Albania does not, typically, sit at the center of most accounts of the conflict between the nations of Christendom and the empire of the Ottoman Turks. Yet a simple look at a map will show its importance. Modern Albania and parts of present-day Montenegro, Bosnia, and Croatia were by turns under the control of the Ottoman Empire and the European powers, especially Venice, and they sit a short distance across the Adriatic from Italy. That control was at times tenuous; composed of semi-autonomous hill clans, quasi-free towns, and a welter of religious and ethnic loyalties, this part of the Balkans was, in the sixteenth century, crisscrossed with intrigue and complicated alliances.
Exactly how complicated is revealed in Noel Malcolm’s masterful account of three interrelated families in Albania and their roles in the political, military, and diplomatic convulsions of a crucial period of European history.1 The sixteenth century for Europe was the century of both Martin Luther and the battle of Lepanto, a great age of discovery and exploration but still with the memories of Muslim domination of Spain and the constant threat of military attack. The Turks had taken much of the Kingdom of Hungary in the 1520s and had even laid siege to Vienna, capital of the Holy Roman Empire.
Malcolm, one of Britain’s leading historians and an expert on, among other things, the work of Thomas Hobbes, found this engrossing story almost by accident. Malcolm came across a passing reference to an all-but-lost