Note: Much of this article was excerpted and adapted from chapter 7 of my 2018 book, Sword and Scimitar.
A little-remembered event that occurred 546 years ago today—the ritual beheading of some 800 Christians who refused to convert to Islam—casts an unexpectedly revealing light on questions still confronting the West today.
The story begins with one of history’s most celebrated conquerors.
When Ottoman Sultan Muhammad II seized Constantinople in 1453, he was only twenty-one years old. The conquest that earned him the title “the Conqueror” was not, however, the culmination of his ambitions. It was just the beginning.
For the next three decades, Muhammad drove Ottoman armies deeper into Christian territory, particularly the Balkans. And beyond the Balkans stood the greatest prize of all: Rome.
According to a famous Islamic tradition, Constantinople and Rome were both destined for Muslim conquest. Muhammad had already taken the first. In 1480, his armies crossed the Adriatic and landed in southern Italy.
Their target was Otranto.
The city fell after a brutal two-week siege. Of Otranto’s roughly 22,000 inhabitants, thousands were slaughtered and thousands more—men, women, and children—were carried away in chains to be sold into slavery.
Churches were desecrated and the cathedral was converted into a mosque.
But the episode for which Otranto would become famous was yet to come.
Some 800 Christian men (the number 813 is sometimes given) who survived the initial slaughter were taken captive. They were offered a simple bargain: embrace Islam and live.
They all refused.
One of the captives, Antonio Primaldo, a tailor, rallied the others:
My brothers, we have fought to save our city; now it is time to battle for our souls!
He urged them to remain faithful to Christ even at the cost of their lives. The others agreed. The offer of life through conversion was rejected.
And so, on August 14, 1480, the captives were marched outside the city to the nearby Hill of Minerva. There they were systematically beheaded—one after another—for refusing to abandon Christianity. The site would thereafter be remembered as Martyrs’ Hill.
According to the traditional account, Primaldo was the first to be decapitated. His headless body then miraculously remained standing and could not be moved until the last of his companions had been killed. One Muslim executioner, supposedly so shaken by what he witnessed that he professed Christianity on the spot, was himself executed.
Otranto’s elderly archbishop, Stefano Agricolo, had already met an even more gruesome fate. The Turks found him inside his cathedral, still dressed in his episcopal vestments. After refusing to renounce Christianity, he too was slaughtered, by being slowly sawn in half—to triumphant jeers of “Allahu akbar!”
Otranto was not intended to be the end of the Ottoman advance. The invasion established a bridgehead on Italian soil, and Muhammad II intended further campaigning in Italy. Rome itself feared what might follow. Only the sultan’s sudden death in May 1481 and the resulting struggle for the Ottoman throne helped bring the enterprise to an end. Christian forces retook Otranto later that year.
The memory of those who refused conversion, however, survived for more than five centuries.
Their bones remain visible today, behind glass in the Cathedral of Otranto—a physical reminder of what happened there in August 1480.
In 2013, Pope Francis canonized Antonio Primaldo and his companions as the “Martyrs of Otranto.”
More than five centuries later, their deaths raise an uncomfortable question:
How much has really changed?
Consider first the strange ritual that follows almost every modern act of jihadist violence.
A Muslim terrorist invokes Islam. He quotes Islamic scripture. He shouts Allahu Akbar. He identifies his victims as infidels. He announces that he is acting in the name of jihad. He slaughters them—including through beheading.
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