Ports can be built. So can long-term supply and communication chains. As for the point, controlling the mouth of the Adriatic seems important. As is extending Ottoman control further into the Mediterranean. And Mehmed II surely wanted it for something. You don't send 18,000 men on a raid.
Generally, large ports to service large invasion fleets don't just spring up out of nowhere based solely on imperial fiat. Plus, the far side of Greece is on the wrong side of mountains...the infrastructure would've been a several-decade investment at least, and no sultan would give a damn about that.
I doubt that control of Apulia would've permitted "control" of the Adriatic entrance. Controlling a coastline is one thing - you can identify the beaches and have a reasonable shot at keeping an eye on most of them, and rotating patrols mean you're aware of an amphibious invasion pretty quickly and, once identified, it can be destroyed. It's different when you've got a stretch of water to try to close to traders; if they don't have to maintain a more or less continuous link, all they really have to do is zip past and keep going. Unless you're talking a ridiculously narrow bit of water like the Belts, it's basically impossible to "control" trade through there before, oh, the twentieth century or so.
Besides, most of the interesting stuff that went into the mouth of the Adriatic that couldn't go any other way ended up passing through Ottoman territory at a different point anyway.
I think that it's impossible to divine Mehmed II's intentions for the Otranto invasion; he certainly didn't take enough troops to launch a full-scale attack, but he may have intended to follow up later. The period chroniclers are contradictory on his purpose. I certainly wouldn't rule out a raid or a show of force; the size of the expedition might simply have been a miscalculation (one way or another). What was weird is that he took a relatively large number of ground troops, but the number of ships he took was pretty small, and Fatih Sultan Mehmed definitely knew that his fleet couldn't beat the Venetians in a stand-up fight away from the Aegean. And the Venetians
would come out against a full-scale invasion. I think that a plausible explanation is that either it was always intended to be a
razzia and he miscalculated the number of troops needed for a show of force, or that he was thinking about a full-scale invasion but realized partway through that he had no chance of doing such a thing in the face of the Venetian navy, and so the whole thing
turned into a
razzia.
aronnax said:
Firstly, Minor Italian State Bukkake. Heh heh, good description.
Secondly, yeah probably. France/Aragon would probably fight back. What about an attack on Otranto and Naples when Suleiman and Francis had that 'alliance'? They could split Italy.
Possible, but unlikely. Francois never came close to the Neapolitan kingdom; his Italian operations were confined to Lombardy most of the time, and he was dealt with by the application of north Italian resources. As it was, combined Franco-Ottoman naval operations were...well, they had some successes, mostly because they didn't try doing anything ambitious like launching a massive amphibious invasion of southern Italy.
