Gracia Mendes Nasi

Gracia Mendes Nasi (1510 – 1569), also known as Doña Gracia or La Señora (The Lady), was a Portuguese Sephardi philanthropist, businesswoman, and one of the wealthiest women of Renaissance Europe. She married Francisco Mendes, whose Hebrew name was Tsemach Benveniste. She was the maternal aunt and business partner of Joseph Nasi, simultaneously known by his alias João Miques, who became a prominent figure in the politics of the Ottoman Empire. She also developed an escape network that saved hundreds of conversos from the Inquisition. Like many Sephardic Jews hiding their true identities, she had a Christianized name, Beatriz (Beatrice) de Luna Miques.
Gracia Mendes Nasi was born in Lisbon, Portugal circa 1510. Her family were anusim from Aragon, Spain. She had a younger sister, Reyna (d. 1556), just as known by her Christian name, Brianda.
In Sephardic contexts, the anusim were the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who were forcibly converted to Christianity as a result of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. The Bnei Anusim are the descendants of these Jews. Though the penalty(ies) for being accused of Judaizing (judaizando in Spanish and Portuguese) was/were well known, countless anusim still held their devotion and connection to Judaism close. In Europe, Jews were often forced to accept Christianity, as was the case in Iberia, while Jews in Asia and North Africa were forced into Islam instead. This is the case for groups like the Mashhadi Jews.
The de Luna family fled to Portugal after the Catholic monarchs of the Spanish Crown, Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, expelled the Jews in 1492. If they hadn’t fled when they did, it’d be very tricky to keep their Jewish practices alive, and themselves alive as well.
Nonetheless, five years later in 1497, the family couldn’t escape their fate: they found themselves forcibly converted to Catholicism, along with most other Jews and Muslims in Portugal at the time.
Gracia’s father, Álvaro de Luna (possibly a relative of Álvaro de Luna from Spain (1388 or 1390 – 1453), a colleague of Don Abraham Benveniste), was married to Felipa Mendes Benveniste, the sister of the Mendes brothers, Francisco and Diogo.
In 1528, at only 18, Gracia married her uncle, Francisco Mendes, a wealthy spice trader, and a fellow New Christian (Cristiano Nuevo and Cristão Novo in Spanish and Portuguese, respectively). He was also a creditor and confidante of John III of Portugal. Brianda later married Francisco's brother, Diogo.
Francisco belonged to the same prominent family as Gracia’s mother, Benveniste, from Habsburg Spain. She was the great-grandchild of Don Abraham Benveniste of Castile.
The couple married in a secret Jewish wedding in Gracia’s basement in her home. Then, they also married in a public ceremony, but at the Lisbon Cathedral with a public Catholic wedding.
Francisco Mendes and his brother, Diogo Mendes, were the masterminds behind an influential and globally renowned trading enterprise and bank, with agents across Europe and around the Mediterranean. The House of Mendes and the House of Benveniste likely began as a company centered on trading precious valuables and employing currency arbitrage. With the onset of the Age of Discovery and the Portuguese discovery of a sea route to India, the Mendes brothers became particularly notable spice traders. They also expanded into silver trading, a crucial payment method for Asian traders who supplied the business with spices.
In the winter of 1535, Francisco died, leaving behind his young wife Gracia with their infant daughter, Anna. In his will, he divided his fortune between Doña and his brother and business partner, Diogo. This decision would leave Doña Gracia a wealthy woman. After some time had passed, she asked the Pope if his remains could be put to rest in a new burial place. Once she received the Pope’s approval, she had her now-resting husband’s body moved to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
A few years before Francisco's death in 1535, his brother, Diogo, had opened a branch office of their house in the city of Antwerp together with his relative Abraham Benveniste. Soon after Francisco's death, Doña Gracia Mendes moved to Antwerp to join Diogo with her infant daughter, Ana (the future wife of Joseph Nasi) and her younger sister, Brianda de Luna. The move from Lisbon was also timely due to the changing political landscape in Portugal, when as of 23 May 1536, the Pope Paul III ordered the establishment of a Portuguese Inquisition.
