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The Triumph of Geopolitics

Amoral geopolitics, more than any clash of civilizations, dictated VenetianOttoman relations.
Robert D. Kaplan
August 12, 2016
September-October 2016

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Noel Malcolm, Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the
Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World (New York: Oxford University Press,

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2015), 604 pp., $34.95.

THOUGH HISTORIANS know about the vast difference between the early modern
world and the modern world, journalists and policymakers are often confused about
the distinction. But the distinction is crucial, and grants an insight into where
human society might be headed next. The early modern period is often popularly
defined as beginning with the Renaissance and ending with the Industrial
Revolution. The modern period begins after that. A key to early modernism is how
it generated identities far more multiple and elastic, and, therefore, benign
compared to those wrought by the ethnic straitjackets demanded by modern
nationalists. Indeed, the main point of the late Harvard professor Samuel P.
Huntingtons The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Ordera book
that everyone owned an opinion about, but that few actually readis that political
identities based on culture and civilization are not primordial, but integral to the
very process of modernization. Yet, if modernism is itself just a stage, are identities
despite the headlines of sectarian war and the conflict between Islam and the
Westmoving imperceptibly in the direction of something more flexible? Might the
early modern era offer a relevant and more hopeful guide to the future?
Arguably the most accurate and finely
shaded view into Europes early modern
past has only recently been published: Noel
Malcolms Agents of Empire: Knights,
Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the SixteenthCentury Mediterranean World. Malcolm is
the definitive academic historian: a research
professor at All Souls College, Oxford,
intimidatingly multilingual, a trained
archival detective and a fiercely engaging writer. He knows that the art of biography
is to illuminate the entire period in question and can write a rich portrait of a
country encompassed within a smartly drawn geopolitical panorama. Agents of
Empire, which is roughly about the contest for supremacy in the Adriatic and the
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eastern Mediterranean between Venice and the Ottoman Empire in the late
sixteenth century, is a microhistory of a family within an encyclopedic, almost
Proustian, vision of early modern Europe. Malcolm is writing academic, not
popular, history. Emotions dont bleed off these pages: you are told only what the
archives and other records reveal. The result is a dose of dryness combined with
extreme eruditionthe mark of the true academy.
Ulcinj, located on the Adriatic Sea in the far south of Montenegro, close to Albania,
is where Malcolms narrative begins. Originally Illyrian, Ulcinj fell to the Romans,
Byzantines and Slavs before coming under Venetian rule in 1405 and Ottoman rule
in 1571. Of course, Ulcinj still mattered greatly to Venice in the sixteenth century
because it stood on a vital frontier. For here was the messy Venetian-Ottoman
borderland of periodic atrocities, where clan conflicts mattered more than religious
ones, even as Christians fled the Ottoman conquest. Nevertheless, the Ottoman
conquest fashioned subtle changes, not an upheaval. As Malcolm writes:
It may seem that an alien element took over at every level. . . . This impression is
false. With a few exceptions (soldiers, and some others), the Muslims were not
immigrants brought in from distant Islamic territories; they were local Albanians
who happened to convert to Islam. Reasons for conversion were various, and in
many cases probably had more to do with advancing ones social and economic
position than with any religious concerns.
In other words, yes, there was in fact a clash of different empires with different
religions, but it was more complicated and less stark than meets the eye. The
Ottoman Empire was still an important source of grain for Venice. There were long
periods of peace between the two empires, when Venice used the Muslim Ottomans
as a source of pressure upon rival Catholic city-states in Italy. Venice even made
arrangements, as Malcolm meticulously puts it, with the sancakbeyis of Bosnia to
employ Croatian light cavalry to supplement its own stradiots. Furthermore,
Venice was the only power whose naval policy was primarily concerned with the
protection of trade routes; and since the trade in question was with the Ottoman

