Chapter 2: The Business of Astrology Just when Galileo’s campaign for the heliocentric theory was reaching its cli- max, another stargazing natural philosopher, much less known, aroused the im- placable ire of the Roman officials. Abbot of Santa Prassede and one-time gen- eral of the Vallombrosa Order, a branch of the Benedictines, Orazio Morandi was accused in 1630 of magic, fortune telling, and political chicanery. His most serious crime was to have predicted the death of Pope Urban VIII, based on certain astrological portents, and to have allowed news about this prediction to spread as far as Spain. Thereupon the Spanish cardinals embarked for Italy in order to attend a conclave that was not in fact to take place for another fourteen years—an embarrassment to themselves as well as to the pope. Urban VIII, fu- rious at what he regarded as an act of political as well as astrological effrontery, personally ordered a criminal inquiry. The consequences were enormous. As- trology itself was hurt by the growing impression that predictions were mere merchandise in the game of political and social favors. Soon after the trial, Ur- ban VIII promulgated the most severe anti-astrology legislation yet. And this legislation, as well as Morandi’s crimes, may well have affected the outcome of the Galileo case, tried soon afterwards. 1 For Morandi as for Galileo, the high-stakes patronage environment of the early seventeenth century demanded new market strategies. And for both, the experiment with them ended in disaster. Nor should we be too surprised that the market strategies of an astrologer occasionally coincided with those of an as- tronomer. 2 So far we have tried to represent the early seventeenth-century cul- tural world according to the terms set by Galileo: as a battle between him and his adversaries. By portraying himself as the enemy of Aristotelianism, Scholas- ticism, and any form of dogmatism, he also distanced himself from forms of dogmatic thought that have come down to us with names like “astrology” and “alchemy.” To contemporaries of Galileo the differences by no means seemed quite so clear. He himself appeared to accept at least one dogmatic preconception in his work, namely, the proposition that mathematical laws were prior to experience. 3 And on more than one occasion he was known to dabble in astrology. 4 Moreo- ver, just as he enhanced the value of his contributions by producing them ac- 20 The Business of Astrology 21 cording to the criteria of a methodological revolution he was carrying on in the fields of natural philosophy that interested him, likewise, astrologers and other practitioners in the collateral fields of natural knowledge attempted to enhance the value of their contributions by submitting them as products of a similar methodological revolution in their respective fields. While Galileo appealed to a wider intellectual marketplace to gain support for his methodological innova- tions, astrologers tried to do the same. 5 In this chapter we will examine the role of sheer intellectual enterprise in defining the characteristics of seventeenth- century natural knowledge. In the next chapter we will see how it benefited Gal- ileo’s disciples. No market, of course, was entirely free in the early modern period. 6 Com- modities signified values in terms of honor and prestige as much as values in terms of money. Since the social status of the acquirer of a commodity affected its value as much as did the status of the producer, commodities were inscribed as much within circuits of personal favor as within circuits of exchange. Practi- tioners were well aware that adherence to specific codes of behavior was essen- tial to their success. This is the sense in which we may speak of a patronage marketplace in this period. And careful attention to the exigencies of the mar- ketplace marked the astute cultural entrepreneur. Orazio Morandi focused his entrepreneurial zeal on attaining a position of greater eminence than his origins among the minor ranks of the Roman patrici- ate might otherwise permit. Once he had risen through the hierarchy of the Val- lombrosa order, in Florence and then in Rome, he considered his carefully cul- tivated Medici ties to have yielded their best fruit. He thereupon set out to perfect the intellectual and cultural techniques necessary for attracting greater attention to himself. His choice, no doubt informed by the examples of such successful sixteenth-century astrologers as Luca Gaurico and Girolamo Car- dano, fell upon the occult sciences. To build an image of professional competence sufficient to support his claims to mastery of the occult, Morandi expanded the existing library of his monastery in Rome. It was already well equipped with a repertory of Italian incunabula as well as a rich sampling of sixteenth-century titles in the humani- ties, classics, and theology from all over the peninsula and the rest of Europe as well—not to mention key humanist manuscripts going back to the founding of the monastery in the thirteenth century. 