Italian historian Carlo Vecce has claimed that Leonardo da Vinci’s mother was freed from slavery by da Vinci’s father, who was himself a well-known slave trader.
, Vecce, a professor at the University of Naples L’Orientale, believes she was kidnapped from Circassia and trafficked via Constantinople to Venice before being bought by a family in the town of Vinci, near Florence, and put to work as a wet nurse, suggesting she had already been pregnant before she was made pregnant again by Ser Piero in the summer of 1451. Leonardo’s birthday is usually given as April 15, 1452.
The certificate, written in Latin, refers to Caterina as being “a slave” from “Circassia”—and that it was signed by Ser Piero in his role as notary. “At the time many slaves were named Caterina, but this was the only liberation act of a slave named Caterina [that] Ser Piero wrote in all his long career... Moreover, the document is full of small mistakes and oversights, a sign that perhaps he was nervous when he drafted it, because getting someone else’s slave pregnant was a crime.”
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