Otranto. Ahmed Gedik Pasha lands in Italy and conquers Otranto by order of Mehmed II, massacring its population. He prepares to march on Rome, as soon as reinforcements arrive at his bridgehead. The Pope thinks of fleeing, but Mehmed II dies on May 3, 1481, before realizing his dream. His successors are either not interested in conquests, or have so much to do in Asia that no one takes care of the West with a premeditated plan until the sixteenth century, when the Turkish flood in the Mediterranean is stopped at Lepanto and Suleiman’s march on Vienna. Until Suleiman the Magnificent, therefore, no one commits himself in the West. Those 25 years of struggle 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 enter history as the one who had conquered Constantinople and Rome, who had cut off the two heads of Christianity.
