The Ancona martyrs and the boycott of the papal port

In 1547 Paul III granted the Portuguese New Christians a safe-conduct inviting them to settle and trade at Ancona, the Adriatic port of the Papal States; Julius III confirmed it. Under it a colony of former anusim grew there, openly returned to Judaism, with agreements registered before the city magistracy.

In 1555 Paul IV revoked the safe-conducts and set the Inquisition on them. About a hundred were arrested; about as many got away to Pesaro and Ferrara. Trials ran through the winter and spring. Sixty-three abjured, were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment and the galleys and shipped toward Malta; some twenty-six escaped en route and reached Pesaro. Those who refused to abjure were executed between April and June 1556 on the Piazza della Mostra: twenty-four people — twenty-three men and one woman — hanged and burned.

On 9 March 1556 Sultan Süleyman I wrote to the pope demanding the release of his own subjects; some were released. That was the lever the answer was built on. Doña Gracia Nasi and her nephew Joseph Nasi, in Constantinople, came to terms with Guidobaldo II, Duke of Urbino, and set it up thus: all Jewish Levant trade to leave Ancona for Pesaro. R. Judah Faraj was sent to obtain rabbinic authorisation.

After eight months the boycott was abandoned. There were four reasons, and the first is decisive. The Jews of Ancona themselves opposed it — the old Italian and Levantine communities, untouched by the executions: they rightly feared collective reprisal against those left behind and against hostages. There was no rabbinic consensus: R. Joshua Soncino of Constantinople declared the ban invalid and dangerous, while R. Joseph ibn Lev and R. Moses Basola supported it. Pesaro could not replace Ancona — no warehousing, no insurance market, no customs apparatus, no roads across the Apennines. And Ragusan, Venetian and Ottoman shippers simply took up the traffic.

In 1558 the Duke of Urbino, having gained nothing, expelled the Portuguese from Pesaro — a second flight for the same people.

Three corrections. The year of the executions is 1556, not 1555: Paul IV was elected only in May 1555 and the trials ran through the winter. The number is twenty-four, not twenty-five or twenty-six: the higher figures confuse the burned with those who died in prison and with the escapees from the Malta convoy. And "the first successful Jewish economic boycott" is wrong — it did not succeed. But it genuinely is the first attempt at coordinated transnational Jewish economic action in the diaspora.