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Gracia Nasi the Lady of 16th century - English version

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Gracia Mendes Nasi.

For most Portuguese people this name is completely unknown, since our school textbooks insist on ignoring what is not convenient to know. The fall of the Portuguese Empire caused by the Inquisition and started 26 years earlier, with the Jewish Genocide of Lisbon in 1506.

Shortly afterwards, in 1510, Gracia Nasi was born in Lisbon, who would become the richest and most powerful woman of the European Renaissance, facing off against popes, Emperor Charles V and her sister Maria.

In 1536, with the death of her husband and the establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal by Pope Paul III, she decided to leave for Antwerp, never to return to Lisbon.

She was now the owner of the commercial empire inherited from her husband, and together with her brother-in-law Diogo, who ran the Casa Mendes in Antwerp, they would further develop the commercial and banking activity, lending money to monarchs and a developing European bourgeoisie.

In the meantime, they developed an escape network for the Iberian Sephardim that took them from Lisbon to Constantinople, where she later ended up settling and living, assuming her Jewish identity to the fullest, living closely with the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, lord of an empire that stretched across the Mediterranean to Europe.

On this path, with many threats to her economic empire and her family, she rubbed shoulders with the most powerful people in the Christian and Muslim worlds and her powerful influence was felt not only in Rome, but in the main European Courts, and in the culturally opposed Ottoman Empire.

A Lady to know!
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@web4Christ, Jewish History, Portuguese Jews

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