Vlad III the Impaler -The Prince of Darkness 18/11/2010

Vlad III Prince of Wallachia, better known as Dracula, the bloodthirsty Devil’s son, was a cruel man who became a legend thanks to Bram Stoker, who refined him and turned him into an exquisite Count. His is a terrible story.

Portrait of Vlad Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, Count Dracula

Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula was quite unfair with its source of inspiration, Vlad III Prince of Wallachia. It seems to be true that Vlad murdered more than 100,000 people in a country of half a million inhabitants. He seems to have enjoyed ordering slow executions and tortures such as flaying, maiming, dismembering, nail insertion in human flesh, hot-iron branding, cannibal practices and, a favourite pastime, impaling. Despite this, history has never been able to prove that he ever bit any girl’s neck.

Moreover, we should place things in context: he lived at the end of the Middle Ages in what is nowadays Romania, precisely the triple frontier made up by the Ottoman Empire, Orthodox Europe and Catholic Europe. The rulers of Wallachia knew that, no matter what side they took, there would be pounded on by somebody. Amongst the existing medieval system of political pressure there were decapitation, battering and the pillaging of entire towns. The penal code of the time wasn’t a great source of relief either, for among its dispositions were that wizards were to be burnt at the stake, forgers to be boiled in oil, blasphemers to be hung from a hook by their tongue, and whoever cut a tree down without permission had their entrails taken out and then was tied with them all the while he was forced to run around the tree until he was totally tied to it.

Let’s face it: Vlad was a psychopath, but we have to acknowledge that if we were to compare it to an academic degree, 15^th c. Wallachia would be a doctorate.

Vlad’s father, Vlad II, had already lived in such violent times. He was an  Order of the Dragon knight, which had been created in order to combat the Turks, and from there he took the surname Dracul [“dragon”]. In an etymological twist, Dracul in Romanian means “the Devil”. The little Vlad, born in Transylvania in 1431, was nicknamed “Draculea”: the Devil’s son.

With he backing of Hungary’s King, daddy Vlad became voivode (that is, Prince of Wallachia) in exchange of his support in the fight against the impious Ottoman Turks. But the Hungarians used to be involved in so many internal wars that they were not capable of helping him to defend his territory. The Turks, on the contrary, were many and were quite well armed and disciplined. As soon as he took the throne, showing an extremely acute practical sense –as well as poor ethics, daddy Vlad decided to switch sides.  He offered tribute to the Sultan, he paid homage together with 300 of his noblemen, kissed the border of his mantle and, in order to leave no doubt, handed him his youngest sons, Vlad and Radu, as hostages.

Few brothers have been as different as those two. While Vlad was portly, Radu was a weakling. While Vlad showed since early childhood a courage bordering reckless insanity, Radu had a weak character and was a dilettante. Vlad had thick eyebrows, a full lower lip and nasal cavities large as volcanoes; Radu on the contrary was popular for his handsomeness. But, above all, Vlad was austere and a repressed moralist, Rady was sensuality personified. From puberty he attracted the lust of the Sultan’s heir, Mehmed, and despite resisting it at the beginning, in time he discovered the advantages and comforts that the exchange could bring him.

It seems that Vlad did not adapt to his new environment so well. Truth be told, he didn’t stay that long. In 1446 the Hungarians avenged his father’s treason by beating him to death and stripping him of his right to be buried. His older brother, Mircea, had the opposite punishment: he was buried alive. Literally overnight Vlad went from direct heir to Prince of Wallachia.

Nevertheless, the system of election for a voivode was not based on primogeniture. In fact, it used to depend on an assembly of Slavic nobles called Boyar, who elected him amongst the royal family candidates. The election used to be carried out depending on whatever was most convenient at the time, and Vlad was certainly not convenient. His first government with Turkish support lasted two months before being removed of his post. His successor, Vladislav II, was not hostile towards the Sultan, so Turkey did not care with the change of ruler. Vlad lost the Ottoman support. Disappointed and abandoned once more, the young man wandered around Europe for the following 8 years trying to secure political back up in order to regain a throne he considered rightfully his.

