Porphyry and Blood
Peter Sandham
© Peter Sandham 2020
Peter Sandham has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 2001, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2020 by Sharpe Books
For my mother and father
Table of Contents
A note on names and titles
Wallachia, June 1462
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Epilogue
Author’s Note
A note on names and titles
The term ‘Byzantine’ only came into use about a hundred years after the Eastern Roman Empire fell. Being such a long-lasting, multi-ethnic empire, which preserved Romano-Hellenistic culture alongside its fervent Christianity, the complex issue of identity and nomenclature would take – and indeed has taken – expert scholars many lengthy academic papers to explore.
So, while acknowledging here that the residents of medieval Constantinople would have referred to themselves both as Romaioi (Romans) and Hellenes (Greeks), in my writing I use ‘Byzantines’ because although it is somewhat anachronistic, it encompasses all the disparate strands of that empire into a single, recognizable term. Similarly, a ‘Greek’ in the following pages refers to someone of the Greek church or a Greek speaker rather than an ethno-nationalist identity.
Several titles and forms of address may be unfamiliar to some readers to below is a short glossary:
Kyr / kyria – medieval Greek honorific, equivalent of sir / lady.
Basilissa – Empress.
Voivode – Wallachian title, akin to Prince.
Şehzade – the Ottoman crown prince.
Valide Hatun – the ‘legal mother’ of the sultan, the most senior female of the harem.
Hatun – Ottoman honorific for lady / wife.
Ikbal - ‘Fortunate’, upper tier of consort below a Sultan’s four official hatun.
Gözde – ‘Favourite’, lowest rank of consort.
Odalisque – chamber girl.
Orta - a regiment of janissary.
Çorbaci – a commander of a janissary orta.
Zağarcibasi – the commander of the janissary cavalry orta.
Grand Vizier – Ottoman chief minister.
Megas Doux – Byzantine ‘grand duke’, one of the highest court positions.
Doge – Venice’s elected chief of state.
Dogaressa – wife of the Doge of Venice.
Stratioti – mercenary soldiers from the Balkans and Greece
Klephts – bandits turned anti-Turk insurgents. Made famous by the 19th century Greek war of independence but the word was first used in the 15th century.
Wallachia, June 1462
The first Hekim Yakub knew of the attack was the screaming. Waking with a jolt, he stared blankly up at the canvas tent roof for a moment while his groggy brain tried to gather itself. The screaming repeated, an unholy, inhuman, guttural howling, joined this time by the hubbub of voices raised in panic.
His head was pounding. He had been drinking again last night, but why not? There was no sin to be found in that. Unlike most of the camp, he was not forbidden the grape by his book. Besides, in all things he was a man of moderation. He knew better than anyone what quantity of wine would upset the body’s balance and indeed how much was required to steady it. So no, he had not been drunk. Instead, he diagnosed that the pounding was a combination of interrupted sleep and the thrum of horse hooves on summer earth.
Wrapping a fur-lined kaftan about himself, Yakub stumbled out into the cold night air and noticed immediately that the stars were winking from sharp to dim as whorls of smoke drifted across the constellations. Orientated by those stars, he looked north, in the direction of the mountains and the city on the plain before them. A wavering orange half-light held that end of the camp in its glow.
He soon determined by the whiff of smoke on the wind and the shouts drifting over the tent canopies that a battle must be underway at that end of the camp. Then somewhere ahead the report of an arquebus cracked the air and confirmed that this was not a horrible accident but a night attack, however improbable that might seem.
The details of whom must be attacking, or its significance, did not enter into his half-asleep mind, simply the fact that a battle would mean casualties and that as the Sultan’s chief physician, he had a duty to attend to. Hekim Yakub wasted no more time star gazing and began to dash across the short, muddy distance between his sleeping tent and the cavernous medical pavilion, pitched uncomfortably close to the fighting.
