The harsh treatment and oppressive taxation of the local Orthodox Greek population by the Catholic Venetians had caused great resentment, so that their sympathies generally lay with the Ottomans.

The incomplete Venetian walls of Nicosia were of no use in stopping the powerful Ottoman Army, and as many as 20,000 members of the garrison and citizens of the city were massacred; 2,000 boys were spared to be sent as sexual slaves to Constantinople.

They would hold out for 11 months against a force that would come to number more than 200,000 men, with 145 guns,[1] providing the time needed by the Pope to cobble together an anti-Ottoman league from the reluctant Christian European states.

[12] Marcantonio Bragadin led the defence of Famagusta with Lorenzo Tiepolo, Captain of Paphos, and general Astorre Baglioni (the last "Governor" of Venetian Cyprus).

Then, at the surrender ceremony on August 5[17] where Bragadin offered the vacated city to Mustafa, the Ottoman general, after initially receiving him with every courtesy, began behaving erratically, accusing him of murdering Turkish prisoners and hiding munitions.

After being left in prison for two weeks, his earlier wounds festering, he was "dragged round the walls with sacks of earth and stone on his back; next, tied to a chair, he was hoisted to the yardarm of the Turkish flagship and exposed to the taunts of the sailors.

[20] Bragadin's quartered body was then distributed as a war trophy among the army, and his skin was stuffed with straw and sewn, reinvested with his military insignia, and exhibited riding an ox in a mocking procession along the streets of Famagusta.

The macabre trophy, together with the severed heads of general Alvise Martinengo, Gianantonio Querini, and castellan Andrea Bragadin, was hoisted upon the masthead pennant of the personal galley of the Ottoman commander, Amir al-bahr Mustafa Pasha, to be brought to Constantinople as a gift for Sultan Selim II.

From a military point of view, the besieged garrison's perseverance required a massive effort by the Ottoman Turks, who were so heavily committed that they were unable to redeploy in time when the Holy League built up the fleet which was later victorious against the Muslim power at Lepanto: this was the legacy of Bragadin and his Venetians to Christianity, as Theodore Mommsen wrote.

The Venetian seamen went on to fight with greater zeal than any of the other combatants at the decisive Battle of Lepanto where an Ottoman fleet was crushed by the combined force of much of southern Europe.