The Battle of Gallipoli occurred on 29 May 1416 between the fleets of the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire off the port city of Gallipoli, the main Ottoman naval base. The battle was the main episode of a brief conflict between the two powers, resulting from Ottoman attacks against possessions and shipping of the Venetians and their allies in the Aegean Sea in 1414–1415. The Venetian fleet, under Pietro Loredan, was charged with transporting a Venetian embassy to the Ottoman sultan, but was authorized to attack if the Ottomans refused to negotiate. The subsequent events are known chiefly from a detailed letter written by Loredan after the battle.
The Ottomans exchanged fire with the Venetian ships as soon as the Venetian fleet approached Gallipoli on 27 May, forcing the Venetians to withdraw. On the next day, the two fleets manoeuvred and fought off Gallipoli, but during the evening, Loredan managed to contact the Ottoman authorities and inform them of his diplomatic mission. Despite assurances that the Ottomans would welcome the ambassadors, when the Venetian fleet approached the city on the next day, 29 May, the Ottoman fleet sailed to meet the Venetians and the two sides quickly became embroiled in battle. The Venetians scored a crushing victory, killing the Ottoman commander, capturing a large part of the Ottoman fleet, and taking large numbers of Ottoman crews prisoner, of whom many—particularly the Christians serving voluntarily in the Ottoman fleet—were executed. The Venetians then retired to Tenedos to replenish their supplies and rest. Although a crushing Venetian victory, which confirmed Venetian naval superiority in the Aegean Sea for the next few decades, the battle had little impact: a peace agreement was brokered but refused by the Venetian Senate, and a settlement of the conflict was delayed until a peace treaty was signed in 1419.
Background
Relations of Venice and the Ottoman Empire
In 1413, the Ottoman prince Mehmed I ended the civil war of the Ottoman Interregnum and established himself as sultan and the sole master of the Ottoman Turkish realm. The Republic of Venice, as the premier maritime and commercial power in the area, endeavoured to renew the treaties it had concluded with Mehmed's predecessors during the civil war, and in May 1414, its in the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, Francesco Foscarini, was instructed to proceed to the Sultan's court to that effect. Foscarini failed, as Mehmed was away campaigning in Anatolia, and Venetian envoys were traditionally instructed not to move too far from the shore (and the Republic's reach); Foscarini had yet to meet the Sultan by July 1415, when Mehmed's displeasure at this delay was conveyed to the Venetian authorities. In the meantime, tensions between the two powers mounted, as the Ottomans moved to re-establish a sizeable navy and launched several raids that challenged Venetian naval hegemony in the Aegean Sea.
Ottoman raids in the Aegean in 1414–1415
During his 1414 campaign in Anatolia, Mehmed came to Smyrna, where several of the most important Latin rulers of the Aegean—the Genoese lords of the northeastern Aegean islands of Chios, Phokaia, and Lesbos, and even the Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller of Rhodes—came to do him obeisance. According to the Byzantine historian Doukas, a contemporary of the events, the absence of the Duke of Naxos from this assembly provoked the ire of the Sultan, who in retaliation equipped a fleet of 30 vessels, under the command of Çali Bey, and in late 1415 sent it to raid the duke's domains in the Cyclades in the southern Aegean Sea. The Ottoman fleet ravaged the islands, and carried off a large part of the inhabitants of Andros, Paros, and Melos into slavery. On the other hand, the 16th-century Venetian historian Marino Sanuto the Younger indicates that the Ottoman attack was in retaliation for the raids against Ottoman shipping undertaken by Pietro Zeno, the lord of Andros. Like the Duke of Naxos, Zeno was a Venetian citizen and vassal of the Republic of Venice, but he had not been included in the previous treaties between the Republic and the Ottomans, and had continued raiding Ottoman shipping on his own account.