 To confound issues further, the case against Galileo transpired in a fraught political context. Galileo was a creature of the powerful Medici and a personal friend of Pope Urban VIII, connections that significantly modulated developments (Biagioli 1993). There were also pressures stemming from the Counter Reformation, the Thirty Years War, and resulting tensions within Urban’s papacy (McMullin 2005; Miller 2008). It has even been argued (Redondi 1983), that the charge of Copernicanism was the effect of a plea bargain meant to cover up Galileo’s genuinely heretical atomism, though this latter hypothesis has not found much support.