An earthquake handed the Ottomans their first European bridgehead
On 2 March 1354 a quake wrecked Gallipoli and emptied its Greek population. Within a month Süleyman Pasha seized the ruins, resettled Turkish families from Anatolia, and gave the Ottomans a permanent European foothold for Balkan expansion.
Ottoman–European fighting stretched from late medieval Anatolian wars into the twentieth century. Mid-fourteenth-century entry exploited a Byzantine succession fight pitting John V Palaiologos against rival John VI Kantakouzenos; Ottoman mercenaries first held tiny Tzympe near Gallipoli before the earthquake gift. Didymoteichon fell in 1361, Adrianople in 1369, and European holdings became Rumelia. Thessalonica surrendered in 1387 after a four-year siege; Sofia fell in 1382, Bulgarian Tarnovgrad in 1393, and Nicopolis's crusade collapsed on 25 September 1396 with some 3,000 prisoners taken.
Bayezid I's 1394 siege of Constantinople paused when Timur smashed Ottoman forces and captured the sultan at Ankara, triggering a civil war until Mehmed I won in 1413—time Byzantium used to recover Thessalonika and much of the Peloponnese. Murad II later retook Thessalonika after an eight-year siege begun in 1422 and forced tribute of 300,000 silver coins yearly. Mehmed II answered Constantine XI's threats over Orhan Çelebi by taking Constantinople on 29 May 1453; Morea fell in 1460 and Trebizond in 1461. Kosovo in 1389 entered Serbian memory as an epic hinge; much of Serbia was Ottoman by 1459.
At sea, Ottoman–Venetian wars ran from 1423 to 1718—Negroponte (1470), Malta's 1565 siege, Famagusta (1571), Lepanto's Ottoman naval defeat the same year, Candia's 1669 fall, Morea's brief Venetian reconquest in the 1680s and loss in 1715—while Corfu stayed the only Greek island never conquered. The Holy League rolled back land gains in the Great Turkish War of 1683–99, yet Ottoman armies largely held until the later eighteenth century. Nineteenth-century Serbian, Greek, and Romanian revolts plus Russo-Turkish wars preceded the First Balkan War and the post–World War I partition sealed at Sèvres, with final Anatolian recovery struggles into 1923.
Source: Ottoman wars in Europe
