PROLOGUE
TURKS IN THE PORT

A WAR BY OTHER MEANS

On 28 July 1480, some fishermen from Otranto who were preparing to go to sea at dawn spotted a shimmer of sails outlined on the horizon and heading towards the city. Anyone still lingering in bed was woken by the cries of people hurrying back from the port to bring news of the catastrophe many had been expecting for months.

The Ottoman galleys had left Valona, a city on the other side of the Adriatic that had been under Turkish control for decades. The Ottoman governor Gedik Pasha was in command of the fleet, which carried some fifteen thousand men, ready to land in Otranto and from there to invade Ferrante of Aragon's kingdom before moving north, to the Papal States and to the heart of Christendom.

As the Ottoman horses and cannons were disembarked at Alimini, a nearby beach, a pitifully small number of troops rallied under the command of captain Francesco Zurlo, in a desperate and impossible defence of the city. The residents of the outermost neighbourhoods clustered around the city walls hastily carried what they could inside the fortified enclosure, and soon enough some five thousand people had gathered there. Others, with more foresight, escaped to the countryside, putting as great a distance as possible between themselves and the doomed city.

In the early afternoon, a small gig with Gedik Pasha himself standing at the bow slipped quietly over the flat, green water that lapped the city walls. Pasha was renowned for his intelligence and determination, although to many this looked more like cruelty. He was also one of the most trusted commanders of Mehmed II, the great conqueror of Constantinople, now confined to the capital as a result of an attack of gout that had left him with a swollen and misshapen leg. Gedik was coming to offer the residents of Otranto a chance to surrender to the sultan of the Sublime Porte and become his subjects, as the Christian citizens of Valona had done years earlier. Not only would their lives be spared but they would also be able to keep their religious freedom, providing that they paid the gizya, a tax levied from both Jews and Christians in lieu of the charitable tithe paid by Muslims, as their religion required. It was an entirely reasonable offer, which might even have improved the lives of many, since the king of Naples was neither magnanimous nor efficient.

But captain Zurlo had been deeply affected by the propaganda circulated by the popes and other Christian leaders, who saw the expansion of the Ottoman Empire as a threat to their own territorial power even more than to their religion. Although he had no chance of staving off such an attack, relying on promises of help from Christian princes that were never to materialize, Zurlo gave orders for a bombard to be loaded and fired at the approaching gig. It was an instantaneous declaration of war and violated the Ottoman diplomatic code, which regarded such negotiations as sacrosanct.

Gedik Pasha's anger was made clear a few hours later, when the city walls came under heavy bombardment that continued for many days, alternating with the activities of the Ottoman sappers. Nonetheless, the first skirmishes gave Zurlo the false impression that he could win the battle, and this prompted him to order the violent deaths of the first Turkish prisoners. Appalling atrocities such as impalement and quartering would later be paid back to the population of Otranto with a vengeance.

The siege of Otranto lasted two weeks, enough time for any Christian army to be able to come to the city's aid. But these commanders and their troops, including those of the heir of Saint Peter himself, Pope Sixtus IV Della Rovere, were too busy fighting each other, notwithstanding thatsome were not far from Puglia. Lorenzo the Magnificent, the ruler of Florence, had abandoned his allegiance to the pope, whom he had never forgiven for backing an attempt to overthrow the Medici in the Pazzi conspiracy two years earlier. Having escaped assassination and resumed control of the city, Lorenzo had then formed an alliance with the king of Naples and, together, they were now warring against the pope's nephew, Girolamo Riario, lord of Imola. This had forced the pope to ally himself with Venice in order to face the combined attack of Florence and Naples. As a result, Venice was engaged in complex military campaigns not only throughout Italy but also across the Mediterranean, where its maritime trade was increasingly hampered by the Turkish expansion. With the political pragmatism that had allowed the Most Serene Republic to survive for five centuries, unlike many other states and republics, the Great Council had signed a general truce with the Sublime Porte in 1479, and in the days before the attack on Otranto it had ordered its ships out of this stretch of the Adriatic so as not to hinder Turkish naval manoeuvres. Having to choose between the friendship of Turks or Christians, Venice had prudently opted for the former. Nor was its pragmatism a secret. Friendship with the Christian rulers came at the price of rapidly changing alliances, and it was this that made the political geography of the Italian peninsula so unstable.

