Here Molly Greene moves beyond the hostile "Christian" versus "Muslim"
divide that has colored many historical interpretations of the early
modern Mediterranean, and reveals a society with a far richer set of
cultural and social dynamics. She focuses on Crete, which the Ottoman
Empire wrested from Venetian control in 1669. Historians of Europe have
traditionally viewed the victory as a watershed, the final step in the
Muslim conquest of the eastern Mediterranean and the obliteration of
Crete's thriving Latin-based culture. But to what extent did the
conquest actually change life on Crete? Greene brings a new perspective
to bear on this episode, and on the eastern Mediterranean in general.
She argues that no sharp divide separated the Venetian and Ottoman eras
because the Cretans were already part of a world where Latin Christians,
Muslims, and Eastern Orthodox Christians had been intermingling for
several centuries, particularly in the area of commerce.
Greene also notes that the Ottoman conquest of Crete represented not
only the extension of Muslim rule to an island that once belonged to a
Christian power, but also the strengthening of Eastern Orthodoxy at the
expense of Latin Christianity, and ultimately the Orthodox reconquest of
the eastern Mediterranean. Greene concludes that despite their religious
differences, both the Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire
represented the ancien régime in the Mediterranean, which accounts for
numerous similarities between Venetian and Ottoman Crete. The true push
for change in the region would come later from Northern Europe.