The following document is drawn from the Bullarium Romanum, Taurinensis Edition, Vol. XV, which covers the final years of Urban VIII (1639–1644) and the full pontificate of Innocent X (1644–1655). After a comprehensive search of the entire 104,000-line volume for all terms associated with Jews — including Iudaei, Hebraei, synagoga, Talmud, ghetto, vigesima hebraeorum, tolerantia, neophyti in Jewish contexts, sanguinis puritas, and related vocabulary — only one document bears explicitly on the Jews: Urban VIII’s reconfirmation of privileges for the Hebrew, Turkish, Greek, and other oriental merchants resident at Ancona, issued June 2, 1642.
The entire pontificate of Innocent X — covering the decade 1644 to 1655, including the Thirty Years’ War’s final years, the Peace of Westphalia, and the Jansenist controversy — produced, so far as this volume records, no papal legislation bearing explicitly on Jews at all. One constitution of Innocent X (CLVIII) does confirm a blood-purity statute for the Spanish military Order of Montesa, but its text does not name Hebrews or Jews explicitly, treating “purity of blood” as a technical procedural matter without enumerating the ancestries it excludes.
Vol. XV is accordingly the sparsest volume in the series for Jewish content — even sparser than Vol. XIII (Urban VIII’s earlier years). The single document present is, however, of real historical significance: it shows the papacy acting not as a persecutor of Jews but as the protector of their commercial privileges, confirming in a single instrument the entire accumulated body of trading rights that various popes had granted to Ancona’s multi-confessional merchant community over the preceding century.
Pope Urban VIII — Confirmantur Privilegia Universitati Hebraeorum, Turcarum, Graecorum et Aliorum Mercatorum in Civitate Anconitana Commorantium Concessa: Confirmation of Privileges Granted to the Community of Hebrews, Turks, Greeks, and Other Merchants Resident in the City of Ancona (June 2, 1642)
Constitution DCCXLVI. Urban VIII, year XIX. Dated at Rome, at Saint Peter’s, under the Fisherman’s Ring, June 2, 1642, pontificate year XIX. Source: Bullarium Romanum, Taurinensis Edition, Vol. XV, p. 186.
Petition of the community of oriental merchants at Ancona
Urban VIII, to perpetual memory of the matter.
Since, as the community (universitas) of Hebrews, Turks, Greeks, and other merchants of the oriental nation residing in our city of Ancona has lately caused it to be set forth to us, those same persons possess various privileges granted to them by diverse Roman Pontiffs our predecessors and respectively confirmed, and they greatly desire that those privileges, for their firmer subsistence and validity, be strengthened with the strength of apostolic confirmation:
Urban VIII confirms all prior privileges, with standard conditions
§2. We, wishing to show to the said community special favors and graces, and inclined by the supplications humbly presented to us on its behalf concerning this matter — the said privileges, provided however that they are in use and are licit and honest, and have not been revoked nor are comprehended under any revocations, and do not conflict with the sacred canons and decrees of the Council of Trent and the apostolic constitutions, and do not conflict with the fidelity and obedience owed by them to us and the Apostolic See, and do not tend against ecclesiastical liberty — by apostolic authority, by the tenor of the present letters, we approve and confirm them, and add to them the strength of inviolable apostolic firmness; and all and each of the defects in law or in fact, if any have intervened therein in any way, we supply.
§3. Decreeing those privileges and the present letters to exist and to be always and perpetually valid, firm, and effective, and to have their full and complete effects, and to be inviolably observed by all and each to whom they pertain and shall pertain in the future for the time being; and that they ought to be so judged and determined by all ordinary and delegated judges, even the auditors of the causes of the Apostolic Palace. And that whatever shall be attempted to the contrary by anyone, by any authority, knowingly or unknowingly, shall be null and void. To those acting contrary, in nothing standing in the way.
Given at Rome, at Saint Peter’s, under the Fisherman’s Ring, June 2, 1642, in the nineteenth year of our pontificate.
