Figure 7 Unknown artist, Paolo Sarpi, “Eviscerator of the Council of Trent” (c.1610). The black patch covers a scar left by an incompetent assassin.
Meanwhile Micanzio was preaching openly against the Pope. The papal nuncio endeavored to shut him down. The Spanish ambassador complained to the Venetian Senate, which blithely replied that it could find nothing anti-Catholic in the sermons. The scandal rose to the attention of the kings of Spain and France, again to no avail, despite the rumor that Micanzio, Sarpi, and Wotton were promoting Protestantism with the help of a pastor from Geneva.23 Though the Vatican rated “Fra Paolo…a pure Calvinist [who] had only heretics, and leaders of heretics, as close friends,” the Republic protected him. In fact there was nothing to worry about. As Diodati came to recognize, Italians could not be saved. “Calvinist worship would seem too cold to such sensual natures.”24
Feigning Catholicism, promoting Protestantism, and championing the cause of Venice were the least of the sins the Vatican saw in Sarpi. The worst was his undermining of Roman Catholicism by his inspired use of that most powerful form of written persuasion, history. And of all his works of the kind, his History of the Council of Trent, an international bestseller despite its length, was the most devastating. A witty and withering account of the stuttering assemblies that set the foundations of the Catholic Counter Reformation, it threatened all received ecclesiastical history by approaching the council as the business of men rather than of the Holy Spirit. Earlier Church historians had irresponsibly invoked the will of God rather than the usual forces at work in human endeavors and ignored the objectives of the popes. Even the best of them had no concept of piety. Take Leo X, whose sale of indulgences precipitated Luther’s rebellion. He was a noble by birth, style, education, “marvellous sweet [in] manner,” of a “singular learning in humanity.” “And he would have been a Pope absolutely compleate, if with these he had joyned some knowledge in things that concerne Religion.”25
Wotton read an incomplete draft of Sarpi’s Trent, recognized its value as propaganda as well as science, and advertised it widely after returning to England in 1611. King James thought it so important that he directed Dudley Carleton, who had replaced Wotton as ambassador in Venice in 1610, to invite Sarpi (“a sound Protestant, as yet in the habit of a friar”26) to England to finish it free from the dangers and harassment that bedeviled him in Italy. Fra Paolo preferred to stay in Venice. Carleton pressed him to finish the great work and offered, as the competition to beat, a book by his godly relative George Carleton, The Consensus of the Catholic Church against the Men of Trent (1613). Sarpi thought Carleton’s Consensus far too indulgent of Roman arrogance and blunders.27 Still he hesitated. Publication would offend many good Catholics and probably expose him to new dangers.
When Archbishop Abbot learned about Sarpi’s manuscript history, he resolved that so useful a piece of anti-papal propaganda should not remain in a monastery. He commissioned Nathaniel Brent, a bold Italophile whose travels had aroused the interest of the Inquisition, to return to Venice and acquire the manuscript. Brent was a friend of Daniel Nijs, a Calvinist merchant of Venice, who dealt in luxury goods and intelligence, and sometimes acted as intermediary between Wotton’s embassy and Sarpi’s monastery.28 Brent soon obtained a copy of the immense manuscript. With the help of Nijs’s network, it found its way to Abbot between June and September 1618. It arrived in 197 canzoni (songs), as the archbishop called them to put bloodhounds off the scent. Their tune was to his taste. “She is an excellent musician that frameth them.”29 The combined power of church and state, of Abbot and James, decreed their immediate publication in Italian. The editorial work fell to the Dean of Windsor.
The Maverick
The dean was none other than De Dominis, who, unlike Sarpi, had accepted James’s invitation and fled to England. This was his third refashioning. He began his career as lecturer in mathematics at the Jesuit College in Padua, where he would have competed for students with Galileo had the Venetian Senate not prohibited the college from teaching university subjects. He soon quit mathematics and the Jesuits to join the Church’s moneymaking officialdom. The business of his archdiocese, Spalato, brought him often to Venice, where he fell in with Sarpi, Micanzio, Wotton, Bedell, and Galileo. Wotton rated him a “person…of singular gravity and knowledge,” and Micanzio, who knew him well, could report nothing more defamatory about him than being in love with the books he had written (Figure 8).30
Figure 8 Marc’Antonio de Dominis among his books, from the frontispiece to his Republica ecclesiastica, i (1617).
