MOLLY GREENE, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). Pp. 241. 19.95 paper

Abstract

Historians of the Ottoman Empire have until recently characterized the 17th and 18th centuries as a period of decline, wedged in between the glorious age of Suleiman and that of the Ottoman recovery in the Tanzimat era. As such, the Ottoman conquest of the island of Crete that began in 1644 and ended with the fall of Candia (Iraklion) in 1669 has often been reduced to a footnote, at best, or confined to discussions of Ottoman military tactics and siege warfare. Greek nationalist historiography sees the conquest of the island as a tragic historic rupture, with the island's people slipping from the mini-renaissance they had enjoyed during the last decades of Venetian control to the despotism of the Tourkokratia. Despite the very important re-imagining of the Ottoman past that has occurred over the past decade as scholars have examined a wider range of archival sources throughout the Mediterranean basin, this thesis has gone largely unchallenged. Molly Greene's monograph on Crete before and after the conquest shatters that simplistic characterization with a well-written, and much needed, bit of historical revisionism.