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Empire, the usual policy involved cooperation, not conflict. There is an even larger
point here: that geopolitics, because it is somewhat refreshingly amoral, stood
above bloody religious clashes. For example, Catholic Poland could live with the
Ottoman-ruled Romanian principalities, but it could not accept the idea of their
becoming clients and creatures of the [fellow Catholic] Habsburgs. Moreover, there
was the overriding determinant of Ottoman policy in Europe in this period, which
was the struggle against fellow-Muslim Persia in Asia, that further encouraged
along with the Ottoman hold over Syria and Egyptthe sultans desire to
dominate the eastern Mediterranean and Cyprus in particular, which only in turn,
helped bring them into rivalry with Catholic Venice.
But nuancing does not lead to airbrushing in this book. For this is as complete
account of a period and a particular geography as one can reasonably imagine. The
author recounts the nastiest sides of the Venetian-Ottoman rivalry, such as the
dispatch by the sancakbeyis of the Balkan interior of irregular forces to burn
villages and seize livestock in order to make life utterly wretched for the Venetians
and their subjects, whose slither of a coastal empire on the eastern Adriatic was
particularly tenuous and subject to Ottoman whims. On the other hand, owing to
the rugged terrain of Albania, Ottoman attempts at administration in this part of
the Balkan interior encountered stiff martial resistance, so that while the Ottomans
could destroy an existing power structure in Albania and its environs, it failed at
constructing a new and pliant one. (Sometimes the anarchy originated on the coast
itself, as when the Uskoks, based in the port of Senj in Habsburg-ruled Croatia,
launched raids into Ottoman territory.)
And it is the Ottoman Empire that Malcolm is talking about, not the Turkish one,
even as Ottoman and Turkish are in many cases synonymous. But because they
are not interchangeable in many other casesgiven that the Ottoman Sultanate was
a rich and cosmopolitan confection of different cultures and even religions, with
many different kinds of self-governing polities and non-Turkish cliques (Bosnian,
Albanian and so on) within itat least the current generation of academics do not
mix or confuse the two. As Malcolm tells us in one of many revealing asides, the
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upper reaches of the Ottoman administration included many renegades

(converts to Islam), from Italy, Croatia, Hungary, Austria and elsewhere, whose
native language and mental formation were Western. This whole system of
government, taxation and military organization made the Ottoman Empire in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the envy of Western Europe.
Malcolm captures the internal workings of this world in needle-point detail,
covering the volumes of diplomatic memoranda at the heart of the story and all the
subsidiary subjects at the edges of it, including long disquisitions on corsairing, the
grain trade, galley construction, disease outbreaks, the ransoming of slaves and so
forth. He so dominates the subject that all any reader can do is to submit in awe,
learn and experience what real expertise is about.
However, Malcolms gifts, particularly in searching out archives, are not centered
on the larger social, military and geopolitical canvas, but on the Bruni and Bruti
families of Venetian-Albanians, who inhabited a world of connections and status at
the borderland of Venetian and Ottoman power around Ulcinj, where the Italian
and Slavic languages were used almost interchangeably. The Brunis and the
Brutis, Malcolm writes, were genuine linguistic and cultural amphibians. And that
. . . was essential to their success in the wider Mediterranean world. This extended
family included a Catholic archbishop in the Balkans, the captain of the papal
flagship at the Battle of Lepanto, an interpreter who worked for both the Venetians
and Ottomans, and a member of the Spanish spy network in Istanbul who later
became chief minister of Moldavia. (Gasparo Bruni himself owed loyalties to
Venice, the pope in Rome and to the king of Spain.)
It is here that Dubrovnik (also known as Ragusa) comes into the picture. A storied,
semi-independent city-state north of Ulcinj on the Adriatics Dalmatian coast,
Dubrovnik functioned as an intelligence hub and communications center between
East and West during the second half of the sixteenth century. Dubrovniks wealth
came originally from being the export center for lead, silver and other commodities
originating in Bosnia, Kosovo and elsewhere in the Balkan interior. Because it was

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virtually enclosed by Ottoman territory, Dubrovnik could not resist the sultans
militarily, even as it depended on the Ottoman Empire for food. But partly because
it was such a reliable supplier of intelligence to Istanbul, Dubrovnik was not
required to supply soldiers to the sultanate or assist the Ottoman soldiery in any
substantial way. Dubrovnik represented the ultimate ambiguity: a Christian state
nestling on the edge of Ottoman territory, practically autonomous but regarded by
the Sultan as part of his empire.

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History is about filling in the blanks with pure research, not with speculation and
novelistic touches. In this case, what Malcolm brings densely alive is a continent in
which vast Muslim armies operate deep inside the Hungarian heartland of central
Europe. And yet it is a continent simultaneously engaged in the most complex of
amoral geopolitics extending to the Near East and thus triumphing, however
tenuously, over civilizational clashes.

