Dracula, Prince of Many Faces
Page 11
Stargazing and defeatist oracles had less to do with the pessimism of those who were in the know than the statistical fact the Constantinople simply did not have enough able-bodied men to cover fourteen miles (nine miles facing the sea and five miles facing land) of walls and towers originally built by Emperor Heraclius in the seventh century. The total population of the city had shrunk from over a million in its heyday to about 50,000 to 60,000, many of whom were members of the clergy, in 1453. When the Turks began their operations against the city during that spring, a multinational army of at most 18,000 or 20,000 poorly equipped men (Greeks, Genoese, Florentines, Catalans, Venetians, a papal contingent, and other small groups from many states) was all that the emperor could muster. The army was supported by a small fleet of sixteen fighting ships (five Venetian, five Genoese, three from Crete, a colony of Venice, one from Ancona, one from Catalonia, one from Provence) — altogether a force totally inadequate to protect the straits and the coast. The best that could be improvised was a boom composed of chains that stretched from the seaward wall facing the Sea of Marmora to the Genoese colony of Galata to the north of the city. The only secret weapon still used by the Byzantines was a mysterious explosive combustible compound known as “Greek fire,” which was placed in a tube and flung by hand to the decks of the defensive fleet, to set the attacking Turkish galleys on fire.
Sultan Mehmed was very boldly determined to challenge the alleged supremacy of the Greco-Venetian defensive fleet by means of a gamble he was not quite certain of being able to carry out. He went to war de facto by declaring the Bosporus — the narrow neck of water that separates the Black Sea from the Sea of Marmora — closed to those ships of all nations who refused to pay a fee. In order to enforce this decree, the sultan decided to build a formidable fortress on the European side of the Bosporus (a smaller one had already been constructed on the Asiatic side a few years before). Completed at breakneck speed within five months, it soon became known as “Cutthroat Castle,” because it stood at the narrowest point of the Bosporus and could thus bombard any vessels trying to sail through to Constantinople. The noose around the neck of Constantinople thus began in advance to tighten; the process of cutting off the imperial city from the west had begun early. To counter whatever strategic and technological advantages the Greek fleet and its allies may have possessed, Mehmed was determined to experiment with a revolutionary use of military hardware to launch his offensive.
The invention of gunpowder and the destructive capacities of the cannon had always fascinated him. He learned from his father that cannon fire had been used with remarkable success by Prince Mircea, Dracula's brother, during the Varna campaign, at the siege of Petretz in Bulgaria and later by Vlad Dracul at the siege of Giurgiu in 1445. Intrigued by the success of the Wallachians and others, Mehmed had also learned that some of these mobile guns had been manufactured in the cannon foundries at Braov by craftsmen who would sell their services to whoever paid them most. Among such cannon forgers was a certain Urban, who had offered to build a cannon foundry at Constantinople for Emperor Constantine XI. The bid was rejected by the emperor, who could not meet Urban's steep price. The circumstances that brought Urban's name to the attention of Sultan Mehmed are unknown, but when Urban met the sultan, a deal was quickly struck. Mehmed asked Urban a simple question: “What is the largest cannon that you can construct that would be capable of battering down the huge walls that Emperor Heraclius built?” Upon being given the specifics, the sultan told Urban he could name his price. As in the case of “Cutthroat Castle,” a monstrous cannon nicknamed the “Basilica” (a play on words with the Greek imperial title Basileus) was built at record speed. The cannon was 27 feet long, had a 48-inch bore, and was capable of firing projectiles weighting 600 pounds, propelled by 150 pounds of gunpowder. The weight of Basilica was such that it required 700 men and 15 pair of oxen to pull it for its initial test shot in the vicinity of Adrianople. It is said that the shot left a crater six feet deep and that the attending noise and smoke was so intense that it created panic among the villagers nearby. This cannon had limited value because of the effort required to move it into place, the need for trained western experts to man it, and the fact that it could be fired only seven times in twenty-four hours because of the danger of exploding due to overheating. However, in the long run the Sultan's faith in the effectiveness of cannon fire was justified, since it helped soften the defenses of Constantinople and created irreparable breaches in both the walls and the outer fortifications.
