On the 1st of June, 1475, a fleet of 482 vessels, commanded by the high admiral Achmet Pacha, appeared before Caffa, which was immediately bombarded by the formidable Ottoman artillery. The attack was of short duration; large portions of the walls, erected at a period when the use of cannons was unknown, were rapidly dismantled; breaches were made in all directions, and the besieged were forced to surrender at discretion on the 6th of June, 1475, after ineffectually attempting to obtain terms of capitulation.
Achmet Pacha entered Caffa as an incensed victor and an enemy of the Christian name. After taking possession of the consular palace, he disarmed the population, imposed an enormous fine on the town, and then seized half the property of the inhabitants, and all the slaves of both sexes. The Latin Catholics were shipped on board the Turkish fleet and carried to Constantinople, where the sultan, established them by force in the suburbs of his new capital, after taking from them 1500 male children to be brought up as members of his guard. Thus was annihilated in the space of a few days, after 200 years of glorious existence, that magnificent establishment which the genius of Europe had erected on those remote shores, and which had shed such lustre on the commerce of the Black Sea.
Caffa, the destruction of which was immediately followed by that of Soldaya and Cembalo, was annexed to the Turkish dominions, and for upwards of 550 years had no other importance than what it derived from its Turkish garrison and its military position on the shore of a Mussulman region, the absolute conquest of which never ceased to be an object of the Porte's ambition. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the old Genoese city awoke from its long trance, and in consequence of the commercial and industrial movement which then took place among the Tatars, it again became the great trading port of the Black Sea. Chardin, on his journey to Persia in 1663, found more than 400 vessels in the bay of Caffa. The town, to which the Turks then gave the name of Koutchouk Stamboul (Little Constantinople) contained 4000 houses, with a population exceeding 80,000 souls.
The new prosperity of Caffa was short lived. From the time of Peter the Great Russia pursued her threatening advance towards the regions of the Black Sea, and in 1783, in the reign of the Empress Catherine II., the Crimea was finally incorporated with the Muscovite empire. Caffa now accomplished the last stage of its destinies; it lost even officially its time-honoured name, and under the pompous appellation of the Greek Colony, bestowed on it by the Emperor Alexander, it became a paltry district town, to which authentic documents assign at the present day scarcely 4500 inhabitants. At Caffa, just as at Soldaya, the construction of useless barracks occasioned the demolition of the Genoese edifices. The facings of the ditches were first carried off, and then, emboldened by the deplorable indifference of the government, the destroyers laid hands on the walls themselves. The magnificent towers that defended them were pulled down, and there now remain only three fragments of walls belonging to the remarkable bastion erected in honour of Pope Clement VI. When the Genoese fortifications had been destroyed, the civil monuments next fell under the ruthless vandalism of the authorities. At the time the Russians took possession, two imposing edifices adorned the principal square of Caffa, the great Turkish baths, an admirable model of Oriental architecture, and the ancient episcopal church of the Genoese, built in the beginning of the fourteenth century, and converted into a mosque after the Turkish conquest. It was decided in the reign of Catherine II. that the mosque should be restored to the Greek church, but unfortunately instead of preserving it unaltered, the fatal project of adorning it with wretched doric porticoes was adopted. The elegant domes that so gracefully encompassed the main building were, therefore, demolished; but scarcely were the bases of the columns laid when a trifling deficit occurred in the funds, as M. Dubois relates, and thenceforth the government refused to make any further advances.