The Conquest of the Balkans Resumes
At this time the Turks resumed their conquest of the Balkans. Serbia finally fell in 1459 and remained among the Turkish possessions until 1804. Sultan Mehmed II took Corinth by siege and Athens without drawing a sword (1458). Like Caesar before him, the conqueror treated the Athenians gently out of respect for their ancestors and showed a scholarly interest in their ancient monuments. It suited him to be gentle, for he had avenged not only the Crusades but also the battle of Marathon.
Bosnia, whose capital and port, Dubrovnik (Ragusa), the book says, had earned the name "the Slavonic Athens of the South" for its culture and civilization, accepted Turkish rule in 1463 and converted to Islam with a ease and speed that astonished western Europe.
Scanderbeg of Albania
The boldest enemy of the Turks in the second half of the fifteenth century was the Albanian Scanderbeg. His real name was George Castriota, and he probably came from a middling Slavonic family. But the legends dear to his countrymen make him a descendant of the kings of Epirus and an adventurous youth. It is said that as a boy he was given as a hostage to Sultan Murad II and raised at the Ottoman court in Adrianople. The sultan so loved his courage and bearing that he treated him like a son and made him one of the commanders of the Turkish army. George embraced Islam and was named Iskander Bey.
After repeatedly commanding Turkish forces against Christians, he repented of his apostasy and fled. He renounced Islam, wrested the Albanian capital, Kruja, from its Turkish governor and openly rebelled (1442, as the book dates it). Sultan Mehmed II sent army after army to punish him, and Scanderbeg, with remarkable speed and a genius for stratagem, defeated them all. At last Mehmed, burdened with greater conflicts, agreed to a ten-year truce (1461). But the Venetian senate and Pope Pius II urged Scanderbeg to break the peace and renew the war (1463). The sultan denounced the Christians as faithless treaty-breakers and returned to besiege Kruja.
Scanderbeg defended the city so fiercely that the sultan had to lift the siege once more. But amid the ruins of victory Scanderbeg died (1468). Kruja surrendered in 1479 and Albania became a province of the Ottoman state.
Mehmed's Further Conquests
Meanwhile the insatiable sultan conquered the Morea, Trebizond, Lesbos, Negroponte (ancient Euboea) and the Crimea. In 1477 one of his armies crossed the Isonzo and plundered northeastern Italy to within thirty-five kilometers of Venice, then returned to Serbia laden with spoil. Venice, terrified, had fought long and stubbornly to hold its possessions in the Aegean and the Adriatic, but now gave up all its claims to Kruja and Scutari and paid the Turks an indemnity of about 10,000 ducats (the book's figure).
Western Europe, which had withheld help from Venice when it was needed, now despised it for making peace with the infidels and keeping it. The Turks had reached the Adriatic, and only the waters Caesar once crossed in oared boats separated them from Italy, Rome and the Vatican.
Otranto
In 1480 Mehmed sent a Turkish force across those waters to attack the kingdom of Naples. It easily took Otranto. According to the book, half of the city's 22,000 inhabitants were killed and the rest enslaved, and the archbishop was among the dead.
The fate of Christendom and of monogamy, as the author puts it, swung in the balance. Ferdinand (Ferrante) I, King of Naples, ended his quarrels with Florence and sent his best troops to retake Otranto. Mehmed was busy with the siege of Rhodes, but in the midst of that grave undertaking he died. Rhodes stayed Christian until the time of Suleiman the Magnificent; the Turks left Otranto and returned to Albania (1481). For a moment the flood of the Ottoman advance stood still.