The disparity between the Ottoman and Byzantine forces has been overplayed by all the Greek historians of the period in order to capture the attention of potential western leaders. In actual. fact, the regular Turkish army was composed of no more than 100,000 men — roughly divided into 60,000 Asiatic cavalrymen, 10,000 janissaries, and 20,000 camp followers. In addition, there were various vassal contingents, numbering about 10,000. The fleet included one hundred triremes (three oarsmen to a bench) and some long sailing ships used for attack in the manner of a modern torpedo boat. Since the Turks were never particularly famous for their seamanship, their fleet was manned by Christian recruits. The grand admiral of the Turkish navy happened to be of Bulgarian origin. By a clever ploy, the latter circumvented the iron chain that the Byzantines had laid to close the entry of the golden gate, by transporting most of the fleet overland, beyond the Genoese-inhabited suburb of Pera, thus enabling it to bombard the seaward walls of the city effectively.
So, on Monday, May 28, 1453, an ominous silence settled on the beleaguered city, where hopes of relief were rapidly dwindling away. Some citizens foolishly entertained the thought of a miracle such as that Mehmed and his troops might suddenly melt away and abandon the siege. In fact, the sultan had declared that last Monday before the final attack to be a day of rest. Thus, the loud sounds of the Turkish siege had stopped, not because it had failed, but precisely because the siege had been successful to that point. In Mehmed's view, the city walls had been sufficiently weakened by earlier cannonshot to allow for the final assault. To counteract this Turkish quietness, the emperor ordered the church bells rung and the liturgy to be celebrated in both Latin and Greek in the Cathedral of St. Sophia. For the previous five months, no pious Orthodox Christian had set foot in that church, ever since the hated union had been proclaimed there on December 12, 1452. But now, on that Monday, May 28, past differences and hatred were forgotten. Together Italians and Greeks, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians went to confession, took communion, and sang the Kyrie Eleison, “Lord, have mercy!” For one brief moment the union of churches became a reality.
At half past one in the morning on Tuesday, May 29, the sultan himself ordered the final assault. As predicted, a waning moon hung in the sky. First the sultan's European mercenaries charged the walls. There followed the assault of the sultan's bodyguards, who had their weapons raised to kill any of the mercenaries who might become cowardly. Behind them marched the elite troops, the janissaries, with their military band blaring tunes to a rapid marching beat. After them the regular Turkish soldiers stormed the walls. For a while it seemed as if the walls just might hold.
Rosenbach Foundation Museum
Woodcut frontispiece of Dracole Waida, Nuremberg, c. 1488, a manuscript that begins “In the year of our Lord 1456 Dracula did many dreadful and curious things…”
With Permission of Cristian Popiteanu, editor of Magazinul Istoric, Bucharest
Portrait presumed to be of Vlad Dracul, Dracula's father. It was discovered during the restoration of the Dracula homestead in Sighioara in 1976 and is evidently a seventeenth-century copy of an earlier portrait. At present it is located in the Sighioara Historical Museum. A copy of the Ambras portrait of Dracula in the upper right corner reveals the likeness to Dracula.
Courtesy of Nuremberg Castle Tourist Center
The “Knight's Hall” where Vlad Dracul was given the insignia of prince of Wallachia by the Holy Roman Emperor, in the presence of a few dissident boyars
, on February 8, 1431.
Library of the Academy of the Romanian Socialist Republic, Bucharest
Seventeenth-century print of Sighioara showing the fortress and the clock tower at the top of the hill where Dracula's homestead is located. From an Album of Sighioara published in Bucharest in 1965.
