Galileo Trial: No ‘Eppur Si Muove’ in the 1633 Record

What was Galileo told in 1616?

The injunction at the center of the 1633 case goes back to an order of February 25, 1616. Pope Paul V told Cardinal Robert Bellarmine to warn Galileo to give up the opinion that the sun stands still at the center of the world and the earth moves. Only if Galileo refused was the Commissary of the Holy Office to give him a formal injunction before a notary and witnesses (Exhibit A, p. 321).

A note dated the next day says both things happened. Bellarmine warned him, and then, “successive ac incontinenti,” at once, the Commissary ordered him to omnino relinquat, nec eam de caetero, quovis modo, teneat, doceat aut defendat, verbo aut scriptis: to “abandon it entirely, and from now on not hold, teach or defend it in any way, by word or in writing” (pp. 321–322). The note records no refusal by Galileo.

Galileo around 1610–1612, a few years before the warning of 1616. Portrait attributed to Tiberio Titi, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Galileo kept a different paper. On May 26, 1616, Bellarmine certified in writing that Galileo had not abjured and had received no penance. He had only been told of the declaration that the Copernican doctrine non si possa difendere né tenere, “cannot be defended or held” (p. 342). The certificate does not say “teach,” and it does not say “in any way.”

That gap is the hinge of the whole trial. Karl von Gebler, who examined the original file, concluded in his history of 1879 that the second half of the February 26 note was untrue, though written in 1616 and not forged later (Exhibit C). Emil Wohlwill, Gebler reports, had suspected a later insertion. The 1633 court treated the note as valid.

Why did the court object to the Dialogue?

The Dialogue on the Two Great Systems of the World, Ptolemaic and Copernican was printed at Florence by Giovan Battista Landini in 1632, as Baretti’s own book list records (Exhibit B, p. 52). On September 23, 1632, the Holy Office told the Florence inquisitor to order Galileo to appear in Rome within the month of October (Exhibit A, pp. 279–280). By his own account he arrived “la prima domenica di Quaresima,” the first Sunday of Lent, which in 1633 fell on February 13 (p. 337).

Stefano della Bella’s etched frontispiece, made for the Dialogue printed at Florence in 1632; this impression is the fourth and last state of the plate. The lettering on the robes of the middle and right-hand figures names Ptolemy and Copernicus.

The sentence gives the court’s reading of the book. It found in the Dialogue “expressly the transgression” of the 1616 injunction, because Galileo defended the condemned opinion there. He had tried “with various evasions” to present it as undecided and probable, the sentence says, which was itself “a very grave error,” since an opinion declared contrary to Scripture could not be probable (p. 404).

The sentence also lists two admissions. Galileo had asked for a license to print without telling the licensers about the injunction. He also confessed that some arguments for the false side were written so that a reader might find them hard to answer, and blamed the dialogue form and a natural pride in his own cleverness, not intent (p. 404). These are the court’s summaries of his words, written to justify its finding.

What did Galileo tell the court in 1633?

On April 12, 1633, Galileo was examined under oath before the Commissary General, Vincenzo Maculano (Exhibit A, pp. 336–337). He said that in February 1616 Bellarmine told him the Copernican opinion, taken absolutely, could not be held or defended, but could be used as a supposition (p. 339). Then he was asked about the injunction itself.

“It may be that some injunction was given me not to hold or defend that opinion,” he answered, ma non ne ho memoria, “but I have no memory of it” (p. 340). Told that the injunction also said “teach” and “in any way,” he said he did not remember those words. He believed he had forgotten them because the certificate he relied on did not contain them.

Illustration

An illustration of the setting of the 1633 examinations, drawn for this page; it does not show any real person or the actual room.

This is testimony, and it was given in self-defense. Galileo needed the injunction to be as narrow as Bellarmine’s certificate, and his answers point that way. The record shows what he said under questioning, not what happened in Bellarmine’s rooms in 1616.

He was not kept in a cell for months. Gebler, working from the dispatches of the Tuscan ambassador, puts Galileo inside the Holy Office buildings only from April 12 to 30 and from June 21 to 24, 1633, in an official’s apartment rather than a prison cell (Exhibit C). For the rest of his time in Rome, according to his pupil Vincenzio Viviani, he was held at the palace of the Tuscan ambassador at Trinità dei Monti (Exhibit A, p. 617).

What did the sentence of June 22, 1633, say?

The sentence opens with the names of ten cardinals, the inquisitors general. Favaro printed it from a copy made at the time and kept in the State Archive at Modena; in that copy, seven of them signed at the foot (Exhibit A, pp. 402–406). It retells the case from the 1615 denunciation through 1616, the book, Galileo’s confessions and the certificate, and then pronounces.

The core is one phrase. Galileo had made himself vehementemente sospetto d’heresia, “vehemently suspected of heresy, that is, of having held and believed a doctrine false and contrary to the Sacred and divine Scriptures” (p. 405). The sentence does not call him a heretic. Everything else in it follows from that finding.

