Thessaloníki

In 1342 the city's sailors and poor drove out the aristocracy and set up the Commune of the Zealots, which governed Thessaloniki with little regard for Constantinople until 1350. The greater danger came from the Ottomans. Murad I forced the city to surrender in 1387 after a four-year siege, and although it returned to Byzantium in 1403, the despot Andronikos Palaiologos, besieged once more, handed it to Venice in 1423 in the hope of protection. Venice held it for seven years. In March 1430 Murad II stormed the walls and sacked the city, and by contemporary reports about a fifth of its people were enslaved.

Under Ottoman rule Selânik recovered as a seaport, and refugees remade it. After Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, Sephardic families arrived in such numbers that by 1519 Jews made up more than half the population, and most of the city's tradespeople were Jewish. In the 16th century Thessaloniki was the largest Jewish city in the world, and the only one where Jews were the majority.