Eventually the dark clouds of renewed warfare between the Turks and the Christian crusaders created difficult times for the two young hostages; their future became increasingly precarious. Encouraged by Hunyadi's victories in Transylvania in 1442, Pope Eugenius IV decided to proclaim the long-delayed crusade. It was calculated to liberate the people of the Balkan peninsula from Turkish oppression, effectively affirm the act of union proclaimed at Florence in 1439 between the eastern and western churches, and reassert the prestige of the papacy, still threatened by various antipopes and by the movement for constitutional government of the Roman curia. The chief architect of this new coalition of forces was the papal legate, Giuliano Cardinal Cesarini, though he had powerful allies in the papal legate at Venice, Cardinal Gondolfieri, and that clever young humanist from Siena, Enea Silvio de' Piccolomini, not yet Pope Pius II. The pope's proclamation and Cesarini's efforts resulted in the so-called long campaign of 1443, led by John Hunyadi, Brankovi of Serbia, and Cardinal Cesarini himself, all under the command of King Ladislas III of Poland and Hungary. It was “long,” because it lasted more than six months, well into the winter season (at a time when wars were usually fought only in the summer months).
Having surrendered his two sons as hostages to the sultan, Dracul dared do no better than send a small contingent under his eldest son, Mircea, to collaborate with the Christian force.
The Christian army of 25,000 men, including Poles, Romanians, Serbs, Germans, and Austrians, which had left Belgrade in the fall, won a splendid victory against the Turks at Niš, captured Sofia, the capital of modern Bulgaria, and seemed on the verge of liberating the whole Balkan peninsula amid the enthusiasm of the local Bulgarian population. Enea Silvio de' Piccolomini, then secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, was, according to his memoirs, sanguine in believing that the moment had come for the Turks to be chased out of Europe. Unfortunately, by Christmastime, winter had set in in the passes leading through the Balkan mountains of Bulgaria, and the crusaders became victims of the first frost and snows in treacherous terrain while provisions were beginning to fail. Hunyadi gave the orders to retreat to Belgrade, where Christmas was spent in celebrations.
The long campaign of 1443 confirmed the fact that the Turks could be defeated by the people of central and eastern Europe, even without western aid. The truce proclaimed at Szégedin at the end of the year by the Polish king, and at Adrianople by Murad, offered the Christians remarkably generous terms that would include returning some captured forts to the Serbs and the Hungarians and liberating all the hostages, including Dracula and Radu and the blinded sons of Brankovi. It was signed by the protagonists, who swore on the Koran and the Bible respectively, and extended a five-year armistice needed by Murad to confront his enemies in Asia. Only the Serbian despot Brankovi, however, remained true to his word, so that his two sons were actually returned.
In the autumn of 1444, the Polish king, on the entreaties of the papal legate Cesarini, broke the treaty and started a new crusade against the Turks. This breach of contract enraged the sultan and brought ill fortune to the Christian armies, at the notorious battle of Varna. The pope had absolved the Christian crusaders of their oath on the grounds that the sultan was an “infidel.” This time the cardinal planned a more ambitious undertaking, which would involve the collaboration of a crusading army with the Venetian fleet, whose task it was to prevent the Ottoman army from crossing the Bosporus from Asia Minor to Europe.
When the crusade, led by Hunyadi, Cardinal Cesarini, and the young king of Poland, set out on the Varna campaign, a special appeal was made to Dracul. He had, as noted, sent a token contingent under his son Mircea to help the crusaders during the long campaign of 1443. This time, the Christian army was to advance along the Danube, rather than to penetrate deep into Balkan territory as they had done before. Dracul met Hunyadi personally at Nicopolis to discuss his eventual participation and the strategy to be followed. As he caught sight of the Christian army, the experienced Wallachian prince noticed the small number of tents that housed the army of 15,000. During a council of war he told the assembled commanders, “The Sultan goes on a mere hunting expedition with more troops than the Christians are bringing into this battle.” and he urged the king of Poland to turn back. Dracul also had moral scruples, given the fact that the Christians had violated the sanctity of a treaty that had just been signed. In addition, being superstitious, Dracul believed in an old Bulgarian soothsayer who had forewarned him that nothing good would come of the Christian venture. Even though the papal legate attempted to quiet his conscience by absolving him of his Turkish oath, Dracul finally chose once again to steer a safe middle course, by sending only a small contingent of 4,000 cavalrymen under his son Mircea to assist the Polish and Hungarian armies in the operations along the Danube.
