Agents Of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits, And Spies In The Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World

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 in 1571, and a highly placed interpreter in Istanbul, formerly Constantinople. 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, 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 book is the result of years of archival detective work, bringing to life a vibrant moment in European and Ottoman history, and challenging assumptions about their supposed differences. Malcolm's work guides us through exchanges between East and West, Venetians and the Ottomans, telling a story of worlds colliding and transforming one another.