In the second half of the sixteenth century, most of the Christian states of Western Europe were on the defensive against a Muslim superpower
- the Empire of the Ottoman sultans. There was violent conflict, from raiding & corsairing to large-scale warfare, but there were also many forms of peaceful interaction across the surprisingly porous frontiers of these opposing power-blocs. Agents of Empire describes the paths taken through the eastern Mediterranean & its European hinterland by members of a Venetian-Albanian family, almost all of them previously invisible to history. They include an archbishop in the Balkans, the captain of the papal flagship at the Battle of Lepanto, the power behind the throne in the Ottoman province of Moldavia, & a dragoman (interpreter) at the Venetian embassy in Istanbul. Through the life-stories of these adventurous individuals over three generations, Noel Malcolm casts the world between Venice, Rome & the Ottoman Empire in a fresh light, illuminating subjects as diverse as espionage, diplomacy, the grain trade, slave-ransoming & anti-Ottoman rebellion. He describes the conflicting strategies of the Christian powers, & the extraordinarily ambitious plans of the sultans & their viziers. Few works since Fernand Braudel`s classic account of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, published more than sixty years ago, have ranged so widely through this vital period of Mediterranean & European history. With a masterpiece of scholarship as well as story-telling, Agents of Empire builds up a panoramic picture, both of Western power-politics & of the interrelations between the Christian & Ottoman worlds.