The camp was alive with men scrambling through the dark passageways of the tent lines, each with the same befuddled, unkempt appearance as his own. No, not exactly the same. Bareheaded in his nightshirt, Hekim Yakub was empty-handed, while all the men he saw seemed to be setting steel helmets to their crowns or pulling on a mail hauberk and every one of them was armed.
They were soldiers, this was their world. It was certainly not his. The terror of being here, far from the order and comfort of his normal palace duties, arrow-close to the fighting, was why he needed to drink each evening to maintain a steady hand. He had been at Constantinople, certainly, but that siege had been the end of a very different campaign. He had been younger too. Courage, it seemed, was no different to endurance. It withered with age. One day he must make a formal study of the phenomenon.
The screaming came again, much nearer than before. A horrible sound that bristled his nape hairs. This time it was accompanied by a new, terrible smell. As Yakub turned his head towards the sound, a camel came crashing through the tent to his right. Its gallop did not stop, even as the lines and canvas became tangled like a mantrap about its legs.
The large white eyes of the beast were wild with terror and pain from the saddle of fire it wore about its hump. Stumbling onwards, still entangled in the guy ropes, the camel crashed to the earth. It kicked and flailed its legs and the canvas beneath it soon kindled. Then, with a wild swipe of a hoof, the material was scooped up and flung against another tent and the promiscuous flames quickly took root.
The attackers must have fired the camel pen by the gate, Yakub realised. The dung would burn like white naphtha and the dry summer grass of the plain made for a ripe bed of kindling to help spread the flames and fill the air with acrid smoke. Then the beasts, breaking loose in panic like this one, would sew fire and confusion across half the camp. It was just the sort of tactic a clever, small force of raiders might employ.
But the army of the Grand Turk could not be unstrung by a few burning beasts. Men around Yakub were already hustling to beat down the flames of the burning tents. A sipahi officer stood calling for his men to fall in. A janissary stopped and put the wretched camel out of its misery with a single shot of his arquebus. He was merely one of dozens of Turks armed with handguns rallying to the gate to pick off the elevated targets of mounted attackers wheeling about in the light of the flames.
Passing the stabling area beside the gate, he found it a charnel house of dead and dying horseflesh. The Vlach raiders had targeted the army’s animals in their initial attack, then turned upon the nearest soldiers as they sleepily stumbled to respond. The entire 13th orta lay butchered in the mud and more bodies scattered the dirt around the gate entrance. As Yakub counted the fallen, a foreign war cry smeared the air beyond the palisaded camp perimeter. If he had come t
his way only a little earlier, Yakub thought grimly, his corpse would doubtless be lying among them too.
It had been a vicious, unexpected blow but the janissaries were battle-hardened veterans and much of the advantage of that initial clash had vanished now that a steady flow of white caps were rallying from the hive of tents, forcing the enemy back out into the darkness of the floodplain.
The sounds of the skirmish beyond the palisade filled the air: the twang of crossbow strings, the whistle of bolts, the drum of hooves and cough of a firearm, the incessant clash and clamour of terrified horses and men. A horn rang out; drums crashed and reverberated across the camp, summoning more soldiers to pour from their bunks.
The tormented animal screams continued to echo across the camp to his ears as Yakub stumbled the last few paces through the entrance flap of the medical tent. He was the first man inside and began to light lamps and make his table ready to receive the wounded. They began to appear before any of his medical staff.
A janissary staggered in, supported by a comrade, his face half sheared away. Yakub’s expert eye immediately diagnosed the wound as the work of a sabre, slicing left to right from a high angle. A cavalry cut to a foot-soldier. He had barely swaddled the bleeding face when the next man came in holding his guts balled up in the cup of his hands.
After that, the trickle became a stream of wounded men. The far side of the tent was soon crowded with injured bodies waiting their turn on the table. These were the least hurt, the ones who had been able to walk under their own power back from the fighting beyond the gate. There would be others lying in worse condition out where the flames and the skirmish still raged but there was nothing Yakub could do for those poor souls.
