In 1459, Pope Pius II called on Christendom to summon a new crusade against the Ottoman Turks. Mehmed II – the Sultan known as ‘the Conqueror’, who six years earlier had conquered Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine empire – had extended Ottoman rule deep into the Balkans, occupying Bosnia, Serbia, and Peloponnesian Greece, while Albania continued to resist. But despite Pius’ invitation to take up arms, every major European state made its excuses. The French King could do nothing until relations with England had improved. The German Emperor could not depend on his princes. The Polish King was fighting the Teutonic Order. The Venetians asked for too much money.
Only Vlad Dracula was prepared to face the Turkish hordes. He was the voivode (military governor, or prince) of Wallachia – the historical region north of the Lower Danube and south of the Carpathian mountains, and one of four neighbouring provinces (with Transylvania, Moldavia, and Dobrudja) that make up present-day Romania. Born in 1431, Dracula was the son of Vlad Dracul, or ‘Vlad the Dragon’ – a loyal and successful knight who gained his sobriquet when he was made a member of the Order of the Dragon by his powerful patron, Sigismund of Luxembourg (the holder of several Central European crowns, including that of King of Hungary, and later also to be Holy Roman Emperor); Dracula simply means ‘son of Dracul’. As a teenager, the younger Vlad had been given as a hostage to the Turks to ensure his father’s loyalty, and during his captivity he learned much about the ways of Turkish warfare.
By the spring of 1462, Mehmed II had raised a 60,000-strong army to strike back at the defiant Wallachian prince. It included elite units known as Janissaries (from the Turkish word for ‘new soldier’) and Turkish soldiers from Asia Minor, as well as 4,000 auxiliary Wallachian horsemen, among them exiled boyars (members of the highest rank of the feudal nobility), led by Radu, Dracula’s younger brother, who had also been held hostage by the Turks and had remained loyal to them. The Sultan considered Dracula’s submissive brother an excellent candidate for the Wallachian throne. The realisation of what faced him spurred Dracula to gather an army of some 30,000 in number. His own boyars and their retainers were augmented by Wallachian and Bulgarian peasants. Men who distinguished themselves in battle were instantly promoted to officer rank. These viteji, or ‘braves’, shaped the unprofessional mass into an army.
Excavating Wiltshire