Conquest of Cyprus by the Ottomans in 1570/71
Cyprus was conquered by the Ottomans in 1570/71 .
prehistory
1474, after the death of the Cypriot King James II (whose succession to the throne in 1464 had generously financed the Republic of Venice ) and his posthumously born son James III. a few weeks later, Jacob II became wife, the Venetian Katharina Cornaro , queen of Cyprus as well as of Lesser Armenia and Jerusalem - but only in name. Allegedly the Spanish followers of James II planned the assassination of the Queen's Venetian advisors, but the attempted uprising was cruelly suppressed by the Venetian admiral and later Doge Pietro Mocenigo . Cyprus was thus practically a Venetian possession. Katharina Cornaro was forced to abdicate in 1489 and sent into exile in Asolo in northern Italy.
Venice maintained good relations with the Ottoman Empire in principle , as this was important for its commercial interests, and through its neutrality during the siege of Rhodes it had initially bought more years of peace. Still, a Turkish attack on Cyprus was to be expected after the loss of Nauplia and Monemvasia . From 1540 onwards the fortifications of Nicosia , Kyrenia and Ammochostos (Famagusta) were renewed; At the same time, however, the Byzantine or Lusignan mountain fortresses of Buffavento , St. Hilarion and Kantara and the port fortifications in Paphos and Limassol were razed.
conquest
Indeed, in March 1570, a Turkish envoy asked the Cypriot Venetians to surrender. On April 17, 1570, Admiral Piyale Pasha left Constantinople with 80 galleys and 30 fists and sailed via Tinos and Negroponte to Rhodes , where he arrived on May 28. On May 16, 1570 Kapudan Pascha Ali Pascha set out with the Ottoman transport fleet from Constantinople to conquer Cyprus, the last major possession of Venice in the eastern Mediterranean (see History of Cyprus, section "Venetian Rule" ). He reached Rhodes on June 1 with 225 galleys and fists, eight galeas and 55 other ships and 50,000 land troops under the command of Lala Kara Mustafa Pascha . On June 4, the assembled fleet sailed to Finike on the south coast of Anatolia , where it arrived on June 17 and stayed for ten days.
On July 3, the vanguard of the invasion fleet appeared in front of Salines , and Lala Mustafa went ashore with the first contingent of about 20,000 men without encountering any resistance. After two weeks his troops and their heavy equipment were ashore and he was marching on Nicosia . The siege of the city began on July 22nd and by the 26th it was completely surrounded. In the course of the following 46 days the army of besiegers increased almost daily, so that finally about 100,000 men were assembled.
A Venetian relief fleet under Girolamo Zanne left Venice at the end of March 1570, but was so decimated by a typhus epidemic in Zara that it was practically eliminated as a task force. Despite urgent calls for help from January 1570, it was not until the end of August 1570 that a fleet of the Holy League under Giovanni Andrea Doria (Giannandrea Doria) assembled in the Souda Bay of Crete . However, an intervention by King Philip II of Spain delayed their departure. Part of the fleet finally sailed towards Finike in the last week of September, but news of the Nicosian case reached them on the way there. Since strong Ottoman naval formations operated at the same time in the southern Aegean Sea and in the Ionian Sea and again sailed in these waters after landing in Cyprus (Ali Pasha had long since left Cyprus, and only Piyale Pasha was left with part of the Ottoman fleet), the Christian fleet was forced to withdraw to southern Italy in order not to be cut off and to prevent an Ottoman attack in the Adriatic . Only a small division reached Ammochostos (or Mağusa), now Gazimağusa , in January 1571 .
Nicosia fell on September 9, followed by Paphos , Limassol and Larnaka over the next few days . Kyrenia surrendered without a fight. On September 18, the Ottoman army appeared in front of Famagusta , the last Venetian fortress on the island, which was fortified strong but strategically ill-advised. The defenders resisted eleven months, until August 1, 1571. Mustafa assured the defenders safe passage into Venetian territory, but then had Bragadin captured and his followers who had accompanied him to the negotiations killed. The Venetian governor of Cyprus, Marcantonio Bragadin , was tortured by Mustafa Pascha for several days and then killed; his ears and nose were cut off and skinned alive. His body parts were given to Ottoman units as trophies. Its skin was filled with hay, the body thus created was clad in uniform parts, it was placed on an ox and paraded through Famagusta. He was then impaled on the prow of Mustafa Pasha's galley along with the heads of other Venetian commanders and brought to Constantinople. In 1580, after paying a large ransom, Bragadin's skin was successfully transferred from Constantinople to Venice, where she was first buried in the church "San Gregorio", then in the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo (called San "Zanipolo"), where it is still there today. [Quote required]
The rest of Cyprus was occupied without a fight and the island was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire. Venice accepted this contractually on March 7th, 1573. The only larger possession of Venice in the Levant remained Crete .
When the Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha negotiated with Venetian ambassadors after the sea battle of Lepanto, which was devastated by the Ottomans on October 7, 1571 , he made the Ottoman view of things and the difference "between your and our defeat" clear to the Venetians:
“In snatching the Kingdom of Cyprus from you, we severed your arm. By defeating our fleet, you only shaved off our beards. The arm does not grow back, but the beard grows all the thicker now. "
aftermath
Venice coped with the loss of Cyprus quite well. Thanks to the rapid normalization of the connections to the Sublime Porte , Venetian merchants were again leading the export of Cypriot cotton a few years after the Cypriot war. The basis of the new Venetian-Turkish relations was a comprehensive agreement, which, contrary to the agreements with the allies of the Holy League and the Vatican, sealed a separate peace in March 1573, which confirmed the cession of Cyprus to the Ottoman Empire and Venice the payment of war compensation to the high Imposed gate in the amount of 300,000 ducats.
The Ottoman rule lasted until 1878. The island's governor was the Kapudan Pasha , a member of the Dīwāns who also administered Rhodes and Crete. In 1878 the Ottoman Empire was forced to lease the island for 92,746 pounds sterling to Great Britain , which in return promised the Ottoman Empire support against a possible Russian advance against the Straits .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Fregosi, Paul "Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries"
- ↑ The cruel end of a Venetian general ( Memento from July 10, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
literature
- John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice , Random House 1982, pbk. Vintage 1989. ISBN 0-679-72197-5 (bpk)
- Hugh Bicheno, Crescent and Cross: The Battle of Lepanto 1571 , Phoenix, London, 2003. ISBN 1-84212-753-5