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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Affaitati Giovan Francesco
1494–1529A merchant from Cremona who arrived in Lisbon around 1494, he entered the circuits linking the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and northern Europe and concluded contracts with the Portuguese Crown for sugar, spices and enslaved people. In 1526 he was involved in the contract concluded by Stefano Spinola with the king for 600 peças of enslaved people.
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Albasini Antonio
1823–1830Registered as Italian, in August 1829 he arrived in Brazil from Lourenço Marques, present-day Maputo, in Mozambique, with a cargo of enslaved people.
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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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Antelmi Arrigo
1645–1675Captain of the ship Sant'Iacopo of Livorno. His account books and logbooks, covering the years from 1645 to 1657, record transactions relating to the crew and sales of enslaved people; among his papers there is also a register entitled «Ruolo delli schiavi che si trova in essere il S.or Capitano Arrigo Antelio a 20 di luglio 1657».
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Bacarreza Cayetano
1778–1830Born in Genoa, the legitimate son of Jose Bacarreza and Lucía Conforte (AGN, Protocolo 60, 1830). In his will he declared that he owned four enslaved people. Between 1809 and 1817 he is documented in three transactions involving enslaved people. The deed by which he received his wife's dowry also included some enslaved people, entrusted to his administration.
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Barberi Lucas
1788–1821Lucas Barberi y Blanco, resident in Lima, was born in Arenzano, «five leagues from Genoa». In his will he declares that he owns three enslaved people (AGN, Protocolos notariales, no. 638, escribano Jose Maria de la Rosa, 1821). Between 1790 and 1819 he is documented in ten transactions involving enslaved people.
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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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Baroncini Cesare
1594He fitted out two ships for the transport of enslaved people and held licences for the slave trade.
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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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Bassignana (Basiñana) Pedro Benito
1520–1540He formed a partnership with the cleric Alvaro de Castro at Concepción (Hispaniola), who had obtained permission to introduce 200 enslaved people into the island for the plantations of the area, including those of Castro himself. When the agreement with Castro ended, Bassignana obtained further licences to bring enslaved people to Cuba as well, where in two voyages he introduced 115 of them, whereas the licence provided for 80: 35 were therefore introduced illegally. This gave rise to a clash with the governor of the island, which led to Bassignana's imprisonment.
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Belgrano Peri (Pérez) Domingo
1757–1780A native of Oneglia, in 1750 he emigrated to Cádiz, where he Hispanicised his surname to Pérez, and a few years later he moved to Buenos Aires, where he became one of the richest Ligurian merchants of the Río de la Plata. He traded in enslaved people imported from Brazil and started commercial operations with the Banda Oriental, France and Great Britain.
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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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Bonini Stefano
c. 1591–1610A minor investor in the Spanish asiento in the 1590s. In the early seventeenth century he was residing in Cartagena.
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Bustanzo Giuseppe
1663–1667Between 1663 and 1667 he organised the networks of the Grillo and Lomellini asiento in the Caribbean from his base in Cartagena de Indias. In the 1650s he had founded in Cádiz, with his brother Giovanni, a trading house that had already dealt with Grillo and Lomellini before the asiento was granted.
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Ca da Mosto Alvise
1455–1462A Venetian navigator in the service of Prince Henry the Navigator, in 1455 he reached the mouth of the Senegal, where he exchanged horses for enslaved people, and continued as far as the Gambia. On the expedition of 1456 he sailed with the Genoese Antoniotto Usodimare towards the Casamance, the Bijagós Islands and Cape Verde; he then remained seven years in Lagos, before returning to Venice in 1462.
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Cadena Gaspar
c. 1595–1610He purchased licences to export enslaved people from Cape Verde. From Lisbon he moved to Brazil, where he prospered by transporting enslaved Africans destined for the sugar plantations.
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Cadorna Esteban
1790–1818Between 1790 and 1818 he is documented in Lima in at least twenty-one transactions involving enslaved people, several times as buyer and as seller. In 1804 he also formed a company with two other partners, contributing 12,000 pesos to a capital of 36,000, intended for the purchase of 150 enslaved people in Buenos Aires and their resale in Lima.
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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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Carrega Esteban
1520–1540In 1526 he brought a cargo of 100 enslaved people from the African coasts to Santo Domingo. He then made further voyages between Seville, the African coasts and Hispaniola under Castro's licence.
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Castelletto Agostino
1656In June 1655 one of his ships, the Nostra Signora della Guadalupe, commanded by Giovanni Battista Piuma, was seized after arriving at Luanda: Portugal had rebelled against Spain and the Genoese, allies of Spain, were treated there as enemies. In December 1655 Castelletto asked the Overseas Council in Lisbon for free access to the port of Luanda; in a consulta of 9 January 1656 the Council approved the transit of the Genoese ships belonging to him and to Francesco Maria Rosso.
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Castellon Jacome
1510–1535Son of a Genoese merchant resident in Toledo, he settled in 1510 in Santo Domingo, where he was the agent of the Genoese merchants of Seville for the trade in enslaved people and sugar. He also invested in land, in stock-raising and in the city's property market, and purchased an ingenio (sugar-cane plantation) on the island. In 1522 he was sent by the Spanish authorities to put down an indigenous rebellion at Cumaná, and subsequently obtained the title of superintendent of the fortress. This post allowed him to engage in the trade in enslaved indigenous people on the Venezuelan coast, employed above all in pearl fishing. He remained at Cumaná for seven years, until 1528, then returned to Santo Domingo, where he was the agent of Pedro Benito de Basiñana and of Geronimo Grimaldi, who were involved in the slave trade with the island. In 1534-1535 he was considered one of the most important entrepreneurs of the New World.
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Cattaneo Alessandro
1506–1550Son of Cesare Cattaneo, in 1506 he rented a house in Seville; around 1508 he was trading with Santo Domingo and in the 1510s with the Cape Verde archipelago. In 1512 he formed with Giuliano Calvi and Stefano Centurione a company that entrusted him with textiles, wine and ship's biscuit worth 1,000 gold ducats, to be taken to the island of Santiago, in Cape Verde, in exchange for enslaved people. In 1513 he sold some enslaved people brought from the African coast to another Genoese merchant of Seville, Giovan Francesco Grimaldi, who transported them to the New World. In 1550 he signed an asiento with the Crown, managed in Seville by two of his brothers, Nicolas and Visconte, who owned the ship Trinidad. Another relative, Jeronimo, handled the trade between Seville and Mexico and in turn had an agent, Juan, in Mexico City.
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Cattaneo Nicoluso (Nicolas)
1514–1550In June 1514 Francisco Garay, a member of the municipal council of Santo Domingo, authorised Nicoluso Cattaneo to procure for him twelve enslaved Christian people for Hispaniola. In 1536 he received permission to introduce 76 enslaved people into the Americas in exchange for the 226,400 maravedís that the government had confiscated from him that same year as a forced loan. In the 1540s and 1550s, with the vessel Trinidad and in partnership with Vivaldo, he made several voyages between the African coasts and Veracruz.
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Cavaleri Pietro Mattia
1668–1674Agent of the Grillo and Lomellini asiento in the islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo. He had previously operated in Madrid as a private lender and as a merchant through a company based in Genoa, together with his partner Bartolomeo Capa. He began working for Grillo in 1664, if not earlier, supervising the delivery of almost 125,000 pesos from Cartagena to Italy, part of a loan that Grillo had granted to the Crown.