June 1414 – November 1419
Gallipoli, 1416
In 1414 Venice tries to renew with Mehmed the treaty it had made with Musa, but its envoy does not reach the sultan, who is campaigning in Anatolia. The Ottomans build up their fleet at Gallipoli. In June 1414 Ottoman ships raid Negroponte and carry off almost all its people, some 2,000 by the Venetian count. In the autumn of 1415 a fleet of 42 ships tries to catch the Venetian convoy from the Black Sea at Tenedos, then ravages Euboea and attacks Oreos, which holds out, and late in 1415 Çalı Bey’s fleet takes away many of the people of Andros, Paros and Melos.
The entrance of the Dardanelles in the Book of the Sea of Piri Reis, 16th centuryWikimedia Commons, Piri Reis, Public domain (Entrance of the Dardanelles by Piri Reis.jpg)
Venice sends Pietro Loredan with a fleet to carry envoys to the sultan, with leave to fight if the Ottomans refuse to treat. He reaches Tenedos on 24 May 1416 and Gallipoli on 27 May, and on 29 May the Ottoman fleet comes out against his ten galleys. By Loredan’s letter he takes six galleys and nine galleots, kills the admiral Çalı Bey and takes 1,100 prisoners, and he has the Christians serving in the Ottoman crews hanged as renegades. Wounded by arrows in the face and the hand, Loredan withdraws to Tenedos.
The tower of the castle of Gallipoli by the harbour, now the Piri Reis MuseumWikimedia Commons, Kızıldeniz, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Piri Reis Museum 4.jpg)
On 31 July 1416 the Venetian envoy Dolfino Venier agrees terms with Mehmed, but the Senate rejects them because they return the Ottoman prisoners. The talks drag on while Valona falls to the Ottomans in 1417. In November 1419 the bailo Bertuccio Diedo signs a peace at Constantinople: Mehmed recognizes Venice’s possessions by name, Venice pays tribute for its towns in Albania and for Lepanto, and both sides free their prisoners.
Sources
- Pietro Loredan, letter to the Signoria of 2 June 1416, in Antonio Morosini’s chronicle.
- Marino Sanudo, Vite de’ duchi di Venezia (early 16th century).
- Doukas, Historia Turco-Byzantina (about 1462).
- Camillo Manfroni, “La battaglia di Gallipoli e la politica veneto-turca (1381–1420)”, L’Ateneo Veneto (1902).
- Antonio Fabris, “From Adrianople to Constantinople: Venetian–Ottoman diplomatic missions, 1360–1453”, Mediterranean Historical Review (1992).
- Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), vol. 2 (1978).
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