The Roman Inquisition

A Papal Bureaucracy and Its Laws in the Age of Galileo

Thomas F. Mayer

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812207644
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: History

While the Spanish Inquisition has laid the greatest claim to both scholarly attention and the popular imagination, the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542 and a key instrument of papal authority, was more powerful, important, and long-lived. Founded by Paul III and originally aimed to eradicate Protestant heresy, it followed medieval antecedents but went beyond them by becoming a highly articulated centralized organ directly dependent on the pope. By the late sixteenth century the Roman Inquisition had developed its own distinctive procedures, legal process, and personnel, the congregation of cardinals and a professional staff. Its legal process grew out of the technique of inquisitio formulated by Innocent III in the early thirteenth century, it became the most precocious papal bureaucracy on the road to the first "absolutist" state.As Thomas F. Mayer demonstrates, the Inquisition underwent constant modification as it expanded. The new institution modeled its case management and other procedures on those of another medieval ancestor, the Roman supreme court, the Rota. With unparalleled attention to archival sources and detail, Mayer portrays a highly articulated corporate bureaucracy with the pope at its head. He profiles the Cardinal Inquisitors, including those who would play a major role in Galileo's trials, and details their social and geographical origins, their education, economic status, earlier careers in the Church, and networks of patronage. At the point this study ends, circa 1640, Pope Urban VIII had made the Roman Inquisition his personal instrument and dominated it to a degree none of his predecessors had approached.

CHAPTER 1

The Roman Inquisition’s Operations

The Congregation of the Holy Office and Its Component Parts

The Roman Inquisition belonged to the pope. Gregory IX originally created it, Paul III revived it, Paul IV and Pius V (both former Inquisitors, Pius also having served as commissary) made it a fearsome institution. It reflects better than any other papal institution the long-term tendency to concentrate power in the pope’s hands. It gave him his most effective institutional means of exercising that power. Unlike older central organs, the Inquisition could take cognizance of nearly any kind of case and be put to nearly any purpose. Its predecessors, especially the three papal courts of the Segnature di Grazia and Giustizia and the Rota as well as the once powerful consistory, the regular meeting of all the cardinals with the pope, had precise and complicated procedures and well-defined areas of competence. Perhaps for that very reason they had gone into eclipse in direct proportion to the expansion of papal prerogatives. The Inquisition’s constantly evolving procedures and jurisprudence instead of steadily ossifying it made it a more and more flexible instrument. Its powerful drive to centralization served the same end. Of course, as its processes, both administrative and judicial, became more complicated and its volume of business increased exponentially, it did slowly become more hidebound. But as a direct outgrowth of papal plenitudo potestatis it constantly underwent renewal through the pope’s personal intervention. If we can believe one avviso, Urban VIII had no doubt on this score. Citing his harsh treatment of Cardinal Pio as an example to those ministers of princes who would try to limit his authority, he laughingly continued that even without a formed process—which he acknowledged was probably impossible in Pio’s case—“it was enough for him [Urban] to know the truth of the facts, not caring that he [Pio] appear judicially.”¹ Unlike in the case of many other central papal organs, we find little evidence of the Inquisition as a body resisting papal wishes. This may be in part an artifact of record keeping, combined with the strict secrecy the pope to a remarkable degree managed to impose. Still, the minute examination that ambassadors and newsletter writers applied to the Inquisition produced little sign of corporate objections to the papal will. Yes, they do report all the usual pressures—faction, personality, politics, economics—coming into play. Despite them, the record shows the popes remaining firmly in control and much more often than not getting their way. Conflagrations like those in the consistories of January 1615 that led Paul V to walk out after Inquisitor Paolo Emilio Sfondrato sharply criticized his building on the Quirinal seem only rarely to have happened in the Holy Office except during the period of tense relations with Spain beginning in late 1630.² The nearest occasion otherwise was the probably spirited discussion over the new title of eminenza that Urban assigned to the cardinals in the same year.³ Again, the Roman Inquisition belonged to the pope.

This does not mean that popes could simply impose their will on the Inquisition. Those competing pressures demanded that they too stoop to negotiation and compromise. Yet the fact that all the members of the Inquisition were direct papal appointees gave the pope enormous resources to dominate it. Some cardinals virtually had to be made Inquisitors, but if they failed to behave themselves, the pope could find ways to marginalize or neutralize them, even the most obstreperous, even Gaspar Borja y Velasco, caricature of the haughty Spanish grandee, even former cardinal nephews like both Aldobrandini brothers, Sfondrato and Ludovico Ludovisi, all of whom at one time or another found themselves forced into exile. The personality of the pope, his training and experience, thus become vital to understanding how the institution worked. It does not bear thinking about the consequences should he really be bored by the Inquisition, as it was alleged Urban VIII sometimes was, leading him to rush through meetings.⁴ In order to understand how the popes dominated the Inquisition, we need to examine how it worked, before turning in Chapters 2–4 to a more detailed study of its membership, including the popes.

