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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Balbi Antonio
1632–1635A Genoese, in 1632 he was an attorney at court and represented Giacomo Saluzzi in collecting the sums owed for sales and shipments of enslaved Black people in Seville and in the Indies.
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Banfi y Parrilla José
until 1781A banker of Genoese origin, knight of the Order of Calatrava and minister of the Supreme Council of the Indies, he died before 1784. His inventory included 16 shares of the Real Compañía de La Habana, deeply involved in the Cuban slave economy, with a nominal value of 500 scudi of 128 quarti each, later reduced to 14 and registered in the name of his daughter María Catalina.
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Cattaneo Alessandro
1506–1550Son of Cesare Cattaneo, he rented a house in Seville in 1506. Around 1508, he began trading with Santo Domingo, and in the 1510s, he traded with the Cape Verde archipelago. In 1512, he established a company with Giuliano Calvi and Stefano Centurione, which entrusted him with textiles, wine, and ship's biscuits worth 1,000 gold ducats. These were to be transported to the island of Santiago in the Cape Verde archipelago in exchange for enslaved people. In 1513, he sold some enslaved people brought from the African coast to another Genoese merchant in Seville, Giovan Francesco Grimaldi, who transported them to the Americas. In 1550, he signed an asiento with the Crown. This was managed in Seville by two of his brothers, Niccolò and Visconte, who owned the ship Trinidad. Another relative, Jeronimo, handled trade between Seville and Mexico, and in turn employed an agent named Juan in Mexico City.
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Centurione Ottavio
1617A Genoese financier active in Madrid, in 1617 he received from the Crown 3,750,000 maravedís secured on the renta de los esclavos negros, the fiscal revenue generated by the slave trade, and later resold the credit in lots.
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de Mari François
1702A Genoese nobleman active between Madrid and Paris, in 1702 he was registered as the holder, on behalf of Francesco Grillo, of a share of 150,000 livres in the Compagnie de Guinée et de l'Asiento. The subscription was actually carried out in Paris by the banker Jean Laurent Verzure, who represented him.
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Fornari (Forne) Domingo
1518–1526With his brother Tomas, Augustin de Vivaldo and Fernan Vazquez he bought the licence that the King of Spain had granted to Gouvenot to bring 4,000 enslaved people to the Americas in eight years. It is not known how many people they sold, but they resold the licences at very high prices, making a profit of 300,000 ducats. The same company, with Genoese and Spanish capital, owned the ingenio of Sanctis Spiritu, just outside Santo Domingo.
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Fornari (Forne) Tomas
1518–1526With his brother Domingo, Augustin de Vivaldo and Fernan Vazquez he bought the licence that the King of Spain had granted to Gouvenot to bring 4,000 enslaved people to the Americas in eight years. It is not known how many people they sold, but they resold the licences at very high prices, making a profit of 300,000 ducats. The same company, with Genoese and Spanish capital, owned the ingenio of Sanctis Spiritu, just outside Santo Domingo.
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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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Grillo Domenico
1663–1674Holder, together with Ambrogio Lomellini, of the asiento granted by the Crown from 1663 to 1674. The two bought enslaved people from the English and the Dutch, in Jamaica, Barbados and Curaçao, in exchange for silver and other colonial products, and resold them in the ports of Spanish America. During this period they officially sold about 22,000 of them, to which must be added those introduced through illegal trade, roughly twice as many.
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Lomellini Ambrogio (o Ambrosio)
1663–1674Holder, together with Domenico Grillo, of the asiento granted by the Spanish Crown between 1663 and 1674. It is estimated that in the eleven years of the asiento the two introduced about 22,000 enslaved people into the Spanish colonies, plus many others, almost twice as many, introduced illegally. He died in 1667, on the return voyage from Cartagena de Indias, where he had gone to renegotiate the asiento; Grillo achieved that aim in 1668, a few months after his death.
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Treasurer to Her Royal Highness, in Madrid he looked after the financial interests of María Luisa of Bourbon-Parma, Princess of Asturias. On 9 July 1784 he collected on her behalf the dividend on 3 and one-third shares of the Real Compañía de La Habana, deeply involved in the Cuban slave economy: 83 and one-third pesos, equal to 1,268 reales de vellón. The securities came from the estate of Elisabeth Farnese.
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In 1673 Grillo asked the Council of the Indies to appoint him agent of the asiento in Peru; he probably never crossed the Atlantic. In the 1660s he had worked in Madrid as an agent of Giovanni Battista Lomellini.
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Rossi Juan Bautista
1784A trustee and business agent, in Madrid he collected the income from the Real Compañía de La Habana, deeply involved in the Cuban slave economy, due to the Infante Fernando, Duke of Parma: 3 and one-third shares, which came from the estate of Elisabeth Farnese. The dividend, 83 and one-third pesos, equal to 1,268 reales de vellón, was collected on 30 July 1784.
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Saluzzi Giacomo
1632–1636Through his representative, Antonio Balbi, he claimed the dividends from a shipment of enslaved Africans undertaken with Antonio del Campo and Benavidez. He also claimed 84,500 ducats for cargo shipped to the Indies in 1632. It seems he also benefited from licences granted by Philip IV's court in the 1630s, linking him directly to those granted to Nicola Salvago.
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Salvago Ambrogio (o Ambrosio)
1603–1609At the beginning of the seventeenth century he invested, together with Francesco Serra, in the asiento of the Portuguese Gonzalo Baez Coutinho.
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Salvago Nicola
1630–1649In 1630, Nicola Salvago purchased a batch of licences to sell 1,500 enslaved people in Buenos Aires from the Cardinal-Infante, who had obtained them from his brother, Philip IV. In 1634, he obtained permission from the Casa de la Contratación in Seville to bring a further 1,000 people to the same city. In 1638, he purchased an additional 335 licences for the same purpose. Salvago also introduced many enslaved people into Buenos Aires illegally, often using his own ships, such as the Santísima Trinidad.
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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.
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Vivaldi (Vivaldo) Augustin
1518–1526With Tomas and Domingo Forne and Fernan Vazquez he bought the licence that the King of Spain had granted to Gouvenot to bring 4,000 enslaved people to the Americas in eight years. It is not known how many people they sold, but they resold the licences at very high prices, making a profit of 300,000 ducats. The same company, with Genoese and Spanish capital, owned the ingenio of Sanctis Spiritu, just outside Santo Domingo.