12/08/2025
The August sun lay heavy over the whitewashed walls of Otranto on this day in 1480. Across the harbor, the banners of the Ottoman Empire rippled in the sea breeze, their crimson field and crescent moon stark against the blue of the Adriatic. The city’s gates, battered and splintered, hung useless on their hinges. Behind them, in the cathedral square, eight hundred men stood bound in rows, their faces set, eyes fixed on the horizon. A Turkish officer read the final demand: embrace Islam or face the sword. When no one stepped forward, the blades began their work.
On July 28, 1480, a fleet of roughly ninety Ottoman galleys appeared offshore, carrying an invasion force of eighteen thousand under the command of Gedik Ahmed Pasha. The target was not merely a provincial town but the gateway to the Kingdom of Naples—and, potentially, all of Italy. Mehmet II, “the Conqueror” of Constantinople, had turned his gaze westward. If Otranto fell, nothing stood between the Sultan’s armies and the papal states.
The siege began with cannon fire that shook the very limestone foundations of the walls. For fifteen days the defenders, numbering perhaps six thousand including civilians, resisted with crossbow bolts, arquebus fire, and boiling oil poured from the battlements. The city’s governor, Count Francesco Largo, fell early in the fighting, leaving Archbishop Stefano Pendinelli to rally both soldiers and townsfolk. Chroniclers tell of the archbishop walking the ramparts in full vestments, carrying the relics of St. Stephen and offering absolution to the dying. But the walls could not withstand the relentless pounding on August 11, a breach yawned open.
