Negotiating Slavery in a Tolerant Frontier: Livorno’s Turkish Bagno (1547–1747)

Figure 1.

Detail of port scene of Livorno, from Francesco Scotto, Itinerario d’Italia, In questa Nuova edizione abbellito di rami, accresciuto, ordinato, ed emendato (Roma: Stamperia del Bernabò e Lazzarini, 1747). Used with permission of the American Academy in Rome. This unattributed city view properly identifies the location of the Quattro Mori sculpture but contains many topographical inaccuracies. One noticeable omission is the absence of Livorno’s prominent central piazza, which is described at length in this edition of Scotto’s text. This travel narrative was published in multiple editions between 1600– 1747, first by Andreas Schottus (d. 1629) and later with textual additions by Francesco Scotto.

The Italian port of Livorno is frequently celebrated as a model for religious tolerance, national diversity, and a liberal free-port economy.¹ By the late sixteenth century, the silting of Pisa’s harbor had paralyzed Tuscan maritime activity, making Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici (r. 1587–1609) desperate to populate a new port within the malaria-ridden coastline of Livorno. After investing heavily in the harbor’s infrastructure, the regime lured settlers to the insalubrious region, offering comprehensive incentives for émigrés from “any nation, Eastern Levantines and Westerners, Spanish, Portuguese, Greeks, Germans, and Italians, Jews, Turks, and Moors, Armenians, Persians, and others.”² The forty-four articles enumerated in the 1591 and 1593 Livornine decrees encompassed comprehensive incentives that assured émigrés security against excessive taxation, protection from the Inquisition, and the right to free and public religious practice. Further provisions discouraged discriminatory practices, counteracted the evangelism of Catholics, and protected religious minorities from slander, abuse, and violence.³ Thus, while religious conflict divided cities throughout post-Reformation Europe, Duke Ferdinando strategically developed the port of Livorno as a frontier of tolerance within the interior of his Catholic duchy.

As a city built nearly ex novo, Livorno’s settlement incentives produced rapid demographic results.⁴ In the closing decades of the Cinquecento, the small backwater port struggled to maintain a permanent population of 500. By 1600, the population reached 3,000, and in 1642 swelled to 12,000 (surpassing that of nearby Pisa). By 1689, Livorno’s growth exceeded the expectations of urban planners and the city hosted a resident population of more than 20,000.⁵ The port transformed from a humble frontier outpost into a cosmopolitan emporium with prominent mercantile communities of Sephardic Jews, Catholic and Orthodox Greeks, Dutch, English, French, and Armenians. From the lavish synagogue situated south of the main cathedral to the mosques nestled within the slave quarters, the urban fabric of seventeenth-century Livorno reflected the regime’s socioeconomic experiment in accommodating religious pluralism.⁶ Ferdinando I’s successors upheld the majority of the Livornine privileges, and in 1676 this political and economic neutrality was codified within the mercantile typology of the porto franco, or free port.

Livorno’s religious tolerance was enthusiastically endorsed by the French Huguenot François Maximilien Misson, who visited the port in 1688. In his travel narrative, Nouveau Voyage d’Italie, first published in 1691, he introduced Livorno as “a completely new city . . . the only ocean port of the Duchy of Tuscany” that is “a free port, where merchants of every country and religion live in complete liberty.” For Misson, religious toleration was evident in the designation of Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim spaces within and around the city, which he described in detail:

Protestants marry aboard English, Dutch, Danish, and other ships that meet in the port, and there they baptize their children. They have a cemetery outside and near the city joining the glacis. The Turks and Jews have them as well (there are a number of Jews, some very rich). The latter do not have any marking on their clothing that identifies them, nor do they in London or Amsterdam; elsewhere it is not like this.⁷

Certainly, Misson’s euphemistic claim for Livorno’s “complete liberty” was conditioned by his recent experience as a Huguenot refugee forced to flee France after King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes...