation facing him, and his own fecklessness, that he had allies and supporters working for him too, and not only in public, as with Cesi’s Lynxes, but behind the scenes—and not just us, but the Venetians. Venice had the biggest spy network in Europe, with a particularly comprehensive contingent in Rome—most of it in the Vatican, of course, but penetrating also into the Roman courts, the courier services, the academies, the hostels, and the brothels. Not even the Vatican itself had as complete an understanding of Rome’s tangled mazes of rumor and machination as the Venetian spy service did.

So the following week, when Cartophilus next heard Buonamici’s looping whistle, he took the slops down to the villa’s compost heap and went on to the orchard gate to meet him. Buonamici led him down the hill into the dense tenements east of it, then into the yard of a small church—one of the many moldering away in the city serving a local neighborhood in complete anonymity. There, Buonamici knocked at a battered side door, while Cartophilus looked around at the old hens pecking listlessly in the garden bed of the resident priest. The door opened, and after a word from Buonamici a man emerged, entirely covered by a monk’s habit and hood. He turned to Cartophilus, who was shocked to see it was the general of the Venetian spy service himself: Father Paolo Sarpi.

Sarpi had been the secret general of Venice’s spy service for many years, since before the beginning of the current war of words and knives between Venice and Rome. He was the perfect man for the job—comprehensive in his knowledge of Europe, and imbued with great analytical powers and a keen vigilance when it came to Rome. The fact that Pope Paul had once tried to kill him was of course a factor in this vigilance, but not the main factor. Rome was always a big problem for Venice, and mostly Paul’s assault had only caused the venerable Servite to take Rome seriously as a danger. The vengeance most people would have sought, Sarpi transformed into a plan for a larger victory; not just Paul’s downfall, but the permanent hamstringing of Rome’s imperial efforts.

Now Sarpi stood there with them, right there in a city where he could have been taken up and tossed into Castel Sant’Angelo, after which disappearing forever was the good option.

“Should you be here, Fra Paolo?” Cartophilus could not help asking.

“Bless you, I am well hidden here. An old monk is invisible in this city, as everywhere. I actually once spent months tucked away in this very church, when my presence in Rome was useful. Now I felt the situation is such that I am needed again.”

“It’s that bad?” Cartophilus asked, wondering how much he knew.

“Word has come that there is a faction here that would like our astronomer to be silenced for good. That’s a real danger. So first I need to know all that you saw in the meeting with Bellarmino.”

He listened closely as Cartophilus recited what he recalled of the meeting. “What about the men with Segizzi?” he asked. “Tell me everything you remember of them.”

Cartophilus told him everything he could, humming unhappily as he tried to recall the scene to mind. As Sarpi listened he frowned, causing his scarred face to bunch on the left side. When Cartophilus finished, he stood there silently for a while.

“I think that was Badino Nores with Segizzi,” he said at last, “and Agostino Mongardo, from Montepulciano. They are Borgia men, and so is Segizzi. So I very much doubt they were supposed to be at that meeting, which means Segizzi intruded on a private conference in Bel-larmino’s own house. That is something Bellarmino would not have tolerated if he didn’t have to.”

“But he’s the Lord Cardinal.”

“Yes, in theory he fears no one. But in fact, he can’t afford to cross the Borgias. I’ve been hearing from people in the other parts of this puzzle, and it’s all beginning to fit together. I think Segizzi’s appearance was a surprise attack. Possibly the warning Segizzi made to Galileo was stronger than what either Bellarmino or Paul had intended. And of course it matters what documents have now been placed in Galileo’s Vatican file to memorialize the meeting. They might declare that Galileo was warned even more explicitly than what really happened, for instance. Our Galileo would be thus doubly deceived, so to speak, as to what exactly the pope has allowed or forbidden him to say.”

“Dangerous,” Buonamici said laconically.

“Indeed. Very dangerous, because even when he is fully on guard, our impetuous one is not so good at holding his tongue.”

The two men nodded wordlessly; it was an understatement to say the least.

“So.” Sarpi shook his head. “Let us set about finding out more about what is happening, and then untying this knot around Galileo’s neck if we can.” He smiled at the prospect, which rendered his face even more terrifying than his frown. “No matter what we find, Cartophilus, I think it would help if you were to convey to Galileo that he should ask Bellarmino for a signed declaration, one which memorializes explicitly what Galileo is commanded to do and not to do. I think Bellarmino will accommodate him, because he is likely to see this as a way to pay the Borgia back for invading his home. Then, if our philosopher is hauled in before the Inquisition proper, we may be able to turn the tables on this little plot.”

Cartophilus nodded gloomily. “I’ll do it. I hope it will be enough.”

“It will be just one move in a chess game, of course. But we can only do what we can do, at this point and always.” And with his hideous smile, the scientist priest slipped back into the ramshackle little church, into one corner of the immense complexity that was Rome.