His break would come from the most unexpected sides. A commercial dispute with Hungary would cost Vladislav II his throne. The Hungarian King needed a more obliging candidate to govern Wallachia, and remembered about Vlad. Negotiations started amongst the Hungarians –always ready to forget that they had killed the Dracul family- and the boyars –always ready to reach an agreement as long as it didn’t impact their wallets. We all know that politics has a short-term memory.  Not even Vlad himself had conscience issues. In order to get to his longed-for throne he had only two alternatives: become an ally of the Turks, who had already betrayed him, or take sides with his father’s and brother’s assassins. He opted for the latter option.

In 1456, at 25, Vlad entered Wallachia leading a Transylvanian army. It wasn’t too hard for him to take the voivode Vlad as his prisoner and execute him in front of a crowd more eager for violence than to see justice done. Thus Vlad III’s princedom was inaugurated. He would add the nickname Draculea to his Tepes surname (‘the impaler’).

Let’s say I am voivode of Wallachia. On the one hand I am being threatened by a 100,000-man army, on the other, a 70,000-strong army. I cannot count on my boyars, who have come up with a system that limits my power at their will. My farmers are fed up with being exploited and refuse to fight. My ancestors have lasted an average of 3 years, dedicated exclusively to stay in power. I am a penniless political nobody, without an army and without any pull in other states. There is only one thing that can keep me in power: fear. They will not overthrow me as long as they don’t dare to.

Fully conscious of this, Vlad kept a strict order in the administration of violence. Following custom, he organized an Easter feast for any boyar who had any influence in the elections of the principality, around 500 of them. When the party was at its climax he came up with a smart game of questions and answers. The first question was ‘How many voivodes have you seen come and go?’ The nobles were having fun. Several of them answered ‘Six’, ‘Eight’. The oldest ones could remember up until 30. The second question was ‘Don’t you think those are too many?’ At this point the boyars were in stitches. ‘They are more than dishes are on this table, more than the jars of wine one can drink’. They were having a ball. Vlad gave the winning answer: ‘If there have been so many it is due to your infamy and your betrayal’. Some of them cut their laughter short upon hearing him; others started thinking that it was time to go home. But it was too late. The doors of the dining-room were opened and Vlad’s personal guards went in.

The nobles were apprehended effortlessly. They begged for mercy, but nobody was listening to them. They tied their hands behind their back and made them stand with their feet wide apart. They turned them upside down and rubbed their rear exits with oil. Next, executioners inserted sharp sticks which they hammered in until they were 20 inches in. Finally, they planted the sticks on the ground like trees. The end of the stick was round, so that it didn’t pierce internal organs; it was only pushing them sideways as it went in, looking for an exit, while the body descended slowly by its own weight. It took some people 3 days to die.

Impaling had a didactic aspect. It was carried out in busy areas, like squares and roads, as a warning in case anybody should even think of betraying the voivode. The victims were left there for months, their cadavers slowly decomposing.

Vlad distributed the impaled boyars’ properties amongst minor nobles, several monks and many free peasants in order to create a new dominant class loyal to his orders. But we should not infer from this an elitist attitude on his side. Vlad was very democratic in his savageness. His next banquet was for Wallachia’s beggars and panhandlers. This time the questions and answers game was different: ‘Would you like to see yourselves free from poverty and hardship?’ The beggars wanted to. In order to satisfy their wishes, Vlad closed the doors to the room and set them on fire. The poverty issue was solved.

He also offered an effective exit to gypsies. He got 300 together, chose three of them and ordered them to be roasted. Slow fire. To the rest he gave them a choice: they could either eat their friends or join the army. The gypsies formed from then onwards an army of dubious courage.

The problem with evil people is that they always think they are good. Vlad was obsessed with his folks’ virtue, which he promoted with rather drastic measures. If anything made him despair above everything else, it was female infidelity. Women who cheated on their husbands were impaled from their vaginas with hot-iron rods. Their sexual organs and breasts were mutilated, and if their sins were serious, they were skinned before being impaled. Their sons used to generally suffer the same punishment. If they were very young they were impaled incrusted in their mothers’ empty breasts. Vlad knew by his own experience how dangerous in the future a son thirsty for vengeance could be. Infanticide was the most practical way to be on the safe side.