Library of the Academy of the Romanian Socialist Republic, Bucharest
John Hunyadi (1387-1456), ban of Severin (1438-1441), prince of Transylvania, hereditary count of Timisoara and Bistria, governor-general and regent of Hungary (1444-1453). Father of King Matthias Corvinus, he was known as the “White Knight” of the Christian crusaders. Nineteenth-century print by Sebastian Langer.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Ladislas V, nicknamed “Posthumus,” king of Hungary (1444-1457). Anonymous contemporary painting of the Austrian school.
Photograph by co-authors
Castle Hunedoara, Hunyadi's headquarters in Transylvania.
Library of the Academy of the Romanian Socialist Republic, Bucharest
Seventeenth-century engraving of the fortress of Belgrade on the Danube, showing the upper and lower castle by the artist Milos Crnjanski.
Photograph by co-authors
Main entrance over what was formerly a drawbridge to the fortress of Belgrade.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The best known of Dracula's portraits, located at the “Monster Gallery” at Castle Ambras (near Innsbruck). It is a copy, painted anonymously during the second half of the sixteenth century, of an unknown original. The original portrait was probably painted during Dracula's imprisonment at Buda or Visegrád after 1462. First listed in the Ambras collection in 1621.
Photograph by co-authors
Chindia Watchtower, the only nineteenth-century reconstruction of Dracula's original palace at Tîrgovite, now largely in ruins. Apart from its role as an observation post, it also enabled Dracula to watch the impalements going on in the courtyard below.
Photograph by co-authors
Eerie remaining wall of Dracula's famous castle on the Arge, before restoration.
Library of the Academy of the Romanian Socialist Republic, Bucharest
Seventeenth-century engraving of Braov (Kronstadt or Cronstad in German) as it existed in Dracula's time, showing the city walls and defensive towers as well as Tîmpa Hill where many of Dracula's atrocities were committed.
Photograph by co-authors
Castle Bran. Originally a fortress of the Teutonic Order founded in 1212 and known as Dietrichstein, it was taken over by the German Saxons to protect Braov at the end of the thirteenth century. Briefly under the rule of Prince Mircea, it was given by Emperor Sigismund to the princes of Transylvania and eventually to the city of Braov. It is often mistaken for Castle Dracula.
But the sultan ordered the elite troops to renew the attack. At the Saint Romanus gate a giant named Hassan breached the walls first and was killed. But other janissaries followed. The Byzantine emperor himself, Constantine XI, was last seen at that very Saint Romanus gate, having thrown away his royal robe, fighting like a common foot soldier. He died a martyr, like a captain who would not desert his sinking ship.
When the Turks finally overran the city, they ripped people's clothing off to use as ropes to bind captives together. In the great cathedral of St. Sophia the priests were still celebrating the morning mass when the Turkish invaders arrived. According to legend, the celebrants were seen to disappear into the southern interior wall of the cathedral with their chalices still in hand; the walls closed behind them. Prophets predicted that these walls would reopen only on the day when Constantinople became a Christian city again, which has not happened thus far.
Sultan Mehmed II waited until the traditional three days of looting had passed (about 4,000 people were killed and 50,000 men, women and children enslaved) and then entered the city. He rode straight to the cathedral of St. Sophia, went to the altar, and intoned the Muslim prayer, “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His Prophet.” The capture of Constantinople had been a Muslim goal almost as old as that religion itself. It was believed that the Prophet Mohammed had said, “Blessed be he who conquers Constantinople.” Henceforth Mehmed II became known by the Turkish epithet Fatih, meaning “Conqueror.” The Ottoman Empire was now geographically part of Europe, though Europeans still could not accept that fact, because the Turks were not Christians.
