Battlecast

By Vito Bianchi

Excerpted from the book Otranto 1480: Il sultano, la strage, la conquista by Vito Bianchi. Editori Laterza. 2023. Sixth edition. Bari. pages 125-131. 

Translated by: Luke Wolf

Translator’s note: In 1480, the large port of Otranto, a city inhabited by thousands, was destroyed by a Turkish naval expedition. Tens of thousands were killed. Thousands more were enslaved. Innumerable were raped. Hundreds of their bones decorate the Cathedral at Otranto which illustrates the top of this article. Almost all of you knew nothing about it. This is the story. 

At dawn on August 9, 1480, the Turkish commander Gedik Ahmed Pasha’s artillery stopped for a moment, and the streets of beautiful, stone-washed Otranto could clearly hear the laughter coming from the Turkish escort. The buildings of the city stood with the geometric rigidity and color palate of massive gravestones. The men defending the city were more crass than usual: alcoholic beverages deliberately distributed by the city’s commanders had loosened the inhibitions of the soldiers on the front lines. They were the men most exposed to the Ottoman barrage, the men who looked death and fear square in the face, each man a boxer confronting the heavyweight champion of the Underworld. You could see death in the galleys of the Turkish fleet. Soon the notes of the timpani, drums and wind instruments that the janissaries, who were Christian children stolen from the Ottoman-ruled Balkans and raised as Muslim slave-soldiers, filled the air, their music deliberately spurred the soldiers to fight. After the song and heavy artillery bombardment ended, the first assault on the city walls began. 

The offensive started with a wave of Turks spilling and fanning out across the Otranto walls. There followed a whirlwind five hours of shots, crossbow bolts, pikes, axes, swords and scimitars, in a wild multiplication of hand-to-hand clashes, mutilations and quarterings, of scattered and slippery entrails that made it damnably difficult for a man to stay on his feet. Such was the way the frontline troops met the shock of the elite Janissaries, their own kinsman and co-religionists, brother killing brother to the delight of the Sultan. And if a large number of janissaries died? So what. Just enslave more Christian children. The Ottoman shock wave crashed against the embankment prepared by Captain Zurlo, who had wisely fortified the parapets and had entrusted the mobile defense to the knights of Baron Giovanni Antonio dei Falconi who was charged with rushing to wherever the enemy hordes threatened to overrun the containing Christians manning the walls; they were a ragtag army comprised of men who hailed from modern-day Spain, Italy, and Greece but they all stood shoulder to shoulder on the cliff-steep walls of Otranto. Falconi and his knights did a lot of rushing. 

The Ottomans were everywhere, ants disturbed from an upturned hive. At the end of a fierce battle, the Turks left several dead on the field and a couple of their flags. Two hundred men of Otranto died on the front lines, among them the nobles Angelo Maiorano (who commanded about fifty helmeted infantrymen) and Michele Leondario, a member of a family of Greek origin who had moved to Salento at the fall of Constantinople and who found himself  living the same drama as he had twenty-seven years earlier, as if he was in a fatal, hallucinatory nightmare. Greek and Italian, Italian and Greek, shoulder to shoulder the men on the frontline fought, their lithe arms turning into flopping jelly from the constant combat, the small muscles of their hands involuntarily clutching their weapons, nimble human hands transformed into blunt, lobster claws. There wasn’t even time to pay funeral honors: the following day the Turks resumed bombing and attacking, managing to temporarily take possession of one of the city towers. The soldiers on the walls bit their fists when they saw the Turkish crescent flying from their own towers. Some blinked in disbelief: so much sacrifice, so much spilled blood, mangled men, and now the enemy had already achieved a foothold. The soldiers of Otranto were one step away from capitulating and two steps away from hell. 

“When the Turks resumed battle” – wrote Marco Trotti to the Dukes of Milan, who in Naples was receiving updates on the progress of the siege – “they had pushed the Christians very hard and almost entered and taken one of the town towers, which had very weak internal walls, and those from the town shot artillery at that tower in such a way that they shot the Turks out of it and so on the other side where the battle was taking place they strengthened themselves in such a way that they shot the Turks out of the walls and came out of the town against the Turks, slipping in blood the whole way.”