Nevertheless, one cannot accuse Vlad of nepotism. He was willing to impart his peculiar sense of justice even against his beloved ones. Once, upon seeing him depressed and wanting to lift his spirits up, his lover told him she was expecting a child of his. But it was a lie. Vlad made her be checked by midwives. After certifying the false pregnancy he cut her pelvis up in order to look for the supposed baby.

Some biographers, influenced by psychoanalysis, suggest that his unusual display of cruelty was due to the fact that Vlad was impotent and so he used to sublimate his sexual lacking through torture. But he would justify himself saying that his was a legitimate worry for Romanians’ healthy morals. Actually he wouldn’t say anything at all; he would simply order the biographer to be executed. In any case, it has to be said that he was equally cruel towards thieves, whom, apparently, he used to judge as reprobate beings as the poor, women, children and gypsies. Knowing fully well the harshness of his punishments –which included, apart from the famous impaling, the loss of eyes, those who cherished other people’s property did repress their impulses in Wallachia. Vlad was especially proud of the symbol of his authority: the cup to drink from in Tirgoviste Square, which was pure gold and unguarded. But nobody dared to steal it in all his reign. The empire of law and order, they say.

We have only spoken about peace up to now. Afterwards, there was a war. And things got worse.

Apparently Vlad could have saved himself the fight against the mighty Ottoman Empire. But the thing is, the Prince was quite badly mannered. The emissary in charge of collecting the Sultan’s levy showed up at the palace without taking his turban off. Vlad didn’t like that. He said: ‘I’d like in this instance to honour your customs’, and he ordered for him to have his turban nailed to his head. Needless to say, he did not pay the levy.

To top it all, Vlad devoted himself to attack the Turkish fortresses in the Danube. Perhaps he simply decided to advance himself to the invasion which would take place sooner or later. Or perhaps he was fantasizing with the idea of leading Christianity in its crusade against infidels. At least that’s what the letter he sent to the Hungarian Kind in order to convince him to add his troops to the combat seems to indicate: ‘I have killed men and women, old and young, from Oblucitza and Novoselo, where the Danube flows into the sea, up to which is located near Chilia, from the lower Danube up to such places as Samovit and Ghighen. We killed 23,884 Turks and Bulgarians, without counting those whom we burnt in homes, or whose heads of were not cut by our soldiers […]; 1,350 in Novoselo, 6,840 in Dirstor, 343 in Orsova, 840 in Vectrem, 630 in Turticaia, 210 in Marotim, 6,414 in Giurgiu, 343 in Turnu, 410 in Sistov, 1,138 in Nicopolis, 1,460 in Rahova…’ The letter was delivered with two large bags full of ears, noses and heads. But he didn’t manage to convince anybody. Vlad would have to confront Sultan Mehmed on his own, who was so furious that he had decided to lead personally both his elite guard corps, the Janissaries, and his 100,000 men army. One of his soldiers, interestingly, was an old acquaintance of Vlad’s: Radu the Handsome, Vlad’s brother, the one chosen by the Sultan to occupy Wallachia’s throne after their victory.

As his only possible strategy, Vlad, who only had 20,000 men with him, invented guerrilla warfare: he attacked at night and by surprise, plundered the Turkish rearguard, killed any soldier who set himself apart from the troops. He also developed methods to promote the courage of his own soldiers: he gave prizes and medals to those wounded in action; on the other hand, those who presented wounds on their backs, a clear sign of desertion, were impaled. Moreover, he ordered his subjects to use the strategy of scorched earth. Wallachians left their towns and took cover in the mountains with food supplies and livestock. Turkish soldiers were demoralized at not finding anything to pillage.

The sultan continued his advance towards Târgoviste under a scorching sun and without water. The more he advanced the less he understood what he stood to gain in this war. The march lasted seven days. On the last one they found the forest of the impaled: 20,000 corpses strewn in a 2,500 acre area. Men, women, children, covered by ravens and vultures which had built nests in their orifices. After the forest lay the capital, abandoned and empty.

