Along with “scorched earth,” Dracula used guerrilla tactics, in which the elements of surprise and intimate knowledge of the terrain were the keys to success. The Italian traveler Michael Bocignoli reported, “Dracula, preparing his cavalry at night and sometimes even during the day, would often emerge from roundabout, relatively unknown paths and attack the stragglers foraging for food, who had departed from the main Turkish force. At times Dracula would even attack the main force when it least expected it, and, before they could rally, he would again take refuge in the forest without giving his enemy an opportunity to give battle on equal terms.” Stragglers who remained behind the main body of the Turkish force were invariably cut off, killed, and most likely impaled. One most insidious technique, almost unheard-of at that period, was what could truly be termed a fifteenth-century form of “germ” warfare. Dracula would encourage all those affected by lethal diseases, such as leprosy, tuberculosis, syphilis, and particularly the bubonic plague (which ultimately made its presence felt in the ranks of the Turkish army) to dress in Turkish fashion and intermingle with the soldiers. Should they perchance survive their illness, and be successful in contaminating any Turk who might die as a result of his catching the disease in question, it was sufficient to bring the dead man's turban back to Dracula's camp, and the infected Wallachian would be richly rewarded. In that same vein, Dracula set free hardened criminals, who were encouraged to kill Turkish stragglers.
Such tactics of attrition worked, as Dracula knew they would from his intimate knowledge of the Turks that he had gained as a child living among them. Not only were the resources (both in men and materiel) of the Turkish army greatly diminished, but the morale of the rank and file, the officers, and even that of the sultan declined under the strain. This general breakdown of will was to play an important part in Mehmed's eventual decision to withdraw.
The Turks advanced towards Tîrgovite along a path dictated by the necessity of providing fodder and water for horses and camels in addition to food for the men. The itinerary was probably as follows: from Turnu the Turks marched northward to the monastery of Glavacioc. Then they turned westward toward Bucharest, and northward again to the island monastery of Snagov—neither of which was captured. Finally they marched to the capital, Tîrgovite. Just before the sultan could reach Tîrgovite, Dracula staged a last-ditch night attack on the Turkish camp in an endeavor to kill the sultan himself. Given the low morale of the Turkish force, killing the sultan could prove to be the last straw; it could cause a total collapse in morale, which might compel the army to withdraw. It was a desperate gamble.
The so-called “night of attack” took place on June 17, 1462, and, according to the Turkish chronicler Enveri, it lasted from three hours after sunset until four the next morning, in a mountainous region south of Tîrgovite, thus at the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. The following is the pro-Romanian account of the event, attributed to a veteran in Dracula's army, but possibly dictated by Dracula himself. It was recorded later by the papal legate Niccolò Modrussa in conversation with Dracula in Buda, and was transmitted in a diplomatic dispatch to the Roman curia:
The sultan besieged him and discovered him in a certain mountain where the Wallachian was supported by the natural strength of the place. There Dracula had hidden himself along with 24,000 of his men who had willingly followed him. When Dracula realized that he would either perish from hunger or fall into the hands of the very cruel enemy, and considering both eventualities unworthy of brave men, he dared commit an act worthy of being remembered: calling his men together and explaining the situation to them, he easily persuaded them to enter the enemy camp. He divided the men so that either they should die bravely in battle with glory and honor or else, should destiny prove favorable to them, they should avenge themselves against the enemy in an exceptional manner. So, making use of some Turkish prisoners, who had been caught at twilight when they were wandering about imprudently, at nightfall Dracula penetrated into the Turkish camp with part of his troops, all the way up the fortifications. And during the entire night he sped like lightning in every direction and caused great slaughter, so much so that, had the other commander to whom he had entrusted his remaining forces been equally brave, or had the Turks not fully obeyed the repeated orders from the sultan not to abandon their garrisons, the Wallachian undoubtedly would have gained the greatest and most brilliant victory. But the other commander (a boyar named Gale) did not dare attack the camp from the other side as had been agreed upon.… Dracula carried out an incredible massacre without losing many men in such a major encounter, though many were wounded. He abandoned the enemy camp before daybreak and returned to the same mountain from which he had come. No one dared pursue him, since he had caused such terror and turmoil. I learned by questioning those who had participated in this battle that the sultan lost all confidence in the situation. During that night the sultan abandoned the camp and fled in a shameful manner. And he would have continued to this way, had he not been reprimanded by his friends and brought back, almost against his will.
Modrussa reported that had Dracula's commander Gale's courage been equal to Dracula's, or had the Turks wavered in their response to the sultan to stay at their command posts, the Wallachian “would have undoubtedly won a great victory.”