One of these defended King James’s Premonition to all Christian Monarchies, Free Princes and States (1609), which instructed the Vatican about the Oath of Allegiance required of English Catholics after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.31 The oath did not touch religious belief, James wrote, and agreed perfectly with the true teachings of the Roman Church.32 He continued his Premonition in this irenic manner, itemizing common ground between Catholicism and Protestantism before accusing Paul V of countenancing assassination, sorcery, and fornication. A strange way to seek accommodation! An astrological analogy clarified James’s methods: “[Catholics] look upon his Majesties Bookes, as men look upon Blasing-Starres, with amazement, fearing that they portend some strange thing, and bring with them a certain Influence to worke great change and alteration in the world.”33 The Vatican prohibited Catholic rulers from receiving James’s celestial message. Most obeyed. Henry IV of France, the only sovereign to accept it, observed in doing so that kings should not write books.34
It fell to Wotton to present the unwanted Premonition, bound in gold and crimson velvet, to the Republic of Venice. Its senators accepted the book with perfect courtesy and exquisite dissimulation: they feigned ignorance of its contents, thanked James profusely, and archived it without opening it. The Venetian Inquisition then read and banned it. Wotton expressed great outrage at this insult to his sovereign and withdrew his embassy without mentioning that he, Bedell, and Sarpi had translated the Premonition to encourage anti-Roman Italians, or that their friend, the Archbishop of Spalato, who was scarcely inferior as a controversialist to the Roman gold standard Bellarmine, was writing in favor of King James.35
De Dominis arrived in England in December 1616 after a stop at the Stuart outpost of Heidelberg, where he published a blistering attack on papal policies. He was very fond of bickering. As he was also gluttonous, egotistical, domineering, and avaricious, he immediately offended Abbot, with whom he boarded while preparing Sarpi for the press. The maverick soon discovered that his flight was an error: the food, the wine, the king, and the people were all as bad as the weather. When his old schoolmate Gregory XV, who succeeded Paul V in February 1621, and the King of Spain offered him safe passage back to Rome and reinstatement to his offices, he accepted.36 He had learned nothing from his involvement with Sarpi’s book. Micanzio warned him that other strayed sheep who returned to Rome had bleated their last there. But De Dominis had persuaded himself that his self-imposed mission would excuse him from the “noose, fire, or poison” that Micanzio foresaw.37
This mission was to realize James’s program of uniting Catholics and Protestants around the core Christian beliefs of the apostolic era. In his huge masterpiece, De republica ecclesiastica (1617–22), De Dominis identified aspects of religious worship that he regarded as unnecessary to true belief. Among these “adiaphora” were the cult of saints, play with the rosary, recognition of the supremacy of the pontiff, and the doctrine of predestination. De Dominis’s Venetian friends regarded his project of bringing Rome and Geneva under so wide a tent as crackpot. It was to overlook that the popes of Rome used religion as “a secret of state, and dominion” (Micanzio), that the political power of all religions rested on enforcing adiaphora (Sarpi), and that a united Christendom including the pope was a formal contradiction (Wotton).38 De republica christiana did excite an ecumenical spirit. The Congregation of the Index and the universities of Paris and Cologne joined in banning it immediat
ely.39
De Dominis returned to Rome carrying an English version of the Oath of Allegiance for the pope’s consideration. Gregory preferred to debrief him about English affairs and Sarpi’s dealings with heretics.40 As anticipated, he played the stoolpigeon (“O what a perfidious fellow! what a rascall!”), and, having spouted all he wished, refused to dribble more. That was a mistake. Gregory’s successor, Urban VIII, who had a keen sense of betrayal and a strong allergy to it, sent the fat bishop to slim down in prison. He soon had no need to diet. “Certainly [De Dominis] hath published propositions by thousands every one of which is very sufficient to make him loose his life.”41 He died in custody in 1624, of poison some say and of luck according to others, since the Inquisition did not get around to burning him until three months after his death.42 Since by then Catholics and Protestants alike regarded him as persona non grata, the churches he had failed to bring together when alive united in welcoming his death.43