Mehmed left Radu there, a legitimate heir who soon got the support of boyars, fed up with the excesses of the previous voivode and as anxious for peace as the Turks. Vlad escaped to Hungary. His allies had abandoned him, his brother was on Wallachia’s throne and his wife had committed suicide in view of their imminent defeat. His problems did not end there, though. The Hungarians intercepted some letters supposedly written by him offering his allegiance to the Sultan. He went to Buda in order to look for help but he only managed to get himself arrested.

He was imprisoned for 12 years, although it doesn’t seem to have been a particularly bad time for him. It was rather like a house arrest. The King of Hungary used to show him to his guests, like a circus beast known by its legendary cruelty. Who knows whether Vlad was also amused by it. He had other hobbies. He used to hunt mice to impale them. He bought birds in the market only to torment them and afterwards set them free. Once, a bailiff went into his house without warning, while in pursuit of a thief. Vlad killed him, explaining that that was not the way one should enter the house of a Prince. The Hungarian King found it very amusing.

But politics has a short-time memory. Conflicts in Wallachia went on. Radu died either murdered or in combat, we don’t even know exactly. The Turks attacked once again. The Europeans needed the best military general who had fought against them. Once more, Vlad Dracula went back to Wallachia to fight against Mehmed.

There are three versions of what happened next. The first one states the Vlad died in combat; the second one, that his men mistook him for a Turk and killed him; the third, that a hit man cut his throat from behind. In any case, all had reasons to do away with him. Vlad’s survival amongst Wallachians, Turks and Hungarians was utterly impossible. At Mehmed’s request, he was decapitated. They buried his body in Snagov’s Monastery and sent his head, preserved in honey, to the Sultan so that he could exhibit in stuck on a spear. Years later Vlad’s son, the last Dracula, would reign and be murdered like all his ancestors.

Engraving of Vlad the Impaler, Count Dracula, Prince of Wallachia

An engraving of the time shows Vlad having lunch peacefully next to a forest of impaled men. Opposite him, one of his men is cutting up a corpse. Nevertheless, Vlad is neither eating human flesh nor drinking blood, he’s just having lunch. On the table is bread, maybe a stew. The engraving is part of Vlad’s history, which became the first best seller in the world, before the Bible did. German chronicles speak about him as if he were a monster; Russian ones, despite not sparing the reader a single detail about his cruelty, consider him a fair man who defended his people against foreigners and corrupt noblemen. Even many Romanians consider him a national hero, but one of them seems to have been the dictator Ceausescu, which is not precisely a good reference.

Throughout history those legends, which have a lot of oral tradition and probably are exaggerated, never got mixed with vampire tales –filthy undead lacking glamour, which abounded in Romania. That is, until Bram Stoker comes in. He turned the unpleasant spawn into a refined Central European Count, making him more palatable to the Victorian reader, adding a gloss of sex appeal.

It is unclear how much did really Stoker investigate and how much was the product of his feverish imagination. It is clear, though, that Vlad, the blood-thirsty son of the Devil whose head was torn off and place on a spear, the Prince who fought against three religions and whose soul would wander around rejected in all paradises, would make good material for any kind of fable. But there were things that not even Stoker’s literary talent could foresee. In 1931 a team of archaeologists exhumed Vlad Dracula’s tomb in Snagov’s Monastery. All they could find inside it were animal bones.

Cover of Bram Stoker's Novel Dracula

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Translated from “El príncipe de las tinieblas” by Santiago Roncagliolo. Published in El País on 21.08.2005. Available in http://www.elpais.com/articulo/portada/principe/tinieblas/elpeputec/20050818elpepspor_3/Tes (last accessed 06.11.2010)

The Cruel Sultan 26/04/2009

The Turkish sultan Mehmet II, or Mahomet, seventh Ottoman sultan, was born in 1432. That year the Ottomans had already deeply penetrated Europe and had almost crushed the whole of the Byzantine Empire, which they had almost reduced to the city of Constantinople. His parents were Murat II and one of his seven wives, Huma Atún, a beautiful Albanese slave. Mehmet was the third male son of the sultan, which meant that he had few chances of ascending to the throne unless something happened to his older brothers. Due to this, and according to chronicles of the time, his was a sad and lonely childhood, full of perils. A childhood were punishments and ill-treatments abounded -his mere existence provoked mistrust on the part of his stepmothers and some of the members of the court. He was, without a doubt, a potential rival in the fight for power. Moreover, having reserved the throne for Mehmet’s older brothers, Murat II almost abandoned Mehmet to his own luck, without showing him any affection, while his mother could hardly protect him either, herself a slave until she became a mother due to her inferior rank as compared to the rest of the sultan’s wives.

