Agents of Empire
Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World by Noel Malcolm [1]
This item is not yet published. It is available for pre-orders and will ship on 01 August 2015 624 Pages | 8 pp insert 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches ISBN: 9780190262785
Noel Malcolm is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy, has previously written histories of Bosnia (1994) and Kosovo (1998). He is a general editor of the Clarendon edition of Thomas Hobbes, for which he himself has produced acclaimed editions of Hobbes's correspondence (1994) and Leviathan (2012). He is also a former Foreign Editor of the Spectator. He was knighted in 2014. Agents of Empire is his newest book.
The first account of the life and family of Antonio Bruni
Examines a family that was closely intertwined with some of the major events of sixteenth-century European history, especially regarding Christian and Ottoman relations
Draws attention to the Albanian strand that runs through sixteenth-century European history
Large-scale history that combines Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve and David Abulafia's The Great Sea
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.
Preface
A Note on Names, Conventions and Pronunciations
1: Ulcinj, Albania and Two Empires
2: Three Families
3: Antonio Bruti in the Service of Venice
4: Giovanni Bruni in the Service of God
5: Gasparo Bruni, the Knights of Malta and Dubrovnik
6: War, Galleys and Geopolitics, 1570
7: War, Rebellion and Ottoman Conquest, 1570-1571
8: The Lepanto Campaign, 1571
9: War, Peace and La Goletta, 1572-1574
10: Istria
11: Bartolomeo Bruti and the Prisoner Exchange, 1573-1575
12: Intelligence-gathering, Espionage and Sabotage, 1575-1577
13: Giovanni Margliani, Mehmed Sokollu and Secret Diplomacy, 1577-1579
14: Bartolomeo Bruti, Sinan Pasha and the Moldavian Venture, 1578-1580
15: Gasparo Bruni and the Huguenot War in Avignon, 1573-1586
16: Antonio Bruni, Jesuit Education and the Last Years of Gasparo Bruni
17: Moldavia, Tatars, Cossacks and Iancu Sasul, 1580-1582
18: Bartolomeo Bruti, Petru Schiopul and Aron, 1582-1592
19: Cristoforo Bruti and the Creation of a Dragoman Dynasty
20: Petru Schiopul in Exile, and his Counsellor, Antonio Bruni, 1591-1598
21: War, Geopolitics and Rebellion, 1593-1596
22: The 1596 Campaign and Pasquale Dabri's Peace Mission
Epilogue: The Legacy: Antonio Bruni's Treatise
Glossary
List of Manuscripts
Bibliography
Index
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