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Loading... Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World (2015)by Noel Malcolm
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Inspired by the hunt for an obscure manuscript that essentially marks the beginning of Albanian historiography, Malcolm provides one with a wide-ranging examination of social and military interaction on the political line between Venice and the Ottoman Empire from the perspective of an extended family of Albanian noblemen. While the subtitle invokes "knights, corsairs, Jesuits and spies" the meat of this book is really the practice of day-to-day diplomacy by the men who found their affairs straddling the lines of conflict. I rather liked this work but for the uninitiated you'll at least want to have read a popular account of the battle of Lepanto first. ( ) no reviews | add a review
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"In the late sixteenth century, a prominent Albanian named Antonio Bruni composed a revealing document about his home country. Historian Sir Noel Malcolm takes this document as a point of departure to explore the lives of the entire Bruni family, whose members included an archbishop of the Balkans, the captain of the papal flagship at the Battle of Lepanto--at which the Ottomans were turned back in the Eastern Mediterranean--in 1571, and a highly placed interpreter in Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire that fell to the Turks in 1453. The taking of Constantinople had profoundly altered the map of the Mediterranean. By the time of Bruni's document, Albania, largely a Venetian province from 1405 onward, had been absorbed into the Ottoman Empire. Even under the Ottomans, however, this was a world marked by the ferment of the Italian Renaissance. In Agents of Empire, Malcolm uses the collective biography of the Brunis to paint a fascinating and intimate picture of Albania at a moment when it represented the frontier between empires, cultures, and religions. The lives of the polylingual, cosmopolitan Brunis shed new light on the interrelations between the Ottoman and Christian worlds, characterized by both conflict and complex interdependence. The result of years of archival detective work, Agents of Empire brings to life a vibrant moment in European and Ottoman history, challenging our assumptions about their supposed differences. Malcolm's book guides us through the exchanges between East and West, Venetians and the Ottomans, and tells a story of worlds colliding with and transforming one another"-- No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)940.230922History and Geography Europe Europe Early Modern 1453-1914 Reformation 1517-1648LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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