alternatehistory.com

Part I

The flag that I've been working on for the Neapolitan Republic, or the Repubblìc Napoletàn in the native Nnapulitano dialect. This is just something that I am doing for the timeline concept concerning the original point of divergence of Theodó̱ra Palaiologína Tocco, the first wife of Ko̱nstantínos IX Palaiológos not dying in November of 1429 in Santomeri while giving birth to a stillborn daughter. The way I'm going with this is that she remains alive to give birth to a healthy baby boy, Manouí̱l Palaiológos, who later grows up to become the skilled Ottoman commander Paleolog Beg.

Paleolog Beg's presence is enough to make the difference when the Ottomans confronted the armies of the League of Lezhë, a loose alliance of Albanian principalities commanded over by Skanderbeg and his Venetian allies at Ohrid in 1464. Skanderbeg and Cimarosto, the commander presiding over the token Venetian force, are captured and executed by the Ottoman general Seremet Beg. With Skanderbeg's execution, the League turns to his successor Lekë Dukagjini who makes a second daring attempt to capture Ohrid from Ottoman hands in the following year. Much like Skanderbeg, he also is defeated decisively in the Second Battle of Ohrid by the Turks though manages to escape with a remainder of his forces back to the League fortress of Kruja. Mehmed and his commander Ballaban Badera attempted to capture Kruja but fails both times until he replaced Badera with Paleolog Beg who narrowly defeats the Albanian defenders in the Fourth Siege of Kruja in 1469 and captures the resistance leader Dukagjini just before he could escape. The League, unable to decide on a replacement, dissolves in 1471 and all major resistance to Turkish rule except for the northern Albanian highlands ends. Venice, the main ally of the dissolved League, is alone and is defeated by the Ottomans by mid 1473.

In the Peace of Constantinople in late October, the Venetians are obliged to cede all their possessions in the Aegean and Albania to the Ottomans and pay a moderate tribute of eleven thousand ducats per year in order to maintain the trading privileges Venetian merchants enjoyed while conducting commerce in Black Sea ports. With the his enemies defeated, Sultan Mehmet began pooling money for a navy, ready for his next venture: the conquest of Italy. On the second day of March 1474, an Ottoman fleet of sixty ships of which ten were galleys, and six thousand soldiers under the commands of Ishak Pasha and Paleolog Beg arrived near Otranto in the southern Italian region of Apulia. The garrison retreated into the castle and attempted to resist the Turks from there but it was eventually breached and the garrison was captured and executed.

It was only twenty one years after Constantinople's fall and with the Turkish occupation of Otranto, many people in Italy and across Europe feared the same fate would happen to Rome. Plans were created for evacuation of the Pope and the citizens of Rome. Pope Sixtus repeated his 1471 call for a crusade against the Ottomans which was supported by the Crown of Aragon, Hungary and France several Italian polities: namely the Republics of Florence, Sisa, and Lucca. In Venice, the pious call to join in a holy war against the Islamic Ottomans was a source of much debate in the government with Pietro Mocenigo, elected Doge of Venice in 1474, leading the faction supporting the Papal call for Crusade and continuance of conflict while the members of the Signoria constituted much of the opposition to war. In the end, the Republic of Venice abstained from a reconstitution of war with the Ottoman Empire, considering that they were already paying a large indemnity for losing the previous conflict and joining in another war might lead them to paying an even larger indemnity or being cut out from all Black Sea trade.

Ferdinando I of Naples, upon hearing of the majority of Otranto's population being either dead or sent off to Constantinople to be sold as slaves, begins raising a large army to be commanded by his two sons Prince Alfonso and Prince Federico. He sends emissaries to his cousin Ferdinando II of Sicily, his uncles John II of Aragon and Afonso V of Portugal as well as many other monarchs throughout Europe to plea for assistance against the Turk. Hunyadi Matyas, King of Hungary, sends powerful magnate and landowner Újlaki Miklós in command of two thousand of the best men in the Black Army; they, with permission of the Venetians, left using ships in Zadar and landed at the port city of Ancona. They marched for a week until they met King Ferdinando, his sons and his army at Capua.

The help could not came at a better time. Messengers from Calabria had arrived, informing the King that another Ottoman army of ten thousand men has landed just a few miles to the northeast of Crotone, capturing it and also Catanzaro. The man in command of the invading Turkish army was another than Paleolog Beg. The Ottomans began ravaging the countryside for women and food, receiving minimal to no resistance from the local peasantry. The King was caught off guard by the news, not expecting another landing, and ordered his sons Alfonso and Federico to take the men that he has conscripted and armed already, a good eleven thousand foot soldiers and two thousand cavalry to head to Reggio, the town that the messengers said that the Ottomans were planning to capture next.

