Galileo is tried by the Inquisition

Galileo Galilei defended the Sun-centered view of the heavens and was tried in Rome in 1633. He was ordered to renounce it and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Context

In 1616, Church authorities ordered Galileo to drop his Copernican ideas and not to defend or teach them. In 1632 he published the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which presented arguments for Copernicus, and the Church treated the book as a violation of that earlier order.

The inquisition began on 12 April 1633 under chief inquisitor Vincenzo Maculani da Firenzuola, who had been appointed by Pope Urban VIII. Trial sessions took place on 12 April, 30 April and 10 May, and the sentence was delivered on 22 June 1633.

The court found him vehemently suspected of heresy for holding that the Sun is the center of the world and that the Earth moves. The Dialogue was banned, he was ordered to read a recantation kneeling, and he had to recite the Seven Penitential Psalms once a week for three years.

Galileo agreed to stop teaching the idea and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. He was still confined when the poet John Milton visited him in 1638. HISTORY notes that the Church did not admit he was right until more than 300 years later.