Molly Greene's new book is primarily an examination of the systematic piracy practised by the Knights of Malta in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and its effects on the Greek merchants of the Ottoman empire. The book advances the thesis that the ‘retreat of the state’, meaning the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, from the Mediterranean at the end of the sixteenth century allowed piracy to flourish and prompted a reconfiguration of commercial relations. That reconfiguration involved a ‘revival of Catholic power’ grounded on expanded French and papal intervention in the Mediterranean. Greene presents the conflict over entitlement to ships, goods and captives through the lens of Malta's Tribunale degli armamenti, a court set up in 1605 to adjudicate disputes among the Knights and to hear the appeals of those whom they had attacked. But, more broadly, she shows a Mediterranean-wide network of piracy, complaints, information exchange and venues of appeal, ranging from French consular courts to the Vatican, to the courts of Orthodox bishops and Muslim kadis. The author uses the lawsuits of Greek merchants to illustrate the intricacies of conflicting maritime conventions and cross-communal commercial operations. Of particular interest here is the focus on local actors and the role that claims of religious affiliation played in petitions for redress. One sees the sorting-out process by which goods and personnel on Ottoman ships were identified. Pirates extracted confessions of ‘Turk’ or Jewish identity from fellow-Christian merchants in order to legitimise the seizure of their goods. Others violated treaties of affiliation by branding Ottoman subjects as ‘North Africans’ subject to seizure. One court testimony depicts three Christian corsair captains (from Malta, Livorno and Sardinia) fighting over entitlement to the rice cargo of merchants from Mytilene. Another shows a Christian shopkeeper getting a Muslim slave drunk and bribing him to give false testimony on behalf of Maltese corsairs. Extending her reach into the eighteenth century, Greene points out the enduring importance of inter-Ottoman trade and the probability that Muslims dominated the maritime commerce of both Rhodes and Crete. The author's footnotes are extensive and add colour and context to her narrative. While focusing on documentary evidence, she also employs English, Greek and Italian primary and secondary sources. For alternative works addressing the nature of Mediterranean ports and Greek commercial networks, the author might also have included Edhem Eldem, D. Goffman and B. Masters, The Ottoman city between east and west: Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul (Cambridge 1999); and Elena Frangakis-Syrett, The commerce of Smyrna in the eighteenth century, 1700–1820 (Athens 1992).