Fall of Gallipoli

Bapheus - Catalan campaign - Bursa - Pelekanon - Nicaea - Nicomedia - 1 Gallipoli - Adrian Opel - 2nd Gallipoli - Philadelphia - 1st Konstantin Opel - Thessalonica - 2 Konstantin Opel

The conquest of Gallipoli by the Ottoman Turks took place in March 1354. After a fifty -year-old chain of defeats the Byzantines had lost almost all their possessions in Asia Minor. The access to the Aegean Sea and the Sea of ​​Marmara enabled the Ottomans in a position to conquer the Peloponnese and Greece and north push forward to Serbia and Hungary.

Conquest

In the Byzantine civil war of 1352-1357 had Turkish mercenaries in the service of the Emperor John VI. Cantacuzenus large parts of the Byzantine Thrace destroyed. 1352 them the small fortress Tzympe was left near Gallipoli. On March 2, 1354, the area was ravaged by an earthquake which devastated hundreds of villages in the area. Almost every building in Gallipoli was destroyed, whereupon the Greek inhabitants left the city. Within a month occupied Süleman Pasha, the son of the Ottoman Sultan Orhan I, the village and populated it with Turkish families from Anatolia.

Follow

John VI. Orhan I. vain offered a payment, so the Turks left the city again. The Sultan said he had not taken the city by force, and could not return something that Allah had given him. In Constantinople Opel spread panic because it was assumed that the Turks would besiege the city will soon. Cantacuzenus ' power was weakened and he was deposed in November 1354.

Gallipoli should establish a bridgehead for the Ottoman invasions into Europe. Within less than ten years, fell to the Turks almost the entire Byzantine Thrace, including Adrian Opel, into their hands.