The Ottoman advance on the West had been underway for some thirty years or more, ever since Constantinople, the city known as 'the second Rome', had fallen to Mehmed II, who then proclaimed himself emperor and heir to the Romans. For thirty years, Christian rulers had put their own trifling dynastic affairs before the defence of Christendom and of the integrity of what, for a thousand years, had been the Holy Roman Empire. Crusades were announced and then immediately aborted through the conflicting interests of the various princes, who in the end had attempted to reach peace with the sultan in other ways. Venice itself, which was the Ottoman Empire's main rival in the Mediterranean, had entered what seemed to be an alliance with Mehmed II. Now Mehmed had sent his highest vassal, Gedik Pasha, to present the bill.

The residents of Otranto, taken in by the religious propaganda of the Christian rulers and then effectively left to themselves, were almost all slaughtered after the final assault on 11 August, which marked a point of no return for the people of southern Italy. The Christians made their last stand in the sacristy, and then inside the cathedral itself. The bishop continued to recite the mass until his head was severed from the neck in one strike, with a sword, then displayed on a pike by the triumphant soldiers. The horrors that followed, once the inhabitants had refused conversion, were typical of any military defeat and any surrender, except that on this occasion it was the Turks who carried them out, in the very heart of Italy.

Understandably, when news arrived in Rome on 3 August, just five days after the siege had started, there was deep concern. Masses were celebrated, promises were made, and lastly a truce was announced between the Italian states, and especially between Sixtus IV and Lorenzo de' Medici, who had been at each other's throats. An alliance was needed to defend Italy's borders from the Turks, but above all the pope needed to claim his spiritual legacy from Mehmed II, because the sultan, a great lover of ancient history and driven by a desire for conquest that made him identify with Caesar and Alexander the Great, claimed not only the temporal but also the spiritual rule of the universal empire whose leadership he had taken when he conquered Constantinople - the second Rome, which over the centuries had been much more powerful and influential than that hamlet of monks and sheep that the ancient city lying between the Tiber and the hills had become.

In the meantime, while waiting to conquer the first Rome, too, and to ride on horseback into Saint Peter's, as his grandfather had dreamt of doing, Mehmed II made much of his claim to Rome's spiritual and cultural legacy, which had to legitimate his dream of a universal empire. To many European intellectuals, his claims seemed well founded, because they were underpinned by facts that were hard to dispute. The legitimate base of his claim had already been acknowledged twenty years earlier, when Pius II wrote a letter to Mehmed in which he declared his readiness to recognize the latter's imperial investiture, on condition that Mehmed converted to Christianity. Mehmed naturally refused. Albeit a tolerant sultan who guaranteed freedom of worship in his empire, he was convinced that his was the true religion and that it should become the leading religion in all the lands and nations that were steadily being added to his empire.

As if this were not enough, many in Italy regarded and continued to regard Mehmed II's claims as being rightful. An authoritative cultural tradition championed his requests, on the grounds that anyone who conquered the second Rome was entitled to call himself Caesar's heir. The pope of Rome, Sixtus IV himself, acknowledged that tradition and took the matter very seriously. If all European princes faced the problem of territorial threats, since they were required to defend their borders with armies, then he, the pope, was called to react to a much more insidious threat: one that threatened to render his spiritual leadership illegitimate.

Sixtus IV decided to respond to this threat with an artistic endeavour that became a sort of universal manifesto of Christian theology and papal legitimacy: the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, the most important chapel in Christendom, which he had just rebuilt and which, from 1481, he would entrust Italy's best artists to embellish.1

THE WAR OF THE...