[1] The Venetians were gradually being deprived of any reliable allies as well: the King of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus, who had previously attacked the Ottomans in the Balkans, was embroiled in quarrels with the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III.
[6] In this context, a peace offer initiated by the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II in late 1477 was seized upon by the Signoria of Venice, which instructed the fleet commander (provveditore d'armata) Tommaso Malipiero to offer the return of all Ottoman lands captured by Venice, as well as significant concessions: the island of Lemnos, the Mani Peninsula in the southern Morea, the fortress of Croia (Krujë) and its territory in northern Albania, as well as 100,000 ducats still owed as tax arrears by the Venetians Bartolommeo Zorzi and Girolamo Michiel, who had held the license for the production of alum before the outbreak of the war.
[7][8] These terms, however, made clear to Mehmed the Venetians' eagerness to end the conflict, and he increased his demands to include an annual payment of 10,000 ducats and the return to the status quo ante bellum.
While Malipiero, whose limited authority did not allow him to exceed his original instructions, left for Venice for consultations on 15 April 1478, the Sultan began preparing another campaign into Albania.
[1][10] Despite the resistance of Scutari, Albania was practically in Ottoman hands, and lack of funds meant that a counterattack by the small forces Venice could muster was unlikely to succeed.
[11] Faced with a hopeless situation, the Venetian government resolved to seek peace at all costs: Giovanni Dario, the secretary of the Senate, was sent to Constantinople with the unprecedented brief to accept all demands made by the Sultan, in exchange for reopening the Levantine trade on which Venice's prosperity depended.
[14] By its terms, Venice undertook to surrender Scutari, Lemnos, and Mani, while at the same time renouncing any claims to Negroponte (Euboea) and Croia, which the Ottomans had already captured during the war.
[22] However, according to the Ottomanist Franz Babinger, the treaty, and the effective abandonment of Venice by the rest of Christendom, was a watershed moment in the relations of the Christian European powers with the Ottomans.