Thus the prince was brought up with the knowledge of having been made an outcast by his own father and with the suspicion that anybody in the royal palaces could be an enemy, waiting for the right moment to kill him. This way, amid harassment and neglect, fighting for survival and for not being pushed aside from the spheres of power, he forged a cruel, sly, distrustful, ambitious and taciturn behaviour that made him trust nobody and therefore, not have any friends. So well-known was to be his mistrust that years later, and referring to how secret his plans were, he was famous for having said if such plans were to be known by even a hair from his beard, he would tear it off and burn it on the spot.

Events took an unexpected turn at his eldest stepbrother’s death, when Mehmet was only seven. Shortly after, his second septbrother died too, a 13 year-old boy. He was found strangled in his bedroom, and Mehmet was always suspected to have been involved in the crime, at only ten years of age. The truth was never known, but if the events were to be so, it would not be something strange in a court whose princes were in constant power battles. In fact, it would have only meant a continuation of a tradition established by Mehmet’s grandfather, Mehmet I, in which, at reaching the throne, he ordered all his little stepbrothers to be strangled with silk strings so that they could not participate one day in a posterior conspiration and throw him off the throne. If the suspicion had been true, Mehmet II would have only been advancing himself, becoming the one to eliminate the rival before him in the succession line. Evidently, such fratricides were encouraged by the respective mothers and collaborators of the royal successors, for they knew that their destiny was secure only if their child became the sultan. If he didn’t, their fate was to be forgotten, even killed.

Whether he participated or not in the crime, the bottom line is that Mehmet became the first in the succession line, and so his father could not help but pay him more attention. He ordered Mehmet to be given a proper education which, among other areas, made him fluent in Greek, Latin, Persian, Hebrew and Arab, apart from Turkish. After two years, when he was only 12, his father abdicated in his favour, believing that he was ready to reign. It proved to be a huge mistake, for shortly after Mehmet and his tutors started a disagreement with the Prime Minister Jalil Bajá, and, to top it off, a Hungarian invasion descended from the North, posing a threat to all Balcan territories occupied by the Otomans –which, in turn, generated such mass killings of Othrodox Christians that caused a real danger of these rising up in arms. Murat the sultan had to come back from his early retirement in 1444, beat the Hungarians and re-establish order in his kingdom. After reproaching Mehmet his impulsiveness and carelessness, Murat gave him a second chance and handed him over the power, warning him, though, to always follow his Prime Minister’s advice.

Nevertheless, the young Mehmet had not learnt the lesson. Once free from his father’s tutelage, Mehmet’s personality, distrustful and cruel, showed up again. He did not follow anyone’s advice and whoever dared question his orders was executed immediately. The Prime Minister complained again and this time Murat took the power definitively, sending his son and tutors to deep Anatolia, with the objective of teaching him the tasks of ruling and for him to learn to restrain his impulsive behaviour. Mehmet finally ascended to the sultanate definitively in 1451 after his father’s death. He was only 19. His dream had finally become true and he would soon take revenge in all of those who had wanted him away from the throne.

But his own experience of reaching the throne by (possibly) killing his brother made him fear that others would do the same to him. He still had a brother left, a child. Following the family tradition, and while the child’s mother congratulated him on his ascendancy to the power, the young Sultan ordered the child to be drowned in the perfumed waters of his bath; he had no rivals left. In order to erase any traces he ordered the execution of his young sibling’s killer, and, next, he married the mother of the child to a slave. After this, and being coherent with such a fratricide behaviour, he passed a bill in which what before had been family treason became law. The new legislation established that every new Sultan had to kill his male brothers when ascending to the throne, with the noble end of avoiding insurrections and civil wars. In order to overcome the religious prohibition of manslaughter, he made clear that the Sultan could not participate directly in the execution. The custom survived almost all the history of the Empire, even performed centuries after, although many of his descendants softened the norm, substituting the execution with outlawing or imprisonment.

