by Dan Davis
Walt laughed to see it. We sat on our horses in the courtyard as the Wallachians took their revenge. “You remember capturing a castle with such ease before?”
“Never,” said Rob.
“I am sure I must have done,” I said.
“What a bunch of gooseberries, Richard,” Walt said. “Never was a fortress so swiftly taken as this, not never. Got to hand it to your boy, Dracula don’t muck about.”
“There he is now,” I said. “Come on.”
I rode toward Vlad as he was issuing orders to his captains. The valuable prisoners were bound and bloody on the floor.
“You shall march these men to Târgoviște,” Vlad said, pointing his bloody sword down at them, “and there impale them outside the walls. The longest of stakes shall be reserved for you, Hamza, and you, Catavolinos. I will see your rotting corpses there when I return.”
“You are not going with them?” I asked.
Vlad turned and laughed, ejecting a great plume of steam. “The Danube is frozen, Richard! We can cross it at will. I shall send for thousands of horsemen and together we shall raid Bulgaria until the spring thaw.”
“What shall we accomplish?” I asked. “William is coming with an army large enough to conquer your kingdom. We should rest the men through the winter.”
“The Turk has ravaged our border and so we will ravage his. We shall weaken him and only grow in strength. Let Mehmed come. Let Zaganos Pasha bring his Janissaries. We shall reduce every point of strength on the border. Every point. God is with us and so we shall begin.”
I turned to my men, who shrugged.
“Who wants to be warm, anyway?” Walt muttered.
It was as Vlad said. We crossed and re-crossed the great river at a hundred points along its length. We surprised the Turks at every point, from Serbia all the way to the delta on the border of Moldavia. We broke into smaller companies for certain raids so that we could strike at a dozen places at once. When we needed to attack a larger enemy position we assembled more of our number so that we always had the upper hand. We lived off the land, taking what we needed from the villages and fortresses that we attacked and burned. The damage we wrought in a single winter was remarkable.
In order to keep a tally of those killed, Vlad ordered that heads or at least noses and ears be cut off and counted. Our soldiers competed to outdo each other in how many noses and ears they could collect.
In February, we came together back at Giurgiu and took stock of the destruction.
“It is time that we informed our overlord Mattias Corvinus of these matters,” Vlad said in the great hall after hearing twenty reports. “Are you ready to take a letter? It is to say the following. I, Vlad III Dracula, have killed men and women, both young and old, who lived at Oblucitza and Novoselo where the Danube flows into the sea, up to Rahova which is near Chilia, from the lower Danube up to such places as Samovit and Ghighen. It is a fact that I have killed… how many was it?”
A clerk referred to the tally he had earlier recorded and cleared his throat before answering. “Twenty-three thousand, eight hundred and eighty-four, my lord.”
“I have killed that number of Turks and Bulgars, but this is not counting those that we burned inside their homes and those whose heads were not struck off by my men. Thus, Your Highness should know that I have broken peace with Mehmed II. That is all, add no more, do not include any of your niceties. Have it taken at once to Buda.”
We hoped that we had done enough damage to delay the invasion or at least hinder it. Most of all, Vlad had scored a moral victory over our enemies by striking the first blow and it was a victory that had to be answered. We knew by then that Mehmed and William were in Greece, engaged in reducing Corinth but he sent another wazir, Mahmud, to conduct a raid in force across the river.
They had almost twenty thousand men and they struck first the port of Brila on our side of the Danube. We brought the army down and trailed them, looking for a good place to intercept. All the while the Turks marched and looted through the lowlands, repaying our winter raids.
“We must stop them,” I said, watching smoke rise above the trees in the distance. “What was all of this for if not to stop precisely this?”
“Have patience, Richard,” Vlad said. “I knew my people would bleed. We shall destroy them utterly but it must be at the right moment.”
“But we could drive them off now,” I said. “We have enough men for that.”
“I do not wish to drive them off. The entire army must be destroyed.”
Whispering to Eva in the dark, I said that Dracula would not listen to reason. “He wants nothing less than a stunning victory.”
“He is vain,” Eva muttered. “He says he will abase himself, suffer any ignominy, for the sake of his people. But he is a man like William at heart, who seeks greatness at the expense of decency and virtue. Greatness no matter the cost.”
“What if he seeks greatness through the preservation of his people?”
Eva sighed. “When those come into conflict, which will he seek more?”
“You think he will choose himself over his people?”
“I think you should go to sleep.”
Vlad waited and waited. And then, when it was almost too late, he ordered us into battle. In fact, it was only as the Turkish army of Wazir Mahmud headed back to cross the Danube at Brila that we finally launched the crushing assault Vlad had been planning for.
