P.S. I'll go back to Brasil once this war ends.
Part XVIII: Notaras’ War (1477-1482)
The sack of Genoa was a blood affair, but its knock-on effects were even bloodier.
The downfall of Genoa had begun back in 1474, when Prospero Adorno, the Milanese-appointed native governor, had been lynched as a traitor. This had drawn the ire of the Milanese, who had considered Genoa and integral part of their realm ever since the republic voluntarily disbanded itself in 1463. In early 1475, Duke Galeazzo marched on Genoa, laying siege to the city and surrounding it on all landward sides. The siege even continued after Galeazzo’s death in 1476, with his minor son Galeazzo II[1] taking the throne with his uncle and regent, Ludovico, maintaining the siege to preserve his family’s honor and prestige. The Genoese were able to hold out for several years, being continuously resupplied from their colonies by sea. However, in 1477 Ludovico persuaded the Venetians to cut the Genoese supply lines and begin a siege proper. Battista Fregoso, the fortieth and final doge of Genoa, was a capable leader and managed to hold off the Milanese for two and a half years, but even he could not make the limited food stores of the city infinite. On 28 May, 1480, a pair of starving militiamen opened one of the sally gates in exchange for safety for them and their families, and the Milanese quickly swarmed the city. The second city of the Mediterranean was brutally sacked, with a quarter of her 80,000 citizens killed or maimed and another quarter enslaved. The city’s silkworks and great hordes of wealth and art were looted in a grisly scene that would be compared to the Sack of Rome by many contemporary authors. Several hundred noblemen and women were butchered like dogs, while anyone hapless enough to be caught out in the open were left to the tender mercies of hardened sell-swords. The ships in the harbor were able to escape as the Venetians rushed to join the looting, packed to the gills before they made their desperate run. Those left on the docks were killed, either outright or by the fires that followed the advance of the Milanese. By the end of the bloody five-day sack, a third of the city had been burned to the ground.
The survivors made their way south across the Ligurian Sea to Genoese Corsica. A former Doge, Paolo di Campofregoso who, as a contemporary chronicle stated, ‘granted the immortality of an insect’, quickly took charge of things. He organized the refugees and established a makeshift capital at Calvi, the primary Genoese fortress of the island. He proclaimed himself ‘Forty-first Doge of Genoa’ here, but this title was not recognized outside of Corsica. The refugees and Genoese loyalists soon had to fight with the native Corsicans, who proclaimed their own peasant’s republic in the high mountains. While this war raged on, di Campofregoso elaborately recreated his native city, but it would remain just a pale shadow of Old Genoa. While the Genoese Republic would live on, albeit in a mutated form, at Calvi, the Genoese colonial empire fell with Adorno himself.
During its long history, the Genoese Republic had spread its tendrils across the Mediterranean, from Safi in Morocco on the far side of the Pillars of Hercules all the way to Tana in the Sea of Azov. This empire had been maintained only through the vigorous efforts of the Republic, for both native rulers and rival Italian republics eyed their conquests hungrily. The Genoese fleet had been spread across the Mediterranean to defend the republic, but its desperate summoning back to the city to hold off the Milanese had left the vast breadth of the Genoese empire almost completely undefended.
The first to strike were the Trapezuntines, with the ambitious aftokrator Alexandros II seizing Genoese colonies across the Black Sea in a nominal attempt to ‘protect’ the Genoese territories therein. He had been abetted by the governor of Gazaria, Scaramanga, who had turned over many of the fortresses to the Ponts and thus earned the undying hatred of all Genoese. The Trapezuntines would not have long to be the sole aggressor, however, and within a few years the Genoese empire had been thoroughly dogpiled by all of their many enemies. The Hafsid Emirate and the Mamluk Sultanate both took the opportunity to extend their control over Genoese factories within their ports, as did the Moroccans and Tlemcenites. Smaller trading quarters and ports across the Mediterranean, from Sevilla in Spain to the Levant, were seized by their respective governments. This caused a great amount of unrest and economic uncertainty across the Mediterranean trading networks, and there was a period of massive fluctuations in price of finished goods and commodities across the region.