The First Battle of Reggio was fought in late 1474 between Paleolog Beg and the Neapolitans by Federico and Alfonso d'Aragon. Paleolog Beg's intentions were to seize Reggio and hold it as a foothold for any incoming waves of reinforcements from Rumelia and Anatolia. Federico and Alfonso's men, reinforcing the defenders of Reggio, were narrowly successfully in repelling the Ottomans. Paleolog Beg, not desiring to lose any more men in the siege, withdrew back to Catanzaro where he and his men would spend the following winter, resupplying. He would besiege Reggio two more times, each time managing to put a dent onto the Neapolitan defenders' numbers but failing to take the cities from the two princes.

On the other hand, Ishak Pasha was much more luckier in his endeavors against the Neapolitans, managing to bring all of Salento under his rule with minimal resistance from the local population. He establishes encampments outside Bari, his temporary headquarters, to prevent any incidents between his men and the locals. He receives four thousand more reinforcements from Anatolia during the winter of 1474, and decides to leave Bari in early January and advance to Cannae where the Ottomans meet the Neapolitan King and his army, four thousand men. Much like the infamous battle of Cannae between Rome and Carthage, the much more numerous Neapolitans are decisively crushed by Ishak Pasha's smaller, much more disciplined force. King Ferdinando is captured and sent to Constantinople as a hostage to Mehmet's court and dies there during his captivity. His eldest son Alfonso leaves his younger brother Federico in charge of Reggio's defenses and becomes the de facto ruler of Naples. He receives word back from his second cousin Ferdinando II but is disappointed to learn that he would not receive any assistance from the Sicilians, citing that he was involved in the War of the Castilian Succession. John II of Aragon, on the other hand, sends fourteen ships and one thousand soldiers to Naples' aid.

It is not enough to keep the Ottomans from continuing their conquest of southern Italy, though it stalled the capture of Naples for at least a year. Reggio was blockaded by Ottoman ships headed by Mahmud Pasha Angelovic, though it repelled two more assaults by Paleolog Beg in March 1475 and August 1475 before it finally fell during the third siege on the fifth of October, 1476 after a two-week long siege. Prince Federico and four thousand men were among the dead. Its inhabitants were spared and the city of Reggio suffered minimal pillaging, mostly because of Mahmud Pasha Angelovic's supervision of Paleolog Beg and his soldiers. The rest of Calabria and southern Italy surrendered to their hands by January of 1477.

The capital Naples falls to the Ottomans by May 1477, after a three month long siege by the combined armies of Paleolog Beg, Mahmud Pasha Angelovic and Ishak Pasha. Eleven thousand people were killed on both sides, including Prince Alfonso and the entire Hungarian and Aragonese contingents, with thousands of people wounded throughout the duration of the siege. Naples experienced little sacking, compared to Constantinople twenty four years earlier and its people were not harmed. Sultan Mehmet II arrived in Naples the following month, with his three sons and an army of fifteen thousand men. They were given a hearty welcome.

Ishak Pasha was reinstated as Grand Vizier by the Ottoman Sultan, upon Gedik Ahmed Pasha's ascension as Kapudan Pasha of the Ottoman navy. Mahmud Pasha Angelovic dies mysteriously upon a few days, likely of Mustafa's involvement due to the large feud that existed between the former Grand Vizier and Ottoman prince due to Mustafa sleeping with Mahmud's wife. Mahmud Pasha Angelovic's body is buried in the Castel dell' Ovo, renamed by the Sultan to the Kale Mahmud in honor of his memory. Bayezid, the second eldest, was made Pasha of the Eyâlet-i-Rûmiyye-i Suğra while the youngest son Cem was given the responsibility of administrating the Eyâlet-i-Trabzon. Şehzade Mustafa, the eldest amongst Sultan Mehmet's three sons, was given the Eyâlet-i-Napoli, which divided into several sanjaks: Reggio Sancak (Paleolog Beg), Bari Sancak (Bua Beg), Otranto Sancak (Turahanoğlu Ömer Beg), Boiano Sancak (Turahanoğlu Ahmed Beg).

Upon the departure of his father Sultan Mehmet and his brothers Bayezid and Cem to the East, Şehzade Mustafa immediately rode his horse, accompanied by twenty Sipahi and an imam, to the Cattedrale di San Gennarao. His first act as Pasha was ordering the imam to recite the Shahada: There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God. The Cattedrale, being the most important church in all of Naples and the seat of the Archbishop of Naples, Oliviero Carafa, who was in Rome at the time, was ordered to be converted to a mosque, the Sultan Mustafa Mosque, out of the ten mosques that would be established in the three hundred and forty one years of Ottoman rule. Şehzade Mustafa ordered the many frescoes in the cathedral to be either destroyed or covered up for they had no place existing in the mosque.

