The wealthy Gracia Mendes Nasi had in 1553 moved to the Ottoman domains, and married her daughter to her nephew Joseph Nasi.

When in 1556 Pope Paul IV sentences a group of Marranos who had returned to Judaism in Portugal to death by fire, she responds by leading leading an unsuccessful economic boycott in 1556 against the port of Ancona in the Papal States, ...

...favoring trade with Pesaro, also in the Marche, which has accepted the Jewish refugees.

The plan fails due to internal divisions in the Jewish community over fear of further persecution.

The philanthropist Gracia Mendes Nasi had in 1558 leased Tiberias, in Palestine, from Sultan Suleiman, for a yearly fee of one thousand ducats.

Her nephew and son-in-law Joseph Nasi, a Jewish politician and financier, had in 1561 obtained ruling authority over Tiberias and Safed but fails in his attempts to promote settlement in the area, based on silkworm cultivation and sheepherding.

The Aegean island of Náxos has flourished since 1207 as a Venetian Duchy.

The last Latin Christian duke, Jacopo IV Crispo, had already been paying tribute to the Ottoman Sultan when Selim II deposes him in 1566.

The Sultan's appointed representative, the last Duke of the Archipelago (1566-79) is a Portuguese Jew (Marrano), Joseph Nasi, the nephew of the wealthy philanthropist Gracia Mendes Nasi.

Joseph Nasi is married to his cousin, Doña Reyna Nasi, the heiress of the House of Mendes (which had taken refuge with its wealth in Portugal after the Alhambra decree of expulsion in 1492, then removed to Antwerp; following the death of the last of the Nasi-Mendes brothers, Gracia had eventually been forced to flee to then Venice, and finally Constantinople).