When he promulgated Licet ab initio in 1542, Paul III established and deputed (constituimus & deputamus) six cardinals as “general commissaries and general and very general Inquisitors.”⁵ Perhaps significantly he gave this new body no name. Pius IV continued to call its members “deputies.”⁶ Their full title in the early seventeenth century remained almost the same: “by divine mercy cardinals of the holy Roman church general inquisitors against heretical pravity in the whole Christian republic, specially deputed by the holy apostolic see” (“miseratione divina S.tae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalibus, adversus haereticam pravitatem in universa Republica Christiana Inquisitoribus generalibus a Sancta Sede Apostolica specialiter deputatis”).⁷ They thus individually remained the pope’s deputies even while the institution underwent the professionalization and bureaucratization typical of papal government in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁸ The key moment came in Sixtus V’s overhaul of the chief organs of papal power in 1588.⁹ He established the basic system in use until the early twentieth century and in broad outline even yet. It resembled that common in other contemporary European governments by which a set of councils acted for the monarch. Sixtus called his “congregations.” This is a revealing term, since its basic meaning is “meeting.”¹⁰ By applying it to his new bodies, the pope tried to routinize the ad hoc nature of papal government. He succeeded only to a degree, in no small part because the popes’ own drive to autocracy interfered. The most powerful of their congregations, the Inquisition, typifies the outcome. Although within about thirty years it became a corporate body, a permanent institution with a professional staff directed by an increasingly professional set of cardinals, and in that sense the routinization project worked perfectly, the Sacred Congregation remained an organ designed to work as much as possible at the level of the individual case, thereby enshrining the principle of spontaneity and preserving the original sense of “congregation.”¹¹ The popes therefore could and did use their new tool in just about any way that pleased them, whatever the rules might say. Since the pope was its head, the Congregation remained directly subject to the papal will in a way different from any other congregation. The cardinal taken as “capo” by the outside world was merely its most senior member, who presided over meetings when the pope did not attend. Urban VIII graphically undercut any possible independence both by appointing almost no one but Barberini loyalists to the Congregation (see especially Chapter 4) and also by ordering in 1628 that it cease to meet by itself in the palace of the senior member and instead assemble in the Dominican general’s apartments at Santa Maria sopra Minerva.¹²

The appointment of local inquisitors perhaps most clearly illustrates papal dominance of the Congregation. This task had once fallen to the general congregations of the Dominicans and Franciscans, and then in the case of the first to their vicar-general, before in theory being transferred to the Congregation.¹³ Both bodies still appeared to take a hand, but in fact the decision fell to the pope.¹⁴ One reason is that inquisitors’ appointments did not expire if they had them directly from the pope.¹⁵ The language of the Dominican general chapter of 1592 is instructive: “approbamus,” says the general, the appointment (by whom not said) of various inquisitors.¹⁶ As another illustration, when in 1615 the Congregation proposed (not appointed) new inquisitors for Parma and Cremona, Paul V rejected both, moving the nominee for Parma to Cremona and ordering the cardinals to try again in the first place.¹⁷ On another occasion, Paul rejected all nominees and ordered “maturius considerari.”¹⁸ In 1617 the Congregation had better luck, having its nominee to Faenza approved.¹⁹ But an earlier occupant of that post had been chosen by Cardinal Agostino Galamini alone at Paul’s command.²⁰ Galamini took an anomalous hand in other appointments, partly as a Dominican and partly as a papal favorite. Thus in 1616 the pope rejected an applicant for inquisitor of Avignon and directed Galamini to find someone better.²¹ The following year he was involved in negotiations for the replacement of the inquisitor of Bergamo. His report supported the removal of the holder and then he was asked to write privately to a possible candidate to see whether he would take the post.²² While it can be difficult to discern clear patterns to the workings of the Congregation’s meetings, matters concerning inquisitors were almost always handled in the secret part of meetings with the pope, suggesting that they were regarded as of peculiar interest to him.²³ Thus the pseudo-Calderini Tractatus novus aureus et solemnis de haereticis was right that the pope appointed inquisitors (as well as that they were friars).²⁴ Inquisitors held office by either a breve (major tribunals) or a letter patent (secondary ones), the first requested by the assessor from the secretariat of breves.²⁵ A few examples of each have come to light, including a letter patent for the inquisitor of Pisa, a breve for Michelangelo Seghizzi to Milan, one for the inquisitor of Florence, and a third for an inquisitor of Venice.²⁶

Naturally, all the contrary forces of early modern government were mixed up in inquisitors’ appointments. One of the best-documented cases may be that of Desiderio Scaglia and Federico Borromeo, archbishop of Milan, except that we have only Scaglia’s side of the correspondence in which he fawningly asked Borromeo for help becoming commissary general and thanked him four years later when he finally got the post.²⁷ A funeral oration alleged that Scaglia had originally attracted attention while Niccolò Sfondrato, the future Gregory XIV, was bishop of Cremona.²⁸ Another example is a change of inquisitor in Florence. The grand duke had been trying to get rid of the incumbent, a partisan of Inquisitor Ferdinando Taverna, since November 1613. The holder tried to cooperate with the grand duke, but Rome refused to allow him to resign.²⁹ When the grand duke proposed to replace him with the inquisitor of Siena, Taverna objected, and his candidate eventually won. Exactly the same thing happened in reverse when the grand duke was balked just a little later in his effort to remove the inquisitor of Pisa.³⁰

As in Florence, there were constant struggles over the appointments of inquisitors in Venice and its territory, although the Serenissima got its way more often than the grand duke did. A well-documented instance concerns the replacement of the inquisitor of Padua in 1627. The Inquisition’s secretary Cardinal Ottavio Bandini along with the commissary backed the candidate who was initially chosen, the Dominican general another, but the Venetian ambassador beat all of them and arranged the appointment of a third man.³¹ The tensions were especially acute in the wake of the Interdict, with the nuncio trying to have various inquisitors reinstated, at the same time as he managed a number of proceedings against those who had written in favor of Venice.³² Contrariwise, the Venetians often tried to get rid of obstructive inquisitors, as happened at U...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Roman Inquisition’s Operations
• Chapter 2. The Sacred Congregation: Inquisitors Before 1623
• Chapter 3. The Sacred Congregation Under Urban VIII
• Chapter 4. The Professional Staff
• Chapter 5. Inquisition Procedure: The Holy Office’s Use of Inquisitio
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments