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.