This sounds like typical
Islamists from the “religion of peace” . . .
Marco Antonio Bragadin led the
defense of Famagusta.
The Ottoman forces kept
pressure on for months, while their artillery relentlessly pounded the city's
bulwarks. According to Venetian chroniclers (whose numbers are treated with
some skepticism by modern scholarship), about 6,000 garrison troops stood
against some 100,000 Turks with 1,500 cannons, backed by about 150 ships
enforcing a naval blockade to stave off reinforcements and victuals.
The besieged garrison of
Famagusta put up a heroic struggle lasting well beyond the most optimistic
assumptions, against far superior enemy numbers and without any hope of help
from the motherland. Furthermore the Turks were employing new tactics. The
entire belt of walls surrounding the town and the exterior plain was filled
with earth up to the top of the fortifications. In the meantime a number of
tunnels were dug out towards and under the city walls to undermine and breach
them.
In July, 1571 the Turks
eventually breached the fortifications and their forces broke into the citadel,
being repulsed only at the cost of heavy losses. With provisions and ammunition
running out, and no sign of relief from Venice on August 1,[2] Bragadin
asked for terms of surrender.
For the next four days,
evacuation proceeded smoothly. Then, at the surrender ceremony on August 5[3] where
Marco Bragadin offered the vacated city to Mustafa, the Ottoman general, after
initially receiving him with every courtesy, began behaving erratically,
accusing him of murdering Turkish prisoners and hiding munitions. Suddenly,
Mustafa pulled a knife and cut off Bragadin's right ear, then ordered his
guards to cut off the other ear and his nose.
There followed a massacre
of all Christians still in the city, with Bragadin himself most brutally abused.
After being left in prison for two weeks, his earlier wounds festering, he was
"dragged round the walls with sacks of earth and stone on his back; next,
tied to a chair, he was hoisted to the yardarm of the Turkish flagship and
exposed to the taunts of the sailors. Finally he was taken to the place of
execution in the main square, tied naked to a column, and flayed alive."[4] Bragadin's
quartered body was then distributed as a war trophy among the army, and his
skin was stuffed with straw and sewn, reinvested with his military insignia,
and exhibited riding an ox in
a mocking procession along the streets of Famagusta. The macabre trophy,
together with the severed heads of general Alvise Martinengo, Gianantonio
Querini and castellan Andrea Bragadin, was hoisted upon the masthead
pennant of the personal galley of the Ottoman commander, Amir al-bahr Mustafa
Pasha, to be brought to Constantinople as a gift for Sultan Selim II.
Marco Bragadin's skin was
later purloined from the Constantinople's arsenal in
1580 by the young Venetian seaman, Girolamo Polidori, who was there on
business. He brought it back to Venice, where it was received as a returning
hero. The skin was preserved first in the church of San Gregorio, then interred with full honors in
the Basilica di San Giovanni e Paolo,[5] where
it still is.
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