Kórinthos

In the last Byzantine century Corinth was the gate of the Despotate of the Morea, and the Greeks tried to shut that gate with a wall. In 1415 the emperor Manuel II came in person to rebuild the Hexamilion, the six-mile barrier across the Isthmus, and finished it in forty days, though the forced labour stirred unrest among the local nobles. Ottoman armies broke through it again and again, and in December 1446 Murad II's cannon left the wall a heap of ruins. Twelve years later the Ottomans took Corinth and its castle on the Acrocorinth. The Venetians captured the city in 1687 during the Morean War but lost it in 1715, and for the next sixteen years the Ottomans governed the whole Morea from Corinth.