{"product_id":"agents-of-empire-knights-corsairs-jesuits-and-spies-in-the-sixteenthcentury-mediterranean-world-9780190262785","title":"Agents of Empire: Knights  Corsairs  Jesuits  and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 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 Brunis 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. Malcolms 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45279923929141,"sku":"ByrdShop_0190262788","price":40.18,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780190262785.jpg?v=1780615986","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/agents-of-empire-knights-corsairs-jesuits-and-spies-in-the-sixteenthcentury-mediterranean-world-9780190262785","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}