Siege of Candia

For twenty-one years, from 1648 to 1669, Ottoman armies besieged Candia, the fortified capital of Venetian Crete and today the city of Heraklion. It ranks among the longest sieges in history. Its fall in September 1669 ended more than four centuries of Venetian rule on the island, but the enormous cost in lives and money weakened both the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Venice.

After losing Cyprus in the 1570s, Venice held Crete as its last great overseas possession, and it avoided provoking its powerful neighbour. In 1644, however, the Knights of Malta seized an Ottoman convoy bound for Alexandria, carrying pilgrims and high-ranking passengers, and brought the loot to Crete. The Ottomans answered by sending a large army that landed on the island in June 1645. Chania and Rethymno fell within two years, and by 1648 most of Crete was in Ottoman hands. Only the capital held out.

Operations against the city opened in May 1648. The Ottomans cut the city's water supply and dug in, but for years their bombardments achieved little. Unable to match the larger Ottoman army on land, Venice tried to starve it by blockading the Dardanelles, the route by which supplies left Constantinople. The war became a long series of naval battles in the Aegean. Venice won most of them, including a heavy victory in 1656, but in July 1657 the Ottoman fleet beat the Venetians, and under the reforming grand viziers of the Köprülü family the supply line to Crete was kept open. Disorder at the Ottoman court, which ended with Sultan Ibrahim deposed in favour of his son Mehmed IV, slowed the effort but did not stop it.

The war was presented in the West as a defence of Christendom. Volunteers and contingents arrived from France, Savoy, the Papal States, Malta and German lands, especially after France and Spain made peace in 1659. Their help was real but poorly coordinated, as commanders quarrelled over precedence, and several attacks on the Ottoman lines failed.

Peace with the Habsburgs at Vasvár in 1664 freed the Ottomans to concentrate on Crete. The grand vizier Köprülü Fazıl Ahmed arrived with a new army, and the last and bloodiest phase of the siege began in May 1667, lasting about twenty-eight months. A Venetian engineer, Andrea Barozzi, deserted and revealed weak points in the walls. In June 1669 a French expedition under the Duke of Beaufort arrived; its first sortie collapsed and Beaufort was killed. A combined bombardment in July did little harm to the Ottoman earthworks, and the French flagship Thérèse blew up by accident. The French sailed home in August.

The commander, Francesco Morosini, was left with only a few thousand fit men in a ruined city. Without waiting for the Senate's approval, he negotiated a surrender in September 1669. The garrison and inhabitants were allowed to leave with their belongings, and Venice kept a few island forts off the Cretan coast and its gains in Dalmatia. Venetian reports put the dead at more than 118,000 on the Ottoman side and nearly 31,000 on the Venetian side, though these figures come from one party to the war. Morosini was tried for insubordination on his return and acquitted. Crete remained Ottoman until the late nineteenth century.

Our 1650 map shows the eastern Mediterranean in the middle of the war, and our 1700 map shows Crete as part of the Ottoman Empire.