"Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants" deals with the raids of Christian pirates and corsairs on peaceful commercial ships in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the ways in which the victims tried to react. However, Molly Greene does not write a conventional study on piracy and trade in the early modern Mediterranean. The book explores an entire world of everyday practices, institutions, and legitimizing ideologies that surround encounters and confrontations at sea, from Constantinople to Alexandria and from Syropalestine to Malta. At the center of the narrative is the Mediterranean itself as a network of maritime routes, as a space of expression and reconfiguration of identities and differences, and as a theater of international compromises and rivalries. Merchants and corsairs, consuls and bishops, cardinals and slaves move on its waves and shores.

Molly Greene utilizes the archives of the Order of the Knights of St. John in Malta, feared corsairs of the time, and reconstructs the genealogy and functioning of the judicial institutions to which Greek merchants and sailors who had fallen victim to attacks appealed. The Greeks, like other Christians living in the Ottoman Empire, found themselves under attack by Christian corsairs because they were Ottoman subjects, and therefore suspected of transporting Muslim passengers and Muslim cargoes. Their protests bring to the fore the contradictions between the rhetoric of the knights (and other Christian corsairs), who legitimized their actions as a holy war against unbelieving Muslims, the law of the sea, which defined the terms of "legitimate loot," and the reality of piracy.

The efforts of Greek merchants and sailors to justify themselves provide Molly Greene with the opportunity to unravel a tangle of rivalries for dominance and strategies of economic survival. They also provide the opportunity to describe in a penetrating and convincing manner the dense and multiple networks of communication that highlight the life of the sea in the eastern Mediterranean as a boundary and at the same time cohesive world, based on delicate balances in terms of identity and reconfigurations in economic and social life. Greek merchants and sailors are right in the middle of this world.