10 years ago
Agents of Empire by Noel Malcolm review – a dazzling history of the 16th-century Mediterranean
In the last year of the 16th century, an English craftsman named Thomas Dallam found himself at the heart of the Ottoman empire. Dallam had been commissioned to build an organ to be presented to the Sultan, and he travelled with his creation through the Mediterranean as far as the court at Istanbul and back. Writing an account of his journey home, he remembered how the interpreter who accompanied him was not a local, but an Englishman named Finch, born in Chorley in Lancashire.
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