Italian Prisons / St. Angelo; the Piombi; the Vicaria; Prisons of the Roman Inquisition

by Arthur Griffiths

This first prison of the Inquisition thus destroyed was rebuilt by Pius V in 1509 and is the same as that now standing in Rome, the vast edifice behind St. Peter’s, near the Porta Cavalleggeri, and fallen to other uses. During the French occupation of Rome to bolster up the papal power, it became a barrack, and the tribunal of the Inquisition was held there until suppressed, to be revived by Pius IX after 1849 in an apartment in the Vatican. The three tiers of cells it contained are still on view, but the interesting archives have been removed to some place of safety where they await the curious investigator.

The Holy Office much needed its new prison. The cardinal-inquisitors were indefatigable and a letter dated 1568 referring to their labours reports that “people are every day burned, strangled or beheaded; all jails and places of confinement are full and there is constant toil in building new prisons.” Pius V was an uncompromising supporter of the Holy Office. He was the first to bear the title of Supreme Inquisitor, adopted by all his successors. Later Gregory XIII became prefect of the congregation of the Inquisition, an office also held by all succeeding pontiffs.

A Franciscan friar, Fra Tommaso di Mileto, was very barbarously punished in 1564 by the inquisitors, on a charge of heretical opinions and practices. Among his offences was a belief that it was not sinful to eat meat on certain days, that images and relics should not be reverenced, that there was no virtue in papal indulgences, that priests could not bind and loose from sin. For this he was sentenced to be walled up alive within four walls which were built up around him, with no more space to spare than just enough for him to kneel down before a crucifix, and “out of that place he was not to stir but there suffer anguish of heart and shed many tears.” A small aperture was left above through which food might be dropped down to him. This kind of sepulchre was used in Spain where many skeletons of persons walled up, emparedados, have been found in places of the character described.

Another notable victim of the Inquisition about this period was Pietro Carnesecchi, a man of high estate and great learning who had been protonotary to Clement VII, but had enjoyed the friendship of many of the reformed faith. He had on one occasion been taken into custody by the Holy Office. Duke Cosimo of Florence had obtained his release and he left Rome for France, where he became still more closely attached to the Protestants. Pope Paul IV, bitterly incensed against him, summoned him back to Rome, but he replied by a contumacious letter which was construed into a direct attack upon the pope. In spite of this, he impudently paid a visit to his friend, the grand-duke at Florence, who immediately gave him up to Pius V, now pope, saying he would surrender his own child to the holy father under similar circumstances, and he went so far as to allow his guest to be arrested at his dinner table.

Carnesecchi met with no mercy. He was speedily tried upon thirty-four charges and sentenced to be handed over to the secular arm, which clothed him in the sanbenito, the yellow frock of the condemned heretic, and prepared to burn him at the stake. Duke Cosimo, full of remorse, vainly strove to move the pope to compassion, but only gained a respite of ten days, during which Carnesecchi might recant and return to the bosom of the Church. Several ingenious priests were sent to reclaim him from the error of his ways, but all argument and exhortation failed and he went to his fiery death with singular courage and constancy. He preferred to go on foot to the scaffold, but with a certain pomp, wearing fine linen under the sanbenito and elegant gloves. Extreme terror was felt all through Italy at this tragedy. Every one feared for himself, his relatives and his friends. Pleasant confidential intercourse ceased and no one dared speak, even in the privacy of the family circle. No nationality was safe, not even the English. A Mr. Thomas Reynolds, resident in Naples, was informed against and sent to Rome a prisoner, where he was laid upon the rack and died under torture.

Giordano Bruno was one of the most celebrated philosophers of his day. He travelled far and wide from Italy and Switzerland, to France, Germany and England, making open profession of the reformed religion. But he was rash enough to venture back to Italy, going first to Padua, where he fancied himself safe from the Inquisition. He was sadly mistaken for the Venetian authorities were no friends to heresy, and he was arrested and removed to the prison of the Piombi, under the “Leads” of the doge’s palace in Venice, and detained there for six years, after which he was taken to Rome. Here he underwent numerous examinations and constantly disputed with the best theologians, among the rest with Cardinal Bellarmine, the chief inquisitor. This trial was prolonged for two years until, wearied out by his unchanging firmness, he was taken into the great hall of the palace of the Inquisition and his sentence read to him as he knelt before the cardinals. After reciting in full his many offences, it was ordered that he should be degraded, for he had received priest’s orders, excommunicated and delivered to the secular arm for punishment, which was to be “inflicted as tenderly as possible and without effusion of blood.” Bruno heard the sentence without emotion, remarking: “I dare say you feel greater pain in pronouncing these penalties than I do in receiving them.” The governor of Rome now took charge of him and he was locked up for a week in one of the common gaols of the city where he was closely watched, in the vain hope that he might yield; but he was firm to the last, when he was taken to the stake, still obstinately refusing to make recantation. The fire was lighted under him and he was burned alive, without even raising his eyes to the crucifix thrust into his face. Thus perished one of the first scholars in Europe.