Upon inheriting the Crown, he decided that Constantinople had to be, as the Coran promised, taken for good from the unfaithful. In those days, Mehmet had already toughened his external appearance, wearing a long mustache that covered his thick red lips, which, together with his eagle nose, gave him a most sinister look.

In 1453, 80,000 men, brainwashed by Muslim monks, sieged the city. Bizance’s capital had less than 9,000 men to defend it, and its total population did not reach 50,000 souls. Still, Constantinople’s magnificent walls were a problem, and in two earlier occasions the Otoman army had already failed to break through them. Nevertheless, now a new weapon was to be put in place: artillery. Hungarian and German renegades had built huge pieces of great calibre. Being so heavy and in order to solve the issue of transporting them, the pieces were put together there and then, in the same spot from which the more than 400 kilos artillery pieces were to be shot, breaking the walls of the city apart. Simultaneously, Mehmet managed to successfully transport 70 ships on land, making them slide over sheets of metal covered with ox grease. They were transported to the deep entrance to the sea, the so-called Golden Horn located North of Constantinople, tightening the circle even more and being able to attack the city from every angle.

Meanwhile, showing the distrust for which he was known, Mehmet used to dress up and mix among his own soldiers in order to listen to their conversations; beware whoever was surprised criticizing him or his orders! He also applied such intolerance to his generals. In one occasion, one of his almirals was made responsible of the escape of a Bizantine ship. He was sentenced to be impaled, but since the rest of his generals pleaded vehemently for Mehmet to reconsider such sentence, he decided instead to whip him personally while four slaves held his naked bloody body until almost killing him.\n

Meanwhile, showing the distrust for which he was known, Mehmet used to dress up and mix among his own soldiers in order to listen to their conversations; beware whoever was surprised criticizing him or his orders! He also applied such intolerance to his generals. In one occasion, one of his almirals was made responsible of the escape of a Bizantine ship. He was sentenced to be impaled, but since the rest of his generals pleaded vehemently for Mehmet to reconsider such sentence, he decided instead to whip him personally while four slaves held his naked bloody body until almost killing him.

Finally, after 53 days of siege, an opening was made in the San Romano of Constantinople door. It was possibly due to the fact that 50 Otoman warriors, who had been able to infiltrate themselves through the poorly defended city walls, helped the invasion army to break through in. Nothing came out of the heroic resistance of Constantine XI, the last Emperor of Constantinople, nor of his men. For days the city was looted. 5,000 citizens of all social conditions were killed and the rest of the population, almost 50,000 people, were turned into slaves. Mehmet, in order to have some fun, bought the Bizantine noble men (who had not been able to escape) off his own army and ordered them to be executed in front of him. After that, he ordered the heads to be put on display on a table so that they could be publicly scorned. Constantinople became Istanbul, and from then on, the sultan was called Hunkar, which means “blood drinker”.

He soon honored his newly given nickname, making clear that he was going to rule as an absolute autocrat. First, he ordered the Prime Minister to be killed, for he had been extremely annoying in telling everything to Mehmet’s father. Although there was no need of big betrayals in order to provoke Mehmet’s wrath. Any small thing could unleash it. One of the sultan’s hobbies was to grown sweet melons in his orchyard, but one day one of his servants stole four pieces. Indignant about it, Mehmet asked around who had it been, and since fear silenced the guilty servant, Mehmet ordered all his servants to be slashed open until the rests of the melon showed in the guilty servant’s stomach. In the end they were found inside the fourteenth servant, for the relief of the servants that followed him in line in such a savage dissection.

