Between 1594 and 1606, a Florentine merchant and repentant slave trader named Francesco Carletti travelled around the world. He was 18 years old when he left Seville with his father. Twelve years later, he recounted his experiences to the Grand Duke of Tuscany over two weeks. That account, surviving in manuscript and not printed until nearly a century after his death, is now the subject of Trading at the Edge of Empires: Francesco Carletti’s World, c. 1600 (Harvard University Press, 2026), published in the Villa I Tatti series. Co-edited by Giorgio Riello, Professor of Early Modern Global History in the EUI Department of History, the volume brings together 24 scholars to examine the world Carletti witnessed. The project was supported by Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. An exhibition in Florence, opening in October 2026, will extend the project to a wider audience. We asked Giorgio Riello about the book and what it tells us about the world then and now.
As the title of the book says, it is not about Carletti himself but more about the world he lived in. Carletti was a merchant and a slave trader. What kind of witness does that make him?
In this book, we were not trying to recover his figure or put him in the pantheon of great travellers.
Francesco Carletti is instead our guide through a world that was very much characterised by empires, by religion, by commercial rules, but was also a world that provided opportunities for merchants like Carletti.
As a merchant, Carletti thinks as a ‘businessman’. I have calculated that he talks about hundreds of different commodities. That is something you would not find in a diary by a clergyman or an explorer. An explorer might talk about the bath they have when they reach a beach or about meeting local populations. Carletti is dealing continuously with commercial matters. He finds it perplexing, for instance, that certain things he thinks are very valuable are worth nothing in the Americas, where nature provides in great abundance. And then he finds it very strange how gold is used in Asia, where it seems to be embodied in objects rather than used as coins in transactions. He is a merchant and to me, as an economic historian, that directness is what makes the account so useful.
The journey was never supposed to go around the world. How did a slave trading voyage from Seville turn into a twelve-year circumnavigation?
It was not planned at all because originally Francesco and his father thought they would purchase enslaved people in Cape Verde, sell them in Central America, and return. But in previous years the prices of enslaved people had gone down significantly. They recovered their investment, but not much more. In the mind of a merchant, making a profit is essential, and so rather than turn back, they kept going: Peru, Mexico, and then illegally across the Pacific to China, where they knew the demand for silver was high. From there to the Philippines, then Japan, where they were among the first Europeans who were not clergymen ever to go.
Then from Japan to Macau, where the father dies. From Macau to Goa, selling silk and porcelain, buying cotton textiles. And from Goa, taking a Portuguese vessel back to Lisbon. But the vessel is intercepted near St Helena by Dutch pirates. Carletti faces a choice: join other passengers on an improvised boat and be set free, or stay with the ship as a captive. He says, where my merchandise goes, I have to go. So, he goes to the Netherlands and fights a legal battle for four years to get back the value of his cargo. The case is very well known in legal history. It provides much of the material and thinking behind Hugo Grotius’s creation of modern commercial law. So, the whole journey is a series of very specific situations, each one following from the previous, driven entirely by a merchant’s calculation.
Carletti’s world included slave trading. He purchased enslaved people in Cape Verde and in Japan. When you are using someone’s account as a window into a period, how do you present that world honestly without sanitising it?
Clearly, the slave trade is not something you can set aside. It is there in the first two chapters of the account, and it returns in Asia. In Japan, he purchases enslaved Koreans, people captured during the wars between Japan and Korea in the early 1590s. He writes that he repents, that he raises moral issues with what he has done. But Carletti is a figure you cannot simply rehabilitate.
So, what we tried to do as editors was to give each of these aspects an equal standing and select experts who could handle the difficult material with rigour. Trevor Burnard, who unfortunately passed away two years ago, wrote a chapter on enslavement. He was an expert on the relationship between enslavement and sexuality, which in this account are intertwined. Mackenzie Cooley, as a female scholar, brought a very different perspective to the material on sexuality. We tried to balance the voices so that the book does not become only about commerce, or only about the slave trade, or only about sexual encounters. The balance that exists in the original account needed to be reconveyed. We found Carletti useful as a witness, not as a hero.
You mentioned that Carletti purchased enslaved Koreans in Japan and one of them came back to Europe with him. Where does that story lead?
It leads to a very bizarre situation. One of the Koreans is baptised Antonio, because Carletti’s father was called Antonio and had just died in Macau. He is the only servant who reaches Europe, reaches Florence, and later Carletti says he is to be found in Rome. He is supposed to be the first Korean ever to reach Europe.
Now, there is a small town in Calabria where the entire population has the surname Corea and claims to be descended from him. In reality, this is very contentious as there is no proof. But it has been used over the decades to cultivate commercial relationships between Italy and Korea, and in the 1990s two novels about Antonio Corea sold millions of copies in Korea. So, if there is a place on earth where they know who Francesco Carletti is, that is Korea. But I should say, not all manuscripts call this person 'Antonio Corea'. The surname appears however in the printed edition, and so he has come to be known as such since.