Source. Bullarium Romanum, Taurinensis Edition, Vol. XV, p. 186. Urban VIII, Constitution DCCXLVI, Confirmantur privilegia universitati Hebraeorum, Turcarum, Graecorum et aliorum mercatorum in civitate Anconitana commorantium concessa, June 2, 1642. Translated from the Latin.
Historical note. This brief constitution requires a substantial historical gloss, because its significance lies almost entirely in what it does not say: it does not specify which privileges are being confirmed, or when they were originally granted, or what they contain. It is a blanket reconfirmation — a papal guarantee that whatever rights the oriental merchant community of Ancona had previously accumulated remained valid — and its brevity is itself a statement of institutional continuity. To understand what was at stake, one needs to know the history of Ancona as a commercial and Jewish center.
Ancona, on the Adriatic coast of the Marche, had been part of the Papal States since the medieval period, but its commercial character was shaped primarily by its position as the principal Italian terminal of the eastern Mediterranean trade. From at least the early sixteenth century, Ancona hosted a large and economically vital community of Levantine merchants — Jews (both Italian and Iberian in origin), Greeks, Turks, Armenians, and others — who conducted trade in cloth, spices, and other goods between the Ottoman Empire and western Europe. The papacy had historically encouraged this trade by granting the merchants of the nazione ebrea and the other Levantine communities specific commercial privileges: exemption from certain tolls, freedom to maintain their own communal organizations and religious practices, rights of safe conduct, and protection from arbitrary seizure of goods or persons.
The most significant grant had come from Paul III in 1534 (see the earlier volumes of this series), who had offered exceptionally generous terms to attract Iberian Jewish refugees — including New Christians (conversos) who had publicly reverted to Judaism after fleeing Portugal — to settle and trade at Ancona. Under his successors this liberal policy had been modified but never entirely abandoned: even Paul IV, who issued Cum Nimis Absurdum and otherwise took the harshest line toward Jews, had found it commercially impractical to strip Ancona’s merchants of their trading privileges entirely. Pius V’s 1569 expulsion order had exempted Ancona precisely because the Levantine trade was too important to disrupt (see Vol. VII).
By the early seventeenth century, Ancona was one of only three places in the Papal States where Jews were legally permitted to reside (the others being Rome and Avignon), and it retained a distinctive character as a multi-confessional trading port where Hebrew, Turkish, and Greek merchants coexisted under shared papal protection. The community addressed by Urban VIII in this constitution — the universitas Hebraeorum, Turcarum, Graecorum et aliorum mercatorum nationis orientalis — was the formal corporate entity through which these merchants collectively held their privileges and dealt with the papal administration.
The timing of the confirmation — 1642, Urban VIII’s nineteenth year — is worth noting. By this point Urban VIII had been embroiled for years in the disastrous Castro War (1641–1644) against the Farnese, a conflict that strained the finances of the Papal State severely and ultimately ended in a humiliating papal defeat. In that context, the commercial revenues generated by Ancona’s Levantine merchants were a tangible asset, and confirming their privileges was an act of economic prudence as much as religious policy. The standard proviso that the confirmed privileges must not conflict with the canons or the apostolic constitutions was a standard legal hedge rather than a genuine limitation — it was well understood by all parties that the privileges in question had accumulated over a century of successive papal confirmations and enjoyed a kind of institutional permanence.
The document’s grouping of Hebrews together with Turks and Greeks is characteristic of how papal administration conceptualized the Levantine merchant community: as a single economic corporation of non-Latin outsiders held together by shared commercial interests and mutual privilege, rather than as separate confessional communities with different legal statuses. In practice, Jewish merchants were subject to more extensive regulation than their Turkish or Greek counterparts — they lived in a formally designated ghetto, were subject to the annual toleration fee and Camerarius oversight described in earlier volumes — but for the purposes of commercial privilege, they were treated as part of a single multi-confessional body whose corporate rights the papacy guaranteed.