However, these economic impacts were nothing in compassion to another crisis that was brewing in the Aegean. In the Treaty of Haskovo following the end of the War of the First Holy League (though of course, it was not known as such at this time), the Genoese had taken a great deal of territory from the Ottomans. More particularly, they had taken the trading ports of Volos in Thessaly and Phokaia in Asia Minor, as well as the islands of Samos, Khios, Lesbos, Ikaria, Lemnos, Tenedos and Samothrake, as well as a few minor islands scattered across the region. This seizure had greatly irked the Sublime Porte, even more than the massive losses in Europe, as the fall of Phokaia was the first time the Ottomans had lost any territory in Anatolia since the 1350s. This issue particularly irked Mahmud Angelović Paşa, who had become grand vizier for the young Mustafa II[2] after Mehmed II ‘died in a hunting accident’ in 1466. Angelović Paşa was able to persuade his ward[3] to exploit the Genoese’s momentary weakness by retaking the ports and the islands. Phokaia was retaken after a cursory siege in 1478, but the grand vizier was unable to prevail upon Mustafa to take the fight to the islands. The sultan feared that just taking over the Genoese islands would invite war with the Latins, and he was fearful of another war in the west after the beating that the Turks had taken the last time around. Ironically, this fear of causing war with the Italians would be exactly what caused war with the Latins.
You see, the Ottomans were not the only ones eyeing up the Genoese possessions in the Aegean. The eternal archrival of the Genoese, the Venetians, had desired to expand their control of the Aegean ever since the Fourth Crusade, and many of the Venetians regarded the Genoese islands as rightfully theirs. In particular, Pietro Mocenigo, the Doge, believed that these islands were Venetian by right of conquest, as their capture had been the goal of their intervention in the Genoese Revolt[4]. In 1477 and 1478, he spent armadas around Morea to seize the islands. Most of the islands were seized without a fight, but Mocenigo was cautious about presenting an overly-aggressive posture towards the Sublime Porte. Neither of the two states could fully destroy the other, but the prospect of full-blown war was daunting to both realms. Mocenigo feared that seizing the islands of Tenedos and Imbros would pose such a threat to Constantinople that Mustafa would be forced to assent to Angelović Paşa’s demands[5] and attack the Venetians. He hoped that the two islands would be left under Genoese control as an effective buffer zone. However, just in case the Ottomans did attack, he stationed two dozen galleys on Limnos under one Iakobos Notaras, with orders to prevent any attempts to take the islands.
Notaras was an interesting character. He was the son of Loukas Notaras, the right-hand man of Demetrios Palaiologos, the last of the Palaiologian emperors. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the rest of the Notarai had been massacred. Iakobos was enslaved as a catamite and spent the next seven years in Turkish captivity, only escaping to the west in 1460. Deeply scarred and without prospects for the future, he joined the Venetian navy with the sole intention of killing as many Turks as possible before his death. Mocenigo had appointed Notaras as commander of the Lemnian fleet in the hope that he would be strident in his defense of the two islands but not actively attempt to spark a conflict. Unbeknownst to him, Notaras had every intention of doing just that.
In 1480 Angelović Paşa finally convinced Mustafa that the islands needed to be taken quickly, both to avenge the losses of his father’s reign and ensure control over the straits into the Marmora. A small fleet of galleys and troop ships put out from Istanbul, passing out of the straits in September 1480. They exited the straits and made for Tenedos, inadvertently being beaten there by word of their departure along the Venetian spy network. Notaras scrambled his ships and moved to intercept, riding at anchor behind Cape Theotoktos on Imbros. As soon as the Turkish ships were out of range of land Notaras sprung his trap, barreling out from behind cover and into their flank. Caught by surprise, the troopships were left vulnerable. Notaras’ flagship the St. Elmo, plowed through two of the transports, reducing them to splinters and screaming men in the water. The rest of the Venetian fleet followed the admiral’s lead, sinking six of the seven transports in less than fifteen minutes before turning to their escorts. The Ottoman fleet was now in disarray, and the Turkish admiral ordered his vessels to run for Tenedos. The swifter Venetian ships then ran them down, with only one of the ten Ottoman galleys managing to run herself aground. Notaras continued the pursuit and burned the galley on the shoreline before landing and setting out to hunt down any survivors. He officially conquered both islands and installed Venetian garrisons to shore up the results of his victory.
Word of the Battle of Tenedos spread rapidly both east and west. In Constantinople, it was taken as a clear act of Venetian aggression, whereas in Venice it was received as a defensive action against Turkish expansion. Mocenigo gave a grand speech in St. Mark’s Square, rallying the Venetians to war in the name of God and country. A similar spirit was raised in Morea and Thessalia, where large populations of refugees from Constantinople and Bulgaria had settled. The former was especially eager, as Thomas Palaiologos had passed in 1465 and was succeeded by his much more aggressive son Andreas, who was eager to advance his family’s claims in the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, in the Sublime Porte, both Mustafa and Angelović Paşa were, if not eager, then confident that they would be victorious in the coming fight. A fleet of galleys had been laid down the previous year, and without having to face off against a Crusading coalition as they had in the War of the First Holy League, they were sure that the superior Ottoman soldiery would be victorious against their mercenary and Grecian counterparts.
