On his return, Millini became Arrigoni’s assistant as secretary of the Inquisition, before quickly but briefly serving as bishop of the bandit country of Imola (where he cooperated with the legate Giustiniani and was peripherally involved in Rodrigo Alidosi’s case [see SI, Chapter 5]). On his return, the pope made Millini vicar of Rome, his personal representative in the government of the bishopric, as well as adding him to numerous particular congregations. Right from the first, Millini was numbered among Paul’s most trusted advisors. Except for the cardinal nephew, no one was more powerful in Rome. There was also no one harder to read, as even his admiring nephew had to admit in the authorized biography. Thus Millini’s blunt speech about the evils in Cremonini’s book should have carried double weight, and Galileo should have been doubly warned by his friend’s example. Although some complained that Millini moved slowly, he was a hard worker, in the habit of holding lengthy meetings of the Inquisition in his palace in Piazza Navona (now engulfed by the Brazilian embassy) in the heat of August to clear its docket. Since there were no manuals from which he could learn how to be Inquisition secretary, he taught himself by studying its files. What theology he knew, he picked up from Bellarmino in the congregations on which both served, in the same way Bellarmino got law from Millini such that they “made a beautiful concerto,” as the official biography put it.
There can be no doubt that anything Millini said, the pope said. So how could Paul have protected Foscarini by proxy at the same time that Bellarmino unsubtly warned him to watch his step? The answer is simple. The papal government was a sprawling, disjointed institution; especially at the top, differences of direction frequently arose, even among cardinals as close to one another as Millini and Bellarmino. As between the two, Bellarmino was the more likely to make policy, Millini to execute it. Chance cannot be overlooked as a factor, either. Given how quickly opinions changed, a cardinal missing one key meeting (as Millini would that deciding the ban on Foscarini) could have enormous consequences.
Millini’s master, Paul V, is a difficult pope to come to grips with.113 Anyone who has ever seen the monumental inscription on the façade of St Peter’s or the only slightly smaller one on the new fountain he built on top of the Janiculum in Rome knows Paul had a big ego. His portraits, especially his funeral monument, on the other hand, make him look almost embarrassingly kindly, playing down his height and regal bearing, which a goatee also helped to offset. He had a slightly different family background from other recent popes. He came from a legal dynasty and was himself a lawyer, but his father, Marcantonio Borghese, had distinguished himself not in papal service as an Inquisitor, for example, but as a high-profile defense attorney. Among his clients was Cardinal Giovanni Morone, one of the Inquisition’s most important sixteenth-century targets.114 Marcantonio had moved the family from Siena to Rome, making them arrivistes and explaining the gigantic “Romanus” after Paul’s name on St. Peter’s. Camillo Borghese, as he then was, rejected his father’s ladder to success and instead worked his way up the other side of the legal hierarchy in Rome until he became secretary of the Congregation of the Holy Office, an excellent springboard to pope.
Paul and even more his nephew Scipione Caffarelli who took the name Borghese were together about as grasping as any papal family ever. Scipione had no less than four palaces all to himself, the smallest and least grand of which was the spectacular one now known as Giraud-Torlonia in via della Conciliazione between St. Peter’s and the Tiber. The Villa Borghese, one of Rome’s most important museums, was intended to be even larger than the grand duke’s nearby establishment at Trinità dei Monti and contained even more art. Scipione also built nearly from scratch a huge villa at Frascati, surrounded by even more extensive grounds than the Villa Borghese.115 Paul also undertook a gargantuan building project at the Quirinal Palace, which he almost entirely rebuilt and vastly enlarged, the one to which Sfondrato objected.116 The family defined conspicuous consumption.
After these outward clues to Paul’s character, things become more difficult. The Tuscan ambassador, probably for reasons of his own, made the pope out to be an ignoramus.117 That he was not. A glance into his funeral chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore will knock that notion on the head.118 If one looks a little harder, one will also see that Paul was very much up to date. Not only did he bring in the best artists to decorate his chapel, among them Galileo’s close friend Ludovico Cigoli, but he also let Cigoli pay homage to Galileo’s telescopic discoveries by painting in its cupola a moon with blemishes.119 Paul had a great deal of work done on the church, including erecting a small plaque in honor of St. Francis, which almost appears to be a joke in light of Francis’s notorious insistence on apostolic poverty. Beyond these hints from his patronage, just how Paul used his brain poses more problems. He was not as lucky as Urban VIII in having a relatively factual official biography in eight massive volumes. Instead, he got a sprawling puff piece almost as long and almost completely useless.120 The official printed biography by Dominican historian Abraham Bzowski at least contains information, but it is so suffocatingly pious as to tell us next to nothing about Paul the man.121 Nor does the comparison to other popes numbered V help much!
Bzowski does say two things of great interest. First, no one was harder than Paul on heretical books—as Bzowski should have known since his own continuation of Cardinal Baronio’s history of the church had encountered difficulties with the Inquisition. Second, the pope never did anything without carefully taking advice. Other commentators agree in making caution Paul’s defining characteristic. That makes sense for a lawyer, but it happens not to be true. Paul was perfectly prepared to shoot from the hip, whether by airily ordering an entire new street to be built because his carriage had been forced to take a small detour or—much more important—without consulting anyone at all, slapping the interdict on Venice in 1606 that just about wrecked the papacy.122 He acted in much the same hasty fashion in Galileo’s case. He is alleged never to have taken any step without calculating its political impact, especially when it came to the grand duke, to whom he owed a big leg up into the papal chair. His handling of Galileo’s case raises doubts about this claim, too. He was not a man to be pushed around.
Florence Gets a New Inquisitor
Despite Paul’s prodding, the investigation into Galileo in Florence was not making much headway. Its inquisitor, Cornelio Priatoni, reported on 11 May that he could not question Ximenes since he was still in Milan, and Priatoni thought it best not to talk to anyone else first.123 Since the inquisitor in Milan reported soon after that Ximenes had returned to Florence, one or the other inquisitor may have been passing the buck.124 Priatoni never did manage to interview Ximenes. (Meanwhile the inquisitor of the frontier post at Belluno was asked to look for the “Letter to Castelli” on a rumor that its dean had a copy of one of Galileo’s writings, which one not specified. The Inquisition could be both incredibly thorough and incredibly sloppy.)125 Priatoni found himself in an almost impossible situation.126 Immediately after Caccini’s lecture, he tried to resign. Rome refused to let him step down until the middle of 1615 on the face-saving pretext of ill health.
Lelio Marzari, the inquisitor of Pisa, wound up replacing Priatoni.127 Marzari’s arrival at this precise moment cannot be coincidence. Priatoni’s foot-dragging may well have been meant to help Galileo, who was probably being leaked information about the progress of his case.128 Marzari’s arrival therefore looked doubly menacing. Galileo ignored the signals and wrote a more inflammatory letter than the one to Castelli. This time he addressed himself directly to the grand duke’s mother, Grand Duchess Christina.129 His central point was that scientists should not start their investigations from the Bible. Whether he meant this as a defense of separate spheres for science and religion or to save the Bible from possible attack by less devout scientists—or a number of other possibilities—the