The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (Fall River Press Edition)

by Alan Warwick Palmer

By August 1687 this ‘Venetian’ force, which included Lutheran mercenaries under the Swedish adventurer Count John Königsmarck, had ejected the Turks from all the Peloponnese except the defiant rocky promontory of Monemvasia. A month later Morosoni’s men swept across the isthmus of Corinth and thrust forwards, by land and by sea, to the Piraeus. They then attacked the tumbledown cluster of homes and shops around the Acropolis which was all that remained of the greatest of classical cities. After ten days of intermittent bombardment the Ottoman troops surrendered. Not, however, before irreparable disaster had hit Athens.2 On the evening of 26 September 1687 a German mercenary fired a mortar from the Mouseion Hill which blew up a Turkish powder magazine in the Parthenon; the frieze and fourteen columns crashed to the ground. A few days later Morosini ordered the carved horses and chariot of Athena to be removed from the west pediment and shipped to Venice as a trophy of war, following the marble Lion of the Piraeus which was already on its way to embellish the gates of the Doge’s arsenal. The task of lowering the group proved too hard for Morosini’s unskilled labourers. Horses and chariot fell to the ground, in ruins. The classical heritage of Athens suffered more from Morosini’s expedition than from any depredations inflicted during the past two centuries of Ottoman rule—although it was, of course, the Turks who used the Parthenon as a gunpowder store.