Chalcondyles gives a slightly different version of these events, adding a few details of his own. According to the Greek chronicler, Dracula rushed into the Turkish camp with some seven to ten thousand troops and was able to drive the Asian troops backward. Aided by torches and flares, the Romanians tried to reach the sultan's red tent. But they mistakenly went for the tent of two viziers, Mahmud and Isaac. This error and the noise created gave the Ottoman cavalry time to mount their horses and the janissary guards surrounded the sultan's tent for protection. The sultan was alerted, and the janissaries warded off Dracula's attack. The sultan then ordered his janissaries to rally under Mihalolu Ali Bey and pursue Dracula and his troops. As a result, 2,000 Wallachian soldiers were taken prisoner, and Dracula himself may have been wounded. Even the Janissary of Ostrovitza, who was an eyewitness to the event, was not altogether successful in playing down the psychological impact of the event as he wrote: “Although the Romanian prince had a small army, we always advanced with great caution and fear and spent nights sleeping in ditches. But even in this manner we were not safe; for during one night the Romanians struck at us. They massacred horses, camels, and several thousand Turks. When the Turks had retreated in the face of the enemy, we [the janissaries] repelled the enemy and killed them. But the sultan had incurred great losses.” Given such testimony, the losses incurred by the Turks were undoubtedly heavy. According to Domenico Balbi, Dracula lost 5,000 men and the Turks 15,000, although these figures appear rather high and may have included minor skirmishes that followed the actual night attack. In any event, the night attack was an act of extraordinary temerity, which is celebrated in Romanian literature and popular folklore. It also represented Dracula's last attempt to save his capital.
A few days later the sultan was ready to attack Dracula's capital city of Tîrgovite, his main objective. The gates of the city were closed and defenders were ready to man the walls and towers recently refortified by Dracula for precisely such a contingency. With the cannons in place, the city was prepared for a prolonged siege. According to Chalcondyles, as the advance guard of the Turkish army reached a site 27 leagues north of the city (a distance of roughly 60 miles), they reported a most gruesome sight, perhaps the most infamous of all Dracula's “horror scenes,” the so-called forest of the impaled. Strung along a mile or so in picket-fence fashion in a huge semicircle, thousands of stakes of various heights held the remaining carcasses of some 20,000 Turkish captives; their bodies were in a state of complete decomposition, due to the heat of the summer and the ravages of ravens and other Carpathian birds of prey, many of which had made their nests within the skulls and skeletal remains of the victims. Barely recognizable because of the higher stakes used in deferenc
e to their position were the remains of the Greek Catavolinos and Hamza Pasha, who had been impaled months before. The tattered remains of their gaudy vestments fluttered against the evening sky. The entire area reeked with the stench of death—the smell of rotting flesh.
Dracula had deliberately stage-managed this sinister spectacle as part of his terror tactics to destroy whatever spirit was still left in Mehmed after the unsuccessful assassination attempt a few days before. Indeed, “the forest of the impaled” was horrible enough to discourage even the most stout-hearted officers who witnessed the scene. Mehmed himself all but admitted defeat, in a statement reproduced by Chalcondyles, which included mixed sentiments of awe and admiration: “What a desolate spectacle this was for the Turks and even for the emperor himself! So overwhelmed by disbelief in what he saw, the emperor said that he could not take the land away from a man who does such marvelous things and can exploit his rule and his subjects in this way and that surely a man who had accomplished this is worthy of greater things.” Confusing sultans at several centuries’ distance, and giving the sultan credit for an aggressive response never made in reality, Victor Hugo, writing his Légende des Siècles (The Legend of the Centuries), recalls this particular incident in these famous lines:
Vlad, boyar of Tarxis, nicknamed “the Devil”,
Refuses to pay the sultan tribute,
Seizes the Turkish ambassadors and has all of them killed
On thirty stakes, planted at the side of the road.
Murad rushes forth, burning crops, barns, and lofts,
Defeats the boyar, captures twenty thousand men.
Then around the huge black battlefield
Constructs a huge wall built of solid rock
And causes horrible wailing cries heard in the battlements
Where he immured and bricked in the twenty thousand captives,
Leaving holes so that one might see their eyes in the shade,
And departed, having written on their somber walls,
“Murad, carver of stones, to Vlad, planter of stakes.”
In actuality, that night the sultan ordered that an especially deep trench be dug around the Turkish encampment to keep out the Impaler. The next day Mehmed gave orders for the retreat. In his eyes, Dracula's country was not worth the price of victory.
As the Turkish army retreated eastward toward Brila, where the Turkish fleet weighed anchor, plague began to make its appearance in the Turkish ranks. To the sultan, who regularly consulted astrologers, it seemed as if he and his men were under Dracula's curse.
Despite this retreat, in late June (June 22) the war took a curious twist, as Dracula's cousin Stephen took this opportunity to betray the man who had helped him gain his throne. With Turkish help, he attacked the fortress of Chilia, which was in the hands of a joint Wallachian and Hungarian garrison. Let us recall that the two families were related by marriage; the two cousins had spent several years at Suceava as students; they had fought side-by-side against Poland at the battle of Crasna in 1450; they had fled to Transylvania in each other's company after Stephen's father's assassination in 1451. On June 28, the Venetian envoy Balbi informed his senate that the fortress of Chilia was attacked by Stephen's army, which had been waiting to effect a juncture with the Turkish feet. “They besieged the town,” he wrote, “during 8 days but could do nothing. Many Turks died in the process. Then they returned in shame, defeated by the Hungarian garrison and Dracula's 7,000 men.” In the course of the attack Stephen was hit by a piece of shrapnel, which wounded his left calf so profoundly, or else was so badly doctored, that he never recovered from that wound to the end of his life. The superstitious peasants stated that that was to be his punishment for the betrayal of Dracula, if not the result of the Wallachian prince's curse.
