People database
People from the Italian peninsula involved in the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, 15th–19th centuries. Search by name or filter by role, place, network and period.
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Affaitati Giovan Francesco
1494–1529A merchant from Cremona who arrived in Lisbon around 1494, he entered the circuits linking the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and northern Europe and concluded contracts with the Portuguese Crown for sugar, spices and enslaved people. In 1526 he was involved in the contract concluded by Stefano Spinola with the king for 600 peças of enslaved people.
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Bardi Giacomo
1576Together with Stefano Lercaro he obtained the concession for the trade in enslaved people and raw materials with the port of Mina, in present-day Ghana.
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Ghinetti Piero
1470In 1470 he sent an enslaved African woman to Livorno to be sold to the Cambini.
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Ginori Lorenzo
1675A Florentine merchant and agent active in Lisbon, in 1675 he was commissioned by Cosimo III de' Medici to procure and send to Florence a young Black or Brazilian man skilled in the processing of sugar cane.
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Lercaro Stefano
1576–1587In 1576 he invested, together with the Florentine Giacomo Bardi, in the Mina company, opened by the Casa da Índia to administer the trade in enslaved people and raw materials in Guinea, one of the most profitable in Portugal. Meanwhile he carried out diplomatic activities between the Republic of Genoa and Portugal, at times in direct contact with the king. In 1587 he obtained with his partner Giulio Spinola authorisation to open an exchange bank in Lisbon, which gave him a monopoly position, since the agreement excluded for ten years the opening of similar banks by others.
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Marchionni Bartolomeo
1470–1493Having settled in Lisbon in 1470 as agent of the Cambini bank of Florence, in 1486 he obtained from the Portuguese Crown the contract to import enslaved people from the Rio dos Escravos (Benin coast); in the same year he received from the Spanish sovereigns the licence to trade in enslaved people with Castile and Aragon. It has been calculated that between 1486 and 1493 Marchionni imported at least 1,648 of the 3,589 enslaved people who arrived in Lisbon, that is 45.9%. He then re-exported some of them to Seville (through Giannotto Berardi), to Valencia (through Cesare Barzi) and to Livorno (through Francesco Guidetti).
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Spinola Stefano
1526A Genoese merchant, in 1526 he concluded with the King of Portugal a contract for 600 peças of enslaved people, in which the Cremonese merchant Giovan Francesco Affaitati was also involved. He is a different person from his namesake Stefano Spinola, who in 1610 sold an enslaved person in Genoa to the Centurione enterprises.