Late that same night, the ancient one carried Galileo’s warmed milk to his room, and when Galileo brought up the subject of Bellarmino and Segizzi’s ominous and contradictory warnings, as he did every night, obsessively, Cartophilus took the opportunity to say, hesitantly, “Maestro, I’ve heard that what people are saying now is that you were forced to make a secret abjuration or something like that.”

“I’ve heard that too,” Galileo growled. “People have been writing to ask me about it, even from Florence.”

Cartophilus nodded as he stared at the floor. “Maybe you might want to get whatever warning it really is from Bellarmino himself, in writing and signed by him, so that you have it specifically spelled out and in a document you can show people later. In case there is ever a question about it.”

“Yes.” Galileo glared at him; he did not like the old one interfering like this, in ways that made him think about what Cartophilus represented. “Good idea,” he said heavily.

“It’s nothing, maestro.”

Galileo began the process of securing another audience with Bellarmino. This had to be done through Guicciardini, so it took per sistence and a bit of begging. While Galileo went through that distasteful process, he spent every evening out at banquets, but now he no longer made virtuoso recitals in defense of the Copernican view, being merely convivial instead. Naturally people noticed this change, and rumors about how severely he had been warned off by the Lord Cardinal proliferated.

Galileo ignored all that and soldiered on. He discovered that Rome had many more than seven hills. It became more and more difficult to clean his jacket without revealing how old and shabby it was. Every night he ate too much and drank too much wine. Even on the rare night that he stayed home at the Villa Medici, he could not calm himself without copious amounts of wine, and he almost always partied late with Annibale Primi on the hilltop, drinking to distract himself in the very face of the huge city and the power it wielded over everyone. On more than one such hopeless night we had to load him into a wheelbarrow and trundle him down the hill to his bed, dumping him onto it like a load of bricks, him all the while snarling and snoring and muttering about bad things sure to happen.

We went to work with Sarpi’s Roman network, wandering the back alleys in the low foul warrens near the Tiber, knocking on doors or meeting people in taverns and the backs of little churches. Rome had been drawing strange people to it for centuries, and their offspring were even stranger and more hand-to-mouth than they had been when they came. We talked to gatekeepers, servants, foreign diplomats’ aides, secretaries, lawyers, cooks, clerks. Some had secrets to sell, or knew of others who did. We paid certain publicans, go-betweens, a poor noble, a defrocked priest, several madams and prostitutes; we hired a few observant old street dwellers to keep an ear to certain doorways, and even employed a roof-crawling professional eavesdropper, a man smaller even than Bellarmino, who was willing to try to make his way to within hearing distance of certain rooms in the Vatican. One contact led to another in this vast net of humanity on the sly, servants and beggars leading us deeper and deeper into the parisitical tangle of the clerical bureaucracy. Rome was an infinite maze at this level, a warren of alleys and dirt-floored piazzas where one passed arcade after arcade with their shops open to the world, where the smells filling the air changed abruptly from baking bread to tanning leather to rotten meat to the stink of the urinals. It was hard to sort out the true from the false, or the useful from the harmful; this was where a big network like the Venetians’ could validate findings, and hope to confirm or invalidate them. Almost certainly they had a better sense of the whole situation than any other group in Rome, even the factions inside the Vatican; but it nevertheless remained a stubbornly murky thing. Forces were swirling.

Buonamici appeared at the gate one day, and when Cartophilus got free they went down to the little church where Sarpi was hiding, and sat in the cool of the shade among the chickens. Some of the street tykes were having a water fight, squirting it at each other through reeds they had found.

The spymaster flicked seed shells at the skinny birds as he told the men part of what he had learned. “A few weeks ago young Cardinal Orsini made an appeal on Galileo’s behalf directly to Pope Paul. He explained Galileo’s view of things, and declared there was no contradiction between that view and Scripture, but the pope told him Galileo should give up his views. When Orsini tried to continue, Paul cut him off by saying the matter was being looked into.”

“That was Bellarmino,” Buonamici said.

“Yes. Paul called him in and instructed him to convoke a special congregation of the Holy Office, who were to be explicitly tasked to identify Galileo’s opinion as erroneous and heretical. This congregation gathered just a few days later—six Dominicans, a Jesuit, and an Irish priest. They reported to the pope that the idea that the sun was the center of the universe was ‘foolish and absurd.’ Stultam et absurdam. Also formally heretical. The idea that the Earth moved was ‘erroneous in faith’ and ‘contradicted the sense of Holy Scripture.’”

Cartophilus put his head between his knees, feeling sick to his stomach. Even Buonamici, the coolest of men, was looking a bit pale. “Formally heretical. That’s new, yes?” he said.