De Dominis’s enduring contribution to English letters, his edition of Sarpi’s Trent, opened the eyes of Catholics who had not perceived that the hidden purposes of the council were “[to] weaken the lawful Rights of Kings and Princes, to pervert the doctrine and Hierarchie of the Church of God, and to lift up the papacy to an unsufferable height of pride.”44 The recurrent theme of the book is revelation: unmasking popes, penetrating mysteries, exposing secrets.45 All Protestants and anti-Roman Catholics could enjoy Sarpi’s lampoons of the learned divines and academics who played the popes’ game by heaping up trifling objections and ridiculous scruples. “A general disputation arose among them, whether it be in man’s power to believe or not believe.” Another session considered the unanswerable question whether children who died without baptism before the age of reason could make good philosophers. And so on. Sarpi reserved his greatest censure, however, for the cruelty, stinginess (or profligacy), self-interest, and cunning of the various popes under whom the council stagnated.46
A copy of Sarpi’s Trent had a place in the library of gentlemen and theologians. The famous bishops Lancelot Andrewes and James Ussher, both of whom will appear often in these pages, each had a copy, as did Sir John Bankes. It was reprinted fifty-eight times between 1619 and 1710.47 The wealthy Buckinghamshire bibliophile Sir William Drake, whose reading habits were representative of his class, took extracts from it. Popular guidebooks relied on it. Peter Heylin’s Mikrokosmos can stand for them all: “[The Council of Trent] hath caused the greatest deformation that ever was since Christianity began.” The popes who orchestrated it were responsible for the disaster, “so [sayeth] the words of the History.”48 A modern authority on Venice holds that Sarpi’s book was artistic as well as toxic, “[with] some claim to be considered the last major literary achievement of the Italian Renaissance.”49
The year after James’s death an English translation of another of Sarpi’s eviscerating works appeared as The History of the Quarrels of Pope Paul V with the State of Venice. The translator, the Provost of Queen’s College, Oxford, Christopher Potter, advertised it as a work by the man who had revealed to the world “that piece of the Mystery of Iniquity, those Arcana Imperii Pontificii”—that is, the machinations of the Council of Trent. In the new book, anti-Roman Anglophones could read of the heroic stand of the late King James, who had recognized his divine duty to defend Venice and “the Liberty given by God to all Princes.”50
The Mathematician
On 11 April 1609, the British royal family, the Venetian ambassador, and other guests of James’s principal secretary of state, the Earl of Salisbury, gathered at a play celebrating the opening of an emporium Salisbury had built to rival the Venetian Rialto. The goods on display, which the guests took home after the performance, included several optical devices: a prism for studying the rainbow, a convex glass that “makes your lady look like the queen of the fairies and your knight like the grand duke of pygmies,” a concave glass that reverses the effect, spectacles, and the jewel of the collection, a “perspective.” “I will read you with this glass [says the emporium’s proprietor] the distinction of any man’s clothes, ten, nay twenty mile off…the form of his beard, the lines of his face…the moving of his lips, what he speaks and in what language.” This device was not a “parabolical fiction,” like the burning mirror that from the top of St Paul’s could set a ship on fire twenty leagues at sea, but a realized object, “a perspective glass” for which the bill of purchase still exists.51
Salisbury’s perspective was a low-power spyglass of the type then recently invented in Holland. Among the first to have one was Archduke Albert VII of Austria, Governor General of the Spanish Netherlands. It amused the court to deploy it during excursions in the countryside (Figure 9). Around April Fools’ Day in 1609 the archduke showed it to the papal nuncio, Galileo’s former student Guido Bentivoglio, a man of great capacity, learned, ascetic, acute, jolly, and a frequent actor in these pages (Figure 10). Bentivoglio glimpsed the potential of the instrument; he had studied with Galileo in Padua and knew something about optics. He hurriedly acquired a spyglass and sent it to Rome, where it made its way to the Jesuits at their intellectual headquarters, the Collegio Romano. They turned it to the heavens before Galileo had one in his hands, but they did not see anything through it undreamt of in their philosophy.52 The low-power Dutch spyglass was a toy, the sort of thing that occupied the company of Foolosophers created in 1609 by the satirical Calvinist Joseph Hall, later Bishop of Norwich. Hall arranged his Foolosphers in two colleges, one given to making such novelties as spyglasses, the other to debunking them. The debunkers doubted their senses. “Strike one of them as hard as you can, he doubts of it, both whether you struck him hard or no, & whether he feele it or no.”53 These heroes of Foolosophy would soon have real-life colleagues who denied the reality of the celestial novelties perceived through Galileo’s telescope.
