August – September 1462
Lesbos, 1462
Niccolò Gattilusio seizes Lesbos from his brother Domenico in late 1458 and has him strangled. He keeps paying the sultan his tribute, but he lets Catalan pirates use the island, and his envoys find no help in Genoa, Rome or Chios. In August 1462 Mehmed crosses to Anatolia with about 40,000 men, visits the ruins of Troy, where in Kritovoulos’s account he calls himself the avenger of the Trojans against the Greeks, and marches to Assos on the coast opposite Lesbos.
The ruins of Troy at HisarlıkWikimedia Commons, Barrowbob, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Hisarlık (City of Troy).jpg)
Mahmud Pasha’s fleet, between 67 and 200 ships in the different accounts, sails from Gallipoli down the Dardanelles and lands on Lesbos on 1 September, and Niccolò answers that he will give up the island only to force. Six large guns arrive after four days and batter the walls of Mytilene for ten days: the Ottomans take the harbour tower and then the lower town, and the defenders, between 1,000 and 5,000 men with 70 Knights Hospitaller and 110 Catalans, lose heart. A Venetian fleet of 29 galleys under Vettore Cappello sails from Chios towards Lesbos, but its orders are to avoid a war with the sultan, and it does not fight.
Niccolò surrenders Mytilene on 15 September 1462 on a promise of estates of equal value and orders the other castles of the island, Molyvos (Methymna) among them, to surrender. Mehmed has about 300 Italian soldiers cut in half as pirates. About 800 boys and girls are taken for the palace, and about 10,000 islanders in all are sold as slaves or shipped to Constantinople. Niccolò and his cousin Luchino are taken to Constantinople and strangled, which ends the lordship of the Gattilusi on Lesbos, held since 1354.
Molyvos (Methymna) and its castle on LesbosWikimedia Commons, Dimitris Eleftheriou, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Molyvos Castle.jpg)
Sources
- Doukas, Historia Turco-Byzantina (about 1462).
- Michael Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror (about 1467).
- Laonikos Chalkokondyles, Histories (c. 1464).
- William Miller, The Gattilusj of Lesbos, 1355–1462 (1913).
- Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (1978).
- Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), vol. 2 (1978).
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