Otranto. Ahmed Gedik Pasha landed in Italy and conquered Otranto on the orders of Mehmed II, massacring its population. He prepared to march on Rome as soon as reinforcements arrived at his beachhead. The Pope considered fleeing, but Mehmed II died on May 3, 1481, before realizing his dream. His successors were either uninterested in conquest, or so preoccupied with Asia that no one engaged in a deliberate plan for the West until the 16th century, when the Turkish invasion of the Mediterranean was halted at Lepanto and Suleiman’s march on Vienna. Until Suleiman the Magnificent, therefore, no one engaged in the West. Those 25 years of fighting in Albania by the Albanian Scanderbeg, Venice’s most faithful ally against the Turks, the “athlete of Christianity,” providentially delayed Mehmed II, who wanted to go down in history as the one who had conquered Constantinople and Rome, who had cut off the two heads of Christianity.
