Dracula, Prince of Many Faces by Radu R Florescu & Raymond T. McNally

Author:Radu R Florescu & Raymond T. McNally [FLORESCU, RADU R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316092265
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-11-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

The Struggle Against Mehmed the Conqueror

THE war between Dracula “the Impaler” and Mehmed II “the Conqueror” was bound to happen; the only question was the timing. Having grown up with Mehmed, Dracula was aware of the sultan's insatiable desire for conquests and his great ambition to be ruler of all Europe as well as Asia. Mehmed had declared, after all: “I am young and rich and favored by fortune, so I intend to surpass Caesar, Alexander, and Hannibal by far.” He planned to strike at the pillars of European civilization and bring it tumbling down into his control. Though Dracula ruled a comparatively small country, he was quite as determined and proud as the sultan himself. And he was not about to give in without a struggle to the sultan's designs on his country.

Dracula realized that he had to avoid a two-front war at all costs. It would be difficult enough fighting the Turkish army, which would outnumber his own three to one, without having to worry about an attack from the west by the Germans of Transylvania or their allies. This was one of the major reasons behind Dracula's decision to seek a permanent peace with Transylvania. Indeed, he hoped to secure Hungarian and Saxon help in his crusade against the infidel Turks. Perhaps little did he realize that the European Christians had no deep sense of a need to unify against the Turkish onslaught, while the Turks were inflamed by the idea of the Holy War of Islam. After all, if you were a Christian who fell in battle, you no longer had the assurance that you would go to heaven as in the heyday of crusading, but if you were a Muslim, there was absolute certainty that if you died in a war for the spread of Islam, your soul would be propelled to an earthlike paradise, where lovely young maidens would serve you tasty drinks.

The Dracula campaign of 1462 must be evaluated in its European context. After the failure of the sultan's army to take Belgrade in 1456, the sultan's immediate aim was to consolidate and stabilize the front by securing the banks of the Danube River at the very least. This meant not only a renewed attempt to capture Belgrade but also control of the mouth of the Danube, the western coast of the Black Sea, and such strategic fortresses as Chilia and Akkerman, technically in Moldavian territory. One of the sultan's janissary commanders, who has left us a remarkable account of the Turco-Wallachian struggle, simply identifies himself as “the Janissary of Ostrovitza” (a site in present-day Yugoslavia). He stated the problem in a soldier's unsophisticated language: “You, my happy master, must know that so long as Chilia and Akkerman are in the hands of the Romanians and the Hungarians possess the fortress of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, we shall not be able to conquer the Balkans.” The sultan accepted this advice, and in this respect he was thinking in remarkably modern strategic terms: control of the Danube and the Black Sea were in fact interrelated.

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