The sentence of June 22, 1633, clause by clause, from Favaro’s volume 19, pp. 405–406. Clauses 1 to 5 are the verdict; clause 6 keeps the court’s power to change it. Drawn from the table published with this page.

The sentence, clause by clause (CSV) (where the data comes from) Data: Antonio Favaro, ed., Le opere di Galileo Galilei, vol. 19 (Florence, 1907)

The prison clause did not stand for long. The reservation clause is why. The court kept the power to moderare, mutare, o levar, to moderate, change or lift, the penalties, and it used that power within days.

What did Galileo swear, and where did he go next?

The abjuration followed the same day at the convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Kneeling, with his hands on the Gospels and giving his age as 70, Galileo swore that he had always believed what the Church teaches (Exhibit A, pp. 406–407). Then came the formula: abiuro, maledico e detesto li sudetti errori et heresie, “I abjure, curse and detest the said errors and heresies.”

He promised never again to say or write anything that could bring the same suspicion on him. He also promised to denounce any heretic, or anyone suspected of heresy, he came to know of, to the Holy Office or the local inquisitor. At the foot he signed: Io Galileo Galilei ho abiurato come di sopra, mano propria, “I, Galileo Galilei, have abjured as above, in my own hand” (p. 407).

After the sentence, from the abjuration to Galileo’s death at Arcetri. Drawn from the table published with this page, compiled from the decrees in Favaro’s volume 19 and Vincenzio Viviani’s account printed in it (Exhibit A).

The 1634 refusal carried a threat. If he kept asking, the decree says, he could be called back to the prisons of the Holy Office (p. 286). A decree of February 25, 1638, let him move to his house in Florence for treatment, but he was not to go out into the city, receive gatherings of visitors or discuss the motion of the earth (p. 287).

Viviani dated the death to Wednesday, January 8, “1641 ab Incarnatione,” in Florence’s style of counting years, which still called that January 1641 (p. 623). Favaro’s family table in the same volume gives the year as 1642.

No reversal of the 1633 sentence appears in the records read for this page. The Dialogue stayed on the Index of Prohibited Books until the edition of 1835, according to Gebler (Exhibit C).

Was Galileo tortured?

The surviving record shows a threat of torture, not torture. On June 16, 1633, the Pope decreed that Galileo be questioned about his intention, etiam comminata ei tortura, “even with the threat of torture.” If he held firm, he was to abjure and be condemned to prison (Exhibit A, p. 360).

The examination took place on June 21. Galileo said that after the 1616 decision he had held Ptolemy’s view as true. Pressed, he was told to speak the truth, alias devenietur ad torturam, “otherwise they would proceed to torture.” He answered, Io son qua per far l’obedienza, “I am here to obey,” and repeated that he had not held the opinion since 1616 (pp. 361–362).

What each layer of the record says about torture, from the decree of June 16, 1633, to Gebler’s reading of 1879. Drawn from the table published with this page (Exhibit A, Exhibit B and Exhibit C).

The June 21 record then closes. Since nihil aliud posset haberi, “nothing more could be had” in carrying out the decree, his signature was taken and he was sent back to his place (p. 362). The next day the sentence spoke of a “rigorous examination” in which he had answered as a Catholic (p. 405).

Later writers split over what those words hide. Baretti, in 1757, simply said Galileo was “put to the torture” (Exhibit B). Wohlwill argued in 1877, as Gebler reports, that the file had been tampered with and that papers recording torture could have been removed (Exhibit C). Gebler answered that the closing line is the usual formula for an examination that ended without torture, and that the decree ordered the threat, not its use.

Where does “Eppur si muove” come from?

The line is not in the sentence, the abjuration or the June 21 record in Favaro’s volume (Exhibit A). The earliest printing found so far, according to Mario Livio (2020), is Baretti’s Italian Library, printed in London in 1757 (Exhibit D). In his entry for the Dialogue, Baretti wrote that Galileo “was in the inquisition for six years, and put to the torture, for saying, that the earth moved” (Exhibit B, p. 52; long s printed as s).

Then comes the scene. “The moment he was set at liberty, he looked up to the sky and down to the ground, and, stamping with his foot, in a contemplative mood, said, Eppur si move; that is, still it moves, meaning the earth.” Baretti gives no source, and he spells the verb move. His book appeared 124 years after the sentence and 115 years after Galileo’s death.

When the saying appears in print, 1633 to 1879. Baretti’s 1757 entry is the earliest printing found so far, according to Mario Livio; the 1774 and 1789 printings are known here only through Gebler’s report. Drawn from the table published with this page (Exhibits A to D).

The search for the first printing has moved backward over time. Gebler, writing in the 1870s, reported nothing earlier than 1774. “It is not known who was the inventor of the assumed exclamation,” he wrote (Exhibit C). Baretti’s 1757 entry is seventeen years older than the printing Gebler knew.

A printed book can only prove that a story existed by its date of printing. That makes 1757 a terminus ante quem for the story, a latest possible date of the kind explained on the page on dating limits.