Brad’s Reviews > Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World > Status Update

"historians have tended to be fixated on a golden age of the Ottoman ‘classical system’, from Mehmed the Conqueror to Süleyman the Magnificent; any deviation from it is liable to be described as a decline."

Reminder that waning geopolitical dominance and imminent total imperial collapse are not the same thing. It's a centuries-long process...

*Sigh*.

The definite strength of this book's historical analysis is the complexity it brings to "realist" historiography [in the sense of focusing on 'great powers' like the Ottomans or Poland].

Corsairs and raiders were not merely auxiliaries---they could certainly act as such, but "they often had interests and policies of their own, to which their protector-powers were sometimes forced, with great reluctance, to adapt."

Slavery was a fact of life…Its basic features – acquisition by raiding or war, public and private sales, the economic and military function, its legal status, the possibility of manumission – were the same on either side of the Christian–Muslim divide. And...that divide was constantly criss-crossed by individuals and agents of many kinds, seeking to organize an exchange or a ransom.