While the Venetians would have superiority at sea until the Ottoman galleys were completed, their ships would be grounded in Italy until the spring of 1481 due to the katabatic winds coming down from the Croatian highlands. The Ottoman army, however, had no such limitation, and so Angelović Paşa was determined to steal a march from his enemies. In the autumn of 1480, he mustered an army in Thrace under the command of a recently promoted provincial commander named Iskender Ağa Paşa. Ağa Paşa was given a force of 3,000 Janissaries, 15,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry drawn from across the rump Ottoman Empire, nearly a third of the total strength of the realm. He struck west from Edirne up the Ebros Valley to the border with Albania before swinging south to follow the Strymon River into the Crown of Thessalonica. Rodrigo de Lara[6], the Aragonese viceroy, was despised by the native Rhomaioi as a tyrant and a heretic who had campaigned vigorously against the Orthodox church and her followers. As such, when de Lara attempted to muster forces to meet the Turkish invasion, he could scrounge up less than 2,000 men. de Lara retreated into Thessalonike and made desperate preparations for a siege. However, Ağa Paşa was unwilling to delay for a siege and so broke off a small force to maintain the siege before moving on into Thessalia[7].
The Despotate of Thessalia was ruled by Mikhael Angelos, a Rhomaicized Serb who was the closest descendant of the old Komnenoi Doukoi rulers. However, he was also the half-brother of Angelović Paşa, and the two were on fairly good terms. Angelović had sent Angelos an offer of protection for tribute a few months previous and his brother had agreed, not wanting to lose his realm for the sake of some Venetians. As such, the Ottoman army waltzed across Thessalia unopposed, arriving at the border with Morea in late January 1481. Andreas had yet to mobilize his soldiers, as he had expected the Ottomans to still be in either Thessalonica or Thessalia. As such, Ağa Paşa brushed past the border guards and lunged into Morean territory, taking the regional center of Livadeia near the Kopais Lake by storm on 6 February. They then moved further into Attika, laying siege to Negroponte (Khalkhis) and Athens, both of which retained Crusader fortresses.
This series of disasters caused panic when it was retold back in Italy, and Mocenigo knew he had to act quickly to restore the situation in the region. He raised a massive force of 40,000, composed of numerous condottiere from across Italy and mercenaries from Croatia and Germany, and loaded them onto a grand armada of more than seventy-five galleys. With himself in personal command, he departed from Venice in mid-April, bound for the Morea. They landed in Korinthos, where Andreas had mustered 8,000 infantry and cavalry on the southern side of the Hexamilion. The combined force then launched a counter-offensive into Attika, forcing Ağa Paşa to withdraw back to the Kopais Lake. The Paşa attempted to withdraw further westwards as the allied army closed on him, but found his route blocked by a smaller Venetian force that had been landed at Galaxidi. The Second Battle of Kopais, fought on 21 May, was inconclusive, with the allies pushing the Turkish right flank into the lake but the rest of the Turkish force being able to retreat intact. The allied force then pursued Ağa Paşa’s force as far north as the Malian Plain, from whence they retreated north into Thessalia. The allies lost 7,000 men and the Turks 11,000.
With the Turks on the run, Mocenigo moved to turn their retreat into a permanent one. He left Palaiologos and his forces with 5,000 mercenaries to hold the passes onto the Malian Plain while the rest of his force took ship. They sailed up the Aegean to Thessalonike, where the Aragonese were still clinging to the city walls. Mocengio landed another large force of 10,000 men here to cut the supply lines to Ağa Paşa’s force in Thessalia and force him to battle. Meanwhile, Mocenigo reinforced his remaining 20,000 men with a force of Vlakh and Albanian mercenaries as well as a number of Greek volunteers, bringing his total strength to 30,000. He landed another pair of small forces at the fortresses of Kavala and Komotene, which guarded the road between Thessalonike and Thrake. By taking and holding these cities, the Venetians would force the Ottomans to travel along the longer Ebros-Strymon route, extending their supply and communication lines. He then retired back to Lemnos, where he continued to gather ships and mercenaries. He was deeply concerned about the capability of the Ottoman fleet, and so began making preparations to force the Straits the following year.
Late 1481 and early 1482 saw negotiations between Venice and the Sublime Porte. Angelović Paşa had successfully puzzled out what Mocengio’s plans were, and he was hoping to delay the assault on the Straits until more ships could be completed. Mocenigo, for his part, knew that an attack on the Straits would be a bloody affair, and hoped to avoid a needless loss of blood and treasure. The Venetians also sought out allies on the Ottomans’ other frontiers, primarily Trapezous and the Karamanid states, who they hoped would draw forces away from their attacks.
