1462 The Night Attack on Mehmet the Conqueror
When your nickname is Vlad the Impaler, and you are the inspiration for the bloodsucking Count Dracula, it is hard to imagine that you have a loyal historical following. In fact, Vlad III Drakulya, Prince of Wallachia, is a hero in the Christian lands of the Balkans which, in the fifteenth century, were being overrun by the Ottoman Turks. Vlad had his little ways — such as nailing turbans to the heads of Turkish emissaries and impaling or burning his less enthusiastic subjects — but his resistance to the Turks made him a folk hero.
In 1453, Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire, which had been for centuries a barrier to the expansion of Islam into Eastern Europe, fell to the forces of Mehmet II, nicknamed the Conqueror. Mehmet then turned on the minor princes of the Balkans — Serbs, Croats, Saxons, Albanians, Wallachians, Transylvanians, etc. — and demanded that they become his vassals. Most saw no option and paid tribute to the Turks, often serving in their armies. Like so many others, Vlad did the same, for a time, but by 1461 he had ceased to acknowledge the lordship of Mehmet and turned to the Catholic Hungarians for aid. Mehmet responded by invading Wallachia with a huge army of perhaps 150,000 men.
On the night of June 16-17 Vlad launched a night attack on Mehmet’s camp, hoping to capture or kill him. Fortunately for the Turks, the Wallachians struck at the tents of the emperor’s advisers and missed their main target. Vlad withdrew and Mehmet followed him to the vicinity of the town of Târgoviște. There they discovered a mass atrocity, designed to daunt the Turks. According to a contemporary Greek historian:
The sultan’s army entered into the area of the impalements, which was seventeen stades long and seven stades wide [about an acre in size]. There were large stakes there on which, as it was said, about twenty thousand men, women, and children had been spitted, quite a sight for the Turks and the sultan himself. The sultan was seized with amazement and said that it was not possible to deprive of his country a man who had done such great deeds, who had such a diabolical understanding of how to govern his realm and its people. And he said that a man who had done such things was worth much. The rest of the Turks were dumbfounded when they saw the multitude of men on the stakes. There were infants too affixed to their mothers on the stakes, and birds had made their nests in their entrails.
The Turks abandoned that campaign but continued to rack up victories in the Balkans. The treacherous politics of the area saw Vlad arrested by his fellow Christians and then restored briefly to power. He died in 1466 fighting the Turks who sent his head to Constantinople.
