Siege of Castelnuovo

The Siege of Castelnuovo was an engagement during the Ottoman-Habsburg struggle for control of the Mediterranean, which took place in July 1539 at the walled town of Castelnuovo, present-day Herceg Novi, Montenegro. Castelnuovo had been conquered by elements of various Spanish tercios the year before during the failed campaign of the Holy League against the Ottoman Empire in Eastern Mediterranean waters. The walled town was besieged by land and sea by a powerful Ottoman army under Hayreddin Barbarossa, who offered an honourable surrender to the defenders. These terms were rejected by the Spanish commanding officer Francisco de Sarmiento and his captains even though they knew that the Holy League's fleet, defeated at the Battle of Preveza, could not relieve them. During the siege, Barbarossa's army suffered heavy losses due to the stubborn resistance of Sarmiento's men. However, Castelnuovo eventually fell into Ottoman hands and almost all the Spanish defenders, including Sarmiento, were killed. The loss of the town ended the Christian attempt to regain control of the Eastern Mediterranean. The courage displayed by the Old Tercio of Naples during this last stand, however, was praised and admired throughout Europe and was the subject of numerous poems and songs. Even the Venetian refused the promised naval link to Castelnuovo with the supplies and reinforcements; after a general troop parliament, the Capitan Francisco de Sarmiento answer to the Barbarossa surrender question was: "Que vengan cuando quieran" .
In 1538 the main danger to Christianity in Europe was the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. The armies of the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent had been stopped at Vienna in 1529. In the Mediterranean, a Christian offensive attempted to eliminate the danger of the great Turkish fleet in 1535, when a strong armada under Don Álvaro de Bazán and Andrea Doria captured the port of Tunis, expelling Ottoman admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa from the waters of the Western Mediterranean. The Ottoman admiral was then required to return to Constantinople, where he was appointed commander of a great fleet to conduct a campaign against the Republic of Venice's possessions in the Aegean and Ionian Seas. Barbarossa captured the islands of Syros, Aegina, Ios, Paros, Tinos, Karpathos, Kasos, Naxos, and besieged Corfu. The Italian cities of Otranto and Ugento and the fortress of Castro, in the province of Lecce, were also looted.

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