The clash again had a cold-blooded outcome: among the defenders there were about a hundred casualties, and 300 among the attackers. Despite the losses, however, the Ottomans had plenty of “human material” in reserve: who, on Friday August 11, after an even more obsessive night bombardment, the Turkish cannon and mortars softened up the Christian defenders for hours before unleashing a third consecutive attack against the shattered soldiers of Otranto, the assault commencing with the rising of the sun. The Turks concentrated against the curtain wall near the castle, the wall which had previously been torn apart by a breach of vast proportions; it looked as if some giant dinosaur had hammered it apart – as if the wall had regurgitated itself apart. 

“Because of the frequency of the bombardments” – we read in the Report of the capture of Otranto written by the Commissioner of the Duke of Bari to the Duke himself, Ludovico Sforza – “and because Otranto did not have good ditches, and the walls were not filled to the ground inside, the Muslim artillery caused an incredible collapse of the wall. Moreover, the defenders were not able, both because of the shortness of time, and also because of the bombardments, to fortify and repair the breaches. Having ruined the defenders on the castle wall, and the castle itself … the Christians were not able to keep up resistance, especially since they were never given the slightest help: outnumbered, outgunned, totally alone.”

Unable to plug the breach, the defenders of Otranto were forced to remain hidden, sheltered from the relentless drumming of the Turkish cannon batteries. 

The last artillery barrage was actually a fake volley, a trick to keep the passage clear: the cannons had in fact been loaded with blanks. The noise, the smoke, the rush of the citizens to hide must have facilitated the irruption of the Turkish cavalry. Desperately the local militia tried to fight at the gap which, although compressed by the accumulation of mangled bodies. Francesco Zurlo, already wounded in the previous melees, was mortally wounded, and his body lay fully armored under the walls of the bastions, the hooves of the Turkish calvary indenting the lifeless metal shell the way factory pistons punch steel. Giovanni Antonia dei Falconi also died from blood loss. The Aragonese garrison, or what remained of it, broke and retreated from the Ottoman encirclement. From then on two struggling groups of men fought street by street, house by house, while the women and children sheltered in the massive city church. The defenders turned their own homes into little castles and they died on their own thresholds, their women and children on the verge of gang rape and slavery – or worse. 

The fishermen, farmers, sailors and merchants who survived and were exhausted defended their homes and their families inch by inch. In desperation, they used billhooks, knives, pitchforks, jars, weapons stolen from the slain and whatever else they found in their path to defend themselves. The battle-hardened Janissaries made short work of the defenders, who often fought in groups of one or two, nothing more than a mere roadblock for the veteran Ottoman soldiers, who blew whistles and attacked in well-trained battle formations, honed by lifetimes of training as slave soldiers. The Janissaries knew how to crack any nut they came across and they did a lot of cracking: cracking down doors, cracking men’s skulls, cracking women’s faith in divine protection. When fishermen and professional soldiers meet in mortal combat, the results are almost certain. The massacre at Otranto was no different. 

The professional Turkish soldiers spread everywhere, like a fanning stain from a spilled wine bottle across a white tablecloth; the Muslims were going up the streets howling, slitting throats, trampling with the hooves of their horses, swinging their sabres and their excited eyeballs, swivelling with excitement by the site of the booty. The oil from the broken olive jars mixed with the red rivulets of crimson blood on the pavement. In the confusion the Venetian consul was also killed, and his residence was sacked. Not an alley, not a corner of the town, was spared by the furious frenzy of the Turks.

The cathedral square, elevated above the surrounding buildings, accessible via narrow and steep streets, became the last defensive position: the survivors crowded there, and were able to contain for a while the first Ottoman platoons that flooded in front of the basilica, which was already damaged by the bombings. The fight lasted until the enemy ranks became more powerful. Then, the Otranto survivors were forced to barricade themselves inside the church, under the wooden trusses painted with the faces of angels, between the three naves where, before the sun rose, the archbishop Stefano Agricoli had laid out the body of Christ for the Eucharist, pronouncing words of comfort that could dissolve in prayer the torment of the population gathered at the foot of the altar.

The elderly prelate had taken care “to exhort everyone to war and to die for the faith”, and awaited his end wrapped in sacred vestments: his voice, however, choked in his throat when the Turks forced the door and, all around, women trembled, children cried, fathers despaired, sensing that they had no escape. At the moment in which the Ottoman hordes managed to penetrate the temple the pastor was stupefied by panic: and, presumably, he did not even notice the soldiers who were approaching him furiously; he did not feel the iron of the blade that was cutting his neck. His heart could not stand the fear and his lifeless body became an object of mockery, with the severed head that, stuck on a lance, was carried around the city streets, like a macabre trophy. The priests and the Jews were immediately massacred. Everyone else were victims of an inhumanity which began from the very beginning of the Turkish entry into the cavernous church. 

