Paolo Sarpi

Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623) was a Venetian Servite friar, historian and canon lawyer who defended the Republic against the papacy. He entered the Servite Order in 1566 and later became the senate's canonist consultor.

When Pope Paul V laid Venice under interdict in 1606, Sarpi supplied the legal case for defiance; excommunicated in 1607, he survived a dagger attack by five assassins later that year. In 1619 his History of the Council of Trent was published and at once banned in Rome. A friend of Galileo, he died in Venice in 1623.