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 and 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 and 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, and 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 and the Ottoman Empire in a fresh light, illuminating subjects as diverse as espionage, diplomacy, the grain trade, slave-ransoming and anti-Ottoman rebellion. He describes the conflicting strategies of the Christian powers, and the extraordinarily ambitious plans of the sultans and 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 and European history. A masterpiece of scholarship as well as story-telling, Agents of Empire builds up a panoramic picture, both of Western power-politics and of the interrelations between the Christian and Ottoman worlds.

• We started tracking this book on June 24, 2015.
• This book was £9.51 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 32 times in the past 3,369 days.
• The current price of this book is £8.99 last checked 2 days ago.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is £5.99.
• The lowest price to date was £3.99 last reached on January 29, 2021.
• This book has been £3.99 one time since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was £13.29 last reached on September 23, 2015.
• This book has been £13.29 3 times since we started tracking it.

• HistoryEurope
• HistoryWorld
• Politics & Social Sciences

• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 507 Pages
• File Size: 50,349 KB