Final Years
In 1544, she fled once again, this time to the Republic of Venice. There she had a dispute with her sister, Brianda, Diogo's wife, about his estate, and had to flee yet again to the nearby city state of Ferrara. In 1553, she moved to Istanbul, in the Ottoman domains, where she arranged for her daughter to marry her husband's nephew and business partner, Don Joseph Nasi.
In 1556, soon after Mendes arrived in Istanbul, the Pope sentenced a group of Conversos in Ancona to the stake, claiming they were still practicing Jewish rites. In response, Dona Gracia organized a trade embargo of the port of Ancona in the Papal States. In Istanbul, she built synagogues and yeshivas. One of the synagogues is named after her (La Señora). These institutions were created primarily to help the refugees to return to Judaism, their ancestral faith.
In 1558, she was granted a long-term lease on the Tiberias region in Israel, from Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, in exchange for guaranteeing a substantial increase in the yearly tax revenues. The Ottoman Empire, under the Sultan, had conquered that part of the Holy Land some years earlier, but it largely been a desolate place. As a result, she obtained the ruling authority over the Tiberias area. With the help of the Sultan, she then began to rebuild the area's abandoned towns to make them available to refugees so they could settle there if they wished. Her aim was to make Tiberias into a major new centre of Jewish settlement, trade and learning. This venture has often been called one of the earliest attempts at a modern Zionist movement. Dona Gracia (Mendes) Nasi died in Istanbul in early 1569.
Read more about this topic: Gracia Mendes Nasi
Famous quotes containing the words final and/or years:
“The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis—the final overthrow.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.”
—Elinor Wylie (1885–1928)