Paolo Sarpi

Paolo Sarpi was a Servite friar who defended Venice against a papal interdict, survived an assassination attempt, and wrote the history of the Council of Trent that Rome spent a century answering. In 1606 Paul V placed the whole republic under interdict over its insistence on trying clergy in its own courts and limiting church property. Venice replied by ordering its priests to keep saying Mass, expelling the Jesuits, and appointing Sarpi as state theologian to argue the case, which he did on the ground that the spiritual authority had no jurisdiction in temporal matters - an argument read across Protestant Europe with great interest. The interdict collapsed after a year with French mediation and no concession. In 1607 he was attacked near his convent and stabbed fifteen times, surviving with a dagger through his face; he is supposed to have remarked on the style of the Roman curia. His History of the Council of Trent, smuggled to London and printed there in 1619 under a pseudonym, argues that the council was managed by the papacy to prevent the reform it claimed to enact. He was also a serious anatomist and corresponded with Galileo, whose telescope he examined. Venice paid his medical costs and made him a state pensioner for life, and he went on working under guard. His last recorded words were reportedly a wish that the republic should endure. The Council of Trent history was placed on the Index immediately and read everywhere; the Jesuit Pallavicino was commissioned to write the answer and took twenty years over it.

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