Nevertheless, Mehmet’s cruelty did not prevent him from acquiring a cultivated refinement. One of his hobbies was gardening, devoting himself passionately especially to roses –he always wore a rose pinned to his clothing. He was also extremely fond of poetry, architecture, theology being, as the skilled politician he was, able to be tolerant with both Christians and Jews, as long as, of course, they submitted themselves without questioning. He also used to love fine wines and cats. His female white angora cat, Zita, was extremely famous. She was the only female to enjoy the priviledge of sleeping in his bed every night, for Mehmet was sexually promiscuous and did not hesitate to have over his bed several young men and women alike.

The glory of having been able to take over Constantinople went to his head, and he started thinking of his own person as the greater conqueror of all times. According to this idea, he decided to keep on with his expansion, both over Asia Minor and the Balcans. He was the instigator of 25 military campaigns in both continents, winning almost all of them, which gave him the absolute control all of the East. In his advance towards the North he challenged the Hungarian monarch Juan Hunyadi, who was still living in Belgrad. In 1459 he defeated the last Serbian insurrection, in 1463 he conquered Bosnia (killing its king) and in 1468 he crushed the rebellion of the legendary Albanian hero Jorge Kastriotis, known as Skandersberg.

Curiously enough, in 1464 one of his hardest battles was against one of the cruelest human beings in history too, the King Vlad of Valakia, called “The Impaler” by the Turkish and known by his as “Drakul” (devil), and who has been incorporated in the Dracula legend. They say that, before defeating and overthrowing him, Mehmet found funny the following incident: a few of Mehmets emissaries had been punished to have their turbans literally stuck to their heads after refusing to uncover their heads in front of the monarch of Valakia. Shortly after that, when Vlad challenged him once again by impaling thousands of Turkish prisoners, Mehmet complimented such murderous act, stating that a human being capable of such actions would be hard to defeat. Nevertheless, said admiration for Vlad’s cruel behaviour did not save him of being execued when he fell in Mehmet’s hands in the process of adding the whole of Valakia to the Otoman Empire.

After his victorious campaigns in the Balcans, Mehmet occupied the Adriatic coast, expelling the Venecians. He also took over Crimea and sent his own Tartar general as Governor of Albania and also expelled the Genoese off the Black Sea. On the North front, only the anguished Hungary (where the King Mattias Corvino ruled) and Tansylvania resisted Mehmet’s troops momentarily. Luck was also on Turkish’ side on the sea front. A good part of the islands in the Egean Sea fell under Turkish offensivesm and in order for Venice to be able to keep some of its strategic trading stronglholds, it had to pay Mehmet an annual tax equivalent to 10,000 pieces of gold.  Only the island of Rhodes, defended by St. John’s Knights, resisted the assault. Mehmet’s expansion seemed not to have limits. In 1480 Turkish forces took over the city of Otranto, located on the heel of Italy, exterminating all its inhabitants and taking, the whole of Christianity being taken over by a panic attack.

Without a doubt, such conquests were possible, besides Mehmet’s skillful military direction, thanks to the quality of the Otoman troops. Among them the section of the Jannissaries occupied an important place, for they were in those days the most effective and combative infantry in the world, and which also fed the sultan’s personal guard. The Jannissaries was made up by 7 to 12 year-old Christian children who had been singled out by their intelligence and strength. They were recruited by force in territories under Turkish rule and converted to Islam by Muslim monks. They were completely uprooted from their affective environment and were toughly trained in an environment of strict discipline and many deprivations. They were not allowed to marry, have any money nor enjoy any luxury, and they had to live communally, which made them some sort of warrior monks, who were given a pension once they retired.

Finally, and fortunately for his enemies, Mehmet II died in 1481, although nobody knows whether his death was caused by a gout crisis or due to poisoning. He had become a hero for the Otoman Empire, but a true devil for Christianity and all those who dared oppose him. With his death, the rest of Christian kingdoms and the Pope gave a sigh of relief, although the fall of Constantinople was engraved in their memory, like an affront impossible to erase.

Translated from “El sultán cruel”, by Juan Carlos Losada, published in El País Semanal, on the 20^th January, 2006 (in http://www.elpais.es/solotexto/articulo.html?xref=20051106elpepspor_5&type=Tes&ed=diario)

By JUAN CARLOS LOSADA

EL PAIS SEMANAL – 06-11-2005