Other medical staff appeared at last and the rising tide of the unattended began to subside. It was all very simple work: stitching, cauterization, incisions for the removal of arrows, the setting of fractures. It was the type of bone-doctory which all these other half-trained butchers were capable of and which, in his more bitter moments, Hekim Yakub felt far beneath him. He was a physician, not a mere surgeon. He practiced humoralism. He had not studied the Al-Tasrif, Galen’s anatomy and al-Nafis’s corrections to it, merely to saw bones and sew flesh. He treated a patient as an integral entity, a complex system of body and mind, a soul situated in its natural and moral environment. Moreover, that old provincial Turk, Serafeddin, might have stolen a march on him towards codifying a first manual of Ottoman medical practice but there would be nothing in that half-written surgical atlas that Hekim Yakub was not better at performing. It was galling, therefore, to be stood in this tent, endangering one’s very existence patching up cannon-fodder, when one could be back in the comfort and safety of the palace, writing a memoir or deducting a royal consort’s humoral imbalance through the careful examination of a vial of her urine.
He looked up and saw one of the younger medical staff impotently standing about, wearing the blank stare of an imbecile. Yakub pointed towards a wounded man slumped inside the doorway but his instruction was drowned beneath the drum of hooves on the earth about the tent. The air became filled with shouts and the whinny of horses. The pounding of hooves mounted like the rumble of a landslide. A voice screamed close by and abruptly stopped. The eyes of the man lying on Yakub’s table grew suddenly wide with fear.
‘Ignore it,’ said Yakub in his steady physician’s voice. ‘Your janissary brothers have already driven the infidel back outside the camp.’
Something kicked against the canvas wall hard enough to shake the lamp strung over the treatment table.
‘It is more of our own men we hear, rushing from the southern end to join the fighting,’ said Yakub with a little less certainty in his tone.
The man on the table began to recite namaz. Yakub took a breath and tried very hard to focus on sewing up the wound in front of him but when a volley of gunfire crackled with such ferocity that it seemed to come from the tent entrance, he found his hands were trembling.
As the number of waiting wounded continued to mount, Yakub began to see faces he recognised. Men who had passed through this medical tent before, in very different circumstances. It became far harder to retain a physician’s detached air of calm. One of the younger lads, whose tongue practically still tasted of the salt from his initiation ceremony, sat pressing a blood-soaked wad of rags to the gash across his cheek. A lithe cavalryman, who had possessed a pair of surprisingly soft hands, now possessed only one.
‘Where’s that damnable lazy Yusuf?’ Yakub snapped to the heavens. He had no way of knowing that the young surgeon was lying five hundred yards to the south with a javelin through his windpipe.
The next man through the medical tent’s yawning mouth appeared to be unwounded. Dressed, like Yakub, in little more than his nightshirt, the long pale hair was tainted with ash from the fire. It was Radu Pasha, the Zağarcibasi, the young commander of the 64th orta: the famous Greyhound Keepers. He had four thousand cavalry under him, the only cavalry in the entire janissary corps and his mounts had been stabled by the camel pens where the flames still raged out of control. By the look of him, it appeared that Radu’s first instinct had been to try and save his horses.
The injured janissary on Yakub’s table tried to get up and allow the senior officer to be attended to but Radu stopped him with a gentle touch of his hand. ‘Stay. I’m unhurt,’ he said. ‘Good to see that you are unharmed too, Hekim Yakub. The fighting came a little close for a time then.’
‘God is merciful,’ said Yakub.
‘Fruitless,’ Radu muttered under his breath, ‘mad, fruitless valour.’
Looking up from the bloody suture he was stitching, Yakub said, ‘Did you save your horses?’
‘Yes,’ said Radu. ‘The poor beasts were wild with fear, they scattered when we broke the gate open. I shall have the devil of a time rounding them up. What did he think he could achieve?’
