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When Galileo heard rumours of this amazing instrument he asked his old friend Sarpi for advice, and was surprised to learn that Sarpi had heard the stories some months earlier and discussed them in correspondence with Jacques Badovere, a French nobleman based in Paris, who had once been a pupil of Galileo.

But Sarpi had not passed the news on to Galileo—their correspondence had lapsed, partly due to Sarpi’s time-consuming duties as adviser to the Senate and partly as a result of the tiredness Sarpi felt after his recovery from the assassination attempt.

On 4 August, he sent a coded message to Sarpi in Venice telling him of the success; Sarpi, as adviser to the Senate, delayed any decision on what to do with the Dutch visitor, giving Galileo time to build a telescope with a magnifying power of ten times, set in a tooled leather case.

Although Sarpi may have been slow to realize its importance, Galileo immediately realized that an instrument that could make distant objects visible would be of enormous military and trade importance to Venice, where fortunes often depended on being first to identify which ships were approaching the port.

He also tried to get the political help of the Tuscan state in keeping the Inquisition at bay, but although Ferdinando II had formally taken up his duties as Grand Duke in 1629, at the age of 19, his youth and inexperience meant that Tuscany could not provide the same level of support for Galileo that Venice had once given to Sarpi.