25 January – September 1479
The peace with Venice, 1479
Venice is short of money and allies, and plague has struck the city. The Senate sends Giovanni Dario, its secretary, to Constantinople with orders to accept the sultan’s demands, and on 25 January 1479 Dario signs the peace that ends sixteen years of war. Venice gives up Shkodër, Lemnos and the Mani and its claims to Negroponte and Krujë, and it keeps Durrës, Ulcinj and Bar on the Albanian coast. It pays 100,000 ducats within two years and 10,000 a year for the right to trade without duties in the Ottoman lands, where a Venetian bailo at Constantinople judges its people.
Doge Giovanni Mocenigo, painted by Gentile Bellini between 1478 and 1485, Museo Correr, VeniceWikimedia Commons, Gentile Bellini, Public domain (Bellini, Gentile - Mocenigo, Giovanni, Doge - Museo Correr - Google Art Project.jpg)
The news reaches Shkodër on 25 April 1479. Every surviving defender chooses to leave, and they sail with Antonio da Lezze to Venice and settle at Gradisca. Shkodër becomes the seat of an Ottoman sanjak, and many Albanian noble families, the Arianiti, Dukagjini, Kastrioti, Muzaka and Topia among them, go into exile in Naples, Venice and northern Italy.
Leonardo III Tocco, the despot of Epirus, is left out of the treaty, because his marriage in 1477 to a niece of Ferrante of Naples has turned Venice against him. Gedik Ahmed Pasha sails against him with 29 ships, and Leonardo flees from Lefkada to the castle of St George on Cephalonia and from there on a Venetian ship to Taranto. In August and September 1479 the Ottomans take Lefkada, Cephalonia, Zakynthos and Vonitsa on the mainland.
The fortress of Santa Maura on LefkadaWikimedia Commons, Geraki, CC BY-SA 3.0 gr (Lefkada - Santa Maura 6270.jpg)
Sources
- Treaty of Constantinople, Greek text with a Latin translation (1479).
- Marcantonio Sabellico, Historiae rerum Venetarum ab urbe condita (1487).
- William Miller, The Latins in the Levant (1908).
- Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (1978).
- Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), vol. 2 (1978).
- Donald M. Nicol, The Despotate of Epiros 1267–1479 (1984).
- Donald M. Nicol, Byzantium and Venice (1988).
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