When Venice declared war on the Ottomans in 1684, the Venetian commander-in-chief, Francesco Morosini, quickly set his sights on a conquest of the Morea as a revenge and recompense for the recent loss of Crete.

Rather than land at Mani, therefore, Morosini chose to target Coron, securing for himself a base of operations and encouraging the Maniots to rise up by a display of military might.

The decisive combat took place on 7 August, when the Venetian lines were broken through; a counterattack at dawn however threw the Ottomans back and dispersed their army.

A major victory over another Ottoman army followed at the Battle of Kalamata, and the conquest of Messenia was completed in the next year with the capture of New Navarino fortress and Modon.

Before its loss to the Ottomans in 1500 during the Second Ottoman–Venetian War, Coron had been under Venetian possession for three centuries and was known alongside neighbouring Modon (Methoni) as the "chief eyes of the Republic", for their strategic position controlling the sea-lanes from the eastern to the central Mediterranean.

The Habsburgs offered to return this isolated outpost to Venice, but the Republic refused, and the Ottomans recaptured the town after a siege that lasted into spring 1534 and forced its population to abandon it.

This was especially the case for the Maniots, the restive and semi-autonomous inhabitants of the mountainous Mani Peninsula, and who resented the loss of privileges and autonomy, including the establishment of Ottoman garrisons in local fortresses, that they had suffered due to their collaboration with the Venetians during the Cretan War.

The Maniots entered into negotiations with Morosini, but the Ottomans pre-empted them: in spring 1685 the serasker of the Morea, Ismail Pasha, invaded Mani and forced the local population to submit, giving up their children as hostages.

To that end, Maltese troops employed a hundred barrels of gunpowder, but the only effect was to create a breach that was filled by the falling stones from the wall.

[21] Free to concentrate on the siege, the Venetians and their allies dug two parallel tunnels under the western bastion, and filled mines with 250 gunpowder barrels recovered from the Ottoman relief army.

After a hard three-hour fight, the Venetians were pushed back, but returned to the attack by noon, while a small detachment was landed over water in the eastern rear of the fortress.

[22][18] In the final stage of the siege, 230 Maniots under the Zakynthian noble Pavlos Makris had taken part, and soon the area rose up in revolt again, encouraged by Morosini's presence at Coron.

[16] The Venetians and Maniots captured the fortress of Zarnata, allowing its garrison passage to Kalamata, where the Kapudan Pasha had landed an army of 6,000 infantry and 2,000 sipahi cavalry.

In the 1690s, some of the Turks were also freed; most of those who left Malta are believed to have gone to North Africa and did not return to Coron, as the city was still under Venetian occupation at the time.