A still more disgraceful case, except that it did not terminate fatally, was that of the renowned astrologer Galileo. It belongs to a later date and occurred in the pontificate of Urban VIII, the pope who first armed the castle of St. Angelo with artillery. Urban VIII was also a champion persecutor, an energetic patron of the Holy Office, of whose merciless activity he thoroughly approved. Widespread alarm prevailed in Italy when it was seen that the Inquisition not only dealt summarily with religious opinions but also, yielding to the most prejudiced ignorance, was fiercely opposed to the advancement of natural science. Galileo, who had reached his seventieth year at the time of his troubles, had long resided in Florence, his native city, as a professor of mathematics under the protection of Ferdinand. He was far in advance of his age and had made many important discoveries. He had gauged the exact oscillations of the pendulum and had invented an astronomical clock; he brought out the first microscope, and with a long range telescope he established many remarkable astronomical facts, such as the explanation of the Milky Way as a collection of small stars, and that the moon was a burned out planet whose light was due to reflection. He dared, moreover, to adopt the theory of Copernicus, that the earth revolved round the sun and not the sun round the earth. When he published his own observations in support of this novel and startling theory, he fell at once under the censure of the Inquisition. The extravagant views entertained by Galileo were pronounced to be absurd, false and heretical. The cardinal-inquisitors referred the writings of Galileo to their literary advisers who, of course, passed a strongly condemnatory verdict upon them. Galileo was warned to abandon the incriminating doctrine and carefully to abstain from teaching it. The astronomer promised to do this, but did not keep his word and ventured to write a dialogue between three persons; one of them still in doubt, the second a believer in the Ptolemaic system—that held by the priests—and the third a disciple of Copernicus and Galileo. When this dialogue was circulated, Pope Urban VIII fancied that he had been caricatured in one of the characters and became greatly enraged against Galileo, who was again summoned before the Holy Office. The grand-duke, Ferdinand, was reluctant to surrender him but his priest-ridden grand-duchess implored him to yield obedience to the Church; and poor Galileo, now in failing health and a prey to great fear, was sent back to Rome to be again arraigned before the tribunal. We have an account of his adventures in his own hand.

“At last, as a true Catholic, I was obliged to retract my opinion and by way of penalty my Dialogue was prohibited; and after five months I was dismissed from Rome. As the pestilence was then raging in Florence, with generous pity the house of the dearest friend I had in Sienna, Mgr. Archbishop Piccolomini, was appointed to be my prison; and in his most gentlemanly conversation I experienced so great delight and satisfaction that here I resumed my studies, arrived at and demonstrated most of my mechanical conclusions concerning the resistance of solids and some other speculations.

“After about five months when the pestilence had ceased in my native place, in the beginning of December in the present year 1633, His Holiness permitted me to dwell within the narrow limits of that house I love so well, in the freedom of the open country. I therefore returned to the village of Bellosguardo and thence to Arcetri; where I still am breathing salubrious air, not far from my own dear Florence.”

Galileo died in Florence, to which he was at last permitted to return, at the age of seventy-eight years. It is an interesting subject for speculation to conjecture what this great genius might have achieved if he had been born later and could have utilized all the appliances supplied by modern science. His personal character was that of a most delightful companion, a man of learning and deeply read, but no pedant. On the contrary, his humour was genial, his wit pungent, and he sometimes made enemies by his banter, as in the case of Urban VIII. The well known story of his whispered protest in private denial of the open admission wrung from him as to this movement of the earth is said to be apocryphal. But it was very likely that a man of his cheerful disposition would say sotto voce “but it does move all the same.” Galileo was a devoted lover of art, passionately attached to music and poetry, and he was said to have known the works of Ariosto by heart.