“Yes,” Sarpi said dryly. “And so it was that Galileo was called into Bellarmino, so that the lord cardinal could order him to abandon the Copernican view. If he refused to do it, he was to be sent to Segizzi, who would order him formally to abjure his positions. If he refused that order, he was to be incarcerated until he agreed to obey it.”

“So Segizzi jumped the sequence.”

“Yes.”

“All of this,” Cartophilus pointed out gloomily, “was caused by Galileo coming to Rome to argue his case. If he had not come, all this would not have happened.”

Sarpi shrugged, staring at Cartophilus curiously. “But that isn’t what happened. So we have to deal with this, now.”

“Yes, Father.”

“It’s also apparently the case that Segizzi has put a document in Galileo’s file that states his warning was comprehensive. Now it’s in the hands of the clerks, and back in the boxes and shelves of the innermost offices. Out of reach of anyone who might want to change it.”

There was silence for a while, and the low cackle and hum of the city wafted into the church and over them. The tykes were shrieking.

“We still have some angles of attack available,” Sarpi reassured them. “Galileo needs to talk to Bellarmino again, because Bellarmino is angry, and that could be a big help. And I’m going to see if I can get our man an audience with Paul again. Of course I will have to use an intermediary; I can’t ask him directly!” His laughing face was both ugly and beautiful.

At first after the interview with Bellarmino, Galileo had told everyone about it, getting angrier every time. His friends in the city came by and tried to calm him down, but he became even more enraged when they did, and shouted so loudly that anyone on the Pincian Hill could hear him. Cesi came by, then Antonio Orsini, then Castelli, but he only got angrier.

Guicciardini dictated letters home to Picchena and Cosimo that could be heard during their composition, or read by anyone who cared to slip into his offices at night and dig into the courier’s bags. One at this time said,

Galileo has relied more on his own counsel than on that of his friends. Cardinal del Monte and myself, and also several Cardinals from the Holy Office, tried to persuade him to be quiet and not to go on irritating the issue. If he wanted to hold this Copernican opinion, he was told, let him hold it quietly and not spend so much effort in trying to make others share it. Everyone feared that his coming here might be prejudicial and dangerous and that, instead of justifying himself and triumphing over his enemies, he could end up with an affront. Now this has happened, but he only gets more hotly excited about these views of his, and he has an extremely passionate temper, with little patience and prudence to keep it in control. It is this irritability that makes the skies of Rome very dangerous for him. He is passionately involved in this quarrel, as if it were his own business, and he does not see what it could lead to, so that he will get himself into danger, together with anyone who seconds him. For he is vehement and is all fixed and impassioned, so that it is impossible, if you have him around, to escape from his hand. And this is a business which is not a joke but may become of great consequence.

That same day, March 6, Galileo was writing his own report to Picchena, which was something he did on a weekly basis. He apologized for having missed writing the previous week’s letter, explaining that it was because nothing had happened.

A week later news came that the Congregation of the Index had ordered Copernicus’s books taken out of circulation, until corrections were added to them that made it clear his hypothesis was a mathematical convenience only, and not a statement of physical fact. The Copernican books of Diego de Zuñiga and Foscarini were prohibited outright.

Galileo, however, was not mentioned in this decree, nor was the word heresy used. Nor had he been ordered to appear before the public tribunal of the Inquisition. So his warning from Bellarmino and Segizzi remained a private matter. Bellarmino and Segizzi had told no one about it, and Galileo belatedly began to keep the details of that meeting to himself.

Nevertheless, all Rome was buzzing with the news. The outline of the story was all too clear. Galileo had come to Rome to campaign for the Copernican view, and in spite of this—indeed, because of this—his view had been declared formally false and contrary to Scripture. Many were pleased at this, and rumors that he had been admonished even more severely in private were widespread.

Now Galileo wrote to Picchena. I can show that my behavior in this affair has been such that a saint would not have handled it either with greater reverence or with greater zeal toward the Holy Church. My enemies have not been so fine, having used every machination, calumny and diabolical suggestion anyone could possibly imagine.

That was a bit of an exaggeration, but typical of Galileo’s bitter rants against his enemies.

Then, to everyone’s surprise, Galileo managed to obtain another audience with the pope himself. This was a real coup, and, given Paul’s part in instigating the actions against the Copernican view, difficult to account for. Young Cardinal Antonio Orsini was said to have interceded on his behalf, although even this did not seem like it should have worked. Nevertheless, Tuesday March 11, 1616, found them strolling in the Papal Garden of the Vatican, just as they had in the vineyards of the Villa Malvasia in 1611.

They walked ahead of their retinue, but spoke freely enough that trailing servants could hear most of their conversation. Galileo complained freely about the malice of his persecutors. He swore that he was as good a Catholic as anyone, that everything he had ever done or said was designed to help the Church avoid an unfortunate error that would later embarrass her.

