Gracia Mendes Nasi (Gracia is archaic Portuguese and Spanish for the Hebrew Hannah, also known by her Christianized name Beatriz de Luna Miques, 1510–1569) was one of the wealthiest Jewish women of Renaissance Europe. She married into the eminent international banking and finance company known as the House of Mendes. She was the aunt and business partner of Joseph Nasi, who became a prominent figure in the politics of the Ottoman Empire. She also developed an escape network that saved hundreds of Conversos - forcibly converted Jews - from the terrors of the Inquisition.
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Dona Gracia Mendes was born in Lisbon, Portugal, into an ancient and venerable family of forcibly converted Jews known as Conversos (also called Crypto-Jews, Marranos and Secret Jews). They are believed to have originally come from Aragon. While still Jewish, they had fled to Portugal when the Catholic Monarchs, Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, expelled the Jews in 1492. Five years later, in 1497, they were forcibly converted to Catholicism along with all the other Jews in Portugal at that time. Mendes was born 12 years later.
In 1528, Mendes married her paternal uncle Francisco (as was the custom among rich Jewish families of those days), who was said by the Portuguese king to be the wealthiest merchant in Lisbon at that time. She never took her husband's name of Mendes, although many historians have since called her Gracia Mendes, based on the modern notion of names. Spanish women of means at that time kept their own names and even today, they frequently use their maiden name hyphenated with their married name. The couple were believed to have been married in the great cathedral of Lisbon, in a public Catholic wedding, and then to have had a Crypto-Judaic ceremony with the signing of a ketubah. Francisco Mendes (originally Benveniste) directed, along with his brother Diogo, a powerful trading company and bank of world repute with agents across Europe and around the Mediterranean. The House of Mendes probably began as a company trading precious objects. Following the beginning of the Age of Discovery and the finding, by the Portuguese, of a sea route to India, they became particularly important spice traders. They also traded in silver - the silver was needed to pay the Asians for those spices.
In 1538 Francisco died, leaving Dona Gracia, his young wife, with an infant daughter, Ana, (future wife of Don Joseph Nasi). A few years earlier, Francisco's brother, Diogo, had opened a branch office of their banking house in the Habsburg Netherlands city of Antwerp. Soon afterwards, Mendes moved to Antwerp and joined Diogo. While there, she developed an escape network that helped hundreds of fellow Conversos flee Spain and Portugal, where there had been constantly under threat of arrest as heretics by the Inquisition. These fleeing Conversos were first directly secretly to spice ships, owned or operated by the House of Mendes, that were regularly sailing from Lisbon to Antwerp. Once in Antwerp, 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 (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.
Five years after Dona Gracia 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 her into an important businesswoman. Her enormous wealth put her into a position to influence kings and popes, which she used to protect her fellow Conversos and spend on 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 this document 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. Dona Gracia resisted all these attempts, which often put her in personal peril.
Under Gracia, the House of Mendes dealt with King Henry II of France, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, his sister Mary, Governess of the Low Countries, Popes Paul III and Paul IV, and Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. 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. She had a dispute there with her sister, Brianda, and had to flee yet again to the nearby city state of Ferrara. In 1553, she moved onto Istanbul, in the Ottoman domains, where she arranged for her daughter to marry the nephew and business partner, Don Joseph Nasi. Like all marriages in those days, it was arranged by the families.
In 1556, soon after Mendes arrived in Istanbul, the Pope sentenced a group of Conversos back in Italy to death by fire, claiming they were still practicing Jewish rites. In response, Dona 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, she was granted a long-term lease on the Tiberias region in Israel, from Sultan Suleiman, 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 largely been a desolate place. As a result, she obtained the 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 her refugees so they could settle there, if they wished. Her aim was to make Tiberias into a major new centre of Jewish settlement, trade and learning. This venture has often been called one of the earliest attempts at a modern Zionist movement. Gracia (Mendes) Nasi died in Istanbul early in 1569.
But this was not the end. Though she disappeared into oblivion almost immediately and remained hardly known for the subsequent 500 years, that is now changing, possibly due to a new sense of relevance among today's women. Indeed, Dona Gracia is fast becoming a cult figure on the world stage. New York City designated a Dona 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. A website (www.donagraciaproject.org) was launched last January. The Turkish government sponsored a Dona Gracia evening in New York City and is also sponsoring 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 mint has produced a commemorative medal. She now has a museum devoted to her life and deeds in Tiberias. The descendants of those conversos, in Southern Italy, Central and South America and the United States, many of whose ancestors she saved, idolize her.