April – August 1466
Athens and Patras, 1466
In February 1466 Venice elects Vettore Cappello, the loudest voice for the war, captain general of the sea for the second time. He leaves Venice in April, strengthens the walls of Modon, Lepanto and Chalcis (then Negroponte), and takes 25 galleys into the northern Aegean. There he takes the islands of Gökçeada (Imbros), Thasos and Samothrace from the Ottomans.
On 12 July 1466 Cappello lands at Piraeus and marches on Athens, the main Ottoman base in the region. His men take the lower town without much fighting, but the Acropolis holds. In early August he gives up and sails for Patras, which the Venetian provveditore of the Morea, Jacopo Barbarigo, is besieging with 2,000 men.
The east end of the Parthenon among the houses of the Ottoman garrison on the Acropolis, drawn by James Stuart in 1751Wikimedia Commons, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, Public domain (The eastern side of the Parthenon, 1751.jpg)
A few days before Cappello arrives, with the town about to fall, Turahanoğlu Ömer Bey comes with 12,000 horsemen and routs Barbarigo’s force. Six hundred Venetians are killed and a hundred taken prisoner, and Barbarigo is killed and his body impaled. Cappello attacks to avenge him and loses 1,200 men, and he takes what is left of his army back to Chalcis, where he dies on 13 March 1467.
Sources
- Laonikos Chalkokondyles, Histories (c. 1464).
- Marino Sanudo, Le vite dei dogi (about 1500).
- Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (1978).
- Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), vol. 2 (1978).
- 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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