3 June – July 1470
Negroponte, 1470
In 1470 Mehmed prepares a campaign against Chalcis (then Negroponte), the capital of Venetian Euboea, and lets it be said that the target is Rhodes. A fleet of about 300 ships, 108 of them galleys, leaves Gallipoli under Mahmud Pasha on 3 June. It retakes Gökçeada (Imbros) on 5 June and besieges the Venetians on Lemnos from 8 to 12 June without success, and on 14 June it sails round the south of Euboea into the channel that separates the island from the mainland.
The Euripus strait at Chalkida (Negroponte)Wikimedia Commons, C messier, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Εύριπος 0054.jpg)
Mehmed comes by land with about 70,000 men and arrives on 18 June. His men build a bridge of boats across the strait in three days and bring the guns over to the island. The defenders refuse the call to surrender on 25 June and throw back assaults on 27 and 30 June and on 5 and 8 July, and Niccolò Canale’s Venetian fleet does not relieve them.
Mehmed orders the final assault on the night of 11 July, and on 12 July 1470 his troops storm the city. More than 6,000 Venetians and Greeks die, and the city is plundered for three days. Later stories have the bailo Paolo Erizzo sawn in half, but Giovanni Maria Angiolello, who is taken prisoner in the siege, writes that Erizzo is killed in the first assault. All of Euboea becomes Ottoman, Canale is tried and exiled to Portogruaro, and Ömer Bey leads an army of 25,000 into the Morea and takes Aigio (then Vostitsa).
The execution of Paolo Erizzo at Negroponte, an 18th-century engraving by Andrea ZucchiWikimedia Commons, Andrea Zucchi, Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0 (Martyrdom of Paul Erizzo. Line engraving by A. Zucchi after Wellcome V0033618.jpg)
Sources
- Giovanni Maria Angiolello, Historia Turchesca (about 1490).
- Tursun Beg, Tarih-i Ebü’l-Feth (about 1490).
- Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (1978).
- Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), vol. 2 (1978).
- Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1481 (1990).
- Théoharis Stavrides, The Sultan of Vezirs: The Life and Times of the Ottoman Grand Vezir Mahmud Pasha Angelović (1453–1474) (2001).
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