ABSTRACT
Although Fernand Braudel (1972, pp. 14, 134–8) could still insist on the ‘unity and coherence of the Mediterranean regions’ in the sixteenth century, that unity was already in a process of dissolution. By 1500 Ad, the emergent hegemonic Ottoman state already controlled mainland Greece, Macedonia and Bulgaria, and over the next 100 years it succeeded in incorporating much of the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean into an imperial Islamic polity centred on Turkey. In so doing, the Ottomans created a power bloc which eclipsed the earlier Genoese and Venetian Empires and was only partly rivalled by the Spanish Hapsburgs in Iberia and southern Italy to the west (Fenech 1993). The tottering Mamluk sultanate which had dominated Syria, Egypt and western Arabia was overthrown by 1517, while Hungary and Wallachia were seized after the decisive battle of Mohacs in 1529. Rhodes was captured by the Turks in 1522, Chios in 1566 and Cyprus – after a prolonged siege of Famagusta and Nicosia – in 1573 (Braudel 1972, p. 76; Lewis 1995, pp. 114–29). In North Africa, Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, Tunisia and Algeria had all been absorbed by the Ottomans before 1566 (Fig. 7.1). The expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315832524/aaa1ae65-e324-4e25-8f13-0a5dd4f6d743/content/fig7_1_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> Source: After Moore (1981, p.86
