Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Late Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World. By Noel Malcolm. Allen Lane; 604 pages; £30.
IN THE 1990s, when the Balkans were at war, Noel Malcolm was best known as a journalist and polemicist, though he was already a promising academic. As a sharp critic of Serb nationalism, he published histories of Bosnia and Kosovo that won praise for deconstructing Serb national myths, even if some critics found him too sparing of the myths told by other nations, such as the Albanians.
That makes it all the more welcome that Sir Noel (now an eminent British scholar who was knighted last year) has written a book that will serve as an antidote to all crude nationalism, and to many historical stereotypes. It brings the reader back to an era long before the nation-state, when personal loyalties and religious coalitions were perpetually shifting.
“Agents of Empire” traces the fortunes in the final decades of the 16th century of one extended family whose members struggled to survive at the interface between two empires, Venetian and Ottoman. They bore the surnames of Bruni and Bruti, and their roots were in a small Albanian-speaking port on the Adriatic, Ulcinj, now part of Montenegro.
The book ingeniously reconstructs the changing balance of forces in the eastern...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1HwHV4x
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