Between Istanbul and Venice: Agency, Faith, and Empire in the Sixteenth Century

John Jeffries Martin

doi:10.21071/mijtk.v0i3.10777

Abstract

Noel Malcolm’s Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World brilliantly excavates and reconstructs the lives of the members of the Bruni and the Bruti, two prominent Albanian families, whose members played significant roles in the political and military history of the Ottoman and Venetian Empires. This review essay attempts to place this important work in the broader context of Malcolm’s oeuvre and, in particular, to assess the book’s contributions to our understanding of agency, religion, and empire in the early modern period.

Highlights

In 1598 Lazaro Soranzo’s L’Ottomano, a book that would become something of an early modern bestseller, was published in Ferrara, with French, German, English, and Latin translations following on almost immediately
Few historians would have been prepared as Malcolm to reconstruct the history of either this author or of early sixteenth-century Albania, much less the wider Mediterranean world of this period
He infuriated some Serb nationalists in his deconstruction of the myth of the Battle of Kosovo on the Field of Blackbirds of 1389.3 Malcolm’s command of languages is legendary. Students of his works on Hobbes, for example, will recognize him as a superb Latinist, with a command of all the major western European languages.4. He reads Albanian, Bosnian, Modern Greek, Macedonian, Polish, Romanian, SerboCroatian, and Turkish—and this is by no means a complete list

Summary

Introduction

In 1598 Lazaro Soranzo’s L’Ottomano, a book that would become something of an early modern bestseller, was published in Ferrara, with French, German, English, and Latin translations following on almost immediately.1 Such success was not in itself surprising.

Results

Conclusion