Piracy was a constant feature of the maritime and political scenery of the Mediterranean since antiquity, though especially during the early modern era, when the area was divided between empires and states of different religions, forming a complex system of power relations. It has been the subject of many studies, which together form a vast literature largely focused on the reactions of the various states of the Mediterranean basin to piracy, and on these states’ subjects as victims of piracy.

Well known for her pioneering book on Ottoman Crete (A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), Molly Greene now follows a new thread in her research through this highly interesting study on piracy in the early modern Mediterranean. She focuses on the corsairs of Malta, a neglected group in the general studies of the field, and on their interaction with Ottoman subjects, mainly the Greek Orthodox, throughout the late 16th and 17th centuries. The book is divided into seven chapters and organized chronologically (the first two chapters cover the 16th century, and the remainder of the book deals with the 17th century).

To give an idea of the book's content, Chapter 1 analyzes the maritime modus vivendi established by the Ottoman Empire and Venice, while Chapter 2 deals with the challenge that the Knights of Malta posed to this order after Suleyman the Magnificent expelled them from Rhodes (1522). Chapter 3 describes the piracy phenomenon after the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and the growing role of religion in this context. The remaining four chapters examine the position and recourses of Greek victims of the Maltese in the 17th century based on unexplored archival sources. Greene examines Greek commerce in the Mediterranean as part of the Ottoman merchant world, the role of the Greek diaspora in the Italian ports in helping piracy victims to organize their redress efforts, the Greek presence in the prize court in Malta itself, and, finally, the role of the papal state in Rome in arbitrating between Catholic pirates and their Christian victims in the context of Counter-Reformation Catholicism.

Written in a lively and fascinating style, the book makes extensive use of the archives of the Maltese prize court (tribunale), among other archives, to show the fluidity of the imperial and religious borders of the Mediterranean basin. Indeed, the main theme of the book is the ambiguity of the position of Greek-speaking Ottoman subjects of (mostly) Orthodox faith. Subjects of an Islamic empire who were caught by corsairs of a common Christian religion but different denomination, they used a multiplicity of networks from Malta to Livorno to Rome itself, along with a multiplicity of legal arguments based alternatively on religion or sovereignty (when invoking peace treaties, for example) in order to get back their pillaged properties, often without success. Greene analyzes this ambiguity, illustrating her study with numerous cases from the court archives, and shows that it constituted a more general feature of legal and territorial realities and allegiances in the early modern Mediterranean. In the course of this analysis, Greene reassesses the role of the Maltese corsairs by stressing: their consistency in following the principles of early modern maritime and prize law rather than their “arbitrariness” and “lawlessness”; the magnitude and importance of Ottoman Greek commerce in the 17th century, which challenges the common emphasis on its rise in the 18th century; and the role of conflicting legal systems giving priority, alternatively, to state or religion allegiances, and their intermingling with state antagonisms and religious movements (mainly the Catholic Counter-Reformation).

Although the book does not exactly live up to its perhaps overambitious subtitle suggesting it is “A maritime history of the Mediterranean,” it certainly is a major contribution not only to the history of Mediterranean commerce and power relations during this turbulent and formative period but also to the study of complex allegiances during the transition to the modern territorial state. According to Greene's scheme, the 16th-century maritime order was based on sovereignty, that is, allegiance to the various states regardless of their subjects’ religion. The renewal of Catholic power as such in the next century (Maltese piracy being not the least factor in this development) emphasized the religious element in Mediterranean politics, blurring sometimes mental borders between states and introducing new forms of mobility and flexibility both for pirates and their victims. Thus, an Ottoman Greek Orthodox subject could use either international treaties between the Ottoman Empire and Venice, for instance, or his religious affinity toward Christendom, in order to seek redress even in the Malta tribunal itself.

As a broad observation, one regrets the lack of a more general view of piracy in the Mediterranean in this book; although Greene is well versed in Ottoman sources, she chooses to almost ignore Muslim piracy, be it of the semi-autonomous states of North Africa or of the Ottoman territories (e.g., Aya Mavra/Santa Maura/Leukas in modern Western Greece). It is true that, as Greene notes, Muslim piracy has been extensively studied already, but incorporating recent books and articles by prominent Ottomanists such as Suraiya Faroqhi (The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It [London: I. B. Tauris, 2006]) or Nicolas Vatin (“Une affaire interne: Le sort et la libération des personnes de condition libre illégalement retenues en esclavage sur le territoire ottoman,” Turcica 33 [2001]: 149–89) would have provided useful insights for expanding her study. In the context of Greene's study, inclusion of the famous Makale-i Zindancı Mahmud Kapudan (The Discourse on Warden Captain Mahmud), a text of Ottoman folk literature most likely composed in the late 17th century and published by Andreas Tietze (“Die Geschichte von Kerkermeister-Kapitän, ein türkischer Seeräuberromane aus dem 17. Jahrhundert,” Acta Orientalia 19 [1942]: 152–210) and Fahir Iz (“Makale-i Zindancı Mahmud Kapudan,” Türkiyat Mecmuası 14 [1964]: 111–50), would have helped to show clearly the fluidity of the religious and political allegiances in the Mediterranean pirates’ milieu from the point of view of an Ottoman audience. In the same vein, one regrets the omission of Bartolomé and Lucile Bennassar's Les chrétiens d'Allah: L'histoire extraordinaire des renégats, XVIe–XVIIe siècles (Paris: Perrin, 1989), which is a veritable gold mine of information on the fate of captured crews, both Muslim and Christian (a citation would be particularly appropriate on page 161, for instance).

By no means is this to say that the author's bibliography is poor or one-sided; on the contrary, one should praise Greene's systematic use of Greek literature together with a rich modern bibliography on maritime law, early modern international relations, piracy, and commerce. Indeed, perhaps the main advantage of Greene's work is the new visibility it provides to the Greek-speaking subjects of the Ottoman Empire in terms of their role in connecting different states and religions. Greene shows how the fluidity of the Greek Orthodox identity was used by the Catholic states of Venice, Livorno, and Rome and by the Greeks themselves when they sought redress and justice. The extensive networks between the Ottoman Orthodox populations and the various Greek communities in the Italian peninsula functioned as channels of information and sources of aid, reinforcing the notion of a “nation in the making” whose identity was officially, so to speak, lost between state allegiances and religious affinities. One might even wonder whether this ambiguity contributed, together with other factors of course, to the formation of Greek national identity over the course of the 18th century.

Its shortcomings notwithstanding (and one should note the lack of maps, even of the simplest kind), Molly Greene's book is extremely valuable for students of Mediterranean piracy as well as Greek commerce and shipping. Certainly, as I noted before, the book is not “A maritime history of the Mediterranean,” but it will prove indispensable to any attempt at writing such a history in the future.