A prison for slaves in Livorno was the macabre scene. During the summer of 1610, a group of 14 Jewish women and girls from North Africa arrived at the dark place. A high-ranking state official, Dr. Bernardetto Buonromei, ordered that all of them be assigned to the men's module, breaking any established norm.
What happened there then, unfortunately, you can already imagine. Muslim slaves and Christian convicts sexually abused these women. The scene was so despicable that one of the victims attempted to throw her young daughters out of the prison window and commit suicide.
Historian Tamar Herzig, a professor at Tel Aviv University, has just discovered hitherto unknown evidence of that traumatic event. As she explains in an article published in the American Historical Review, Buonromei put everything she started into silencing what happened, trying to erase from the collective memory the suffering of that group of women who suffered a gang rape at the beginning of the century. XVII.
The documents studied by Herzig indicate that it was customary in the Livorno prison to separate women and men into different sections, a rule that was not followed in that case. When they learned what had happened, representatives of the city's influential Jewish community sent protests to the Tuscan authorities denouncing the unprecedented sexual abuse.
All complaints and testimonies, however, were soon silenced with the help of the weak and sickly IV Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo II de' Medici, who backed Dr. Buonromei. The grand duke accepted the official's claims that his actions had been aimed at increasing the Tuscan state's profits from the slave trade, ensuring the future payment of high ransom fees for enslaved foreign Jews by Tuscan's local Jewish community. Livorno.
Buonromei kept his job as physician in charge of the slave prison, known as Bagno and completed in 1605, and when he died a few years later Cosimo II himself paid for his tombstone in Livorno's main church.
The Jewish community of Livorno in the 17th century was one of the richest and most influential in Italy and its relationship with the Tuscan rulers used to be strong. But according to the texts found by Tamar Herzig, even the wealthiest and most well-connected members of this community were subject to extortion by government officials like Buonromei.
The researcher found that the rulers of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany turned the gang rape incident into a huge show of violence, using it to pressure Livorno's Jews into agreeing to pay exorbitant ransom fees for people captured in the North Africa and forcibly transported to the northwestern Italian city.
Buonromei, who was Livorno's first mayor before his appointment to the slave prison, is still honored today as one of the city's founding fathers. A street in the city center bears his name, and a figure commemorating him parades in the annual processions that celebrate the elevation of the municipality to the category of city.
"Revealing the female and Jewish aspects of the slave trade in Italy is very important, because these issues have been largely neglected in historical research in the 16th and 17th centuries. I hope that by raising awareness of the phenomenon of female slavery , this work will lead to a reconsideration of the current commemoration of slavers like Bernardetto Buonromei, thus achieving some historical justice for the victims," Herzig notes.
Dr. Buonromei not only made his fortune from the slave trade in the main slave center of early modern Italy, but, as the expert points out, he was personally responsible for the horrendous abuse of Jewish women and girls who were enslaved after capture them by force in Tetouan (in the north of Morocco).
This collective inter-ethnic rape, moreover, clashed with the official policy of Livorno, where there was a racist law that since 1593 prohibited sexual contact not only between Christians and Jews, but also between a Jew and "a Turk, whether man or woman, or … a Moor, whether man or woman”.
Most studies of slavery in 17th-century Italy had focused primarily on galley slaves, who reportedly suffered harsher treatment than enslaved women. Another factor that came into focus was the rivalry between Muslims and Christians during this period.
“But until now very few works have addressed the place of Jews as victims of trafficking in Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries. Slave rape was endemic in both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, but it was rarely noted in the historical record. This study is the first to reveal the attitude of Italian representatives towards Jewish women from North Africa, captured by force and taken to Italian ports as slaves, an attitude that significantly impacted relations between local Jews and Christians. , he concludes.
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