Pope Paul V
Pope Paul V reigned from 1605 to 1621, quarrelled with Venice, and issued the first warning to Galileo. Born Camillo Borghese in Rome in 1550 to a family of Sienese lawyers, he trained in canon law at Perugia and Padua, served as nuncio to Spain, and was made a cardinal in 1596 and Vicar of Rome. He was elected as a compromise after the twenty-seven-day pontificate of Leo XI. He was a canonist by training and temperament, and asserted ecclesiastical jurisdiction rigidly. Venice had passed laws restricting the church's acquisition of property and had arrested two clerics for trial in secular courts. Paul demanded their surrender, and when the republic refused he excommunicated the senate and placed Venice under interdict in 1606. The interdict failed completely. The Venetian clergy, on the government's instruction and with the theologian Paolo Sarpi's arguments behind them, continued to say mass; only the Jesuits obeyed and were expelled for a decade. After a year, French mediation ended the affair without Venice conceding anything of substance. It demonstrated publicly that the papacy's oldest weapon no longer worked. In 1616 the Holy Office declared heliocentrism formally heretical, and Cardinal Bellarmine, on Paul's instruction, admonished Galileo not to hold or defend it — the warning that returned to destroy him seventeen years later. He was a considerable builder. He completed the nave and façade of St Peter's to Carlo Maderno's design, giving the basilica its present form, restored the Acqua Paola aqueduct, and built the Borghese chapel. His nepotism was extensive; his nephew Scipione assembled the Borghese collection. He died in 1621.
- Lived: 1552 CE – 1621 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: pope, cleric
