Gracia Mendes Nasi

Banker
Gracia Mendes Nasi was one of the most influential and wealthiest Jewish women of 16th century Renaissance Europe. Because of her descent she was prosecuted and had to flee across Europe. She finally settled in the Ottoman Empire from where she ran her business.

Gracia was born in Portugal as a Christian and her original name was Beatrice de Luna. In 1528 she married Francisco Mendes, who had with his brother Diogo established a business in spices and precious stones which evolved in a powerful trading company and a bank of world repute with agents across Europe and around the Mediterranean. After Francisco’s death in 1536, she inherited a half of his enormous fortune and the following year moved to Antwerp. There she became known in aristocratic society, and along with her brother-in-law, Diogo, she organized a secret network through Europe to facilitate the flight of Marranos from Portugal, via the Low Countries, and sometimes England, to Italy and more tolerant Ottoman Empire. They also sought the help of the papal nuncio to stop the activity of the Inquisition in Portugal in 1535. In 1545 she fled to Venice, because of the pressure from the government to seize the Mendes fortune. In Venice she was denounced to the authorities as a Judaizer by her own sister Reyna, Diogo’s widow, but through Turkish diplomatic intervention on her behalf she was released. She went to Ferrara and stayed there until she finally settled in Constantinople in 1553.

In Constantinople she continued to help the fugitives from the Inquisition and to support scholars, academies and synagogues. In 1556, ith the help of her son-in-law Joseph, she organized the blockade of the port of Ancona to avenge the persecution of the Marranos there. In 1558 or 1559 she secured from the sultan, in return for an annual payment of 1,000 ducats, a grant of the ruined city of Tiberias in Ereẓ Israel, where she set up a yeshivah. The grant was renewed to Joseph and the two of them tried to develop it commercially. Gracia Mendes Nasi probably died in Ereẓ Israel, in 1569.