Spring – late 1477
Friuli and Krujë, 1477
In spring 1477 Ottoman troops under Evrenosoğlu Ahmed Bey blockade Krujë, which Venice has held since Skanderbeg’s death, and cut it off from the Venetian ports on the coast. About 250 soldiers and 500 townspeople are inside, with food for about six months. Hadım Süleyman Pasha marches on Lepanto (Nafpaktos) and cannot take it, and in the north the Ottomans take most of Zeta with Žabljak.
Nafpaktos (Lepanto) below its castleWikimedia Commons, ChrLoukop, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Καστρο Ναυπακτου Castle of Nafpaktos.jpg)
On 6 September 1477 a Venetian and Albanian army comes to relieve Krujë. The provveditore Francesco Contarini leads one part over the plain from the coast, and more than 2,000 men, Nikollë Dukagjini’s Albanians among them, come from Lezhë and Shkodër. They meet about 8,000 Ottomans near Zezë on the plain below Krujë, and the Ottomans withdraw towards Tirana and leave their camp. While the victors plunder it, the Ottomans come back, rout the relief army and kill more than a thousand men, Contarini among them, and the blockade goes on through the winter.
In autumn 1477 Ömer Bey leads Ottoman horsemen into Friuli. On the Isonzo he ambushes and routs the army of Girolamo Novello, the Venetian captain general, and his horsemen plunder the Venetian lands as far as the Tagliamento and the Piave. Late in 1477 Mehmed offers peace, and the Venetian Senate answers that it will give up Krujë, Lemnos and the Mani and pay 100,000 ducats.
The plagues of 1480, locusts, plague and the Turks, in the fresco on Graz Cathedral attributed to Thomas of Villach, about 1485Wikimedia Commons, GFreihalter, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Graz Ägydiusdom Gottesplagenbild 168.jpg)
Sources
- Marcantonio Sabellico, Historiae rerum Venetarum ab urbe condita (1487).
- Tursun Beg, Tarih-i Ebü’l-Feth (about 1490).
- Mehmed Neşri, Kitâb-ı Cihan-nümâ (late 15th century).
- Zarij Bešić (ed.), Istorija Crne Gore, vol. 2 (1970).
- Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (1978).
- Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), vol. 2 (1978).
- Oliver Jens Schmitt, Das venezianische Albanien (1392–1479) (2001).
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