The war of course was far from over and continued on. The young Ottoman prince Mustafa lacked his father Mehmet's martial, war-like spirit and had no appetite to fight against what remained of the Neapolitan army and who with King Ferdinando and his two eldest sons Prince Federico and Prince Alfonso dead looked onto Ferdinando's youngest son Prince Giovanni da Aragon, a man whose lack of military experience was compensated for his political savvy and his close ties to the Papacy via his intimate friendship with Cardinal Oliviero Carafa, Admiral of the Papal Fleet and legate to his father Ferdinando, who convinced Pope Sixtus IV to send money and reinforcements to the young Neapolitan monarch. Giovanni used what money he had with him to hire famous condottierri Federico da Montefeltro and son-in-law Giovanni della Rovere, nephew of Pope Sixtus IV, to lead his armies against the Ottomans.

Turahanoğlu Ömer Beg, appointed by Sultan Mehmet as the Sancak-Beg of Otranto, was relieved of his administrative position and offered to command the Ottoman army in Napoli against the Neapolitan remnant. Ömer Beg accepted and on September 12th, 1477, he and twenty thousand men departed from Napoli to the southern Apennine mountains, where they heard that the enemy army was hiding in. For the next couple of months, they fought the Neapolitans in various skirmishes throughout the mountains; most of said skirmishes ending in stalemates or narrow victories by the Ottomans though the Neapolitans were constantly on the run from the Ottomans. Desertion became an increasingly significant problem especially after Sultan Mehmet arrived once more to the Italian peninsula, bringing with him fifty thousand men in total and took over command, crushing the Neapolitans on June 4th, 1478 in a decisive battle near Mount Vesuvius. Four thousand of the remaining eleven thousand men loyal to King Giovanni were captured, killed or wounded with Federico da Montefeltro held hostage while the rest commanded by Giovanni and della Rovere fled north to sanctuary in Rome. Sultan Mehmet ordered for the elder condottieri to be decapitated and for his head to be carried on a burlap sack to Pope Sixtus IV.

By the time Sultan Mehmet and Turahanoğlu Ömer Beg had returned to Naples in mid June of 1478, it had been four years, six months and twelve days since the Ottoman invasion of Italy had begun. The Kingdom of Naples had now been conquered and abolished, the royal family all dead save for one pesky prince who has managed to bring the direct involvement of the Papal States onto the war as well as the Crown of Aragon and the Kingdom of Hungary. Naples was now under Ottoman hands and its cathedral had been completely converted into a mosque, with minarets and all. It came at the cost of the estimated thirty four thousand Ottoman soldiers who had killed or wounded since the start. Despite all the advances that the Ottomans had made in the peninsula, Rome was still not captured and that alone infuriated Mehmet who as Caesar of the Romans aspired to capture the capital of the old Roman Republic and later Empire, from which sprouted the conquered Eastern Romans.

The goal now was to conquer Rome and after that, extend Ottoman rule until the entire Italian peninsula was either under the Ottoman banner or paid tribute to the Sultan. The news of Mehmet marching towards Rome arrived within a manner of days by Papal spies stationed in Naples. The College of Cardinals advised Pope Sixtus IV that it was best to enact a quick evacuation of the city rather than stay and continue any resistance against the Turks. Their plans were to flee to Avignon where they would be under the protection of King Louis XI of France. Giovanni, titular ruler of Naples, and the Pope's nephew pleaded for Sixtus IV to not flee but to send more money and men their way and calling for the Catholic monarchs of Europe to pool their resources together in forming a great Crusader army to repel the Turk. Sixtus IV refused to grant the Neapolitan exile more money or men and forced King Giovanni to board a ship to the Crown of Aragon. Giovanni della Rovere was put in charge of evacuating the Roman citizenry enacted a quick evacuation of Rome's citizenry while he stayed in St. Peter's Basilica with the Cardinals, praying to God for the Turks to be defeated and expelled from the peninsula. Arrangements were made with the Swiss Diet to get four hundred Swiss mercenaries, in addition to the several thousand Italian mercenaries that had decided to aid the small Papal army in defending Rome. It said that the defenders never numbered more than thirteen thousand. By September 6th 1478, most of the citizenry had evacuated and the Ottoman army, sixty one thousand men in all, were outside the Aurelian Walls.

The siege had begun.
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