Noel Malcolm, Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth Century Mediterranean World

Noel Malcolm’s exhaustively researched new book on several generations of the Albanian Bruni family will no doubt receive a good deal of attention from historians of Catholic Europe and the Counter-Reformation, and deservedly so. But Ottoman historians should read it as well. In vivid and elegant prose, Malcolm gives us the best account I have seen yet of the Ottoman conquest of the Albanian world, as well as a fine-grained study of cross-border relations and Ottoman diplomacy at work, both in the region and in Istanbul. 

Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in The Sixteenth Century Mediterranean World

Noel Malcolm’s exhaustively researched new book on several generations of the Albanian Bruni family will no doubt receive a good deal of attention from historians of Catholic Europe and the Counter-Reformation, and deservedly so. But Ottoman historians should read it as well. In vivid and elegant prose, Malcolm gives us the best account I have seen yet of the Ottoman conquest of the Albanian world, as well as a fine-grained study of cross-border relations and Ottoman diplomacy at work, both in the region and in Istanbul. 

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  • Noel Malcolm, Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in The Sixteenth Century Mediterranean World, London: Allen Lane, 2015, xxv+604 pp., ISBN 978-019-0262-78-5.