The conflict between Dracula and Stephen, which has elicited much controversy among Romanian historians, has a simple explanation. Stephen had his own priorities—he was less interested in treaty obligations than in assuring the survival of Moldavia, should the fortress of Chilia fall to the Turks. Besides, there was a Hungarian contingent at Chilia, along with the Wallachian troops, and Stephen was at odds with the Hungarian king. Matthias Corvinus had, as previously mentioned, given political asylum to Stephen's father's assassin, Petru Aaron. (The Chilia episode also was important for Matthias. Since Hungarian forces were involved in fighting the Turks, he had a pretext, albeit a weak one, to justify acceptance of the papal subsidies, which were intended to foster the crusade.)
On June 29, during the month of Ramadan, the sultan's army reached Brila and had that port burned as a final act of defiance. By July 11, the sultan and his bedraggled troops arrived in Adrianople. The troops marched into the city late at night (most of the horses and camels had perished) for fear of arousing the suspicions of the local population, who would have suspected that the campaign had ended in failure. Next morning, festivities were held to commemorate the “great victory over Dracula”! The army finally returned to Constantinople, where the thin and haggard faces of the returning veterans could hardly mask the severity of the defeat that they had suffered. Court historians persisted,
however, in representing Mehmed as having won a great victory against the faithless Impaler!
There can be no question that Sultan Mehmed had suffered the most humiliating defeat of his career at the hands of Dracula, and that his plans to reduce Wallachia to a Turkish province had failed dismally—as had projects of further expansionism in central Europe. This did not necessarily signify that Dracula had won the war. A deft move made by Mehmed was to leave his protégé Radu the Handsome with a small contingent of Turkish soldiers in the Brgan region of Wallachia to attempt to win over the boyars, the townspeople, and the peasants at large; he was to try to convince them to recognize him as prince of the land in Dracula's place. The Turks in turn would respect the ancient autonomy of the country as they had done before, on the condition that Radu would recognize Mehmed as his sovereign lord. Nothing, in fact, was to be changed in the Wallachian-Turkish relationship except the person of the prince, since Dracula was clearly unacceptable to the Turks.
What Sultan Mehmed had failed to do by military force, Radu and the boyars eventually succeeded in achieving by diplomacy—though the freedom of Wallachia had in essence been ensured by Dracula's stubborn resistance. It is conceivable that Radu had strengthened his links with the boyar hierarchy by marrying, according to the late George Florescu, one of Romania's leading genealogists, Maria Despina, the sister of Vintil Florescu, a prominent enemy of Dracula, who had quit or been expelled from the boyar council when Dracula became prince in 1456.
Prince Radu (the future Radu the Handsome) has far too often been dismissed by historians as just an attractive bisexual youth with a finely chiseled face, regular features, and particularly beautiful green-blue eyes that had helped to win the heart of two successive sultans, but a man totally lacking in intelligence and statesmanship. Clearly the sultan's minion, he was showered with gifts by Mehmed and maintained a small court of his own at Constantinople throughout the campaign, composed in part of Wallachian boyars. Though there was initially no thought on the sultan's part of establishing Radu on the throne, Dracula's brother had exploited his presence at the sultan's side in Wallachia since the beginning of the campaign, by contacting dissident boyars; he made it his business to keep informed of what they were thinking through a network of spies and other sycophants. It was probably at his suggestion that dissident boyar delegations began to appear in the sultan's camp as of the first week of June, urging Mehmed to rid the country of the heinous Impaler and replace him with his attractive and peace-loving brother. Moreover, they alleged, Dracula was the candidate of the Hungarian king, Matthias (a fact of which the Turks had of course been aware since the peace treaty of 1460), whereas Radu would be loyal to his natural liege lord, the sultan, with whom he was tied by bonds deeper than friendship. Arguments such as these may well have given Mehmed his cue when his campaign against Dracula bega
n to fail.
Radu's appeal to the Wallachian people from his headquarters in the Brgan, paraphrased by the historian Chalcondyles, provides further proof of his astute political and propagandistic instincts and also demonstrates his attitude of “sweet reasonableness.”
I am aware of the mighty forces that the sultan controls, which sooner or later he will use to lay waste what remains of your country. If we continue to oppose him, we shall be despoiled of all that is left to us. Why do you not reach an agreement with Sultan Mehmed? Only then will you have peace in the land and in your homes. Are you aware that there are no cattle, no horses, no farm animals, no food left in this country? Surely you have borne such sufferings long enough because of my brother, because you were loyal to this man who was responsible for more suffering than any other prince.
Dracula, Prince of Many Faces Page 21