ÌÇÐÄTV

What makes the Mediterranean fascinating is what makes writing its history such a challenge. Noel Malcolm’s magnificent Agents of Empire uses the intertwined stories of two Albanian families – the Brunis and the Brutis – as a prism through which to view the contacts and the conflicts that made the early modern Mediterranean. As diplomats, spies, bishops, soldiers, traders and interpreters, they were mobile and multilingual. From their Albanian roots, networks of kinship and contacts stretched in all directions, crisscrossing barriers of faith and nationality.

The sheer linguistic challenge of a study like this is evident from the beginning of the book: a prefatory note offers helpful tips on the pronunciation of Turkish, Albanian, Serbo-Croat and Romanian. Malcolm’s account represents a staggering archival achievement. He draws on material in upwards of 10 languages in archives from Rome and Warsaw to Dubrovnik and Malta. The result is a work of astonishing (if, at times, almost overwhelming) richness and detail: a deftly woven tapestry of Mediterranean history that incorporates “the all-too-neglected Albanian thread that is woven into the history of 16th-century Europe”.

In its attention to the stories of the Brunis and the Brutis – frontier families practically unknown outside of specialist histories – across multiple generations, this study is a wonderful contribution to the human history of the Mediterranean. It is impossible to read Malcolm’s account without a sense of its resonances for today. Every morning, we wake up to stories of new horrors and new heroics from the Mediterranean. It remains a zone of contact and conflict, a region that both defies and defines our ideas of Europe, Asia, Africa and the world in between. Through work such as Malcolm’s, we can come closer to understanding why it continues to resist our indifference: the Mediterranean remains, as it was for the Romans, “our sea”.

John Gallagher (University of Cambridge), the Guardian, June 2015