Agents of Empire by Noel Malcolm: The hard-fought battle for the centre of the world

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

Author: Noel Malcolm

ISBN-13: 978-0241003893

Publisher: Allen Lane

Guideline Price: £30

It is common knowledge that the Mediterranean was once, as its names indicates, the centre of the world. But we are only starting to understand what that central role might have meant for the people who lived in the territories on its shores.

Sicily, for example, is now largely imagined as an impoverished island, riddled by organised crime, the legacy of stultifying traditional structures and filial allegiances, backward in contrast to the industry and energy of northern Italy. But for much of European history the story was quite different, and Sicily’s natural fertility and wealth made it a powerful and desirable kingdom, fought over by a succession of superpowers: Greeks, Romans and Normans.

Noel Malcolm, the premier historian of the Balkans in the anglophone world, was inspired to write this significant and substantial book, Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World, when, 20 years ago, he came across a reference to a treatise by Antonio Bruni, the first work about Albania written by an Albanian. Further archival digging around the Mediterranean led him to the story of two closely related families, the Bruni and the Bruti, Albanians from a border town between the Venetian and Ottoman Empires who served the Italian city state throughout the 16th century. Agents of Empire charts the fortunes of the most significant members of the two families in their roles as soldiers, prelates, galley slaves, grain merchants and spies, as a means of reconstructing the Mediterranean world we have lost.

The book’s series of interlocking stories provide the reader with a wealth of detail about life in southern Europe. What is most striking is just how contingent life was and how conflicted and provisional loyalties invariably were. People either learned to live with anxiety or found ways of accepting that fundamental and frightening change was always around the corner: military occupation, disease, significant deaths in the family that affected everyone’s fortunes, religious change, crop failure and famine.

Divided populations

Albania was divided in its religious faiths, as one might expect of an area bordering two hostile empires. But Muslim Albanians were not immigrants from “distant Islamic territories” but local Albanians “who happened to convert to Islam”. And in divided populations, loyalties could split, change and revert without difficulty.

Members of the Bruni family served the Venetian state with distinction, but Bartolomeo Bruti chose to spy for the Spanish. He was probably recruited when acting as a trainee dragoman – an interpreter – when he was in Istanbul in the mid-1570s. It was not an obviously wise career choice, as Bartolomeo died an ignominious death when his luck finally ran out. Imprisoned in Moldovia, he tried to flee from a hostile local ruler over the Polish border. His nose was cut off and he was strangled when he was in his mid-30s. Bartolomeo was a talented linguist and, as the documents he produced while in the service of his Spanish masters reveal, a man who “possessed mature judgment and a good knowledge of conditions in the Ottoman capital”. Perhaps he chose his perilous life; perhaps he had no real choice.

Malcolm writes especially well about the Battle of Lepanto, the great naval encounter between the Venetians and the Ottomans in 1572. The Venetian victory was celebrated throughout Europe at the time, with the young James VI of Scotland, later to be the first king of the British Isles, writing a poem celebrating the defeat of the infidel threat. Sadly for the Europeans, the victory proved less than decisive, and the Ottoman navy swiftly regrouped.

Archbishop Giovanni Bruni, perhaps the most successful figure in the families, had been imprisoned as a galley slave after he had fiercely urged resistance to the Ottoman siege of Bar (now in Montenegro), which fell to the Ottomans in 1571. He was killed by the Spanish soldiers who overran his ship hoping for loot, despite his declaration that "I'm a bishop, I'm a Christian." Had he lived he would have been reunited with his brother Gasparo, a Knight of Malta, in "a novelistic scene worthy of Cervantes". The author of Don Quixote was, as is well attested, fighting for the Venetians at the battle, in a Genoese ship.

Sea warfare in the 16th century was especially brutal, the aim of any commander being to ram an opposing vessel with the long beak on the prow of his ship and overwhelm it. Desperate hand-to-hand fighting was the norm, but the Venetians triumphed largely because they had six large warships – galleasses – that blasted the Ottoman galleys out of the water.

It was the assumption that this mode of combat would give them an advantage that also led to the defeat of the Spanish Armada in the subsequent decade as the English vessels kept their distance and used their superior cannon to good effect. Military culture was changing rapidly.

Agents of Empire is also strong on social and cultural history, and, just as the story contains tales of grisly deaths well told, so does it include accounts of food, trade and eating. Malcolm uses his protagonists skilfully to explain the diverse nature of ordinary life. The discussion of Antonio Bruni, author of the treatise on Albania, enables him to provide a description of life in a seminary of the Jesuits, the Counter-Reformation order established to revivify the Catholic faith and to train young men for crusades against heretics and Muslims.

Diet

The boys were subject to rigorous discipline but they ate well, a pound of meat a day with fruit and cheese, the diet of the upper classes. The Jesuits were clearly a food-conscious order: a Jesuit traveller to Moldovia in the 1580s was delighted to learn that one could buy a stack of dried fish as big as a man, and a barrel of caviar for the trifling sum of one scudo.

Malcolm has written yet another book for which we should be grateful, and which can stand worthily beside his histories of Kosovo and Bosnia. No one since the great French historian Fernand Braudel has illuminated the Mediterranean world so brightly, nor given us an understanding of the intimate connections between global politics and ordinary life.

If the lives of the protagonists sometimes get lost in great swathes of detail, it is always worth pursuing the story knowing they will return to the centre stage before too long, and the information one gleans on the way is as valuable as the main plot.

Andrew Hadfield's recent books include The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500-1640 and Edmund Spenser: A Life