Qualla: Ottoman conquest of Adrianople

Ottoman conquest of Adrianople: Introduction

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The metropolitan bishop of Adrianople wrote a poem to his emperor at Christmas 1366, and in it the city was still Byzantine. Three years later, it was not. Sometime between 1366 and 1369, the third most important city of the Eastern Roman Empire, ranking after Constantinople and Thessalonica, passed into Ottoman hands and became Edirne. The exact day, the exact battle, even the exact year is disputed by historians who have spent careers comparing chronicles and counting eclipses. What is not disputed is that the people who lived there, Greeks and Bulgarians and Jews who had thought of themselves as Romans of the Empire, woke one morning in the late 1360s to find that they were now subjects of a sultan.

Ottoman conquest of Adrianople: The Long Slide From Gallipoli

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Ottomans crossed into Europe in 1354, when an earthquake collapsed the walls of Gallipoli on the European shore of the Dardanelles and Suleiman, son of Sultan Orhan, took the city. From there the advance into Thrace was rapid, broken only briefly by the bizarre kidnapping of ...

Ottoman conquest of Adrianople: What Date, Exactly

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The fall of Adrianople is one of those events that historians cannot quite pin down. Ottoman sources, written long after the events they describe, place it between 1361 and 1363, citing a solar eclipse in the year of the conquest. Later Turkish chroniclers describe the Byzantine ...

Ottoman conquest of Adrianople: What Happened to the People

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Whoever took the city, the Greeks and other Christians who lived in Adrianople did not flee en masse. They could not have. The city held tens of thousands of people, many of whose families had lived there for generations, sometimes since Roman times when Hadrian had founded the c...

Ottoman conquest of Adrianople: Edirne, the New Capital

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The city was renamed Edirne, a Turkish reshaping of Hadrianopolis, and continued for some time to be administered by Lala Shahin Pasha, the general usually credited with its capture. Sultan Murad I held court mostly at the old capital of Bursa, in Asia, and only entered Edirne in...

Ottoman conquest of Adrianople: Ninety Years Until Constantinople

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From its capture in the late 1360s until the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Edirne functioned as the principal seat of Ottoman power. From its palaces Mehmed II planned the siege that would finally end the Roman Empire. The Selimiye Mosque, which would become the mas...