7 Morandi put his own stamp on the li- brary between 1614 and 1630, when he was abbot of the monastery and, at vari- ous times, general of the order and its solicitor at the papal court. To draw attention to his book acquisition as well as to widen the circle of those who might be interested in his astrological expertise, Morandi conceived of a unique expedient: he opened the library up to the Roman community—or, at least, to parts of it—as a public library. What is more, he allowed certain bor- rowers to take books home. And in fact, one of the most remarkable documents in the trial record is the complete library lending list for three years in the 1620s, one of the earliest such documents we know, attesting to the circulation 22 Chapter 2 of books of scholarship and literature to an audience that included priests and laymen, artists and patrons, writers and scribes, students, and women. 8 By the time Morandi got through with it, the library contained a particularly rich collection in matters of all sorts relating to the heavens. And typically, in the early seventeenth century, matters relating to the heavens largely included matters relating to astrology. So the library not only possessed editions (and we are often able to tell which ones) of standard astronomical classics, ancient and modern, from Aristarchus, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy to Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, as well as the main sets of planetary tables and ephemerides. 9 It also possessed a complete set of astrological works, from Ptolemy, Julius Firmicus Maternus, and Aratus to the medieval Arabic author Abenragel, to more recent works by Henricus Lindhout, Henrik Rantzau, and Rudolph Goclenius.10 Astrology, of course, was no less dangerous in the seventeenth century than was astronomy. 11 We do not know whether the Santa Prassede library copy of Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres had ever been “cor- rected” as the 1616 papal decree demanded. What we do know is that works by astrologers and astrology sympathizers Joachim Camerarius, Philip Melanch- thon, and Cyprian Leowitz, notoriously ill regarded by the Index, were present in the library and customarily lent out. 12 In spite of all the efforts of astrology’s apologists to defend such interests against ecclesiastical interference, Sixtus V’s pronouncement was still as valid in the seventeenth century as when he had first made it in 1585. 13 To wit, con- demning all “astrologers . who claim to have a vain knowledge of the stars and planets and most audaciously purport to foresee the divine dispositions in their time.” Such persons, it explained, “draw up nativities or genitures con- cerning the motion of the planets and the courses of the stars, and judge future and even present affairs, especially occult ones.” They presume, from the birth of the child and its natal day, “and any other most various observation and nota- tion of any time and moment,” to foretell “their condition, course of life, hon- ors, wealth, children, health, death, journeys, struggles, enemies, imprison- ments, assassinations, and various dangers and other adverse or prosperous occurrences or events.” And it threatened severe action against anyone “who knowingly reads or keeps these sorts of books and writings or such that contain these matters.” Thus, when Abbot Gherardo Gherardi, visiting Rome from the University of Padua where he taught philosophy, borrowed a “manuscript of nativities of car- dinals” from the Santa Prassede library on 13 March 1629, as our library log informs us, there was no doubt that such works came under the ban, no matter which cardinals’ nativities were being described or for what purpose. Other astrological manuscripts that circulated could be dangerous merely by virtue of their authors’ reputations. One very dangerous reputation was that of Tommaso Campanella, whose Inquisition trial was still going on. Around that time Fran- cesco Usimbardi, a prelate in the Apostolic Chamber, borrowed an unspecified “manuscript of Campanella” from Santa Prassede, perhaps the same manuscript The Business of Astrology 23 “astrology” that was borrowed by another library patron named Stefano Sena- rega about whom we have no other information. 14 To explain the appeal of judicial astrology in a city where some of the great discoveries of modern astronomy were being discussed, there is probably no need to repeat what Keith Thomas has already written concerning the troubled times and the difficulties of life. 15 Other inducements no doubt included the uncertain fortunes of courtiers and clients of wealthy patrons. Roman society was special in this respect, because rewards and prizes were distributed at the whim of an absolute ruler, usually elected in his declining years, upon whose death an entirely new regime was customarily erected.