The Battle of Gallipoli occurred on 29 May 1416 between the fleets of the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire off the port city of Gallipoli, the main Ottoman naval base. The battle was the main episode of a brief conflict between the two powers, resulting from Ottoman attacks against possessions and shipping of the Venetians and their allies in the Aegean Sea in 1414–1415. The Venetian fleet, under Pietro Loredan, was charged with transporting a Venetian embassy to the Ottoman sultan, but was authorized to attack if the Ottomans refused to negotiate. The subsequent events are known chiefly from a detailed letter written by Loredan after the battle.
The Ottomans exchanged fire with the Venetian ships as soon as the Venetian fleet approached Gallipoli on 27 May, forcing the Venetians to withdraw. On the next day, the two fleets maneuvered and fought off Gallipoli, but during the evening, Loredan managed to contact the Ottoman authorities and inform them of his diplomatic mission. Despite assurances that the Ottomans would welcome the ambassadors, when the Venetian fleet approached the city on the next day, 29 May, the Ottoman fleet sailed to meet the Venetians and the two sides quickly became embroiled in battle.
The Venetians scored a crushing victory, killing the Ottoman commander, capturing a large part of the Ottoman fleet, and taking large numbers of Ottoman crews prisoner, of whom many—particularly the Christians serving voluntarily in the Ottoman fleet—were executed. The Venetians then retired to Tenedos to replenish their supplies and rest. Although it confirmed Venetian naval superiority in the Aegean Sea for the next few decades, the battle had little impact: a peace agreement was brokered but refused by the Venetian Senate, and a settlement of the conflict was delayed until a peace treaty was signed in 1419.
Background
Relations of Venice and the Ottoman Empire
In 1413, the Ottoman prince Mehmed I ended the civil war of the Ottoman Interregnum and established himself as sultan and the sole master of the Ottoman Turkish realm. The Republic of Venice, as the premier maritime and commercial power in the area, endeavoured to renew the treaties it had concluded with Mehmed's predecessors during the civil war, and in May 1414, its bailo (resident ambassador) in the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, Francesco Foscarini, was instructed to proceed to the Sultan's court to that effect. Foscarini failed, as Mehmed was away campaigning in Anatolia, and Venetian envoys were traditionally instructed not to move too far from the shore (and consequently the Republic's reach); Foscarini had yet to meet the Sultan by July 1415, when Mehmed's displeasure at this delay was conveyed to the Venetian authorities. In the meantime, tensions between the two powers mounted, as the Ottomans moved to re-establish a sizeable navy and launched several raids that challenged Venetian naval hegemony in the Aegean Sea.
Ottoman raids in the Aegean in 1414–1415
During his 1414 campaign in Anatolia, Mehmed came to Smyrna, where several of the most important Latin rulers of the Aegean—the Genoese lords of the northeastern Aegean islands of Chios, Phokaia, and Lesbos, and even the Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller of Rhodes—came to do him obeisance. According to the Byzantine historian Doukas, a contemporary of the events, the absence of the Duke of Naxos from this assembly provoked the ire of the Sultan, who in retaliation equipped a fleet of 30 vessels, under the command of Çali Bey, and in late 1415 sent it to raid the duke's domains in the Cyclades in the southern Aegean Sea. The Ottoman fleet ravaged the islands, and carried off a large part of the inhabitants of Andros, Paros, and Melos into slavery. On the other hand, the 16th-century Venetian historian Marino Sanuto the Younger indicates that the Ottoman attack was in retaliation for the raids against Ottoman shipping undertaken by Pietro Zeno, the lord of Andros. Like the Duke of Naxos, Zeno was a Venetian citizen and vassal of the Republic of Venice, but he had not been included in the previous treaties between the Republic and the Ottomans, and had continued raiding Ottoman shipping on his own account.
Apart from the attacks on Naxos, Ottoman raids were also directed against immediate Venetian interests. In June 1414, Ottoman ships also raided the Venetian colony of Euboea, an island off the eastern shore of mainland Greece. The Ottomans pillaged the colony's capital, Negroponte, taking almost all its inhabitants prisoner; out of some 2,000 captives, the Republic was able after years to secure the release of only 200, mostly elderly men, women, and children, the rest having been sold as slaves. Furthermore, in the autumn of 1415, ostensibly in retaliation for Zeno's attacks, an Ottoman fleet of 42 ships—6 galleys, 26 galleots, and the rest smaller brigantines—tried to intercept a Venetian merchant convoy coming from the Black Sea at the island of Tenedos, at the southern entrance of the Dardanelles. The Venetian vessels were delayed at Constantinople by bad weather, but managed to pass through the Ottoman fleet and outrun its pursuit to the safety of Negroponte. The Ottoman fleet instead raided Euboea, including an attack on the fortress of Oreos (Loreo) in northern Euboea, but its defenders under the castellan Taddeo Zane resisted with success. Nevertheless, the Turks were able to once again ravage the rest of the island, carrying off 1,500 captives, so that the local inhabitants even petitioned the Signoria of Venice for permission to become tributaries of the Turks to guarantee their future safety—a demand categorically rejected by the Signoria on 4 February 1416. The raids spread considerable panic: Lepanto on the western coast of Greece was deserted, and at Venice no one was found who wanted to contract, not even for a small sum, the right to equip merchant galleys bound for Constantinople, or the Black Sea ports of Tana and Trebizond. Due to the lucrative trade opportunities these ports offered, the contracts ordinarily fetched prices of up to 2,000 ducats, but now the Venetian government was obliged to supply armed escorts for the merchant galleys at its own expense. Nevertheless, the same missives to Venice also highlighted the bad state of the Turkish fleet, especially of its crews; and expressed the certainty that if a Venetian fleet had been present to confront them, it would have been victorious.
