Bruni Antonio - Agents of empire: knights, corsairs, Jesuits and spies in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean world

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First published 2015

Copyright Noel Malcolm, 2015

Cover image: Detail from The Battle of Lepanto, Andrea Michieli (Vicentino) Palazzo Ducale, Venice, Italy/Cameraphoto ArteVenezia/Bridgeman Images.

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-141-97836-9

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This book is dedicated to Alban, Faruk and Uran

1. )

Nearly 20 years ago, I was reading a sixteenth-century Italian book about the Ottoman Empire when the hairs began to stand up on the back of my neck. The author had referred to a treatise on the main European province of the empire by a certain Antonio Bruni; then, discussing the Albanians, he said that information about them was available in the work of Bruni, their compatriot. Here was a reference to a text about (or at least partly about) Albania, written by an Albanian something of special significance to those who study the history of that country, since it would appear to be the first ever work of its kind by a named Albanian author.

I had not seen any reference to this treatise before. Further research quickly established that it was unpublished, unlocated and altogether unknown. One modern Albanian textbook appeared to quote from it, but the quoted material consisted only of a detail given in the sixteenth-century Italian book, at the point where it referred to Brunis work. As for Antonio Bruni himself: he seemed to be a near-invisible figure, who had left almost no trace of his existence in Albanian history. I could find just one mention of him, in a work by the doyen of modern West European writers on Albania, Peter Bartl, who noted that someone of that name had apparently interceded on behalf of an errant priest (who later became an Albanian bishop) in Rome, at an unspecified date in the late sixteenth century. The rest, at that stage, was silence.

Of course it was quite possible that Brunis treatise had not survived in any form. But I knew that in Renaissance Italy manuscript treatises of a politico-geographical nature were a popular genre, and that they often circulated in many copies; given the extraordinary wealth of libraries and archives in that country, there was no shortage of places where a copy of this work might conceivably be lurking. As the years went by, I tried many different ways of locating it, some of them methodical (for example: looking for references to other manuscript sources in the Italian book and then hunting for those ones, in the hope that

When I finally had the manuscript of Brunis treatise in my hands, I found that it was not as long as I might have hoped; nor was it devoted exclusively to Albania, though it did contain many points of interest about that country. Nevertheless it was an unusually fascinating work, with a distinctive character, very different from the normal run of West European writings about the Ottoman territories in this period. Here was a text written by someone with significant amounts of inside knowledge not a foreign diplomat picking up second-hand information in Istanbul, or a traveller passing through places where he could not communicate directly with the inhabitants. I decided that I would transcribe the work, and find some suitable scholarly venue in which to publish it, with a short introduction.

But there my real problems began. How could I introduce this work without giving an account of who Antonio Bruni was, and of how, when and why he chose to write it? A few hints about his activities emerged from the text itself (including a rather puzzling connection with an exiled ruler of Moldavia), but otherwise the manuscript gave me only two details about him. One was his name, given there as Antonio Bruno rather than Bruni; trying to find more information about him on that basis was almost impossible, as both forms of the name are frustratingly common in Italian culture and history. The other was the name of the city he came from: Dolcigno or Dulcigno Ulcinj, in present-day Montenegro. I knew that a Giovanni Bruni of Ulcinj had been the local archbishop, and so I began with him, hoping to find a family connection. Gradually, by a combination of more good luck and much time-consuming detective work, I pieced together some of the family history, and began tracing the stories of several of Antonio Brunis closest relatives his father, his uncles and his cousins until, eventually, there came a point where I realized that I had a much larger project on my hands.

Here was a family story of particular richness, and occasional real drama, which was closely intertwined with some of the major events of sixteenth-century European history, especially where relations between the Christian and Ottoman worlds were concerned. For many years I had been studying the ways in which those two worlds both clashed and connected in the early modern period. The full spectrum of interactions between Western Christians and Ottomans ranged from war and corsairing at one end, via espionage, information-gathering and diplomacy (including the essential work of the dragomans or professional translators), to trade, collaboration and actual employment by the Ottomans at the other. And now I could see that members of Antonio Brunis family occupied, at different times and in different places, every one of those places on the spectrum. Thus the idea for this book gradually took shape. I had two basic aims: to describe the experiences, adventures and achievements of an unusually interesting set of people; and at the same time to use their collective biography as a framework on which to build some broader, more thematic accounts of EastWest relations and interactions in this period. The themes here are many and various, involving not only the large-scale diplomatic and strategic issues that shaped those international relations, but also topics such as the grain trade, piracy and corsairing, the exchange and ransoming of prisoners, galley warfare, espionage in Istanbul and the role of the dragoman. Each time that I turn aside from a biographical narrative to discuss one of these issues, this is not a digression; it is part of the substance of the book.