SARPI, PAOLO. - Born in Venice on 14 Aug. 1552, died there on 14 Jan. 1623. Already at the age of 18 he distinguished himself at Mantua in disputations; in 1575 he entered the Order of the Servites and by 1579 he already held the office of provincial. In 1585 he came to Rome as procurator general of his Order. The true causes of his mortal enmity toward the Roman Curia and the Society of Jesus have not yet been sufficiently explored: but it is certain that in 1593 the appointment of S. as bishop of Milapotamos, favored by Card. Santori, and later the appointments to the bishoprics of Caorle and Nona, were rejected at Rome. His relations with the Protestants, and especially with Bedell, chaplain of the English ambassador to Venice, Wotton, were a source of friction.
P. S. began to be much talked about when, on 28 Jan. 1606, having become State theologian of the Republic of Venice, with an annual stipend of 200 and then 400 florins, he was adviser to the Republic in the struggle against Pope Paul V: and with very many opinions, of which only a small part is printed, he maintained that the censures inflicted by the Pope on Venice, and in particular the interdict, were not valid; he supported the Republic in its resistance to the Pope, and together with the jurists Mennocchio and Pellegrino and with the ex-Jesuit Marsiglio, he was a leading figure in the anti-papal propaganda.
Once peace was restored between the Pope and Venice, the Republic continued to protect the excommunicated S., whom the Pope would have wished to see handed over to the Roman Inquisition.
When on 5 Oct. 1607, the victim of an attack, he was wounded by three dagger blows to the head, the nuncio Gessi was named as the instigator; it is not demonstrated, however, that this was desired by Rome.
Protected by the Republic, S. continued his struggle against the Papacy by other means: he advised and assisted the envoys of the Calvinist Du Plessis Mornay and of the German Protestant Dohna, who wanted to introduce Protestantism into Venice: but he disappointed them, refusing to convert. In the years 1612-15, under the influence of the Gallican writings against the Council of Trent by Gentillet, Ranchin, Thou and Gillot, he planned to strike a blow at the Papacy of the Counter-Reformation with his Istoria del Concilio Tridentino. In his youth he had known at Mantua Camillo Olivo, former secretary of Card. Ercole Gonzaga, and moreover at Venice the former French ambassador to the Council, Ferrier; he had long been gathering, in addition to verbal accounts, written notes as well, and the State Archive of Venice was fully at his disposal. Despite this, the sources for his Istoria del Concilio Tridentino are relatively poor. The gaps in the sources were filled in with a certain imagination.
The formal merits of the work — concision and masterly precision of language and gripping exposition — are matched by numerous errors in detail; and the greatest flaw is the anti-papal spirit carefully concealed, yet surfacing on every page.
The Istoria is in reality an indictment of the Roman Curia: it was printed in 1619 in London by the apostate Marcantonio de Dominis (v.), hardly without S.'s knowledge. Although it was placed on 22 Nov. 1619 on the Index of Prohibited Books, ten years after its appearance it was already translated into five languages, widely read and often printed despite the confutations of Pallavicino. During the Risorgimento at least three reprints of it were made.
S. believed that he was neither a Protestant nor irreligious. His work is explained by his concept of the Church, strongly influenced by Gallicanism (a concept that continues the line of Marsilius of Padua), and especially by his deep hatred of the Papacy and of the Order of the Jesuits. He was an intelligent, and therefore dangerous, enemy of the papacy of the Catholic Reformation.