The
Barberini were a powerful family, with branches in Rome
and Florence, which had produced several
cardinals up to that point.
Maffeo was born into the Florentine branch of the family
in 1568. His father died when Maffeo was only three
years old; his mother insisted that he be educated by
the
Jesuits--first in
Florence, and later in Rome at the Jesuit Collegio
Romano. Here he lived with his uncle, Francesco
Barberini, who held the high church office of
Protonotary Apostolic. In 1589 he took the degree
of doctor of law from the University of Pisa.
Maffeo Barberini' s rise in the church hierarchy was
rapid. In 1601 he served as papal
legate to the court of Henri IV, king of France;
in 1604 he became archbishop
of Nazareth (an office he obviously fulfilled in
absentia since the Holy Land was under Moslem rule) and
took up the post of papal nuncio (lit. messenger, the
papal legate permanently accredited to a civil
government) to the French king; in 1606 he was made a
cardinal with the titular church of St. Peter in
Montorio and later St. Onofrio; in 1608 he became
bishop of Spoleto. As bishop,
Barberini convened a synod,
completed the construction of one seminary and built two
others, and served as legate of Bologna and
prefect of the Segnatura di
Giustizia. Upon the death of Pope Gregory XV, in1623,
Maffeo Barberini was elected Pope, taking the name of
Urban VIII.
During his long papacy, Urban VIII promoted missionary
work. He formed dioceses and
vicariats in various
missionary terrritories and founded a college for the
training of missionaries. He also repealed the monopoly
on missionary work in China and Japan given to the
Jesuits in 1585, opening these countries to missionaries
of all orders. In 1639 he prohibited slavery among the
Indians of Brazil, Paraguay, and the West Indies.
During this period the temporal power of the papacy was
in greatest danger from the Hapsburg dynasty which ruled
much of the German speaking region of Europe, the
Southern Netherlands, and Spain. Spanish influence in
Italy has been on the rise for a century, and the
kingdom of Naples and Sicily, under Spanish rule, lay
immediately to the South of the Papal State. For this
reason, Urban VIII favored the anti-Hapsburg policy of
the French, neglecting to support the catholic cause in
Germany.
Urban VIII saw to it that the Barberini family benefited
from his papacy. His brother and two nephews were made
cardinals and given high church offices. Other family
members were helped by the Pope in the acquisition of
property and titles . He even went so far as to make war
on Parma, Tuscany, Modena, and Venice over a matter of
protocol involving his nephew-cardinals. Pope Urban
strengthened fortifications and armaments in the papal
territories. He lavishly supported artists, chief among
whom was Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, who beautified St.
Peter's cathedral. Urban had the bronze supporting
girders of the Roman Pantheon melted down and made into
cannon and and other objects. This prompted the epigram:
" What the barbarians did not do the Barberini's did."
Maffeo Barberini was an accomplished man of letters, who
published several volumes of verse. Upon Galileo' s
return to Florence, in 1610, Barberini came to admire
Galileo' s intelligence and sharp wit. During a court
dinner, in 1611, at which Galileo defended his view on
floating bodies, Barberini supported Galileo against
Cardinal Gonzaga. From this point, their patron-client
relationship flourished until it was undone in 1633.
Upon Barberini' s ascendance of the papal throne, in
1623, Galileo came to Rome and had six interviews with
the new Pope. It was at these meetings that Galileo was
given permission to write about the Copernican theory,
as long as he treated it as a hypothesis. After the
publication of Galileo' s Dialogue Concerning the
Two Chief Systems of the World, in 1632, the
patronage relationship was broken. It appears that the
Pope never forgave Galileo for putting the argument of
God's omnipotence (the argument he himself had put to
Galileo in 1623) in the mouth of Simplicio, the staunch
Aristotelian whose arguments had been systematically
destroyed in the previous 400-odd pages. At any rate,
the Pope resisted all efforts to have Galileo pardoned.