Once they settled in Antwerp, Beatrice invested her family fortune in her brother-in-law's business, and started to make a name for herself not only as his business partner but as an independent business woman herself. The relationship between the de Luna and Mendes households became even stronger, with the marriage between Beatrice's sister, Brianda, and Diogo Mendes. But just five years after Beatrice Mendes settled in Antwerp, Diogo also died. It was now 1542, and in his will he left his niece and sister-in-law control of the Mendes commercial empire, making Beatrice Mendes an important businesswoman. The enormous wealth enabled her to influence kings and popes, which she did to protect her fellow Conversos. It also enabled her to finance her escape network. It is believed she was the driving force behind the publication of the Ferrara Bible from Sephardic source texts. The second, public printing of the book was dedicated to her. All the while she had to fend off attempts by various monarchs to confiscate her fortune by trying to arrange a marriage of her only daughter to their relatives. Had this happened, a large portion of the family wealth would have been lost, as it would have come under the control of her daughter's husband. Beatrice Mendes resisted all these attempts, which often put her in personal peril.
Starting in Antwerp, Habsburg Netherlands, she began to develop an escape network that helped hundreds of fellow Crypto-Jews flee Habsburg Spain and Portugal, where they had been constantly under threat of arrest as heretics by the Inquisition. These fleeing conversos were first sent secretly to spice ships, owned or operated by the House of Mendes/Benveniste, that sailed regularly between Lisbon and Antwerp. In Antwerp, Beatrice Mendes and her staff gave them instructions and the money to travel by cart and foot over the Alps to the great port city of Venice, where arrangements were made to transport them by ship to the Ottoman Empire Greece and Turkey in the East. At that time the Ottoman Empire, under the Muslim Turks, welcomed Jews to their lands. The escape route was carefully planned. Even so, many died on the way as they traversed the mountain paths of the high Alps.
Under Beatrice Mendes (Gracia Nasi), the House of Mendes/Benveniste dealt with King Henry II of France, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, his sister Mary, Governor of the Low Countries, Popes Paul III and Paul IV, and Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Sultan. These dealings involved commercial activities, loans, and bribes. Earlier payments to the Pope by the House of Mendes and their associates had delayed the establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal (see History of the Jews in Portugal).
In 1544, she fled once again, this time to the Republic of Venice, and took up residence on the Grand Canal. The city-state offered Jews and conversos a safe base to live and conduct business, although most practicing Jews were confined in crowded ghettos; because of this situation that Jewish people were put into, the Mendes family most likely practiced Judaism secretly while still putting up the Catholic charade. She continued the type of business that she did with her brother-in-law, and very successfully traded pepper, grain, and textiles. While in Venice, she had a dispute with her sister, Brianda, Diogo's wife, regarding his estate, and left yet again to the nearby city state of Ferrara to avoid the ruling the Venetian Giudici al Forestier (Tribunal for the Affairs of Foreigners) decided would end the sisters' conflict over equal control of the fortune.
The city of Ferrara was eager to accept the Mendes family; Ercole II, Duke of Este (1508-1559), agreed to the terms of Diogo Mendes's will so that the wealthy family would move to his city, and received them gracefully in 1549. In Ferrara, Beatrice Mendes, for the first time in her life, was able to openly practice Judaism in a distinguished Sephardi Jewish Community and in a city that recognized her rights. She chose the Hebrew name Nasi (her daughter's name) instead of her own Latin/Jewish name Benveniste. This time in her life is most likely when she started to become known as Doña Gracia Nasi. The genealogy of her family starts to get a little confusing here; this is most likely when her sister Brianda adopted the name Reyna, when Beatrice's daughter Ana became known as Reyna as well, and also when Brianda's daughter, named after Beatrice, was given the name Gracia. The family's new proud Jewish identity brought Doña Gracia beyond the realm of commercial business, and she became a large benefactor and organizer for resettling Jewish people using her commercial network during the Jewish diaspora. Doña Gracia became very involved with the Sephardic colony in Ferrara, and became an active supporter of the burst of literacy and printing among the Jews of Ferrara. Because of her humanitarian efforts and other successes, books that were printed during this time, like the Ferrara Bible (published in 1553) and Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel (published 1553, written by Samuel Usque), were dedicated to Doña Gracia Nasi.
