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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Infante and Duke of Parma, beneficial owner of 3 and one-third shares of the Real Compañía de La Habana, deeply involved in the Cuban slave economy, which came from the estate of Elisabeth Farnese. The dividend, 83 and one-third pesos, was collected on 30 July 1784 by the trustee Juan Bautista Rossi. The coupons document the transfer of Cuban income to the courts of the Italian peninsula.
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Princess of Asturias and wife of the future Charles IV of Spain, through the Farnese inheritance she was the beneficial owner of 3 and one-third shares of the Real Compañía de La Habana, deeply involved in the Cuban slave economy.
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Cipriani Leonetto
1812–1888Born in Centuri, Corsica, on 16 October 1812, to Matteo Cipriani and Caterina Caracciolo, he died on 10 May 1888. Having moved with his family to Livorno in 1822, in 1831 he was sent by his father to Trinidad to look after the family's considerable commercial and financial interests in the Antilles. He made two stays in America (1831-1834 and 1835-1836), during which he operated in Trinidad, St. Thomas and Puerto Rico. In 1835, on news of the emancipation of enslaved people in the British colonies, he was sent to London and then to Trinidad to protect the family's mortgage claims on slave estates; the Cipriani family is among the beneficiaries of the compensation provided for by British law. On the death of his father, in 1837, he accepted the guardianship of his younger siblings and inherited agricultural estates in Tuscany and Corsica, in addition to the interests in the Antilles. An entrepreneur, soldier and politician, he took part in the wars of independence, was governor of Livorno, consul of the Kingdom of Sardinia in California (1852-1855), Governor General of the Romagna (1859) and senator of the Kingdom of Italy.
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Colombo Cristoforo
1493He sent to Giannotto Berardi, partner of Bartolomeo Marchionni in Seville, the first known shipment of enslaved people from the Americas to Europe: Indigenous Taíno people.
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d’Este Isabella
1491Marchioness of Mantua, in 1491 she instructed her agent in Venice, Giorgio Brognolo, to procure for her an African girl, «una moreta», aged between one and a half and four years.
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De Negron Carlos
1536–1540Son of a Genoese who had arrived in Seville at the beginning of the sixteenth century and been naturalised. A graduate in law, he was also active in the slave trade: he owned two galleons that sailed between Africa and Veracruz. He married a prominent member of the Sevillian nobility. He was later appointed legal adviser to the tribunal of the Inquisition, then fiscal of the Council of the Indies and finally of the Council of Castile. His seven children became important officials or landowners.
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de’ Medici Cosimo I
1555Duke of Florence and later Grand Duke of Tuscany, he owned enslaved people employed on the Medici galleys. A list of 1555 of the oarsmen in his possession includes a man described as «moro negro», employed on board as a trumpeter.
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de’ Medici Cosimo III
1680–1699 (decade)Grand Duke of Tuscany, between the 1680s and 1690s he had purchased for his court Eustachio, an African man skilled in the preparation of sweets «all'indiana», who remained his property. He also asked his agent Lorenzo Ginori to procure for him a young Black or Brazilian man skilled in the processing of sugar cane.
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Durazzo Marcello
1765–1772He invested in the Compañía Gaditana de Negros, and thus in the slave trade, through José María Enrile.
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Farnese Elisabetta
1784Queen Mother of Spain, originally from Parma. According to the coupons of 1784, the securities of the Real Compañía de La Habana, deeply involved in the Cuban slave economy, which passed to the Bourbon-Parma came from her estate: 3 and one-third shares each to the Infante Fernando, Duke of Parma, and to María Luisa, Princess of Asturias. The collections were handled in Madrid by the Italian trustees Juan Bautista Rossi and Francisco Antonio Paglia.
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Feroni Francesco
1660–1670Born in Empoli between 1614 and 1616, he moved to Livorno, where he worked for the merchant and senator Lorenzo Buonaccorsi, who probably sent him to Amsterdam. There he first took part in the grain trade to Italy, and above all to Livorno, where in 1645 he managed to send 1,650 tons of Baltic grain by chartering sixteen ships; further shipments followed. He became an important figure in the Italian community of Amsterdam, and Ferdinando II asked him to represent him before the States General. In the meantime he diversified his business: he entered the trade with Portugal, to which he exported linen and textiles and from which he imported Brazilian sugar and salt, and he was one of the main importers of Spanish wool into the United Provinces. His most profitable trade, however, was the slave trade. He invested part of the profits from the grain trade in the purchase of a ship, the Speranza, which carried textiles and alcoholic drinks to Guinea in exchange for enslaved people; after they had been sold in America, on the return voyage the Speranza carried sugar, cocoa, tobacco and gold ingots to Europe. His commercial successes depended on his good relations with the Dutch West India Company. From 1662 he took part in the Grillo and Lomellini asiento, bringing enslaved people from Guinea to the Caribbean.
