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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Amatori Benozzo
1503–1517He acted as a procurator for various Florentine merchants in Lisbon, including Marchionni, Morelli and Sernigi, as well as for Portuguese merchants. He also maintained ties with other Florentines based on the Iberian Peninsula: in 1506, for instance, he sent an enslaved boy of thirteen from Madeira to Andrea Canigiani, who was living in Valencia.
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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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Barzi Cesare
1486–1519Marchionni's agent in Valencia. Between 1489 and 1497, he imported an average of 268.5 enslaved Black people into Valencia each year, totalling 2,148. In the 1490s, he was the city's leading slave trader. He was also a marine insurer, typically insuring cargoes of sugar bound for the Mediterranean (Pisa) or Flanders, either on his own behalf or on behalf of other operators, primarily Italians or conversos. In 1510, he founded a trading company in Lyon with several other partners, including Venturi, Carnesecchi and Boninsegni.
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Berardi Giannotto
1482–1495He was a Florentine merchant who lived in Seville and ran the Seville branch of the Medici bank. Along with Marchionni and Giovanni, his brother, he obtained permission to trade enslaved people from the Canary Islands and the African coast in the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. He also played a key role in financing exploration and conquest enterprises, including the conquest of the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands with the Genoese banker Francisco de Riberol, and Columbus's first voyage. During his second voyage, it was precisely to Berardi that Christopher Columbus sent the first known shipment of enslaved indigenous people to cross the Atlantic. In 1495, he signed an agreement with the Spanish monarchs to dispatch twelve caravels to the West Indies to supply Hispaniola. However, he did not live to see the results as he died in January 1496, before the caravels set sail. Moreover, the caravels never reached the New World as they were wrecked in the Strait of Gibraltar a few days after setting off. Following his death, the company was inherited by Amerigo Vespucci, who sold it a few years later to another Florentine entrepreneur, Donato Nicolini. Nicolini then entrusted Piero Rondinelli with the management of the Seville business.
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Cambini Francesco e Bernardo
1461–1469Owners of two enslaved African women, Isabell and Giovanna, who arrived in Livorni from Lisbon in 1461 and 1469 respectively through Giovanni Guidetti, agent of the Cambini bank in Lisbon.
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Campana Bastiano
1547Agent and factor of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici. In 1547 he was sent to Portugal to purchase for the duke goods, animals and enslaved people destined for the court of Florence. His diary contains the accounts of those purchases.
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Carletti Francesco (e Antonio)
1594–1595Francesco Carletti and his father Antonio bought 80 licences, at 25 ducats each, to transport enslaved people from Cape Verde to the Indies. They bought 75 people, two thirds of them male, paying 100 scudi each in order to resell them at 170. Having left San Jacopo on 19 April 1595, after thirty days they arrived at Cartagena. Many of the people transported died during the voyage, and others arrived ill; Francesco states that he lost 40% of the capital invested. From Cartagena, where in February the goods they had sent from Spain for Peru had also arrived, they went on to Panama and from there embarked for Lima. In Lima they sold, for a total of 1,600 scudi, four of the enslaved people, who had meanwhile recovered and had travelled with them. They then sold the rest of the merchandise in exchange for some silver bars of 70-80 pounds each.
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Dal Borgo Federico
1539Agent of the Strozzi company in Seville, in 1539 he received from the sovereign the licence to transport enslaved people and goods to America.
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Del Rosso Lorenzo
1548–1570In 1548 Lorenzo del Rosso and Francisco “Rucho” obtained a licence to transport thirty-five enslaved Africans to the Indies, paid for in all 105,000 maravedís, equivalent to 280 ducats, and received silver in return. Between 1569 and 1579 Del Rosso transported a further 230 enslaved people to the Americas.
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Ferrari Francesco
1601–1700 (century)A Florentine merchant resident in Amsterdam, in the seventeenth century he formed with the Genoese merchants of Cádiz Domenico Recagno, Bartolomeo Grillo and Ambrogio Lomellini a company that organised the transport of enslaved people to American ports.
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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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Giraldi Niccolò
c. 1550Participation in the slave trade and in other business in Atlantic exchanges enabled his family to enter the Portuguese nobility in the mid-sixteenth century, to purchase the captaincy of Ilhéus and to win the favour of the Lisbon court.
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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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Mazzinghi Niccolò
1467Owner of two enslaved African people, a woman and a girl, who arrived in Livorno from Lisbon in 1467 through Giovanni Guidetti.
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Mucini Stefano
1464He bought an enslaved African woman from Giovanni Guidetti, who had brought her to Livorno from Lisbon.
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Parenti Niccolò
1591A Florentine merchant, in 1591 he organised a voyage from Livorno to Africa to purchase enslaved Black people and transport them to America. The expedition was joined by the eighteen-year-old Francesco Carletti, who embarked in his service on a galleon belonging to the Genoese shipowner Pietro Paolo Vassallo.
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Ricasoli Luigi
1526In December 1526 Luigi Ricasoli and Giovanni Orsucci form Lucca, after declaring that they had resided in Spain for more than fifteen years, obtained from the sovereign the right to send goods accompanied by enslaved people to the West Indies.
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Soderini Giovanni
1536–1556He was born in Florence on 27 July 1511. Following the beheading of his father, a republican, and the sequestration of the family's property, he was forced to leave the city. He moved to Seville, and from there to Santo Domingo around 1536. By 1543, he owned La Magdalena, a sugar mill located southwest of Santo Domingo. During this period, he met Alonso Hernández de Las Varas, a wealthy sugar entrepreneur whose family had been established in Hispaniola for many years. Shortly afterwards, he married Alonso's eldest daughter, Isabel, thereby entering the island's sugar oligarchy. Through this marriage, he became co-owner of the Santa Bárbara sugar mill near Azua la Vieja. Towards the end of his life, it is estimated that he owned around 200 enslaved people, with 53 registered at La Magdalena in 1556, 138 at Santa Bárbara in 1557, and nine in his domestic service. Despite having attained an excellent position, he diversified his business by trading with Cuba. In 1552, he organised an enterprise with the German Melchor Grubel to mine gold in the Colombian Andes.