Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Livorno was a famous commercial entrepôt and home to many diverse minority groups. Although the city has long been a laboratory for historians seeking to understand how early modern tolerance functioned, studies of mobility and minorities in Livorno continue to provide rich areas of archival research and analysis. Lorenzo Benedetti’s new book on the Orthodox Greek community seeks to address the relationship – between the archbishop of Pisa, Francesco Guidi, and the Greek community of Livorno – that had a direct impact on the Greek Orthodox community but is as yet little-studied. The book has a distinct focus on religious life, centring around how the Orthodox Greeks were permitted to worship from the period from the investiture of the Guidi, until his death.

Benedetti’s study is structured in two parts, consisting of one chapter in each part, with a short introduction and epilogue. The first chapter, ‘The Greeks in the archdiocese of Pisa in the eighteenth century’, gives an overview of the political and economic context of the wider Greek community in Livorno from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. This chapter outlines the Tuscan Grand Duchy’s political motivation for welcoming more foreign merchants from the Levant in the sixteenth century. It also analyses the political impact of Francesco i de’ Medici’s famous ‘Livornina’: a declaration which gave habitation, trading and other protections in Livorno to religious minorities including Jews and Muslims (mostly from the Ottoman Empire). The chapter then goes on to explain the rise of more non-Catholic, ie. Orthodox Greek merchants arriving from the Balkans and settling in Livorno. Initially these Orthodox Greeks had no designated place of worship, unlike the Catholic Greeks who from the early 1600s could worship and form a confraternity in the church of Santissima Annunziata. Benedetti outlines the various tensions between those Greeks considered to be ‘united’ (ie. Catholic) and ‘schismatic’ (ie. Orthodox), as well as the obvious fears of the Catholic authorities that Orthodox Greeks might ‘infect’ the Catholic Greek community and cause them to join the Orthodox faith.

The second chapter expands on these dynamics and charts the rise of a policy to appease the Orthodox community, in order to avoid scandal and maintain peace. This involved permitting a Greek Orthodox church, Santissima Trinità, to be constructed (not without some resistance) in 1757 and a cemetery established for Greek Orthodox burials. The church was finished and then consecrated in 1760. Although Guidi did not exactly exhibit a positive attitude to the Orthodox Greeks, he did accede to some of their demands for more religious autonomy and freedom to worship. However, when it came to the funeral processions and services of Orthodox Greeks, Guidi was horrified at their ostentation and use of liturgical items he considered should only be used by Catholics. Although the Orthodox Greek community had acquired the right afforded to other communities of a dedicated burial ground outside the city walls, the visibility of their presence made the Catholic authorities uneasy. This attitude exemplifies tensions around the concept of religious toleration in the early modern period and reflects the common out-of-sight out-of-mind approach where heterogenous worship should not offend – in the case of Italy – the Catholic majority.

Lorenzo Benedetti’s book offers a modest, though informative, contribution to the historiography of religious minorities in general, and Orthodox Greeks in particular in eighteenth-century Italy. The book is relatively short at 183 pages, of which roughly half are taken up by endnotes, appendices and bibliography. Benedetti’s aim is clearly not to produce a monograph-style broad and comprehensive analysis of the religious minority of Orthodox Greeks, but to offer a detailed study on a specific and focused aspect of this community. The book largely achieves this aim: it provides a detailed account of various aspects of the relationship between Catholic and Orthodox Greeks in Livorno, and the process which led to the establishment of a Greek Orthodox church and cemetery. Benedetti effectively weaves in the economic motivations from the Grand Duchy which underpinned Guidi’s actions regarding the Orthodox Greeks. This reveals that Guidi demonstrated perhaps the quintessential example of early modern tolerance: that is, an acceptance of objectionable religious differences due to overriding reasons of political and economic pragmatism. However, Benedetti also outlines where tolerance met its limits and the archbishop amongst others objected to anything they considered infringed too much on Catholic ‘purity’.

Although Benedetti briefly places the Orthodox Greeks in the context of other religious minorities in Livorno, such as Armenians, Dutch and German Protestants and Jews, the work would have benefitted from more in-depth comparison which revealed to what extent Greek Orthodoxy was tolerated less, equally, or more than other minorities. This comparison would help considerably to elucidate what might be peculiar or normal about the treatment of the Greek Orthodox community in the wider context of Livorno’s plural minorities, and what this indicates about the Tuscan political and ecclesiastical authorities’ attitudes towards Orthodox Greeks. The book is also in a heavily narrative style, and it is not always easy to follow the author’s contributions to historiography beyond the fact of the originality of the work. Benedetti makes a case that this work addresses a historiographical lacuna, but it would have been helpful to see a stronger case for what this contributes to our understanding of the interplay between ecclesiastical and secular authorities, and what impact this had on minority communities. A stronger argument could have been achieved by a more explicit engagement with the historiography and a clearer thematic structure where the two large chapters were broken down into smaller cohesive chapters. However, the strengths of Benedetti’s work are the attention to meticulous detail in the archival material, and an insight into the individual decisions and opinions of various ecclesiastical figures. Overall, this book is detailed and informative and should no doubt prove useful to historians working on religious minorities in early modern Livorno.