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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Canot Theodore
1819–1860Born in Florence to a French father (Louis Canot, an officer and paymaster in the Napoleonic army) and a Piedmontese mother, in 1819 he left Livorno as a cabin boy on an American vessel. Shipwrecked near Cuba during a voyage to Havana, he eventually reached the city, where in 1826 he embarked on the Areostatico, a slave ship bound for the Rio Pongo, in West Africa. Over the following twenty years or so he was among the principal traders in enslaved people between the African coast and Cuba, first as a commercial agent on the Rio Pongo, then at Gallinas, where he worked with the Spanish slave trader Pedro Blanco. Arrested by the French navy, he was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment in Brest; pardoned by Louis-Philippe after about a year, he returned to Africa. In 1841 he founded at Cape Mount, in Liberia, a trading settlement called New Florence, which the British navy destroyed in 1844. Having resumed the slave trade, in 1847 he was captured during an expedition and taken to New York for trial; he fled before the verdict and took refuge in Brazil. He died in Paris in 1860.
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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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Cei Galeotto
1532–1560Born in Florence in 1513, like Soderini he was forced to leave the city because of his father's republican ideas. His father was executed and the family's large patrimony was confiscated. In 1532, he moved to Seville. In 1539, he sailed for Santo Domingo aboard the Concepción. After a few weeks, the ship put in at Cape Verde to purchase enslaved people to be transported to the Antilles. A total of 250 people were embarked (Cei bought 40 of them) at a price of 36 ducats each. During the voyage, 12 people died of smallpox. Prior to departure, he entered into a two-year accomandita with Luigi Ricasoli, a fellow Florentine based in Seville. Under this agreement, Ricasoli would supply Cei with goods to sell. Cei began selling his merchandise, but Ricasoli's death interrupted the shipments from Spain. After concluding his business with the Ricasoli heirs, he embarked on a caravel bound for Venezuela and Cabo de la Vela. In the nearby pearl-fishing area, he purchased three indigenous people to work as fishermen, who earned him 400 ducats in about ten months. In September 1542, he returned to Santo Domingo, where he resumed living with Giovanni Soderini and Mauro Fantoni. Over the next few years, he participated in various colonisation expeditions in Venezuela and the New Kingdom of Granada, reaching as far as Bogotá. In 1553, he returned to Seville, where he resumed and expanded his commercial activities to include Italy, Germany, and France. He returned to Florence in 1560, where he held several public offices, and he died there in 1579.
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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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de' Medici Francesco
1608–1610Nephew of Giovanni de' Medici, between 1608 and 1610 he purchased from his uncle the rights and proceeds of the giurì di Spagna, the taxes on the trade in enslaved people bound for the New World.
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de' Medici Giovanni
until 1608Natural son of Cosimo I, he held the rights to collect the giurì di Spagna, the duties on the trade in enslaved Black people to the Indies. In 1608 he submitted a petition to sell these rights to his nephew Francesco de' Medici.
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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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Owner of an enslaved African woman named Barbera, who arrived in Livorno from Lisbon in 1461 through Giovanni Guidetti.
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Del Nero Neroso
1584–1586He sent to America 900 enslaved people under the São Tomé contract on behalf of his contractor, Giovanni Battista Rovellasca. He had been an employee of Lorenzo Del Rosso, also a slave trader.
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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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Agent of the Cambini for the Pisa and Livorno branches, he was the owner of an enslaved African woman, Marta, who arrived in Livorno from Lisbon in 1461 through Giovanni Guidetti.
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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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Participation 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, which appointed his natural son Francesco ambassador to England and France and, in 1588, Governor General (de iure) of Brazil.
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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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Guidetti Giovanni
1461–1467Agent of the Cambini in Lisbon, in 1461 he sent three enslaved African women and a range of goods, including hides from Ireland and silks from the Iberian Peninsula, to Livorno on the ship Santa Maria di Nazarette. The three women — Isabell, Barbera and Marta — had been baptised and were destined for domestic work. Isabell was purchased by the Cambini, Barbera by Giovanni degli Albizzi (a member of an important Florentine noble family), and Marta by Ridolfo di Ser Gabriello (a Florentine merchant who lived in Pisa and was an agent of the Cambini in Pisa and Livorno). At the end of 1464, Guidetti sent three more women aboard the caravel Santo Spirito, one of whom was purchased by Piero and Giuliano di Francesco Salviati. The following year, another woman was sent aboard the Dispensiero and purchased by Stefano Mucini, a member of a Florentine family with significant trade interests between Tuscany and Portugal. In 1467, Guidetti sent three more African women aboard the Santa Maria Nunziata. One was sold to Benedetto di Ser Francesco Guardi and the other two to Niccolò di Paradiso Mazzinghi, a Florentine merchant who lived in Pisa. In 1474, Guidetti sent two more large consignments of enslaved people to Livorno: 26 people (25 women and one man) on the Santa Maria Nunziata, and nine women on the Santa Maria Grazia. Not all of them appear to have originated in Africa, as some were described as having light skin. The 25 women were sold in Pisa and Naples, while the man and the other nine women were delivered to Lena Vettori, Guidetti's wife.
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Lapi Francesco
1536He was a partner in the Florentine Strozzi company and represented it in Seville. In 1536, he received authorisation from the sovereign to send goods, accompanied by enslaved people, to the West Indies.