The Grand Turk: Sultan Mehmet II - Conqueror of Constantinople and Master of an Empire (26 page)

Dario returned to Venice on 16 April 1479 with one of the Ottoman negotiators, Lutfi Bey, accompanied by a party of twenty. Domenico Malipiero writes that forty Venetian noblemen went out into the Bacino San Marco in gilded vessels to meet the envoys, while ‘the Doge and the College stood at the window of the Hall of the Great Council’. Then on 25 April, the feast day of St Mark, Lutfi Bey took an oath to confirm the peace in the presence of Doge Giovanni Mocenigo, who swore to it and proclaimed it to the Signoria.

The Greek text of the treaty and a Latin translation are preserved in the state archives of Venice, where one can read Sultan Mehmet’s oath of agreement, dated 25 January 1479: ‘By the God of Heaven and earth, by our great Prophet Mohammed, by the seven copies of the Koran which we Moslems possess and profess, by the 124,000 prophets of God by the faith which I believe and profess, by my soul and the soul of my father, and by the sword with which I am girded.’

The war between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, which had lasted for sixteen years, was at last over. But the Serenessima paid a great price for the peace, for which she was reviled by her fellow Christian states, as the nineteenth-century historian Horatio Brown pointed out in his history of Venice:

Thus after sixteen years of continuous warfare, Venice secured a ruinous peace which deprived her of a large part of her Levantine Empire, and rendered her tributary to the new lords of Constantinople. She had undertaken the war at the request of Europe and encouraged by promises of support; she had been deserted at the very outset; she struggled on with great bravery, spending men and money till she could endure no further drain; she made the best peace she could, and instantly all of Europe attacked her for her perfidy to the Christian faith…

12

The Siege of Rhodes

Venice was severely criticised for coming to terms with Mehmet, most notably by King Matthias Corvinus and Pope Sixtus IV, who felt that the Venetians had betrayed the Christian cause. But the overwhelming power of the Ottomans soon led other Italian states to cultivate friendly relations with Mehmet, particularly those who were doing business in Istanbul.

The first to do so was Florence, where the ruling Medici family was engaged in a struggle with the rival Pazzi clan, who were backed by Pope Sixtus. On Sunday 26 April 1478, at High Mass in the Duomo in Florence, Lorenzo de’Medici and his brother Giuliano were attacked by a group led by Francesco da’Pazzi and Bernardo Bandini de’Baroncello. Giuliano was killed, but Lorenzo was only slightly wounded, and he led his supporters to put down the attempted coup. All the conspirators were slain except for Bernardo Bandini, who escaped and made his way aboard a Neapolitan galley to Istanbul, where he took refuge with relatives in Galata.

When Sultan Mehmet learned of Bandini’s presence in the city he had him arrested and imprisoned, after which he informed Lorenzo Carducci, the Florentine consul in Galata. Carducci’s associate Bernardo Peruzzi sent the news to the Signoria in Florence ‘of the arrest of… Bernardo Bandini, impious parricide and rebel against us’. The Signoria’s letter responding to Carducci, dated 18 June 1479, is full of praise for Sultan Mehmet as a friend of Florence.

By letters of Bernardo Peruzzi we have learned with great pleasure how that most glorious prince [Mehmet] has seized Bernardo Bandini, most heinous parricide and traitor to his country, and declares himself willing to do with him whatever we may want - a decision in keeping with the love and great favor he has always shown toward our Republic and our people as well as with the justice of his most serene Majesty…

Antonio de’Medici was sent to Istanbul to pick up Bandini, who was placed in his custody and brought back to Florence. There on 29 December he was hung from a window of the Palazzo del Bargello, as Leonardo da Vinci, watching from the square below, sketched his dangling body. Lorenzo de’Medici expressed his gratitude to Mehmet by commissioning the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni to make a medallion honouring the sultan.

After the Venetians signed their agreement with the Ottomans they made every effort to keep the peace, acting with great restraint in cases of Turkish aggression. The situation was still very critical, for in the summer of 1479 an Ottoman fleet assembled at Valona (Vlore) in Albania, directly across the Strait of Otranto from the heel of the Italian peninsula, and there was fear that Mehmet was planning a large-scale invasion of Italy.

The fleet was commanded by Gedik Ahmet Pasha, the former grand vezir, whom Mehmet had released from prison and appointed as captain-pasha of the Ottoman navy. Gedik Ahmet sent an envoy to the Signoria, with an astonishing proposal that they join him in an invasion of the Kingdom of Naples, saying that King Ferrante and the Pope were common enemies of the Venetians and the Ottomans. The message went on to say that Sultan Mehmet was ready to attack Naples with or without Venetian help, but the Senate diplomatically turned down the proposal.

