Book | Agents of Empire and Antonio Bruni

Mavi Boncuk |

Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-century Mediterranean World 

Noel Malcolm [1]
Oxford University Press, 2015 -  604 pages 
ISBN 10: 0190262788 / ISBN 13: 9780190262785 

In the late sixteenth century, a prominent Albanian named Antonio Bruni [2]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.

Contents

Ulcinj Albania and Two Empires 1
Three Families 23
Antonio Bruti in the Service of Venice 35
Giovanni Bruni in the Service of God 55
Gasparo Bruni and the Knights of Malta 76
Galleys and Geopolitics 100
Rebellion and Ottoman Conquest 123
The Lepanto Campaign 151
War Peace and Ottoman Resurgence 175
The Brutis and Brunis in Istria 194
Bartolomeo Bruti and the Prisoner Exchange 206
Espionage and Sabotage in Istanbul 223
Secret Diplomacy and the Grand Vizier 244
Sinan Pasha and the Moldavian Venture 261
Gasparo Bruni and the Huguenot War 278
Antonio Bruni and the Jesuits 299
Moldavia Tatars and Cossacks 317
Bartolomeo Bruti in Power 336
Cristoforo Bruti and the Dragoman Dynasty 362
The Exiled Voivod and his Counsellor 379
Habsburg Ottoman War and Balkan Rebellion 391
Pasquale Bruti and his Peace Mission 415
The Legacy Antonio Brunis Treatise 430
Glossary 447
Notes 451
List of Manuscripts 529
Bibliography 537
Index 579

[1]  Sir Noel Robert Malcolm, FRSL, FBA (born 26 December 1956) is an English political journalist, historian and academic. A King's Scholar at Eton College, Malcolm read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge and received his Doctorate in History from Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a Fellow and College Lecturer of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, before becoming a political and foreign affairs journalist with The Spectator and the Daily Telegraph.

He stepped away from jour

nalism in 1995 to become a writer and academic, being appointed as a visiting fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford for two years. He became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 1997, and a fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 2001. Since 2002, he has been a senior research fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was knighted in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to scholarship, journalism, and European history.

Noel Malcolm is the author of:

• De Dominis, 1560–1624: Venetian, Anglican, ecumenist, and relapsed heretic (1984)
• George Enescu: His Life and Music ( Toccata Press, 1990), which has been translated into several languages
• Bosnia: A Short History (New York University Press, 1994), which has been translated into several languages
• Origins of English Nonsense (HarperCollins, 1997)
• Kosovo: A Short History (New York University Press, 1998)
• Books on Bosnia: A critical bibliography of works relating to Bosnia-Herzegovina published since 1990 in West European languages (with Quintin Hoare) (Bosnian Institute, 1999)
• Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford University Press, 2002)
• John Pell (1611–1685) and His Correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish: The Mental World of an Early Modern Mathematician (with Jacqueline Stedall) (Oxford University Press, 2005)
• Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Late Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World (2015)
• Useful Enemies: Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750 (2019)

He edited Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years' War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes (Clarendon Press, 2007), and The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes (1994) and Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (3 volumes, Oxford University Press, 2012), for which he was awarded a British Academy Medal.^[3] He has also contributed over 40 journal articles or chapters in books since 2002

[2] Antonio Bruni (born c. 1550 – died 1598) was an Albanian commander and spy from Ulcinj, part of the Albanian Bruni family, in the 16th century. He was the uncle of Bartolomeo Bruti. Members of the family worked for the Venetians, the Papacy and the Ottomans. In 1479 Antonio Bruni fled Shkoder when it fell to the Ottomans. Bruni was then educated by the Jesuits[6] in May 1572 in Rome and he was a doctorate in Avignon. He also worked for one of his cousins in Moldavia. Bruni's father was Gasparo Bruni, the first knight of Malta and the commander of the Papacys fleet during the Battle of Lepanto. In august 1591, Bruni returned to Koper and was elected as the overseer of the grain store.

Petru Schiopul

Petru Schipoul, Voivod of Moldavia, abandoned his throne and fled to Habsburg territory where he contacted Bruni in Koper in 1592, according to a letter which Bruni presented to the elected pope Clement VIII in Rome. Before Petru Schipouls decision to leave, he received a loan of 11,300 ducats in advance from a Ragusan merchant in Moldavia named Giovanni de Marini Poli who had come to collect sheep and cattle. However Schipoul fled and the new Voivode Aron refused to pay his predecessors debts. Marini Poli pursued Petru for the money and in May 1593, Antonio Bruni traveled to Bolzano where Petru was and made him sign a legal document empowering Antonio to speak and act on Petrus behalf. This proved that Antonio was fluent in Romanian. For seven months Bruni stayed in Tyrol helping Petru with his legal defense in court against Marini Poli.  In 1594 Petru died and his family members stripped the house of possessions which Bruni opposed. He also felt a special responsibility for the son of Petru, Stefan. In 1596 he submitted a memorandum to the Austrians suggesting an anti-Ottoman geostrategic plan.

Death
It is believed that Antonio Bruni died from the plague during his travels between Koper and Bolzano in Trieste July 1598. Bruni was the first Albanian to write a general description of Albania which was a major source of information in Lazaro Soranzos L’Ottomanno (1598).Antonio Bruni had an insiders view of the empire; his work had taken him to such places as Vlorë, on the southern coast of Albania, and Constanta, on the Black Sea coast, and he also stayed in Moldavia. In his writings, he identified the ancestors of the Albanians with Goths or Macedonians.Bruni was a friend of Innocentius Stoicinus, bishop of Lezhe in August 1596. According to Mekjashi in 1603, Bruni had intervened in Rome to save Stoicinus from punishment for immoral behavior.