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9 C h a p t e r 1 The Roman Inquisition’s Operations The Congregation of the Holy Office and Its Component Parts The Roman Inquisition belonged to the pope. Gregory IX originally created it, Paul III revived it, Paul IV and Pius V (both former Inquisitors, Pius also having served as commissary) made it a fearsome institution. It reflects better than any other papal institution the long-term tendency to concentrate power in the pope’s hands. It gave him his most effective institutional means of exercising that power. Unlike older central organs, the Inquisition could take cognizance of nearly any kind of case and be put to nearly any purpose. Its predecessors, especially the three papal courts of the Segnature di Grazia and Giustizia and the Rota as well as the once powerful consistory, the regular meeting of all the cardinals with the pope, had precise and complicated procedures and well-defined areas of competence. Perhaps for that very reason they had gone into eclipse in direct proportion to the expansion of papal prerogatives. The Inquisition’s constantly evolving procedures and jurisprudence instead of steadily ossifying it made it a more and more flexible instrument . Its powerful drive to centralization served the same end. Of course, as its processes, both administrative and judicial, became more complicated and its volume of business increased exponentially, it did slowly become more hidebound. But as a direct outgrowth of papal plenitudo potestatis it constantly underwent renewal through the pope’s personal intervention. If we can believe one avviso, Urban VIII had no doubt on this score. Citing his harsh treatment of Cardinal Pio as an example to those ministers of princes who would try to limit his authority, he laughingly continued that even without a formed process—which he acknowledged was probably impossible in Pio’s case—“it was enough for him [Urban] to know the truth of the facts, not chapter 1 10 caring that he [Pio] appear judicially.”1 Unlike in the case of many other central papal organs, we find little evidence of the Inquisition as a body resisting papal wishes. This may be in part an artifact of record keeping, combined with the strict secrecy the pope to a remarkable degree managed to impose. Still, the minute examination that ambassadors and newsletter writers applied to the Inquisition produced little sign of corporate objections to the papal will. Yes, they do report all the usual pressures—faction, personality, politics, economics—coming into play. Despite them, the record shows the popes remaining firmly in control and much more often than not getting their way. Conflagrations like those in the consistories of January 1615 that led Paul V to walk out after Inquisitor Paolo Emilio Sfondrato sharply criticized his building on the Quirinal seem only rarely to have happened in the Holy Office except during the period of tense relations with Spain beginning in late 1630.2 The nearest occasion otherwise was the probably spirited discussion over the new title of eminenza that Urban assigned to the cardinals in the same year.3 Again, the Roman Inquisition belonged to the pope. This does not mean that popes could simply impose their will on the Inquisition. Those competing pressures demanded that they too stoop to negotiation and compromise. Yet the fact that all the members of the Inquisition were direct papal appointees gave the pope enormous resources to dominate it. Some cardinals virtually had to be made Inquisitors, but if they failed to behave themselves, the pope could find ways to marginalize or neutralize them, even the most obstreperous, even Gaspar Borja y Velasco, caricature of the haughty Spanish grandee, even former cardinal nephews like both Aldobrandini brothers, Sfondrato and Ludovico Ludovisi, all of whom at one time or another found themselves forced into exile. The personality of the pope, his training and experience, thus become vital to understanding how the institution worked. It does not bear thinking about the consequences should he really be bored by the Inquisition, as it was alleged Urban VIII sometimes was, leading him to rush through meetings.4 In order to understand how the popes dominated the Inquisition, we need to examine how it worked, before turning in Chapters 2–4 to a more detailed study of its membership, including the popes. When he promulgated Licet ab initio in 1542, Paul III established and deputed (constituimus & deputamus) six cardinals as “general commissaries and general and very general Inquisitors.”5 Perhaps significantly he gave this new...

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