An earthquake handed the Ottomans their first foothold in Europe at Gallipoli
In March 1354 a powerful earthquake flattened the town of Gallipoli and its walls. Within a month Ottoman forces had taken it, gaining their first stronghold in Europe and a springboard into the Balkans. It was only one chapter in the story of a narrow peninsula that empires fought over for two and a half thousand years.
The peninsula juts south-west from European Turkey between the Aegean and the Dardanelles, the strait the ancients called the Hellespont. Its name is the Italian form of the Greek Kallipolis, beautiful city. Greeks and Romans knew it as the Thracian Chersonese, and prized it for its wheat, its crossing point to Asia at Sestos, and its grip on shipping from Crimea. A defensive Long Wall ran across its narrowest neck, about 6.5 km wide.
Thracians held it until Greek settlers founded around a dozen cities in the 7th century BC. The Athenian Miltiades the Elder planted a colony about 560 BC and ruled the whole peninsula, passing it to his nephew, the famous Miltiades the Younger. Abandoned to Persia in 493 BC, it returned to Athens and joined the Delian League in 478 BC. Sparta took it after winning at Aegospotami in 404 BC, and in 338 BC Athens ceded it to Philip II of Macedon.
Later owners queued up. Lysimachus, one of Alexander's successors, built his capital there; Celts from Galatia settled in 278 BC; the Seleucid Antiochus III seized it in 196 BC, prompting Greek appeals to Rome. Rome gave it to Pergamon, then took it back, and under Augustus it was imperial property. Attila the Hun captured its towns in 443 AD. The Byzantines held it, apart from a Venetian interlude from 1204 to 1235, until the Ottoman capture.
A crusade led from Savoy briefly won it back in 1366, but Byzantium had to return it ten years later. By the 19th century Gelibolu was a district of about thirty thousand Greeks, Turks, Armenians and Jews. In 1854, during the Crimean War, British and French troops camped there and built an 11.5 km defensive line against a possible Russian attack. In 1913, during the First Balkan War, fighting at Bulair brought evacuations and suffering to Greek villages nearby.
Source: Gallipoli