The description of the Benedictine friar Ilarinoe de Verona is not far from the truth:

“The infants, torn from their mothers’ breasts, were partly slaughtered, partly stabbed. The pregnant women, with their bellies tightly tied, were forced to give birth to the immature fetuses, still palpitating in their blood. The others, especially the virgins, with their clothes raised above their buttocks and pubic area exposed, after having remained like this, shamefully exposed to the unbridled lust of the Turks – I say this out of pity, not out of obscene satisfaction – in the end almost all were killed. Some of the most beautiful were spared, to be reserved in slavery for the lust of the princes.”

The cathedral of Otranto and the archbishop’s palace were stripped of gold and silver, and the Turks were delighted to find the 18,000 ducats that the bishop had accumulated and which, in the opinion of some commentators of the time, could have been spent on the construction of more adequate fortifications.

In total, the raid brought the conquerors 60,000 gold coins. It was a sum that included ransom money: by paying 300 ducats each, about twenty wealthy gentlemen were able to escape the massacre and regain their freedom. On the contrary, the boys, the most beautiful girls and the best adolescents, taken as slaves, were transferred to Istanbul. The slaves who remained were put to work making bread for the Turkish army from morning to night, and “held for their use.” The defenseless, those no longer young enough to be enslaved, those unable to satisfy the exorbitant demands of money and work – mostly adult males who had escaped the massacres – were led on August 12th to the presence of Turkish commander Gedik Ahmed on the hill of Minerva, just outside the city. 

There, in front of the pavilion specially prepared for the Christian Pasha festival, with its precious carpets announcing its majesty from the very threshold, all the horror that had been experienced by the Ottomans in the Wallachian campaigns against Dracula, all the terror that had been reiterated in the massacres of Caffa, Zakynthos and Ithaca, had yet another, trembling replay. 

The inexorable codes of Turkish warfare required the Ottoman commander to punish the survivors in an exemplary manner. This was especially true because the defenders refused to surrender, they had shot a cannonade at him during negotiations, and the Otranto soldiers conducted a desperate resistance that had been opposed to the overwhelming forces of the Ottomans. The holocaust had to be celebrated by spectacularizing the liturgies of pain, conferring a complex theatricality to the extermination of the vanquished, with the aim of visually marking the inevitability of the defeat and consecrating the sinister, terrifying fame of the Ottoman commander. The horrific scene was witnessed by Gabriele Memmo and other local dignitaries who had redeemed themselves with money and were consequently released from the carnage. 

One man, in fact, even though he had the money, refused to save himself: a certain master Natale, who could have used the money patiently saved during a lifetime of work for his own liberation, renounced the offer from the Turks to ransom himself and instead chose to stay with the approximately eight hundred fellow citizens destined to be executed. With holy resignation, the condemned faced the scimitar praying: after all, what else was left for the victims if not to turn to God? Among the first to be beheaded was an old wool shearer, the magister Grimaldo, who lived his final moments inviting his companions to accept suffering: “Up to now we have fought for our country and to save our property and our lives: now we must fight for Jesus Christ and to save our souls!” he exclaimed. On those extreme and pitiful phrases, on those very human gestures and feelings, the example of the martyrs were built for us. Here is a priceless heritage, as incorruptible as Master Natale. Then Grimaldo’s head was cut off, the face grimacing the way a woman cringes when an unwanted man touches her. According to Christian tradition, although headless, Grimaldo’s body remained erect, without any Muslim being able to throw it to the ground. 

And even if the traditional story is untrue, Grimaldo’s spirit has never been thrown down and still stands to this day. 

As night fell on that scene of doom, approximately eight hundred men were martyred at the pavilion of Pascha on August 12, 1480, their grimacing heads piled up in a pyramid of pain. Such is a story worth remembering and there are countless others like it you’ve never heard. 

They’re all here on Battlecast and they’re all paid for by wool shearers and fishermen like Magister Grimaldo. “The world forgets but the poets never forget!” (Turula).