The move to Ferrara, however, did not end the quarrel between Doña Gracia and her sister, Brianda (now Reyna de Luna), over control of the estate. To finally end the dispute, Doña Gracia briefly went to Venice to settle with her sister in the Venetian Senate.
After the settlement was made, she, her daughter Ana (now Reyna Nasi), and a large entourage moved to Constantinople (now Istanbul), in the Ottoman domains, where she arranged for her daughter to marry her husband's nephew and business partner, Don Joseph Nasi. This move in 1553, just as her others, proved to be just in time as the political atmosphere in Counter-Reformation Italy started to become hostile. In Constantinople, Doña Gracia lived fashionably in the European quarter of Galata. She was very dedicated to her Jewish lifestyle, and assumed a role of leadership in the Sephardi world of the Ottoman Empire.
In 1556, soon after Doña Gracia arrived in Constantinople, Pope Pius V sentenced a group of Conversos in Ancona to Execution by burning at the stake, claiming they were still practicing Jewish rites. In response, Doña Gracia organized a trade embargo of the port of Ancona in the Papal States. In Istanbul, she built synagogues and yeshivas. One of the synagogues is named after her (La Señora). These institutions were created primarily to help the refugees to return to Judaism, their ancestral faith.
In 1558, Doña Gracia was granted a long-term lease on the Tiberias region in Galilee (part of Ottoman Syria at the time), from Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, in exchange for guaranteeing a substantial increase in the yearly tax revenues. The Ottoman Empire, under the Sultan, had conquered that part of the Holy Land some years earlier, but it was largely a desolate place. Consequently she obtained ruling authority over the Tiberias area. With the help of the Sultan, she then began to rebuild the area's abandoned towns to make them available to refugees so they could settle there if they wished. Her aim was to make Tiberias into a major new center of Jewish settlement, trade and learning. A Jewish traveler who visited Tiberias around this time mentions how she had lent support to the Jewish community there, and how after her death they were compelled to ask for Jewish donations elsewhere. This venture has often been called one of the earliest attempts at a modern Zionist movement. Doña Gracia (Mendes) Nasi died in Istanbul in early 1569.
After the death of her spouse in 1579, Gracia's daughter, Reyna, established her own printing business, one in Belvedere, near Constantinople, and another press in the Constantinople suburb of Kuruçeşme. She published at least fifteen books, including a tractate of the Talmud as well as several prayer books. She was the first Jewish woman to have established her own press rather than inheriting it, and the first woman printer and publisher in the Ottoman Empire.
After Doña Gracia's death, her life and story remained relatively unknown for the next four centuries. In 1969, Jewish educator and historian Bea Statdler published a book length biography, The Story of Doña Gracia Mendes. A museum and hotel dedicated to her was opened in Tiberias, Israel in the early 2000s. New York City designated a Doña Gracia Day in June 2010, followed by a similar proclamation in Philadelphia a year later. Israel's political leaders honored her for the first time in October 2010. The Turkish government sponsored a Doña Gracia evening in New York City and has also sponsored an exhibit in Lisbon. There have been lectures, articles and festivals in her honor all over Europe. The growing numbers of women in business and the professions who attend the programs identify with her ambition, courage and even personal loneliness. An Italian white wine has been named after her. The Israeli Government Coins and Medals Corporation has produced a commemorative medal. She is idolized by the descendants of conversos she saved, now living in southern Italy, Central and South America and the United States. In the TV series Muhteşem Yüzyıl, Gracia Mendes Nasi is portrayed by Turkish actress Dolunay Soysert.