AND BECAUSE it all does so undeniably come alive, it forces reflection on our own
world. Weespecially the knowledge and policy elite among usinhabit a
cosmopolitan milieu that should make the Brunis and Brutis quite familiar to us.
Anyone who has experienced the upper reaches of London, Washington, New York,
Berlin, Shanghai and innumerable other cities, or has experienced the fancy and
influential conference circuit, is aware of people of the most exotic parentage with

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extraordinary multilingual gifts and eclectic loyalties. This is a world of, for
instance, someone born in Singapore, whose parents come from France and the
Punjab, who may speak English, French, Chinese and Hindi, and has at least two
passports, with relatives serving in multiple governments and nongovernmental
organizations at reasonably high levels. This is the world of a former narrow and
aristocratic elite morphing into a larger global upper class, one full of opportunities
and risks: somewhat akin to that of the Brunis and Brutis.
It is also a world of Dubrovniks: that is, of transactional city-statesthink of
Singapore and Dubaiwhose loyalty, deep down, is to business and trade rather
than to any larger power per se. And, of course, it is a world of secular geopolitics
that increasingly transcend religious divides: Israel and Saudi Arabia in a very real,
albeit unspoken, alliance against Iran; former enemies America and Vietnam lining
up against China; largely Eastern Orthodox Romania tilting away from Orthodox
Russia while Orthodox Bulgaria and Serbia tilt increasingly toward Moscow.
Divisions of religion and sect obviously cannot be denied, just as they could not be
in the early modern world, but, as in that world, the closer you look the more the
cross-cutting complexities and contradictions abound.
Finally, at a more profound and yet, perhaps, less obvious level, there is, as the
French philosopher Pierre Manent intimates in Metamorphoses of the City, a
growing emphasis on city-states and the half-hidden traditions of empire, even
while the problems of modern states increase. I mean that powers such as the
United States, China, Iran and the European Union, while not officially empires,
have many of the frustrations and challenges of former imperiumsboth successful
ones and not. Meanwhile, on almost all continents cities grow into both megacities
and region-states of their own.
Isnt this all, then, to a much more amplified and enlarged, high-tech extent, a
version of early modernism? Just as the young Henry Kissinger saw an answer to
the possibility of nuclear conflict in the 1950s by concentrating on the
post-Napoleonic court diplomacy of Metternich and Castlereagh, Noel Malcolms

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answer to where so-called postmodernism is heading is to concentrate on the early

modern exploits of an extended, multinational family amid a world that is rather
more multicultural than we may realize.
Robert D. Kaplan is the author most recently of In Europes Shadow: Two Cold
Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond. He is a senior
fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
Image: Battle of the combined Venetian and Dutch fleets against the Turks in the
Bay of Foya, 1649. Public domain.
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Alex Podgaets 21 hours ago

This paper is a rather deep and wordy attempt at digging for the roots of the conflict Mr
Kaplan labels "Muslims vs The West" (quote, not my words) yet it might look too far and
doesn't notice near things.
I live in Russia, last week I've been told by one American friend: most of us in the USA don't
have hatred for you guys. It was sweet to hear, and I answered something nice as well, but I
immediately thought about Ukraine.
For peoples of Middle-East and Muslims the feeling might be even more acute - like, we don't
care if you love us or hate us, just stop killing us for a start! ^_^
5

Reply Share
Janek > Alex Podgaets 7 hours ago

You should recall your own Russian imperial history and your actions in Europe. You
should, at least, try to remember the millions of people you killed when building your
Russian empire and later on your Soviet (Bolshevik) empire in the XX century. You
can fool the Americans who hardly know the European history that is presented to
them and distorted by the filters of the political correctness (PC), the current religion.
You can not fool those who know the true history of Europe and the Russian
imperialism then and now. You should be afraid of your own shadow.

Reply Share
FoolForTruth > Alex Podgaets 14 hours ago

It is always big power and money that goes unaccountable. I for one would love to see
accountability for causing so much pain and suffering for millions of people, as in
Syria for example. Is it really a pipeline that caused all that misery?

Reply Share
Oldtimer > Alex Podgaets 20 hours ago

Well said

Reply Share
10x25mm 11 hours ago

So what brought about the decline of early modern government by elites? The rise of the
homogeneous nation state, the industrial revolution's new blood, monetary chicanery, or
some kind of 'Trumpian' figure?

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