As it turned out, the Ottoman fleet was not intended for an invasion of Italy but for an attack on some of the Ionian Islands, the archipelago lying along the north-western coast of Greece. The islands that Gedik Ahmet had been ordered to attack were Santa Maura (Lefkas), Cephalonia, Ithaka (Ithaki) and Zante (Zakynthos). All these islands, as well as the town of Vonitsa on the Greek mainland, were ruled by Duke Leonardo III Tocco, who had been Despot of Arta in north-west Greece during the last years of the Byzantine Empire.

The Ottoman fleet’s course took it from Valona through the strait between the mainland and Corfu, northernmost of the Ionian Islands, a possession of Venice. While passing through the Strait of Corfu, according to a Venetian report of 7 September 1479, Gedik Ahmet’s ships encountered the republic’s Captain-General of the Sea ‘with some of our galleys.’ Because of the peace treaty that had been signed earlier that year the Venetian flotilla did not interfere with the Ottoman fleet, but simply observed it as it went on to attack Leonardo Tocco’s island domain. According to the report:

He [Gedik Ahmet Pasha] was saluted and honored by our aforesaid captain, as he passed by on his way to the lord Leonardo’s state, and he went first to S. Maura, which he found abandoned by the aforesaid lord, and garrisoning [the fortress] with Turks, he then continued on to Cephalonia, took the island, then the fortress, pillaging everything. He burned and destroyed the castello, leaving the whole island deserted…

After Gedik Ahmet took the castle on Cephalonia he enslaved the islanders and destroyed their homes, according to the Venetian chronicler Stefano Magno, who adds: ‘He also laid waste the island of Ithaki and other small islands nearby, which belonged to the said lord [Leonardo Tocco].’

Gedik Ahmet sailed on from Cephalonia to Zante, where 40 per cent of the population were Venetian subjects, and which was garrisoned by 500 Venetian
stradiots
, or cavalry. When the Ottoman forces landed on 8 September they were opposed by the
stradiots
, who inflicted casualties on them, while the Turks in turn killed a number of the Venetian residents of the island when they refused to surrender.

The Venetian captain-general Antonio Loredano was then sent to Cephalonia to protect the Venetian subjects there, while Gedik Ahmet wrote back to Istanbul for instructions. A courier from Istanbul arrived on 23 September, with instructions that the Venetian subjects were free to leave, but that the island belonged to the Ottomans, and Sultan Mehmet wanted to destroy it and resettle its Greek inhabitants elsewhere in his empire. The Venetian subjects left aboard Loredano’s ships, along with the
stradiots
, and the civilians were resettled in the republic’s possessions in the Morea. Gedik Ahmet then slaughtered all Leonardo Tocco’s officials on the island, after which he took the Greek population off to be resettled on the islands in the Sea of Marmara.

Meanwhile, Leonardo Tocco had taken refuge with King Ferrante, who gave him two fiefs in the Kingdom of Naples. Leonardo’s brother Antonio made an attempt to retake the Tocco possessions, hiring an army of Catalan mercenaries with whom he briefly occupied Cephalonia and Zante in 1480, before he was driven out by the Venetians and finally murdered.

That same year Mehmet mounted a small expedition to the eastern end of the Black Sea under Hızıroğlu Mehmet Pasha, who captured three Georgian fortresses. Mehmet Pasha then sailed his fleet across the eastern end of the Black Sea, where he took two fortresses of the Circassians, whom Mehmet wanted to reduce to subjects of the Tartar Khan of the Crimea, his vassal.

Throughout 1479 there were also numerous raids by Ottoman
akincis
into Hungary, Transylvania, Croatia and even Austria. The raids into Hungary brought a reprisal from King Matthias Corvinus, who sent an army of 7,000 troops to attack the Ottomans in Sarajevo, which they looted and burned. A Turkish force under Daud Pasha cut off the Hungarians on their homeward march and, after heavy casualties on both sides, forced the invaders to abandon their loot and flee.

Mehmet then turned his attention to Rhodes, where, now that the Venetians had come to terms, the Knights Hospitallers of St John were the only Christian power in the eastern Mediterranean that still refused to pay tribute to the Ottomans. The Knights had been plundering Muslim merchant ships and Mehmet was determined to end their piracy, according to the Turkish chronicler Kemalpaşazade. Mehmet was also anxious to open up the south-eastern Mediterranean to his navy, for he seems to have been planning a major expedition against the Mamluks of Egypt, and to do that he first had to subjugate the Knights of Rhodes.

