Siege of Trebizond (1461)

Fortification plan of (central) medieval Trebizond (modern Trabzon, Turkey). Current remains in red

Date	14 September 1460 -15 August 1461
Location	Trebizond, Empire of Trebizond
Result	Ottoman victory; Fall of the Empire of Trebizond

Belligerents

Ottoman Empire

Empire of Trebizond

Commanders and leaders

Mehmed II
Mahmud Pasha Angelovic

David of Trebizond

Strength

60,000 cavalry,
80,000 infantry

Unknown

The Siege of Trebizond was the successful siege of the city of Trebizond, capital of the Empire of Trebizond, by the Ottomans under Sultan Mehmed II, which ended on 15 August 1461. The siege was the culmination of a lengthy campaign on the Ottoman side, which involved co-ordinated but independent manoeuvres by a large army and navy. The Trapezuntine defenders had relied on a network of alliances that would provide them with support and manpower when the Ottomans began their siege, but failed at the moment Emperor David Megas Komnenos most needed it.

The Ottoman land campaign, which was the more challenging part, involved intimidating the ruler of Sinope into surrendering his realm, a march lasting more than a month through uninhabited mountainous wilderness, several minor battles with different opponents, and ended with the siege of Trebizond. The combined Ottoman forces blockaded the fortified city by land and sea until Emperor David agreed to surrender his capital city on terms: in return for his tiny realm, he would be given properties elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, where David, his family, and his courtiers would live. For the rest of the inhabitants of Trebizond, however, their fates were less favorable. The Sultan divided them into three groups: one group were forced to leave Trebizond and resettle in Constantinople; the next group became slaves either of the Sultan or of his dignitaries; and the last group were left to live in the countryside surrounding Trebizond, but not within its walls. Some 800 male children became recruits for his Janissaries, the elite Ottoman military unit, which required them to convert to Islam.

With the last members of the Palaiologan dynasty having fled the Despotate of the Morea the previous year for Italy, Trebizond had become the last outpost of Byzantine civilization; with its fall, that civilization came to an end. "It was the end of the free Greek world," wrote Steven Runciman, who then noted that those Greeks still not under Ottoman rule still lived "under lords of an alien race and an alien form of Christianity. Only among the wild villages of the Maina, in the southeastern Peloponnese, into whose rugged mountains no Turk ventured to penetrate, was there left any semblance of liberty."

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