At the beginning of the 1400s the Chancellor of Florentine Republic Leonardo Bruni praised his city as a model of liberty and justice for all, citizens and foreigners. He also extolled Florence’s openness to, and protection of, asylum seekers:
Because of Florence’s reputation for generosity, all those who were exiled from their homeland and uprooted by seditious plots, or dispossessed on account of the envy of their fellow citizens, have always come to Florence as to a safe haven and unique sort of refuge. … Hence, no one will ever think that he really lacks a homeland so long as the city of Florence continues to exist.
In reality the Florentine Republic was never the utopia described by the patriotic Bruni; however compared with much of Europe at the time, Florence was a tolerant city and home to a thriving Jewish community. After the fall of the Republic, when Florence became a principality ruled by the Medici family, Cosimo I (Duke from 1537, then Grand Duke in 1570) made it a policy to protect his Jewish subjects. Though in the early 1570s under papal pressure the Grand Duke enclosed the Jews of Florence in a ghetto, where they were subject to precise regulations, the Florentine Jewish population grew. Located in the very center of town, the Florentine Ghetto at the end of the sixteenth century was emerging as one of Florence’s busiest commercial centers, along with the shops in the nearby Ponte Vecchio, the Mercato Vecchio, and the Mercato Nuovo. A crossroads for scholars of Jewish backgrounds, doctors, (al)chemists, as well as merchants, Florence, and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany as a whole, became a haven for Southern European Jewry.
