Events

Ottoman forces under Sultan Murad II stormed the walls of Thessalonica on March 29, 1430, overwhelming the Venetian garrison and the remaining Byzantine defenders after a two-month siege. The city, the second-largest in the Byzantine Empire after Constantinople, fell in a single day of brutal fighting. The Ottomans slaughtered or enslaved much of the population in the immediate aftermath. Thessalonica had been under nominal Byzantine control for centuries, but its strategic position on the Aegean coast made it a prize that changed hands repeatedly. In 1423, the despot Andronikos Palaiologos, unable to defend the city against Ottoman pressure, had sold it to the Republic of Venice. The Venetians fortified the walls, garrisoned the harbor, and hoped that their naval power would be enough to hold it. Murad II besieged the city with a force estimated at over 50,000 troops. The Venetian garrison was small, perhaps 1,500 soldiers, and the local population was too diminished and demoralized to mount effective resistance. When the walls were breached, Ottoman troops poured into the city. The sack lasted three days. Contemporary sources describe widespread killing, looting, and the enslavement of thousands of inhabitants. Churches were converted to mosques. The city's Christian character was permanently altered. The fall of Thessalonica served as a rehearsal for what would come twenty-three years later. Constantinople, now deprived of its most important provincial city and further isolated diplomatically and economically, would fall to Murad's son, Mehmed II, in 1453. The loss of Thessalonica demonstrated that the Venetian-Byzantine alliance could not hold against Ottoman military power and that no Western crusade was coming to save the remnants of Byzantium. The city remained under Ottoman control until 1912, when Greek forces recaptured it during the First Balkan War. The Ottoman conquest of 1430 marked the effective end of Byzantine influence in the Aegean and the beginning of nearly five centuries of Turkish rule.

Edward of York destroyed Queen Margaret's Lancastrian army at Towton on March 29, 1461, in a snowstorm that became the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. Estimates of the dead range from 20,000 to 28,000, with most modern historians settling on a figure near the higher end, a casualty count that exceeded any single day's fighting in both the Napoleonic Wars and World War I on British soil. The battle took place on a plateau between the villages of Towton and Saxton in Yorkshire, where roughly 50,000 men met in conditions of near-zero visibility. A strong south wind drove snow directly into the faces of the Lancastrian line, and Edward's archers exploited this by advancing within range, loosing their volleys, then retreating while Lancastrian archers fired blind into the wind and fell short. The hand-to-hand fighting lasted over ten hours, an extraordinary duration for medieval combat, and ended only when the Duke of Norfolk's reinforcements arrived on the Lancastrian flank and broke their formation. The retreat became a rout, with fleeing soldiers drowning in the swollen River Cock or being cut down in the surrounding fields. Mass graves excavated near Towton in 1996 revealed skulls with multiple blade wounds, suggesting that many of the dead were killed after they had been knocked down or disarmed. The decisive Yorkist victory established Edward as King Edward IV and shifted the balance of the Wars of the Roses dramatically. Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou fled to Scotland. But Towton didn't end the dynastic struggle. Edward would be deposed ten years later, restored to power in 1471, and die naturally in 1483, after which the crown passed through two more violent transfers before Henry Tudor finally settled the question at Bosworth Field in 1485.