Religion and Politics in the Composition and Reception of Baronius’S Annales Ecclesiastici: a New Letter from Paolo Sarpi to Isaac Casaubon

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chapter 2 Religion and Politics in the Composition and Reception of Baronius’s Annales Ecclesiastici: A New Letter from Paolo Sarpi to Isaac Casaubon

Nicholas Hardy*

This chapter presents a text and translation of a new item of correspondence from Paolo Sarpi to Isaac Casaubon, written in August 1612, and containing a discussion of Caesar Baronius’s Annales ecclesiastici, which Casaubon was pre- paring to attack in print. Sarpi makes the otherwise unattested claim that cer- tain passages in the first volume of the Annales were inserted by Baronius at the behest of one of his scholarly assistants, Latino Latini, who wished to dis- credit Baronius’s history in the eyes of its more discerning readers by lacing it with patently absurd “proofs” of contemporary Roman Catholic doctrines. The letter is therefore of obvious interest to scholars of Counter-Reformation histo- riography. However, it also illustrates the ways in which citizens of the early modern Republic of Letters could disagree with one another over matters of intellectual and political principle. Sarpi’s comments on the Annales were shaped by his disapproval of Casaubon’s desire to concentrate on Baronius’s philological and historical errors, and by Casaubon’s increasing alignment with the religio-political agenda of his patron, King James i of England. Furthermore, the oblique manner in which Sarpi communicated his disapproval serves as a reminder that learned letter writers sought to manipulate their correspondents with a variety of generic conventions, stylistic registers, and other formal techniques: in order to evaluate the information a letter con- veys, scholars first need to understand its literary as well as historical context. In corresponding about Baronius, Sarpi and Casaubon were discussing intellectual and religio-political problems that had affected their careers since 1606. At the beginning of that year, Venice was in a dispute with Rome, occa- sioned by its recent passage of laws expanding its jurisdiction over ecclesiastical property held within its territories, and its imprisonment and trial in civil

* I would like to thank Simon Ditchfield, Filippo de Vivo, Jean-Louis Quantin, Noel Malcolm, Thomas Roebuck, and Jan Machielsen for help regarding Sarpi’s letter; and Theodor Dunkelgrün, Scott Mandelbrote, Kirsten Macfarlane and Gian Mario Cao for comments on this chapter.

22 Hardy courts of two clerics.1 The dispute escalated in April, when Pope Paul v placed an interdict on the kingdom of Venice. The interdict excluded the people of Venice from participating in rites of the church and even sacraments, although it stopped short of outright excommunication. Sarpi’s recent appointment as official consultant to the Venetian Senate in theology and canon law placed him at the center of the controversy.2 In the following months, he wrote private memoranda for the government, and authored or made major contributions to various state-sponsored publications.3 Two of the papacy’s main defenders were the cardinals Robert Bellarmine and Caesar Baronius, whose comprehensive works of theological controversy and ecclesiastical history had become cornerstones of the Counter-Reformation church.4 Baronius made a speech in the papal consistory in favor of an interdict that was published three months later.5 Bellarmine became even more prominent, clashing directly and indirectly with Sarpi in a series of pamphlets disputing the nature and limits of ecclesiastical and civil power.6 Part of the Venetian response was to seek help from abroad. In May 1606, the Venetian ambassador to France, Pietro Priuli, approached Casaubon, among other Frenchmen, to write in support of Venice. He had secured his aid by October of the same year, having shown Casaubon the pamphlets published by Sarpi in the intervening months.7 Casaubon was impressed by the antipapal stance Sarpi had taken, as well as by his learning and his literary talents.8 The main product of Casaubon’s admiration emerged in June

1 Paolo Sarpi, Histoire du Concile de Trente: édition originale de 1619, ed. Marie F. Viallon and Bernard Dompnier, trans. Pierre François Le Courayer (Paris: Champion, 2002), xviii–xx. 2 Bartolomeo Cecchetti, La Republica di Venezia e la Corte di Roma nei rapporti della religione (Venice: P. Naratovich, 1874), 1:11–12; Vittorio Frajese, Sarpi scettico: Stato e Chiesa a Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994), 289–90. 3 Gaetano Cozzi, “Paolo Sarpi tra il Cattolico Philippe Canaye de Fresnes e il Calvinista Isaac Casaubon,” Bollettino dell’Istituto di Storia della Società e dello Stato Veneziano 1 (1959): 85–86. For a list of publications regarding the interdict from 1606 to 1607, see Filippo de Vivo, Patrizi, informatori, barbieri: politica e comunicazione a Venezia nella prima età moderna (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2012), 369–403. 4 Robert Bellarmine, Disputationes, 3 vols. (Ingolstadt, 1586–93). 5 Generoso Calenzio, La vita e gli scritti del cardinale Cesare Baronio (Rome: Tipografia vati- cana, 1907), 749–50; de Vivo, Patrizi, informatori, barbieri, 302–03. 6 Cozzi, “Paolo Sarpi,” 97–99. 7 Paolo Sarpi, Lettere ai gallicani, ed. Boris Ulianich (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1961), xxviii–xxxi; de Vivo, Patrizi, informatori, barbieri, 101–02. 8 See the notes taken between late Aug. and early Nov. 1606, when Casaubon was at La Bretonnière, in ms Casaubon 27, fol. 39r, Bodleian Library, Oxford; Casaubon to Paulus Petavius, 4 Nov. 1606, in Isaac Casaubon, Epistolae (Amsterdam, 1709), 279–80. See also