Molly Greene . Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterranean . (Princeton Modern Greek Studies.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010. Pp. xiv, 305. $35.00.

Abstract

No one derives more profit from an offshore account of Mediterranean history than the scholar Molly Greene. In her first monograph, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2000), and in this work, her strategy is to plant herself on an island promontory—first, on Crete, now, on Malta—and watch the movements of merchants and pirates. From those heights, she is able to pick out connections that are obscured at lower elevations. Her overriding goal, however, expressed as such in the book's conclusion, is to demonstrate that the Mediterranean constitutes “an international maritime order, not a sui generis sea but rather a space comparable to both the Indian and the Atlantic Oceans” (p. 231). In a series of loosely interlocking arguments, she largely succeeds in her goal. Pirate raids on merchant vessels are the events that captured Greene's interest. She analyzes them for what they reveal about Mediterranean economic history in general, and the impact of Ottoman and Venetian maritime trade on contemporary notions of sovereignty and subjecthood in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her book is organized around lawsuits brought by Christian Ottoman subjects against the Knights of Malta for loss of property taken in their pirate raids on Ottoman vessels. The Ottoman subjects pressing suit are the Greek merchants of the title. The Catholic pirates are the Knights, who preyed on Ottoman commerce in their never-ending war against Islam. Greene advances the idea that in the period during which Venice and the Ottoman state began to direct their commercial energies away from maritime commerce, the Knights of Malta and the papacy filled the vacuum created by their withdrawal. The religious order and the papacy held out the possibility of legal redress to all Christians, thereby encouraging Christian Ottoman subjects to emphasize their Greek Christian identity over their status as Ottoman subjects in specific contexts. Christian merchants who were subjects of the sultan had recourse to legal redress in the court of the Knights. Their Muslim colleagues and fellow victims did not.