Trebizond

In the 1340s the little empire was pressed from every side. The Black Death arrived in September 1347, probably by ship from Kaffa, while the nobility was fighting a civil war, and the next year the Turkmen chief Tur Ali Beg, an early ancestor of the Aq Qoyunlu, laid siege to the city before giving up. Emperor Alexios III answered with a marriage rather than an army, giving his sister to Tur Ali's son Kutlu Beg, and the Komnenoi held on by such ties with the Turkmen of the interior until they had outlived Constantinople itself.

In 1461, eight years after Constantinople fell, the last emperor, David, surrendered Trebizond to Mehmed II. Turkish settlers were sent in, yet the city stayed largely Christian for generations: in the tax survey of 1523 about 85 percent of its people were Christians, most of them Greeks, with an Armenian minority. It also became a post for Ottoman princes. Under Bayezid II his son Selim, the future Selim I, governed here, and in 1494 Selim's son Suleiman, later called the Magnificent, was born in the city.