Mircea fought with a great deal of courage, according to Michael Beheim the meistersinger, who has left us an interesting poem on the Varna crusade based on testimony from a German veteran called Hans Mägest. At the siege of Petretz in Bulgaria, Mircea made use of cannon fire for the first time in Romanian military history, to destroy the walls of the city, and then led his troops to attack the Turkish garrison through the gap created. He succeeded in entering the city and finally captured the fortress, hurling some fifty surviving Turks to their deaths into the water-filled moats some fifty feet below. The Wallachians, however, were unable to save their allies from their tragic fate on the hills outside the Bulgarian port of Varna.
From their camp in a strategic location, the Christian forces were surprised to see Murad II's vastly superior forces camped on the outskirts of the city. The Turks outnumbered the Christians three to one. The Burgundian boats and those of the Venetians had failed to stop the sultan's army from crossing over from Asia Minor into Europe. The battle of Varna turned into a disastrous defeat for the Christian cause. During the encounter, the horse of the Polish king was pierced by a Turkish spear; young King Ladislas fell to the ground to face hand-to-hand combat with the elite Turkish troops. They chopped off his head and placed it on a pike for all to see. Seeing that the king was dead, John Hunyadi rushed forward with the faithful Wallachian troops in an attempt to snatch the young king's body from the clutches of the infidels. But his energies were fruitless. Hunyadi and his Wallachians could not even get near. All around him, Hunyadi saw his troops fleeing; he barely managed to escape. It was a calamity from which he never recovered. Giuliano Cardinal Cesarini, the military hero of the Hussite wars, was found dead, lying naked, stripped of all his belongings, on a desolate mountain pass just outside the city of Varna.
Another eyewitness to the campaign, Andrea de Palatio of Parma, accused Mircea's Wallachian contingent of having betrayed Hunyadi in the heat of battle. This accusation seems hardly warranted, given Beheim's account; it was more likely thanks to the Wallachians, who knew the terrain of the Varna region well, that the few escapees, who included Hunyadi himself, managed to extricate themselves from an extremely difficult situation.
By allowing his son Mircea to cooperate with the Christian forces at Varna, Dracul had broken his promise to the sultan and consequently risked the lives of his two sons. Vlad Dracula, of course, learned that his father had violated the oath and put his life in jeopardy. The boy must have come to think then that life was cheap, when one could not even trust one's own father. Henceforth, to all appearances, Vlad Dracula depended less upon human relationships. Dracula's father, after all, was conscious of what he was doing; in a letter to the city fathers of Braov, Dracul indicated that he knew that he was risking the lives of his sons. He complained about how any of the citizens of Braov could possibly doubt the depth of his loyalty to their cause. “Please understand,” he wrote, “that I have allowed my children to be butchered for the sake of the Christian peace, in order that both I and my country might continue to be vassals to the Holy Roman Emperor.” The two children were neither butchered nor blinded, as the father believed they would be. Nor were they executed in the fol
lowing year, 1445, when Burgundian galleys under Walerand de Wavrin sailed up the Danube, attacking the Turkish fortress of Turtucaia and capturing Giurgiu with the collaboration of Mircea and, this time, of Dracul himself. The purpose of that expedition was to avenge the Varna tragedy and find the bodies of the Polish king and the cardinal.
Although Dracul's two boys were not killed, their lives were certainly in danger, and the terms of their imprisonment were made harsher. A Turkish document states that Radu, the handsomer of the two, had to defend his honor against the sexual advances of no less a person than young Mehmed himself, the heir to the throne. The Byzantine chronicler Laonicus Chalcondyles described Radu's beauty and voluptuousness, which had won him the favor of the future Mehmed II. He gives us a vivid account of the manner in which Radu defended his honor against advances of the drunken prince, who did not follow the prescription of the Koran, by using his sword to wound his would-be lover. Fearing for his life, Radu spent the night hidden in a tree outside the seraglio for fear of Mehmed's vengeance. Being weak-natured, though, he eventually succumbed to sensual pleasures and became Mehmed's minion. He also became Mehmed's protégé and chosen candidate for the Wallachian throne, not leaving Turkey until 1462. Submission was also the price paid by Radu for his becoming a full-fledged officer at the sultan's court, which probably took place in 1447, under Murad II.