‘Who?’ said Yakub. He knew very well who. Signalling for one of the junior surgeons to take over the stitching, he guided the Zağarcibasi to the tent threshold. He needed some air in any case and it was clear to him that what ailed this young officer was a malady of the mind rather than the body. Melancholia perhaps. Radu needed the ministrations of a physician, a good one, such as Hekim Yakub, not a blood-letting surgeon.
‘Vlad,’ said Radu gazing in the direction of the skirmish. ‘What could my brother hope to gain from this beyond a glorious death? He can have no more than thirty thousand, even if he’s armed every bearded boy in Wallachia. We’ve three times his numbers.’
‘Perhaps he hopes to instil fear,’ said Yakub, wiping his hands down his ruined kaftan. ‘I know I shan’t rest easy for a while. And if the camels and horses were to be consumed by the fire, then our baggage train would be slowed, and your cavalry gone.’
‘I might agree if they’d simply tossed their torches and turned tail, but they’ve lingered and given battle.’ Radu shook his head and stared blankly in the fighting’s direction. ‘Mad, fruitless valour, how typical of you brother.’ He seemed in no rush to join it but Yakub knew that was not from want of courage. However estranged the years had made them, Radu and the Vlach ruler were still brothers and Vlach blood ran in this janissary’s veins. ‘The cost to Vlad’s small army is mounting by the moment,’ Radu added. ‘There must be two Turks to every Vlach out there by now and more joining all the time. He will lose them all at this rate and for what?’
Yakub’s scrutinizing, physician’s eye caught the disturbance in the normally placid face: the dilating pupils, the twitch of muscle at the cheekbones. But whatever thought had prompted it remained stillborn on Radu’s tongue. The silence hung between them, heavy as the smoke clouds of the dampening fire.
‘For what?’ the doctor prompted.
‘Too many,’ Radu murmured to himself. ‘We are too many, all rushing into the dark against unknown numbers. A titanic army, unbalanced and flailing wildly from a horsefly bite.’ Then, as if waking from a dream, his attention snapped back t
o Yakub. Grabbing the physician by each arm he said, ‘At maghreb, do you remember? I told you I had imagined my brother among the faces of the men heading to prayer. Exhaustion, I think you suggested.’
‘Yes, I remember,’ said Yakub, keeping his tone measured. The mood change, the sudden mania that seemed to have seized his companion was most disturbing and suggested a far deeper humoral malady. Perhaps he should have sensed it earlier when Radu had first raised the matter of his hallucination. Then, as now, Yakub’s instinct was to placate his patient’s overstimulated nerves. ‘A tired mind plays tricks.’
‘What if it wasn’t a trick?’ said Radu. ‘What if Vlad really was in our camp earlier this evening? Sneaking around disguised as one of us; learning our weak points.’
‘That seems unlikely. But if so?’
‘Don’t you see?’ said Radu. He was already stepping away from Yakub, out onto the trampled wide apron of grass before the medical tent where the soldiers were still passing on route to join their comrades beyond the palisade. ‘This blunt attack on the camp gate didn’t need reconnaissance.’
He might be a physician, not a soldier, but Yakub was nobody’s fool. He understood exactly what Radu was implying and his mind took off at the gallop like a tarpan. A flurry of thoughts and memories danced about his head: the hubris of Hamza Bey, the fatal ruse at Giurgiu, the warnings of the Valide Mara Hatun. It was happening. It was happening just as that fey Serb witch had foretold. The battle of Kosovo, repeated. They had been warned. The pair of them had even been charged with preventing it and despite that, still, they had fallen into Vlad’s trap.
The Sultan was going to die.
Or was there still time?
Before him, Radu was already turning like a dervish, looking around madly for the symbolic spoon stuck in the front of a bork that would denote the rank of çorbaci. Grabbing the first such officer he found by the arm, he bellowed, ‘Get back! Get your men back inside! It’s a distraction! Get back and defend your sector!’
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