The fall of Constantinople, a metropolis that had been isolated by the Turks ever since their conquest of most of the Balkans, was one of the great turning points of history, equal to the later fall of the monarchy in France in 1789 or the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, which marked the birth of a new era. Certainly, Pope Nicholas V, who had done little more than equip three Genoese galleys loaded with weapons and food for the beleaguered city, thought of the “fall” as one of the world's major calamities when he wrote, “The light of Christianity had suddenly gone out. We shall not see it again in our lifetime.” This sense of personal guilt undoubtedly shortened the pope's life. Equally perturbed was the humanist Enea Silvio de' Piccolomini, who also lamented the massacre of his fellow Christians. The future Pope Pius II, however, laid emphasis on another aspect of the tragedy, calling it “the second death of Homer and Plato,” since it was Greek-speaking civilization that had fallen. When news reached Paris and London of this calamitous event, King Charles VII of France and Henry VI of England ordered their respective courts to go into mourning. Even in distant Moscow, the bells of the church at the Kremlin tolled, as requiem masses were held in memory of fellow Orthodox martyrs.
Most immediately affected, though, by the Turkish conquest were the neighboring states, Vladislav II's Wallachia in the first instance, Transylvania, under the watch of Vlad Dracula and Hunyadi, and, of course, Hungary, under its inexperienced Ladislas V Posthumus. More distant in a geographic sense, though by virtue of traditions and status deeply committed to the defense of the Christian world against the Ottoman, was the newly crowned (in 1452) Holy Roman Emperor of the German states, Frederick III, who had just returned from Rome with his young Portuguese bride Eleanor, fortified by the prestige of a papal coronation. However, Frederick III, though he expressed pious words of sympathy, was far more concerned with the consolidation of his power in Europe, preserving his ascendency over Ladislas V Posthumus and launching a crusade against the heretic king of Bohemia, George Podbrady, a closer threat than that presented by Mehmed II.
While details about the fall of Constantinople reached western Europe only after months of delay, news about the extent and horror of the catastrophe was brought to all the Romanian provinces from the beginning of the siege by a steady flow of refugees who inevitably had to pass through these frontier lands. Among the first were a number of Venetian sailors who had survived the sinking of their galley in the Sea of Marmora by swimming ashore to the Thracian coast. They had made their way through Bulgaria, being given food and shelter by the native population, crossed the Danube through Wallachia, and headed toward their homeland through the Transylvania pass at Turnu Rou after passing through Sibiu, Dracula's command post. Among countless stories of sufferings and atrocities, they related how those of their shipmates who were captured by the Turks were impaled by order of the Sultan on stakes planted in full view of the beleaguered city. This act was aimed at persuading the citizens to surrender without a struggle; then, in accordance with custom, the Turks could show leniency toward the population. The description of this gruesome scenario raised a few eyebrows, though impalement was known to and used by the German Saxons as a form of punishment for capital offenses.
One ruler who was kept precisely informed of events in Constantinople was Vladislav II in Tîrgovite, because he had had a boyar observer permanently attached to the sultan's court since Mehmed's accession in 1451. An invaluable informant in Tîrgovite was a Romanian bishop called Samuil, who managed to escape from Constantinople after its conquest, reaching the Wallachian capital toward the end of June 1453. He was rec
eived in audience by the prince, and one can assume that Vladislav's increasingly pro-Turkish stance was a result of this meeting, since the bishop described in vivid details the kind of punishment inflicted by the sultan on his enemies. Bishop Samuil also sent one of Vladislav's boyars with a letter addressed to the mayor of Sibiu, to inform the Saxons of the ultimate aims of Mehmed. Bishop Samuil warned the mayor, Oswald Wenzel, that “the Turks will eventually subdue all of Christianity if God will allow it. … They will next conquer the lands [meaning Belgrade] of the despot George Brankovi of Serbia. … They also say that the city of Sibiu, which lies on their path, must be destroyed.” Since his own city was specifically mentioned, the mayor of Sibiu became very alarmed: “Sibiu, Sibiu,” he wrote in desperation, “why, this is Hermannstadt [the German name of the town]! … Turkish conquest of our fortress will mean not only the conquest of Hungary but that of all of Christianity.” He appealed to Hunyadi, commander-in-chief of the region, to Ladislas V Posthumus, the king of Hungary, to Vlad Dracula, who had made his headquarters in the town, to the mayor and city council of Vienna, and to the Holy Roman Emperor himself for help.