Dracula, as noted, proved a more difficult prisoner, and whatever duress he had to suffer toughened his character to a diamondlike hardness. Being perpetually aware of the danger of assassination and, consequently, of the expendability of life, Dracula became a cynic. He also gained invaluable insights into the torturous workings of the impressionable Turkish mind and learned the effectiveness of the Ottomans' use of terror tactics. He was to employ this knowledge to great advantage in his subsequent career.
In essence, the two boys had been spared because Sultan Murad preferred to use them as pawns who might yet contribute to Dracul's defection, even after the campaign of 1445. In the long run, this presumption turned out to be correct. The temporary incursion of the papal Burgundian fleet on the Danube under Walerand de Wavrin, though a fascinating military episode, cannot be looked on in any other light than as a mere epilogue, which in no way altered the balance of forces after the great Christian disaster at Varna. The Turks remained in a position to resume their offensive on the Danube in the summer of 1446. In that year Dracul was officially informed that his sons had been spared, and the Turks offered to renew peace negotiations, under terms that Dracul accepted; a new treaty was signed in the summer of 1447. In addition to the stipulations previously assented to, there was an obligation to expel the 4,000 Bulgarians who had taken refuge on Romanian soil during the 1443 campaign, and to abandon the fortress of Giurgiu and other townships Dracul had conquered on the Danube. Wallachia, however, was allowed to remain an autonomous land.
In spite of their temporary rapprochement in 1445, relations between Hunyadi and Dracul had never been close. Initial mistrust was compounded by Dracul's ambivalent Turkish policies, though the basic reasons for Hunyadi's decision to eliminate Dracul rose from the circumstances that followed the debacle at Varna. In a council of war held somewhere in Dobruja, in what was Turkish-occupied Bulgaria at the time, both Dracul and Mircea held Hunyadi personally responsible for the magnitude of the Christian disaster, because of Hunyadi's having refused to take Dracul's advice at Nicopolis. Young Mircea, aware of the fact that the shoddy Burgundian and Venetian fleet had been incapable of coordinating efforts to prevent the Turkish landing on the Danube, argued for the arrest, trial, and execution of Hunyadi, who was temporarily Dracul's prisoner. The “White Knight's” generous past services on behalf of the Christian cause and his international reputation undoubtedly saved his life. Dracul eventually ensured Hunyadi's safe passage to his Transylvanian homeland. But, if nothing else, the humiliation Hunyadi endured gave him the pretext to lead a punitive expedition against Dracul in November 1447.
Given the anarchy that attended the death of the Polish king, Hunyadi clearly nurtured ambitions of his own, extending not only to seeking the Hungarian and perhaps even the Polish crown but also to securing the principality of Wallachia for himself. At the very least, he wished to ensure the succession of a safe and loyal ally in Wallachia. He found one, in the person of Vladislav II, a member of the rival Dneti clan, who had been residing at Braov. Hunyadi thus launched a deliberate propaganda campaign against Dracul, portraying him as a “fickle ally” who had always secretly supported the interests of the Sultan. During the month of November 1447 he came in person to meet Vladislav in Braov, then crossed the Carpathians heading towards Tîrgovite, in the company of his new candidate. Forewarned, Dracul and Mircea ordered the city to close its gates, but a boyar revolt took place, hatched by the partisans of the Dnetis. In the end father and son were forced to defend themselves, to little avail, with a small number of loyal boyars within their own city. Mircea was captured by the citizenry of Tîrgovite, tortured, and killed in the most horrible fashion, being buried alive.
Vlad Dracul succeeded in fleeing the city during the night, hoping to reach friendly Turkish troops on the Danube. He never got that far, being caught and assassinated in the marshes of the village of Blteni close to Bucharest, where a small chapel still stands in his memory at the very place where he was felled by his Dneti enemies. A few faithful followers took his body and buried him in a small wooden chapel, at the site of the present Monastery of Dealul near Tîrgovite. Dracul's tomb and that of Cneajna, his wife, have never been found, nor have any paintings of them survived beyond the fresco recently uncovered at Sighioara. After his death, however, Dracula's father was fondly remembered by some of his contemporaries. The official court historian at Budapest, the Italian humanist Antonio Bonfini, wrote that Dracula's father had been “a righteous and unconquerable man, the mightiest and bravest in battle, since with only a few men at his disposal and due solely to his own heart and wisdom, he waged a long war with the Turks, supported by his soldiers, who proved to be valiant beyond belief and without any foreign help, and the war was such that even all the Christians put together could hardly have faced.” Walerand de Wavrin, who had become personally acquainted with Dracul during the joint attack on the fortress of Giurgiu in the late fall expedition on the Danube in 1445, declared that he had been “very famous for his bravery and for his wisdom.”