Paul nodded as he spoke, and answered that he was well aware of Galileo’s uprightness and sincerity.

Galileo bowed deeply, then hurried to catch up to the immensely rotund pontiff. “Thank you, Sanctissimus, thank you ever so much, but I find I am still somewhat anxious about the future, because of the fear of being pursued with implacable hate by my enemies.”

Paul cheered him up brusquely: “You can put all care away, because you are held in such esteem by me, and the whole Congregation. They will not lightly lend their ears to calumnious reports. You can feel safe as long as I am alive.”

“Thank you, Holiest One,” Galileo said, seizing the pontiff abruptly by the hand and kissing his ring with many enthusiastic whiskery kisses. Paul endured this for a while with a noble look into the distance, and then indicated it was time to leave and headed back toward his chambers like a great ship in a light wind, with Galileo trailing him and expressing his thanks in the floweriest terms. Never had anyone heard Galileo speak with such obsequious gratitude, except perhaps those who had seen him in the Medici’s presence in the early years of the century.

After that, Galileo returned to the Hill of Gardens in infinitely better spirits. He renewed his efforts to be allowed to see Bellarmino a second time, which turned out to be a long campaign. But several weeks later, again to everyone’s surprise, an audience there too was granted. One morning near the end of May he returned to the little lord cardinal’s house in the Vatican, and told him of the rumors being reported back to him from all over Italy, and how badly they were harming his reputation and his health. He didn’t mention Segizzi’s unexpected appearance during his last visit, but he did assure Bellarmino that he had said nothing about that meeting afterward to anyone (an incredible lie), adding that he was sure Bellarmino had been perfectly discreet as well. The implication was clear: Segizzi and his companions must therefore be responsible for the rumors.

Bellarmino’s eye twinkled a little as he listened to all this. There was no doubt at all that he took the implication. He nodded, looking around his study as if he had lost something in it; perhaps he was remembering Segizzi’s little invasion. Finally, with a small smile, he called in a secretary, and had him write out a certificate for Galileo that he dictated on the spot.

We, Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino, having heard that it is calum-niously reported that Signor Galileo Galilei has in our hand abjured and has also been punished with salutary penance, and being requested to state the truth as to this, declare that the said Galileo has not abjured, either in our hand, or the hand of any other person here in Rome, or anywhere else, so far as we know, any opinion or doctrine held by him. Neither has any salutary penance been imposed on him, but that only the declaration made by the Holy Father and published by the Sacred Congregation of the Index was notified to him, which says that the doctrine attributed to Copernicus, that the Earth moves around the Sun and that the Sun is stationary in the center of the world and does not move from east to west, is contrary to the Holy Scriptures, and therefore cannot be defended or held. In witness whereof we have written and subscribed the present document with our own hand this twenty-sixth day of May 1616.

Still smiling his small ironic smile, Bellarmino signed the document, and when it was sanded and dried, gave it to Galileo, nodding at it as if to indicate that this was the warning he had meant to convey all along: no holding of the opinion, or defending it—but no ban on discussing it. This document would always exist to make that clear.

Guicciardini made his semiannual review of the Villa Medici’s accounts and went through the roof. He dictated at nearly the top of his lungs a letter to Piccena:

Strange and scandalous were the goings-on in the garden during Galileo’s long sojourn in the company and under the administration of Annibale Primi, who has been fired by the Cardinal. Annibale says that he had huge expenses. In any case, anyone can see that they led a riotous life. The accounts are attached. I hope this will be enough to get your philosopher ordered home, so that he will end his campaign to castrate the friars.

It was enough. The same courier brought back Cosimo’s order to Galileo, which was to return to Florence immediately.

During the week of the journey back to Florence, Galileo spoke to no one about what had happened. He looked exhausted and pensive. At night he got out his telescope again, and made his usual viewings of Jupiter. By day he brooded in silence. It was pretty obvious to all of us that his effort had rebounded on him, that by going to Rome to strengthen his position, he had forced the issue in a way that blocked his work entirely, and indeed brought him very close to Inquisitorial danger. And by no means was that over. From the road he wrote bitterly to Sagredo: Of all the hatreds, none is greater than that of ignorance for knowledge.

No doubt it occurred to him often that if he had just stayed in Florence and continued his work without drawing any attention to it, the storm from the clerics might have blown over. Cesi might have been able to campaign gradually on his behalf in Rome, at the level of the cardinals and the College of Rome. It might have worked. Instead Galileo had, in his usual pigheaded way, decided to reason with the pope—to bombard him so suasively that that ultimate arbiter of the situation would be convinced to support him. He couldn’t imagine things turning out any other way.

Either that, or else, as some of us said when he was asleep, he had seen a danger and run straight at it, attacking it in the hope of killing it when it was young. It was quite possible he had made an accurate estimate of the danger, had calculated the odds and made his best attempt. But failed.