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Social History
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Catholic Pirates and Greek

Merchants: A Maritime History of the
Mediterranean
a
Nabil Matar
a
University of Minnesota

Version of record first published: 15 May 2012.

To cite this article: Nabil Matar (2012): Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History
of the Mediterranean, Social History, 37:2, 222-223

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 222 Social History vol. 37 : no. 2
feminist, Black civil rights, labour and political histories. This examination of a time when
poverty, not poor people, was the problem, and of a deep coalition of dedicated activists who
represented a wide range of identities and interests, should be highly usable for scholars and
activists alike.

Stephanie Gilmore
Dickinson College, Pennsylvania
ª 2012, Stephanie Gilmore
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2012.672221
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:05 21 September 2012

Molly Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the
Mediterranean (2010) 320 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, $35.00).

This book is a must read for scholars and students interested in a new perspective on the early
modern history of the Mediterranean – new because Greene focuses on the Greek role which
is nearly always ignored.1 As Palmira Brummet has said, the Mediterranean is generally viewed
by historians as ‘our’ sea, meaning West European, Protestant and/or Catholic. Greene shows
that the Mediterranean was also populated by Greek/Orthodox sailors and traders, whose
shipping played an important role in the commercial networks of the basin and beyond, all the
way to London. The Mediterranean was ‘theirs’ as well.
The book is in seven chapters, with an introduction and conclusion. And the thesis is
compelling, especially for historians who have focused on the western Mediterranean with its
clash of piracies between the Europeans and the North Africans. In that narrative, a religious
polarization has been forced upon the interpretation of early modern piracy: although a few
historians mention the depredations carried out on Muslims by Euro-Christians, the blame for
maritime insecurity, danger, kidnapping, torture, conversion and ransom is repeatedly made to
fall squarely on the shoulders of the ‘terrorists’ (Linda Colley’s term), from Libya all the way to
Morocco. ‘There is no mention of anything other than Muslim violence, and it is a western
Mediterranean story’ (2).
Greene turns to the Greeks who belonged not to a Christian, but a Muslim, dominion – the
Ottoman Empire. Most of the Greeks who rode the Mediterranean waves were Ottoman
subjects, and they carried on their ships merchandise and passengers that reflected the religious
and ethnic diversity of that empire. There were Jewish and Armenian entrepreneurs, along
with Turkish officials and investors. As they used their navigational skills to expand their
economic activity between the eastern and western ports of the Mediterranean, the Greeks,
Orthodox in their Christianity, found themselves falling prey to the piracies of fellow
Christians for whom the Greeks were schismatic, tainted by Islam, and therefore fair game.
Thus the title which Greene chooses for her book.

1
Though Greene’s earlier study, A Shared World
(Princeton, 2002), did bring in the Greeks of
Cyprus.
 May 2012 Reviews 223
There was nothing that the Greek Orthodox could do against the Catholic attacks at sea
except turn to the courts in Valetta, Rome and Venice in search of compensation and justice.
And in those courts, and among the vast records that have survived, Greene finds an intriguing
conundrum which faced Catholic lawyers and judges: how to deal with a Christian subject of the
Muslim Sultan, especially when the latter insisted that his subjects be protected, regardless of their
religion. Many of the cases that Greene studies show how the Greeks occupied ‘an intermediary
position because they were at one and the same time both Christians and Ottoman subjects’
(115). This unique position establishes the unique importance of the court records, because
neither Muslims nor Jews could appeal to legal justice in the manner that the Orthodox did.
For Greene, the situation of Christians being plundered by fellow Christians undermines the
simplistic division of the Mediterranean along religious lines and demonstrates that, while
religion was never forgotten, in the world of commerce and law a new, ‘secular’ (9) order was
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:05 21 September 2012

beginning to emerge. It was an order of trade and pillage, ransom and exchange, which made
Algiers similar to Livorno.
Greene ranges in her research across numerous archives and languages, showing how this new
order was emerging from the midst of conflicts not only between Christians and Muslims, but
also among Venetians and Maltese and Turks. Greene supports her argument with a wealth of
examples from the courts and from naval and ecclesiastical records. Taking into account changes
occurring in western Europe, she discusses the impact of the Counter-Reformation on Catholic
naval zeal, the beginnings of the Protestant/English penetration of the Mediterranean, the
seizure of Tangier in 1662, and the decentralization in the Ottoman administration, which
opened the door for Greeks and other minorities to take part in sea trade and in European
consular activity (especially as translators and intermediaries). Although Greene relies most
heavily on legal sources, the narrative she weaves is engaging and widely informative. The
book moves from the courts to the ships, and from pirates to clergymen, and from the
dungeons of captives in Valetta to the corridors of financial power in Venice. Legal cases are
studied for details about the places of origin of merchants, the cargo in which they traded, the
currency they used, their family and business associations, and the arguments that they made in
their suits for compensation. But perhaps most strikingly, Greene’s analysis of the cases shows
that ‘the Orthodox Christians had their protector in the person of the Ottoman sultan’ (76).

Nabil Matar
University of Minnesota
ª 2012, Nabil Matar
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2012.670764

Theodora Dragostinova, Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the
Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900–1949 (2011), xiv þ 294 (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, $45.00).

Theodora Dragostinova’s first book, Between Two Motherlands, is an important contribution to

the studies of minority politics and population movements that also revises common
perceptions of Balkan nationalism. It focuses on one of the many cultural-ethnic groups that
lived in the demographic mosaic of post-Ottoman south-eastern Europe to examine how the