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.
Advanced search
-
Salvago Nicola
1630–1649In 1630 Nicola Salvago purchased from the Cardinal-Infante, who in turn had obtained them from his brother Philip IV, a batch of licences to sell 1,500 enslaved people in Buenos Aires. In 1634 he obtained from the Casa de la Contratación of Seville permission to bring another 1,000 to the same city, and in 1638 he purchased a further 335 licences for the same traffic. He also introduced many enslaved people into Buenos Aires illegally, often on his own ships such as the Santísima Trinidad.
-
Salvago Stefano
1530–1539 (decade)A Genoese businessman and factor in Seville for the banker Ansaldo Grimaldi, in the 1530s he took part in trading and credit companies between Madrid, Valladolid and Seville and became an influential asentista. The sources expressly mention his asientos for the slave trade. He also operated with Antonio Grimaldi and with Tomasso Salvago, another factor of the same network.
-
Salvago Tomasso
1450A member of the Salvago merchant family, on 28 April 1450 he purchased an enslaved person in Genoa from Geronimo de Carmarino, as documented by a notarial deed. He is a different person from the Tomasso Salvago active as factor for Ansaldo Grimaldi in Seville in 1530.
-
Salviati Lorenzo
1601A Florentine marquis, in 1601 he obtained from Philip III the privilege of the so-called giurì di Spagna, that is, the right to collect the duties on the sale and trade of enslaved Black people transported to the West Indies. The proceeds and credits connected with this duty later passed into the assets of the Monte di Pietà of Florence.
-
Owners of an enslaved African woman, one of the three whom Giovanni Guidetti sent from Lisbon to Livorno on the caravel Santo Spirito at the end of 1464.
-
A real cédula signed by the king in 1555 expressly authorised him to take with him to the Indies, to Puerto Rico, six enslaved Black people as personal servants. The document associates him with Antonio Merlo as a member of the same family of Italian origin.
-
A member of the House of Assembly of Jamaica, he came from a Jewish family of Italian origin. He owned a plantation in St. Ann, where 18 enslaved people worked, two plantations in St. Catherine, with about 15 enslaved people, and perhaps one in St. John. He was the father of Jacob J. Sanguinetti and Caroline Blanche Lucretia Sanguinetti.
-
Sauli Franceso Maria
1620–1699Francesco Maria Sauli operated in Genoa on behalf of Grillo and Lomellini: he received and sold the goods arriving from Cádiz, procured credit and insured the asiento ships. His activity, however, went far beyond this: he invested in Roman and Neapolitan public debt, traded in grain, silver, silk textiles and marble, and invested in the Genoese shipyards. In 1666 he supplied Grillo and Lomellini with galleons of 500 tons each for the slave trade. In 1667 he procured for Feroni, in Amsterdam, funds to buy enslaved people for the asiento. At the beginning of 1668 Grillo asked him to insure the ship Santa Cruz, of 500 tons, with 34 guns and a crew of 70 men, commanded by Giovanni Francesco Garibaldo: the ship was to sail from Cádiz to Angola, load enslaved people there and carry them to Curaçao, Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico, perhaps also to Cumaná and Caracas, and then transport silver from Cádiz to Genoa. In March 1668 Sauli won the tender for the insurance.
-
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.
-
Secchi Jean
1878–1879Between 1878 and 1879 Secchi and his associates, Pantin, Lecavallerie, Texidor, Larrabide and Jimenez, transported to Cuba groups of seven to forty people at a time, of Indian, Chinese and Venezuelan origin, as indentured servants.
-
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.
-
Serra Francesco
1603–1609He invested in the slave asiento of the Portuguese Gonzalo Báez Coutinho together with Ambrogio Salvago, but did not take part in the logistical management of the activities.
-
Siccoli Pietro
1839Captain of the Bela Fiorentina (La Bella Fiorentina), a ship built in Genoa that sailed under the Portuguese or Brazilian flag. Having set out from Havana, she was captured by the British in 1839 near the coast of Sierra Leone.
-
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.
-
Owner of the ship San Pedro, used in the slave trade by Cesare Baroncini.
-
He was among those who in 1634 obtained licences to sail from the ports of Seville, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Cádiz, Lisbon and the Canaries, load enslaved people at Cape Verde, in Guinea, at São Tomé, in Angola and at Mina, and transport them to New Spain and Tierra Firme (Colombia and Venezuela).
-
Spinola Ambrosio
1594He held licences for the trade in enslaved people on the ship San Miguel.
-
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.
-
Spinola Tolomeo
from 1547With other Genoese (Pinelli, Negron, Fiesco) he formed a company with a capital of 12,000 ducats, one third of which was his. The company sold enslaved people in New Spain in exchange for sugar. The link between the slave trade and sugar became ever closer, and sugar became the second largest export after silver. The partners also invested in sugar production in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico in the first quarter of the sixteenth century.
-
Suparo Santiago
1770–1804After emigrating to Buenos Aires in 1770, he got married and had nine children. He owned a farmhouse (quinta) and nine enslaved people.
-
Tedeschi Giuseppe
c. 1670–1700A missionary, he sent enslaved people from Goa to Cosimo III.
-
Terri Antonio
1755–1767Born in the Marquisate of Finale, in the Republic of Genoa, the legitimate son of Antonio Terri and Angela Adriano. In Cádiz he married Antonia Álvarez Campana Cardona, whose mother was a native of Finale (AGN, Protocolo 20, 1780). Between 1755 and 1767 he is documented in three transactions involving enslaved people.
-
Usodimare Antoniotto
1455–1456A Genoese navigator in the service of the Portuguese, in 1455 he came into possession of 31 enslaved people from the Gambia. In 1456 he took part with Alvise Ca da Mosto in the expedition that reached the Casamance, the Bijagós Islands and Cape Verde.
-
Vanni Bartolomeo
1460–1469 (decade)An agent of the Cambini bank, from the early 1460s he took part in the importation of enslaved Black people from Lisbon to Florence. He operated in the same network as Giovanni Guidetti, who in 1461 brought to Tuscany Isabell, Barbera and Marta, destined respectively for the Cambini family, Giovanni degli Albizzi and Ridolfo di ser Gabriello.
-
Genoese owner of the galleon on which, in 1591, Niccolò Parenti and the young Francesco Carletti embarked at Livorno for an expedition organised by Parenti to purchase enslaved Black people in Africa and transport them to America.