Diplomatic and military response of Venice
In response to the Ottoman raids, the Great Council of Venice engaged in feverish military preparations. A half-percent levy was raised on goods, soldiers and crossbowmen were recruited, and the experienced Pietro Loredan was appointed Captain of the Gulf, at the head of a fleet of fifteen galleys; five were to be equipped in Venice, four at Candia (Crete), and one each at Negroponte, Napoli di Romania (Nauplia), Andros, and Corfu. Loredan's brother Giorgio, Jacopo Barbarigo, Cristoforo Dandolo, and Pietro Contarini were appointed as sopracomiti (galley captains), while Andrea Foscolo and Dolfino Venier were designated as provveditori (commissioners) of the fleet and ambassadors to the Sultan.
While Foscolo was charged with a mission to the Principality of Achaea in southern Greece, Venier was tasked with reaching a new agreement with the Sultan on the basis of the treaty concluded between Musa Çelebi and the Venetian ambassador Giacomo Trevisan in 1411, and with securing the release of the Venetian prisoners taken from Negroponte in 1414. Should negotiations fail, he was empowered to seek to form an anti-Ottoman league with the Bey of Karaman, the Prince of Wallachia, and the rebellious Ottoman prince Mustafa Çelebi. Loredan's appointment was unusual, as he had served recently as Captain of the Gulf, and law forbade anyone who had held the position from holding the same for three years after; the Great Council overrode this rule due to the de facto state of war with the Ottomans. In a further move calculated to bolster Loredan's authority (and appeal to his vanity), an old rule that had fallen into disuse was revived, whereby only the captain-general had the right to carry the Banner of Saint Mark on his flagship, rather than every sopracomito. With "rare unanimity", the Great Council voted to authorize Loredan to attack Ottoman possessions if the Ottomans had continued their raids in the meantime. If they were unwilling to negotiate a cessation of hostilities, he was to protect Venetian shipping and attack the Ottomans, without however putting his ships in excessive danger. Nevertheless, the emphasis of the Council's instructions was to ensure peace, and Loredan's squadron was intended as a form of military pressure to expedite negotiations. As no further news of Ottoman attacks arrived until Loredan sailed in April, the expectation in the Venetian government was that the matter would likely be resolved peacefully.
Role of Gallipoli
The main target of Loredan's fleet was to be Gallipoli. Described by the Italian naval historian Camillo Manfroni as the "key of the Dardanelles", the city was one of the most important strategic positions in the Eastern Mediterranean. At the time it was also the main Turkish naval base and provided a safe haven for their corsairs raiding Venetian colonies in the Aegean. With Constantinople still in Christian hands, Gallipoli had also for decades been the main crossing point for the Ottoman armies from Anatolia to Europe. As a result of its strategic importance, Sultan Bayezid I took care to improve its fortifications, rebuilding the citadel and strengthening the harbour defences. The harbour had a seaward wall and a narrow entrance leading to an outer basin, separated from an inner basin by a bridge, where Bayezid erected a three-storey tower (the Birghoz-i Gelibolu). When Ruy González de Clavijo visited the city in 1403, he reported seeing its citadel full of troops, a large arsenal, and 40 ships in the harbour.
Bayezid aimed to use his warships in Gallipoli to control (and tax) the passage of shipping through the Dardanelles, an ambition which brought him into direct conflict with Venetian interests in the area. While the Ottoman fleet was not yet strong enough to face the Venetians, it forced the latter to provide armed escort to their trade convoys passing through the Dardanelles. Securing right of unimpeded passage through the Dardanelles was a chief issue in Venice's diplomatic relations with the Ottomans: the Republic had secured this in the 1411 treaty with Musa Çelebi, but the failure to renew that agreement in 1414 had again rendered Gallipoli, in the words of the 20th-century Ottomanist Halil İnalcık, "the main object of dispute in Venetian-Ottoman relations". The Ottoman naval raids in 1415, launched from Gallipoli, further underscored its importance.
Battle
The events before and during the battle are described in detail in a letter sent by Loredan to the Signoria on 2 June 1416, which was included by Marino Sanuto in his History of the Doges of Venice, albeit with some major omissions, which are filled by the Morosini Codex of Antonio Morosini, who copies the letter virtually verbatim. Loredan's letter was written not simply as an account of the battle, but as a defence against any accusation that he might have overstepped his authority and needlessly risked his command; he is therefore at pains to emphasize that the battle began due to Turkish attacks on his ships. Loredan's account is essentially corroborated by the 15th-century Venetian chronicle attributed to Gasparo Zancaruolo, which provides some additional details from the now vanished Venetian archives or oral traditions, while Doukas also provides a brief and somewhat divergent account, which evidently is drawn from rumours and hearsay. The contemporary Byzantine historians Sphrantzes and Laonikos Chalkokondyles also provide brief accounts, emphasizing the Venetians' reluctance to get drawn into battle.
Arrival of the Venetian fleet on 27 May
According to Loredan's letter, his fleet—four galleys from Venice, four from Candia, and one each from Negroponte and Napoli di Romania—was delayed by contrary winds and reached Tenedos on 24 May, and did not enter the Dardanelles until the 27th, when they arrived near Gallipoli. Loredan reports that the Venetians took care to avoid projecting any hostile intentions, avoiding any preparations for battle, such as erecting a pavisade around the ships. The Ottomans, who had assembled a large force of infantry and 200 cavalry on the shore, began firing on them with arrows. Loredan dispersed his ships to avoid casualties, but the tide was drawing them closer to the shore. Loredan tried to signal the Ottomans that they had no hostile intentions, but the latter kept firing poisoned arrows at them, until Loredan ordered a few cannon shots that killed a few soldiers and forced the rest to retire from the shore towards the anchorage of their fleet.