Pope Urban VIII
Pope Urban VIII reigned from 1623 to 1644, condemned Galileo, and nearly bankrupted the papacy on his family. Born Maffeo Barberini in Florence in 1568 into a wealthy merchant family, he was educated by the Jesuits, took a doctorate in law at Pisa, served as nuncio to France, and was made a cardinal in 1606. He was a genuine intellectual, wrote Latin verse of some quality, and as a cardinal had been Galileo's admirer and protector, writing a poem in his honour and congratulating him on his telescopic discoveries. That is what makes the 1633 trial so consequential. Galileo believed he had permission to treat heliocentrism hypothetically, and published the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in 1632 — placing the pope's own argument in the mouth of a character called Simplicio. Urban, already under pressure for his conduct of the Thirty Years' War and reportedly convinced he had been mocked, referred it to the Inquisition. Galileo abjured under threat of torture and spent his last nine years under house arrest. Urban's foreign policy was disastrous. He feared Habsburg encirclement more than Protestantism, and so effectively assisted Catholic France against Catholic Austria while spending on fortifications and on the futile War of Castro against the Farnese, which the Papal States lost and which quadrupled the papal debt. His nepotism was on a scale that shocked contemporaries; his relatives are estimated to have taken over a hundred million scudi. He employed Bernini extensively, stripping bronze from the Pantheon for the baldachin, from which Romans said what the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did.
- Lived: 1568 CE – 1644 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: pope, cleric