When tidings of the precise circumstances of the brutal slayings of his father and brother Mircea, whose heroic exploits he had followed from afar, reached Dracula at Adrianople, there must have been anguish in his heart — but above all, he must have felt an intense desire for vengeance against his family's murderers, in accordance with the “eye for eye and tooth for tooth” principle. He had to wait almost ten years though, for an opportunity.
CHAPTER 3
The Thorny Road to Power
THE impact of Vlad Dracul's death was like that of a thunderbolt out of a clear blue sky. He had, after all, been one of the mainstays of the Christian resistance, a most effective crusader and the only representative of the Dragon Order who remained loyal to his oath, at least in fighting the Turks. Dracula was officially informed of his father's death by Sultan Murad II at the end of the year 1447, since news traveled slowly from Wallachia to Adrianople. He was now completely free. Dracula was made an officer in the Turkish army; he was also given to understand by his Turkish masters that they considered him as a candidate for his father's throne — his stern character and leadership qualities had evidently impressed Murad. (Only later did Radu, as noted, gain this favored position.) The actual assumption of the Wallachian throne was to await the first favorable political circumstances.
At a more personal level, there exists an oral Romanian peasant tradition, a most poignant story that still survives in the regions where the indirect descendants of a certain boyar Cazan survive to this day and that may well contain a grain of truth. Sensing that his end was near, fleeing Tîrgovite for the Danube, Dracu
l turned to Cazan, his former chancellor, and asked that he remit to his son and heir, Vlad Dracula, two precious relics: the Toledo blade granted to him by Emperor Sigismund at Nuremberg in 1431, and the gold collar with the dragon insignia engraved upon it. Riding day and night from his estates in Oltenia, Cazan undertook this perilous journey, crossing the Danube in Dobruja, and reached Adrianople within five days at gallop speed. Cazan then handed Vlad Dracula the precious relics and gave him a detailed account of his father's and brother's brutal slayings. According to the story, Vlad Dracula then took an oath, witnessed only by the boyar, that henceforth he would not rest until he had avenged this crime and killed Vladislav II in person.
A first opportunity presented itself to the seventeen-year-old Vlad Dracula in 1448, as John Hunyadi was trying to rebuild an anti-Ottoman front along the Danube River. The Transylvanian governor crossed the Danube into Serbia during the month of September, and penetrated deep into Turkish territory, where he hoped to make a juncture with the army of the Albanian leader, a renegade Muslim and Dracula's former companion as a hostage, George Castriota. The sultan had been so impressed with Castriota's prowess that during his hostage years he named him Alexander (Iskander in Turkish) for Alexander the Great. To the name Iskander the sultan added the honorific title of “bey” (chieftain). When Castriota fled the Turkish court for Albania, his compatriots heard the words “Iskander bey” as “Skanderbeg,” and the name stuck. Skanderbeg, like Vlad Dracula in Wallachia, turned into one of the most ardent fighters for independence against the Turks.
During the first half of October, Hunyadi's Christian army reached the Serbian plateau known as Kosovo Polje, where the Serbs had suffered their historic defeat at the hands of Sultan Bayezid in 1389. While Hunyadi had advanced with his troops, Turkish spies and scouts, who functioned much better than those of Hunyadi, had informed the sultan's army of the exact position of the Christian troops. During three days (October 17, 18, and 19), the second battle of “the field of the Black Birds” took place. It resulted in a serious defeat for the Hungarian-led army and for the eight or nine thousand Wallachian soldiers under the command of Hunyadi's puppet, Vladislav II Dneti. The historian Chalcondyles referred to this when he wrote, “On the left wing was Dan [Vladislav II], who was his [John Hunyadi's] great friend, the one whom he had brought to the Dacian land because of his hatred toward Dracula.” As happened following the battle of Varna, Hunyadi was barely able to escape from the defeat at Kosovo; the rear guard of Skanderbeg's Albanians saved the remains of the army from total annihilation. As he tried to flee northward on foot, Skanderbeg was taken captive by the Serbian despot George Brankovi, who wanted to avenge himself because his principality had been looted during the southward passage of the Christian crusaders. Hunyadi was temporarily imprisoned by Brankovi in the Serbian fortress of Smederevo. He was freed only after promising to negotiate a marriage between his son Matthias and Elizabeth Cilli, the daughter-in-law of Brankovi.
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