Duarte da Silva
Duarte da Silva · Economics & Business
New Christian merchant-banker who financed the Portuguese Restoration and the Brazil Company, survived the Inquisition, and handled Catherine of Braganza's dowry in London
1596, Lisbonne, Portugal — 1677, Londres, Angleterre
Lisbonne, Londres
Duarte da Silva is recognized among Jewish contributors to Economics & Business — New Christian merchant-banker who financed the Portuguese Restoration and the Brazil Company, survived the Inquisition, and handled Catherine of Braganza's dowry in London
Origins and early life
Duarte da Silva was born in Lisbon in 1596 and baptized at the church of São Nicolau, the son of the merchant Diogo da Silva, in a family of New Christians — the descendants of the Jews of Portugal forcibly converted in 1497, who remained under the permanent suspicion of the Inquisition.
Work and career
He became, in the words of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the most celebrated New Christian merchant-banker of his day, trading in Brazilian sugar and Asian goods, and when Portugal broke from Spain in 1640 he put his fortune at the service of the new king, John IV, financing the war of independence and, in 1649, the Brazil Company that the Jesuit António Vieira had designed to draw New Christian capital into the defense of the empire.
The Inquisition arrested him in 1647 on the charge of Judaizing — of secretly keeping the faith of his ancestors; he was held for five years and reconciled at an auto-da-fé in December 1652, a confession obtained in the Inquisition's prisons, and this fiche says plainly that his own religious life remains what the tribunal alleged and he was made to admit. Ruined in Portugal, he was sent to London in 1662 to pay the dowry of Catherine of Braganza on her marriage to Charles II, and settled there, where Samuel Pepys described him as 'a Jew of great wealth and full credit in Amsterdam'. He rebuilt his affairs in the trade between London, Lisbon and the Low Countries and died in London in 1677.
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Source: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/71579
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New Christian merchant-banker who financed the Portuguese Restoration and the Brazil Company, survived the Inquisition, and handled Catherine of Braganza's dowry in London
Source: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/71579