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Giustiniani Giustiniano
1663–1704From 1663 to 1674 Giustiniani served on the Isthmus of Panama as an agent of the Grillo and Lomellini asiento. His duties included the logistics of the slave trade: he received the asiento ships arriving at Portobelo, assessed the state of health of the captives, saw to their sustenance, sold them in the local markets and organised their transfer across the isthmus to Panama. He was thus involved in twenty-five asiento voyages that reached the isthmus, and was responsible for the lives of almost 11,500 captives. After the end of the Grillo and Lomellini asiento he married a noblewoman from Navarre and returned with her to Spain, to Madrid. He nevertheless continued to be involved in the slave trade through his close collaboration with his brother-in-law Antonio Echeverz, who at the beginning of the eighteenth century had become one of the most powerful men on the isthmus, a great owner of land and of enslaved people. In the first months of 1692 the Venetian Nicolás Porcio, a key figure in the asiento since the late 1670s, appointed Giustiniani chief administrator of the asiento in the event of his death, which occurred two years later. With the proceeds of the slave trade Giustiniani purchased government offices and titles from the Crown: honorary offices in the Council of Italy and the Council of War (1684), the office of provincial alcalde of Panama and Portobelo (1685), the habit of knight of the Order of Calatrava (1692), and the titles of Marquis of Peñaflorida and Viscount of Casares (1704).
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Imperiale Francesco Maria
1654–1655He financed the voyage of the slave ship Nuestra Señora de Guapelo y Guadalupe, which was owned by Giovanni Battista Piuma Campodonico and was set to transport enslaved people from Luanda to Santo Domingo in the Caribbean.
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Montesisto Giuseppe
1765–1772Genoese consul in Cádiz, he invested in the Compañía Gaditana de Negros and thus in the slave trade to the Spanish colonies.
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Pluma Pasquale
1829–1840Consul general of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Cuba, he was accused of having validated the papers of several slave ships. In 1836 he was involved in the murky affair of the Cavallo Marino, a Sardinian brigantine already reported by the British at Bahia for having illegally introduced a large consignment of dried meat intended for the enslaved people of the Brazilian plantations. The Cavallo Marino had arrived in Havana on 1 February 1836 and from there had set out again for the African coasts, from which she returned in January of the following year, but under the Portuguese flag. In 1840, after the Grand Duchy had signed the Anglo-French treaties for the suppression of the slave trade in 1837, the British authorities accused him of having falsified the ship's papers of two vessels engaged in the slave trade: the Bella Fiorentina, a Tuscan schooner seized on 20 May 1839 off present-day Liberia, and the Victoria de Libertade, a Portuguese schooner captured on 26 June 1839 off Sierra Leone. To these two ships, owned by two Spaniards, he had issued false papers of other states. He was dismissed in 1840.
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Scala Giambattista
1840–1850Born in Chiavari in 1817 to a family of sailors, he left school at the age of twelve to go to sea with his father. Having obtained his captain's licence in Genoa, he made trading voyages between the Ligurian port and Brazil, with at least two calls in West Africa around 1846. The suspicion of his involvement in the slave trade dates from this period. The main source of the accusation is the British consul Benjamin Campbell, who met Scala in Freetown in 1853 and reported to the British Foreign Secretary that he recognised him as one of those skilful and cunning Genoese captains who sailed under the Sardinian flag and had repeatedly eluded the patrols of the Royal Navy. He was later Italian consul in Lagos; in 1862 he published in Sampierdarena the memoirs of a journey he had made to Abeokuta in 1858.
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Serra Baltasar
c. 1691–1700A member of the Ligurian patrician family of the Serra, active in the Spanish administration. He was appointed juez conservador of the monopoly of the asiento de negros, with the task of protecting the legal privileges and commercial interests connected with the introduction and sale of enslaved Black people in the American colonies.