<p><strong>Agostino Cattaneo</strong> was a slaveholder and citizen of the Republic of Genoa active in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. The son of <strong>Catteneo de Cattaneis</strong> and born before 1460, he emerged as a prominent nobleman of the Ghibelline faction and a recurrent magistrate. First recorded as <em>anziano </em>in 1485, he served in 1487 simultaneously as <em>sindicatore </em>and <em>anziano</em>, combining fiscal-judicial oversight with membership in the senior governing council. Over the following decades he was repeatedly elected <em>anziano </em>(1507, 1510, 1512, 1513, 1519), acted as an <em>elector</em>, and sat several times on the <em>Balia </em>(1514, 1516, 1521), the extraordinary commission charged with matters of state security and high policy.</p>
<p>He also occupied key financial and administrative posts: <em>officiale di Misericordia</em>, <em>procuratore del comune</em> and consultant on <em>cose importanti</em> in 1515, and in 1525 he was both a <em>console di Ragione</em> and an <em>officiale di Mare</em>, linking him to fiscal adjudication and maritime governance. In 1511 he was dispatched as ambassador to the Duchy of Milan, and in 1517 was sent "alla Christianissima" on behalf of Ovada, reflecting Genoa’s diplomatic engagement with the French crown. According to the sixteenth-century chronicler Agostino Giustiniani, his house was sacked by the <em>Popolo </em>during an uprising in the early 1500s, illustrating the factional tensions surrounding his prominence. He was buried in the church of Santa Maria di Castello, a mark of established civic status. In 1492 he purchased an enslaved, baptized Muslim child named <strong>Lucia </strong>from <strong>Francesco Spinola</strong>, further attesting to his participation in Genoa’s Mediterranean slaveholding economy.</p>