In the twilight of the Renaissance, the grand duke of Tuscany--a scion of the fabled Medici family of bankers--invited foreign merchants, artisans, and ship cap

In early modern Europe, free ports were places where merchants of any nation, religion, or ethnicity could trade on equal terms; and where there were no import

In the twilight of the Renaissance, the grand duke of Tuscany-a scion of the fabled Medici family of bankers-invited foreign merchants, artisans, and ship capta

The 1570s marked the beginning of an age of pervasive piracy in the Mediterranean that persisted into the eighteenth century. Nowhere was more inviting to pirat

Although there is a rich historiography on Enlightenment Tuscany in Italian as well as French and German, the principle Anglophone works are Eric Cochrane’s T