Carletti’s travel account has been published in very different editions over three centuries. The first printed version in 1701 redacted the chapters on slavery. A 1941 edition renamed it “The Diary of the Good Slave Trader”. A 1964 review did not mention slavery at all. What does each age see in this text?
It is quite revealing. The original account is organised in 12 chapters. The first two deal with the slave trade. In the 1701 printed edition, those chapters were heavily redacted because enslavement was seen as a difficult subject, and Carletti’s repentance even more troubling as it would have questioned Florentine interests in this terrible trade. So, the first readers of the printed text got a version with the hardest material removed.
Then in 1941, under fascism, the title is changed to Il Diario del buon Negriero, “The Diary of the Good Slave Trader”. There is a racial agenda implicit in that title. And then in 1964, when the first English translation is published, a review in the first issue of the New York Review of Books calls Carletti’s recount boring. Carletti is seen as a man with no particular inquisitiveness. What I find revealing is that slavery is not mentioned once in the entire review. For us today, that is astonishing. But in the 1960s, it was perhaps not perceived as a central question.
Florence’s airport is named after Amerigo Vespucci. There is no airport named after Francesco Carletti, and perhaps there should not be. But his account is also barely known, even among historians. Why?
Several things. He comes at the end of a period of the great explorers. By his time, that kind of novelty, especially for the New World, has worn off. And his style worked against him because he writes in Florentine Italian that is very approachable, very direct, but does not have the high language or sophisticated philosophical content of other travellers. For a very long time, that was considered a drawback. He was not a man of the cloth, not a great literary figure, and I think that penalised him.
Then there is the publication history. The account circulated only in manuscript until 1701, and printed copies seem to have been quite rare. Modern scholarly editions only came in the 20th century. I do not think many Florentines today know who he is. There is a Via Francesco Carletti near the airport, but that is about it. The exhibition, I hope, is a moment for that to change. It is an opportunity for people to know his story, both in its positive and negative parts.
Carletti described hundreds of commodities in his manuscript. Is there a moment or an object from his account that has stayed with you?
There is a passage that has made a great impression on me. When he arrives on the coast of Central America, in the Panama region, they have to go from one coast to the other on foot and it is the journey of hell. The description is absolutely astonishing. People are dying all the time. It rains constantly. And what matters, he says, is that one saves the animals more than the people, because without the animals, you cannot transport the goods. All the care is for animals and goods, but not for people. It is a vision truly of hell on earth, and it's presented as one of the most harrowing experiences Carletti makes in the course of 12 years.
And then there is an object: Towards the end of the account, when he is presenting his journey to the Grand Duke, he talks about India and uses a trick. He shows the Grand Duke what muslin is, this very fine, very semi-transparent cloth of cotton, by holding it in his own hand, and by opening it, it turns out to be an entire shirt made of this material. Apparently, it is a great surprise. It is really the equivalent of the Apple computer being taken out of an envelope. A demonstration of the wonders of the world.
An exhibition opening in Florence this October will use Carletti as a guide to rethink the city’s global connections. What will visitors find?
The idea is to propose to Florentines and to visitors a different view of their city. We think of Florence as the cradle of the Renaissance, as if everything happens here. But the city is much more porous with the rest of the world than we usually acknowledge. The enormous collections of incredible objects from around the world that are preserved in Florence are testimony of that. We have selected objects that are mentioned by Carletti, and things that are in the collections but not very well known. He mentions cocoa, for instance, and we find a decorative item made with a cocoa shell in the collections of the Palazzo Pitti, collected by the Medici at exactly the same time.
Each age has seen something different in Carletti. What does ours see?
The parallelism with today can be far-fetched, to be perfectly honest. But some human processes are shared with the past. We see the exploitation of people, the enslavement, and at the same time the inquisitiveness, this human process of understanding a world that is not your own and that is fast changing. Today, we share these concerns with Carletti, including both some positive and negative aspects.
Giorgio Riello is Professor of Early Modern Global History in the EUI Department of History. He is the principal investigator of CAPASIA (The Asian Origins of Global Capitalism), an ERC-funded project studying European trading posts across Asia and the Indian Ocean world. His books include Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2013), winner of the World History Association Bentley Prize, and Luxury: A Rich History (Oxford University Press, 2016). Trading at the Edge of Empires: Francesco Carletti’s World, c. 1600, co-edited with Brian Brege, Paula Findlen, and Luca Molà, was published by Harvard University Press in 2026 as part of the Villa I Tatti Research Series.
The exhibition Global Florence: The World of Francesco Carletti will be hosted at Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana from 9 October 2026 to 9 January 2027. It is the result of a collaborative project realised by the EUI, Stanford University, Syracuse University and the University of Warwick.
The exhibition will include a number of important global artefacts, preserved in major Florentine museums, archives and libraries, as well as in private collections. It will make use of Carletti’s travels as a narrative tool to immerse viewers in Florence’s global connections.
Picture: Portuguese Carracks off a Rocky Coast, circle of Joachim Patinir, c. 1540. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.