Ancona

A very typical career for someone like that involves moving from city to city to city and working in many places.

I've talked about the example of Michele Marullo, a Greek emigre scholar who worked in Ancona and then in Padua and then in Florence, then in Naples and then for a while in Ferrara and then in Florence again, you know, back and forth.

Many prominent Florentine scholars of Machiavelli's work.

fathers and grandfathers' generation were hired to go work for kings in foreign countries, right? Poggio Barcolino went to work for Cardinal Beaufort in England during the minority of child King Henry VI.

And in addition to the rescue and the housing and the education, she fed around eighty people a day at her residence, as well as giving money to poor Jews, to the home for the sick, and once again, she subsidized Hebrew printing as she had done in Ferrara.

And you also have the Ancona affair, which was spoken about in a previous episode.

Yes, yes.

If listeners want the, um, full details, they're going to have to listen to podcast twenty-two.

But in very brief, there was a crisis in 1555 when the new Pope, Paul IV, revoked papal guarantees of safety given to conversos living in Ancona.

What he did is he reinstated the Inquisition, and they arrested dozens of former conversos who had now returned to open Judaism because they'd been guaranteed immunity.

And in 1556, twenty-five Jews were burnt at the stake in Ancona.

And in response, Dona Grazia used her international trade empire and political influence to organize an unprecedented economic boycott to which she secured rabbinic support.

He acknowledged the services which Rome had rendered him, and he surrendered various rights which the Crown had long exercised over the Church in Sicily.

He gave up Ancona, Spoleto, Ravenna, and other territories in central Italy to enlarge the patrimony of St. Peter.

He ceded certain lands in Tuscany, the estates of the Countess Matilda, which had long been a cause of dispute between popes and emperors.

Lastly, he took the oath of obedience to Rome in the presence of the German princes.

Henry, already elected as his successor to the imperial crown, was named as his heir to the kingdom of Sicily.

The babe Conrad, his second son, was to succeed on the event of Henry's death.

From Barletta, the emperor proceeded to Brindisi and there issued an edict withdrawing the grant of the March of Ancona, which he had made to the papacy at his coronation.

We made our grant to the church, he wrote to the inhabitants of the March, without intending to give up the rights of the empire.

From a distance, its towers, domes, walls, and terracotta rooftops seem to grow directly from the hills.

If you'd like to discover more about the region of Le Marche, it is episode 11 in my Regional Capitals of Italy series, with its capital Ancona.

Dominating everything in this town of Urbino is the Palazzo Ducale, or the Ducal Palace.

This enormous Renaissance palace seems almost impossibly grand for a city of Urbino size.

Alboin, with associates from many German tribes, attacked, overran, and occupied a great portion of Italy.

Ravenna and the maritime cities, as far as Ancona, with Rome, Naples, and Venice, were still preserved to the allegiance of the emperor and acknowledged the authority of the exarch at Ravenna.

But the rest of Italy came under the dominion of the Lombard king.

His numerous dukes, almost independent chiefs, seized each his city or large territory.

The coronation of the new king was the result of a bargain, and for the service which they rendered they were paid in cities and provinces.

Pippin, having in his company the pope who had crowned him with a solemnity new among Teutonic kings, crossed the Alps, humbled Aistolf, the Lombard king, and forced him to give security that he would respect the rights and property of St. Peter.

Aistolf evaded his engagement, and Pippin compelled him, after a second overthrow, to become tributary to the Frank kingdom and to cede to his conqueror all that he had recently won of the territory still left to the Greek emperor in the north of Italy, the exarchate of Ravenna and the Flaminian Pentapolis, an expression for the lands and cities between the Apennines and the Adriatic from Ferrara to Ancona.

This territory the Frank king presented as a donation to St. Peter.

And the expense was borne by the heirs of Piero Saccione de Talati, according as he had ordained before he died in Bibbiena, a place in the Casentino, and because Moccio erected his church without any vaulting, and laid the weight of the roof on the arches of the columns, he exposed himself to a great peril and was truly too bold.

The same man made the church and convent of St. Antonio, which, before the siege of Florence, was at the Porta Affienza, and today is wholly ruined, and he wrought in sculpture the door of St. Agostino in Ancona, with many figures and ornaments similar to those which are on the doors of St. Francesco in the same city.

In this church of St. Agostino he also made the tomb of Fra Zenone Vigilante, bishop and general of the order of the said St. Augustine, and finally he built the Loggia de Mercatanti of that city, which has since received, now for one reason and now for another, many improvements in the modern manner, with ornaments of various sorts.

All these works, although they are in these days much less than passable, were then much extolled, according to the standard of knowledge of these men.

They fled south to Ragusa, which is what is now Dubrovnik, which was a little tiny independent maritime city-state that was Greek-speaking, which is why they fled there.

Lived there when he was a little boy and then they moved to its Italian neighbor city of Ancona.

which is on the east coast of Italy.

Ancona is very geographically easy to reach from Dubrovnik, from Ragusa, to the degree that the two cities were allies and they guarded each other's backs with their fleets.

So if either was attacked, the other would send their fleet to help them.

And if either was besieged, when Ancona was besieged, they would load their treasures and wives and children onto their ships and send them to Ragusa to sit out the war in the other city, on the other side of the sea.

So very close partners.

So it makes sense that she came to Ancona.