Abstract

The article deals with a group of Portuguese merchants, who over the course of two generations settled in Pisa and Livorno at the behest of Dukes Cosimo and Ferdinando de’ Medici between 1549 and 1591. They were descendants of Jews who had converted to Christianity and in the last decade of the sixteenth century, when given the possibility to do so, some openly embraced Judaism. The members of this group, who never developed the kinds of institutions typically associated with foreign communities, served as mediators between the Iberian world in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and the Italian peninsula while they made inroads into Tuscan society with a view to remaining there.