The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown: The Down 'n Dirty Mud Wrassle

Previously on the Smackdown...
We have seen that there were sound empirical reasons for accepting the consensus science of a stationary earth, in particular the lack of stellar parallax and of Coriolis effects.
In particular, the Church Fathers had interpreted Scripture in the light of this settled science, since like everyone else they assumed the scientists had gotten it right.  This consensus has stood for 1400 years.
In the early 1600s, a series of telescopic discoveries had shaken Aristotelian cosmology and one (the phases of Venus) had broken Ptolemaic astronomy beyond repair.  These discoveries were being made nearly simultaneously by mathematicians all over Europe: Harriot, Fabricius pere et fils, de Peiresc, Marius, Galileo, Scheiner, Lembo, and others.
Since the earth was "clearly" stationary, most astronomers shifted to the Tychonic or Ursine models.   A few -- mostly humanists rather than scientists -- rallied around the Copernican model.  Kepler's elliptical model for some reason flew below the radar.
One discovery -- the sunspots -- resulted in a flamewar of epic proportions between Fr. Christoph Scheiner, a mathematician in Ingolstadt, and Galileo Galilei, a mathematician-courtier of the Florentine Grand Duke.
It is 1613, and Galileo has published his Letters on Sunspots, after the censors have removed all of his appeals to Scripture.  (They did not object to his straight-up endorsement of Copernicanism.)  Meanwhile, Galileo's enemies are preparing an attack.  Several men of a severely Peripatetic persuasion have formed a "league" (as they have called themselves) under Ludovico delle Colombe.  Learning of this, Galileo calls them the "Pigeon League" (since colomb means "dove").  Ludovico, he says, never opens his mouth without saying something stupid.  Galileo's love of a witty put-down could get him in trouble some day.

"But my most holy intention, how clearly it would appear if some power would bring to light
the slanders, frauds, stratagems, and trickeries that were used eighteen years ago in Rome in
order to deceive the authorities!"   -- Letter: Galileo to Peiresc (22 Feb 1635) Read more »