Smyrna

By the 1330s Umur Bey of the Aydinids held both the fortress on Mount Pagos and the harbour castle below, and his fleets sailed from Smyrna to raid across the Aegean. In 1344 a crusade coordinated by Pope Clement VI seized the harbour castle in a surprise attack, and for nearly sixty years the Knights of St John held the waterfront while the Turks held the heights. Timur ended the standoff in 1402, destroying the city and massacring most of its Christian majority; the Ottomans returned in 1415 and took full control when the last Aydinid bey died in 1426.

The Ottoman town was small, with barely three hundred adult men on record in 1530. Its rise came with the cotton of the hinterland, which from the late 16th century drew French, English, Dutch and Venetian traders. The French moved their consulate here from Chios in 1619 and the English in 1621, and the long war for Crete made Smyrna the army's supply port. Neither the plague of 1676 nor the earthquake of 1688 checked it, and by the end of the 17th century some 90,000 people lived here, Turks, Greeks, Armenians and Jews alongside the European merchants of the quays.