The Order of the Knights Hospitallers of St John had been founded in Jerusalem in the eleventh century. One of its original purposes was to build and operate hospices and hospitals for the Christian pilgrims who came to visit the Holy Land, and another was to fight in the crusades. Their emblem, the white cross of St John on a red field, contrasted with the red cross on white of the Knights Templars and the black cross on white of the Teutonic Knights, the latter two being solely military crusading orders.

The Knights of St John moved frequently during the Middle Ages, from Jerusalem to Lebanon in 1188, to Palestine in 1191, to Cyprus in 1291. Then, after taking Rhodes from the Byzantines in 1309, they established their headquarters in the principal town of the island, at its eastern end, where they built a powerful fortress opposite the south-western coast of Asia Minor. The Knights also captured and fortified several other islands in the Dodecanese, as well as building a great fortress on the south-western coast of Asia Minor at Halicarnassus, Turkish Bodrum. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Knights of Rhodes fought against both the Ottomans and Mamluks at sea as well as on land, sometimes alone and sometimes in coalitions with other Christian powers, one notable instance being their participation in the crusading expedition that was defeated by Murat I at Nicopolis in 1396.

At the time when Mehmet was considering an expedition against Rhodes the grand master of the Knights of St John was Pierre d’Aubusson, a French knight who had been fighting against the Turks for a quarter of a century. He had distinguished himself in the attack on Rhodes by the Ottoman admiral Hamza Bey in 1455, during which he personally led the defence, fighting hand to hand with the Turks even after he had been wounded five times. According to a contemporary historian, d’Aubusson was ‘of fine person and acute intelligence and easily captured the friendship of anyone who met him and whose affection he studied to win’. At the time of his election as grand master, on 17 June 1476, he had been given dictatorial powers to prepare the defences of Rhodes against what the Knights saw as the inevitable Turkish attack on their island fortress.

D’Aubusson began discussions with Kaitbey, the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, who was also threatened by Mehmet, and on 28 October 1478 they signed a peace treaty. Then, to gain more time to strengthen the defences of Rhodes, d’Aubusson entered into negotiations with Sultan Mehmet, who was only too pleased to do so, since he needed some months to fully prepare his army and navy for an expedition against the Knights.

Normally such negotiations would have been conducted by the grand vezir or one of the other pashas. But on this occasion Mehmet entrusted the task to Prince Jem, his youngest son, who was summoned from Konya to head the negotiations with the Knights. The negotiations were successful from the points of view of both parties, and in the late summer of 1479 a truce was signed between the Ottomans and the Knights of St John.

Earlier that summer Mehmet had sent out invitations to celebrate the circumcision of his nine-year-old grandson, the future Selim I, son of Prince Beyazit. Now that Venice was at peace with the Ottomans, an envoy was sent with an invitation for Doge Giovanni Mocenigo to attend the circumcision feast, but he politely declined.

The envoy also delivered a letter containing Mehmet’s request that the Venetians send him ‘a good painter’ (
un buon pittore
). The Signoria chose Gentile Bellini, who at the time was restoring the paintings in the Hall of the Great Council in the Doge’s Palace. Gentile accepted the commission, while his younger brother Giovanni replaced him in the work of restoration in the council chamber. Gentile, accompanied by two assistants, left Venice on 3 September 1479 aboard the galley of Melchiore Trevisano, which arrived in Istanbul at the end of the month.

Gentile remained in Istanbul for about sixteen months, departing for Venice around mid-January 1481. During that time he did the celebrated portrait of Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror now in the National Portrait Gallery in London, and probably several other works as well, though none of the latter have been definitely attributed to him.

Another portrait that may have been painted by Gentile Bellini during his stay in Istanbul was discovered around 1950 in a private collection in Switzerland. The painting shows Sultan Mehmet on the left facing a beardless young man on the right, both figures in half profile. An old label on the back identifies the painter as Gentile Bellini and the subjects as
Maometto Secondo i suo Figlio
(‘Mehmet II and his Son’). The young man would appear to be Prince Jem, who was about twenty at the time, for Mehmet’s only other son, Prince Beyazit, was thirty-two, appreciably older than the youth in the painting. Both brothers were at that time serving as provincial governors in Anatolia, Beyazit in Amasya and Jem in Konya, and so, when the painting was discovered, it was thought that neither one of them could have been the youth shown with Mehmet, since Bellini did the painting in Istanbul. Jem did return to Istanbul in 1479, however, when his father recalled him to take charge of the negotiations with Pierre d’Aubusson, and so he may have been living in Topkapı Sarayı for at least part of the time that Bellini was working there.