Figure 9 Jan Breughel the Elder, Extensive Landscape with View of the Castle of Mariemont (c.1610), detail. Archduke Albert and Nuncio Bentivoglio would have employed their primitive telescope in much the same way on their contemporaneous excursion.
Figure 10 Antony Van Dyck, Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio (c.1623); the cardinal was Van Dyck’s first major patron in Italy.
A few months after the spyglass had made its debut in Salisbury’s emporium and the Collegio Romano, a peddler offered one to the Venetian Senate. The senators consulted Sarpi. He examined it, deduced its operation, and advised against buying it. He knew how to make a better one: ask the mathematician at the university. Always needing money, Galileo ran a workshop that made spectacles, calculating instruments, and other small things to supplement his professorial income. Sarpi described the spyglass. Galileo perceived its military and commercial value and grasped the opportunity to add it to his inventory.
Late in 1609, Galileo turned his telescope, now capable of magnifications up to thirty times, to the heavens, and opened a new world. The mysterious Milky Way turned out to be a vast collection of dim stars. The moon, violating standard physics, was not a smooth globe of extraterrestrial quintessence, but a rocky ball much like the earth. And, most extraordinary of all, some small bright dots, never seen before, moved along with Jupiter, sometimes preceding and sometimes following him. Galileo identified the dots as four satellites circling the planet. Our earth was not unique in possessing a moon! Moreover, since Jupiter’s satellites stayed with him in his travels, Copernicans did not have to worry that a moving earth might lose its companion. With an eye to his future as well as to the heavens, Galileo hurriedly published his Sidereus nuncius with a dedication to his former pupil, Cosimo II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and personalized the gift by naming the four satellites of Jupiter the “Medici stars.” He did not bother to explain how the instrument worked, an omission that Archbishop De Dominis tried to supply.54
Although Galileo did not stress the point, his discoveries, by making the moon earthlike and the earth planet-like, supported the Copernican system. But neither did he pretend, as Copernicus had, that his disc
overies had ancient antecedents; he did not mention that Plutarch and many others, including his favorite poet Ariosto, had interpreted the moon’s visible features as hills and seas. Perhaps he claimed too much. But he had found great novelties in the heavens and, what was more, he took responsibility for them. In this he differed capitally from Sarpi and De Dominis. They agitated for a return to a state of Christianity that they supposed had existed before the innovations of power-grasping popes; he, for a new, revolutionary, unprecedented view of the world (Figure 11).
Figure 11 The Grand Duke’s philosopher and mathematician: Galileo (c.1613), by Francesco Villamena, as reproduced in Galileo, Systema cosmicum (1635, 1641).
The news from the stars ran quickly to England. On the day of its publication, Wotton sent a copy of Sidereus nuncius to Salisbury for delivery to their sovereign with the following advertisement:
[It is] the strangest piece of news…that he hath ever yet received from any part of the world…four new planets rolling about the sphere of Jupiter, besides many other unknown fixed stars; likewise the true cause of the Via Lactea, so long searched; and lastly, that the moon is not spherical, but endued with many prominences, and, which is of all the strangest, illuminated with the solar light by reflection from the body of the earth…So as upon the whole subject he has first overthrown all former astronomy…and next all astrology…[T]he author runneth a fortune to be either exceeding famous or exceeding ridiculous.”55
Soon the English market was flooded with poor-quality perspectives. An Italian who proposed to sell lenses in London received the answer that “perspective glasses are here common.” But not good ones; glass perfect enough for telescopes was rare.56 Consequently, Galileo’s discoveries at first did not spread by observational test, as he recommended, but by the written word, although Sidereus nuncius itself quickly became rare. After Galileo had lobbied successfully for the resounding position of Mathematician and Philosopher to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the Florentine diplomatic service distributed copies of the book. Its ambassador in London, Ottaviano Lotti, offered one to King James, who thus had the new world in duplicate.57
The Ghost of Galileo Page 3