However, the war took an unexpected turn in February 1482, when Mocenigo died of plague on Lemnos. Disease had broken out in the camp several weeks previous but the Doge had not thought to take precautions against it, instead visiting with his men in hopes of inspiring loyalty. This backfired massively, and he perished after a brief period of illness. The sudden death of the Doge threw the Venetian cause into disarray. Several of the chief captains of the republic sailed back to Italy to take part in the election, leaving command of the fleet under the control of Notaras. This was a windfall to the Ottomans, who were able to move against the Venetians without having to face a command centralized around an able general such as Mocenigo. Angelović Paşa dispatched an army to clear the road to Thessalonike, which was now under siege by Ağa Paşa’s surviving forces. As expected, Notaras dispatched a force to prevent this, leaving his own forces understrength. This was just the opportunity that was needed.
In late May 1482, the Ottoman galley fleet was finally finished. An armada of eighty-six galleys assembled on the Golden Horn, with the experienced naval commander Gedik Ahmed Paşa at their head. The Ottoman fleet put out on 6 June and sailed across the Marmora with 20,000 soldiers aboard, ready to either be landed or fight boarding actions. After a brief voyage, they exited the straits off of Tenedos and swung westwards, towards Lemnos. The Venetians were caught unawares, their intelligence network having lapsed after the death of their ringleader, and Notaras had to scramble to meet them before they reached Lemnos.
The Battle of Imbros, fought on 18 June, was a humiliating Venetian defeat. Notaras was a capable captain but far from a good admiral, while Gedik Ahmed Paşa would be hailed by his contemporaries as the successor of Themistokles. The Ottomans used their numerical superiority well, extending a line of galleys more than a mile long. Notaras foolishly tried to match them out of fear of being enveloped, instead spreading his line out so horrifically that many of the galleys lay hundreds of feet apart from their nearest companion. The Turks exploited this mistake ruthlessly. After Gedik Ahmed Paşa gave the order to advance, the Ottoman galleys separated out in turn, with each one pinning down a Venetian counterpart in boarding actions. However, there were still Turkish galleys free to engage these now bogged-down Italian ships, which they did. Several dozen galleys were sent to the bottom and several more captured, with only fourteen of the fifty-two Venetian galleys escaping the massacre. The Ottomans lost twenty-three ships in a combination of enemy action, friendly fire and actual fire. The only saving grace was that the Ottoman landing on the island was repulsed, but this would prove to be a weak mercy as supply problems forced the large Venetian army there to surrender in July.
Following the disaster at Imbros, the Ottomans rapidly reversed their losses. The grand vizier led a large army to Thessalonike a few months later, forcing its surrender after a brief siege. They wintered in the surrounding region before pressing on across Thessalia the following year. In 1483, the new Doge--Giovanni Mocenigo, Pietro Mocenigo’s younger brother--finally sued for peace. The resulting treaty gave the contested islands over to the Ottomans, as well as the Venetian holdings of Thasos, Volos and the Skyriade Islands. The vassalage of Thessalia would also be transferred to the Sublime Porte. The following year, the Ottomans would ‘purchase’ the Crown of Thessalonica from the cash-strapped Aragonese, extending their control over the region and bringing them to new heights since the disaster two decades previous.
All of this begs the question; Why then did the Trapezuntines declare war in 1483, when all signs were against it?
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[1] Butterflies mean the young duke has a simpler name
[2] Mustafa (b.1449) was one of Mehmed’s sons who died in his childhood OTL; TTL, Angelović Paşa used him as a figurehead to secure his hold on power
[3] After Mehmed’s disasterous reign, many of the janissaries and in the court began to consider him either incompetent or cursed. In 1467, he was assassinated by Angelović and his partisans, who then seized the grand vizier and did the same. Mustafa was then installed, who in turn appointed Angelović as Paşa
[4] As the final conflict of the Republic came to be known
[5] Angelović Paşa did not have complete control over Mustafa and was afraid of pushing the Sultan into the arms of his court opponents, and so did not outright demand the islands be annexed.
[6] Butterflies mean that he never became a crusader, although he did remain a very pious Catholic.
[7] The Aragonese were at this time engaged in the War of the Castilian Succession, with Ferdinand of Aragon and Afonso of Portugal both trying to seat their wife on the throne of the disputed kingdom. TTL, due to the Aragonese being overstretched in the Mediterranean, they are unable to prevent the Portuguese from seizing Burgos in 1476 and are gradually pushed out of Castille over the following years, with the intervention of the French in 1482 causing The expenses of the war would force the Aragonese to pawn Thessalonike to the Turks.
