Nikopol(Turk. Niğbolu) is a port city on the southern bank of the Danube River in present-day Bulgaria. A Jewish community of Romaniots and Ashkenazim lived there before the Ottoman conquest in 1389. Sephardi Jews arrived in the city after the expulsion from Spain in 1492. As a regional administrative and commercial center, Nikopol attracted Jewish settlers and became a major Jewish center in sixteenth-century Bulgaria.

Nikopol’s Jewish population numbered 206 between 1520 and 1535, 492 in the mid-sixteenth century, and 1,017 in 1580. Importing salt from Wallachia, tax farming, cus…