Ottoman–Venetian War (1463–1479)
Chief among these was the Republic of Venice, which had founded an extensive maritime empire, controlling numerous coastal possessions and islands in the Adriatic, Ionian, and Aegean Seas.
In its first conflict with the Ottomans, Venice had already lost the city of Thessalonica in 1430, following a long siege, but the resulting peace treaty left the other Venetian possessions intact.
[8][9] According to the Greek historian Michael Critobulus, hostilities broke out because of the flight of an Albanian slave of the Ottoman commander of Athens to the Venetian fortress of Coron (Koroni) with 100,000 silver aspers from his master's treasure.
[10] Using this as a pretext, in November 1462, Turahanoğlu Ömer Bey, the Ottoman commander in central Greece, attacked and very nearly succeeded in taking the strategically important Venetian fortress of Lepanto (Nafpaktos).
The Morea and the western Greek coast (Epirus) would fall to Venice, Hungary would acquire Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, and Wallachia, the Albanian principality under Skanderbeg would expand into Macedonia, and the remaining European territories of the Ottomans, including Constantinople, would form a restored Byzantine Empire under the surviving members of the Palaiologos family.
[13] The new alliance launched a two-pronged offensive against the Ottomans: a Venetian army, under the Captain General of the Sea Alvise Loredan, landed in the Morea, while Matthias Corvinus invaded Bosnia.
[15] Ottoman reaction was swift and decisive: Sultan Mehmed II dispatched his Grand Vizier, Mahmud Pasha Angelović, with an army against the Venetians.
[16] The Morean campaign was swiftly victorious for the Ottomans: although messages received from Ömer Bey had warned of the strength and firepower of the Venetian position at the Hexamilion, Mahmud Pasha decided to march on, hoping to catch them unawares.
[14] In the event, the Ottomans reached the Isthmus just in time to see the Venetian army, demoralized and riddled with dysentery, leave its positions and sail to Nauplia.
[13][17] In the meantime, for the upcoming campaign of 1464, the Republic had appointed Sigismondo Malatesta, the ruler of Rimini and one of the ablest Italian generals, as land commander in the Morea.
[19] Small-scale warfare continued on both sides, with raids and counter-raids, but a shortage of manpower and money meant that the Venetians remained largely confined to their fortified bases, while Ömer Bey's army roamed the countryside.
The mercenaries and stratioti in Venice's employ were becoming disgruntled at the lack of pay, while increasingly, the Morea was becoming desolate, as villages were abandoned and fields left untended.
[21] Malatesta himself, disenchanted by the conditions he encountered in the Morea and increasingly anxious to return to Italy and attend to his family's affairs and the ongoing feud with the Papacy, remained largely inactive throughout 1465, in spite of the relative weakness of the Ottoman garrisons following the withdrawal of Ömer Bey from the peninsula.
[22] In the Aegean, the new Venetian admiral, Orsato Giustinian, tried to take Lesbos in the spring of 1464, and besieged the capital Mytilene for six weeks, until the arrival of an Ottoman fleet under Mahmud Pasha on 18 May forced him to withdraw.
Under his leadership, the Venetian war effort was reinvigorated: the fleet took the northern Aegean islands of Imbros, Thasos and Samothrace, and then sailed into the Saronic Gulf.
This strategically-sited fortress, at the lowlands near the end of the old Via Egnatia, cut Albania effectively in half, isolating Skenderbeg's base in the northern highlands from the Venetian holdings in the south.
On his return in early 1467, his forces sallied from the highlands, defeated Ballaban Pasha and lifted the siege of the fortress of Croia (Krujë), attacked Elbasan but failed to capture it.
After Skanderbeg died, some Venetian-controlled northern Albanian garrisons continued to hold territories coveted by the Ottomans, such as Žabljak Crnojevića, Drisht, Lezha, and Shkodra—the most significant.
The Venetians and Shkodrans resisted the assaults and continued to hold the fortress until Venice ceded Shkodra to the Ottoman Empire in the Treaty of Constantinople on 25 January 1479 as a condition of ending the war.
