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Say the name Galileo, and most people picture the astronomer standing before scowling Inquisition judges, forced to recant his claim that the earth revolves about the sun.

To secular scholars, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was a martyr to religious bigotry, demonstrating how pious superstition can shackle human knowledge. To Protestant historians, Galileo's fate is a sharp contrast to the freedom other Enlightenment luminaries, like Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and Johannes Kepler, enjoyed in Reformation regions.

But there's more to Galileo's story. Born in 1564 into a Europe passionate—and passionately divided—about its faith, the astronomer experimented, observed, and published his findings without ecclesiastical restraint for almost seventy years before his run-in with the papal authorities. He lived and died just as faithful to the Roman Church as Boyle was to the Anglican or Kepler to his Lutheran roots.

This stands in contrast to the network of thinkers and tinkerers, self-styled "the New Philosophers," who would help bring the scientific revolution to full flower. Many of those men paid little attention to the commitments of nationality or religion that divided their contemporaries. They considered themselves citizens of a borderless and nonsectarian commonwealth of science. Indeed, for some, their allegiance to the pursuit of verifiable truths about the natural world superseded all other commitments. The Dutch mathematician and physicist Christiaan Huygens, for example, declared, "The World is my Fatherland, Science is my Religion."

Despite Galileo's faithfulness to his church, he is most often portrayed today as a secular scientific hero who stood firm against religious bigotry. His loyalty to his faith is largely ignored. Internationally famous by middle age, he might easily have found more intellectual freedom in England or the Dutch states or even in the French court. Yet he remained in Italy and submitted to an Inquisition he considered ignorant and a pope who used him as a political pawn.

Galileo's career launched in 1604, when he demonstrated that a new star, a supernova, was further away than the moon. This may strike the modern reader as fairly obvious, but the cosmological implications for the early seventeenth century were enormous. His study of the new star confirmed his growing belief in a Copernican—heliocentric—universe.

During this same year, Galileo began pursuing a fruitful patronage relationship by buttering up Cosimo II de Médici, who was slated to inherit his father's title as Grand Duke of Tuscany. The struggling academic dedicated one of his new inventions, a geometric and military compass, to Cosimo. Five more years would go by, however, before the old duke obliged his scion (and gave hope to the astronomer) by dying.

Meanwhile, Galileo supplemented his income by selling his newly invented compass to students, along with a handbook on how to use it. He also invented a primitive thermometer and a barometer. He wrote voluminously, notably on the long-debated phenomenon of motion.

When Cosimo II married in 1608, Galileo produced, as a kind of wedding present for his future patron, a 56-ounce lodestone (magnet) capable of lifting over twice its weight in iron. The astronomer proposed the lodestone as a fitting emblem of Cosimo's own strength and powers of attraction.

The following year, two events occurred that would change Galileo's future. First, the old Duke of Tuscany died, leaving the way clear for his son to assume his position.

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