The Turks were loaded with Wallachian prisoners that they would make into slaves, along with tons of stolen food, wine, gold, weapons and everything they could carry on wagon and horse. Drunk on their riches, they camped by the river and prepared to ferry their piles of booty across.
It was there that Dracula got his stunning victory. We killed ten thousand Turks in that battle, shattering their army utterly.
And then in May 1462 we heard that Zaganos Pasha and Sultan Mehmed were coming.
***
The Turks needed their vast fleet on the Danube in order to supply and support their army and enable the crossing of the men and horses from Bulgaria and so to hinder them we had destroyed the ports along the river and deployed our men in certain strong garrisons. All our efforts then were turned toward discovering where the crossing would be made. We baited our traps by leaving certain regions lightly defended but William was cunning when it came to such things. We did not even know if they would cross in one place or divide to cross at multiple points and either join up or launch a series of smaller armies. Each one still might be larger than the entire Wallachian army all together.
Keeping up with the enemy troop movements on the other side certainly stressed our captains on the river but it had to be done. We needed to be able to respond quickly to the invasion in order to have a hope of stopping it before it reached Târgoviște.
We soon had word from our agents and spies that the Turks were bringing close to a hundred thousand men. This was as large an army as they could ever realistically supply in the field and so it showed Mehmed was determined to conquer Wallachia once and for all. It was as large as the army he had brought to Varna, to Kosovo, and to Belgrade and in all those places it had taken all the might of Hungary and her allies to fight the Turks to a standstill.
This time, Wallachia would stand alone.
The Turks had sixty thousand core soldiers with at least thirty thousand auxiliary forces including Bulgarians, Serbians and Anatolian akinje marauders. Of great concern was the hundred and twenty cannons that they would bring to the field.
Dracula did his utmost to bring allies to fight with us. For a time, we hoped the Venetians would send forces but nothing came of it in the end. No matter how many messengers we dispatched, Mattias Corvinus would send no one to aid us. Instead, he was facing off against Frederick III in the north and so it seemed he was happy enough for Christendom to lose another kingdom.
All we had was what Wallachia could provide.
The mass levy of Wallachian peasantry produced a rather motley army
. Many were just boys, though they called themselves young men, and the elder of them were often bent-backed from their years spent tilling their fields. But the men knew their country and, in the woodlands and marshes and mountains of Wallachia, they were at home. And what is more, Dracula’s viteji, his new officer class, had been recruited from these very same men and they knew their people, just as the people knew the land.
It was not just the country peasants but the townsmen also who were called up to fight. These fellows were the ones trained in the mass use of the hand-guns, as well as in the use of the precious few war wagons and cannons that we had available.
When the recruiters had gone out to find every able-bodied man and boy, many had come back with women also. These were not turned away and indeed many of them demonstrated their ability to shoot crossbows and even hand-guns and drive wagons. Most in fact acted as ammunition carriers and loaders for their husbands or sons but I saw plenty of women fighting in a murderous rage amongst their menfolk in the battles to come. Sadly, I saw some dead and injured, also. Women are sometimes driven to defend their homelands and they are brave to do so in spite of being weak in body. But it is always a tragedy when a people are forced into such positions and there is not a Christian man who has lived that enjoyed seeing a woman fight. They are the most precious thing in all the world and when they feel the need to take up arms then one knows her men folk have already failed in their duty.
Including women and children, our army numbered a mere thirty thousand.
Of those, we had about ten thousand cavalry, who were mostly experienced soldiers that knew their business. These men were well armed and wore lamellar and mail and their lords and their retinue were clad in plate armour.
And of course we had the sluji. Everyone in the army knew that if things were falling apart they were to rally around their prince, his bodyguard and the sluji.
As well as all this we had our very light cavalry, who were excellent riders with their wits about them riding fast horses. These men conducted lightning raids when opportunity presented itself but mainly served as our reconnaissance and messenger force.
With any army, it is necessary to be supported by thousands of servants to clean and mend and cook and support the soldiers in every way and in this we were blessed to have the entire nation of Wallachia behind us.
The old boyar families on the other hand completely abandoned Dracula and their own people and fled into the mountains. There is no doubt that they believed we would be destroyed and when we were they planned to come down from Transylvania and pledge allegiance to the Sultan and take up whatever positions they could under their new masters. Such men are so far beyond contempt that it is impossible to find a suitable punishment. I prayed that in time they would at least find themselves duly impaled.
But only if we beat an army three times our size made up of veteran soldiers.
They came at us in two parts.
First they were sighted at Vidin. Mehmed came up the river by ship in the hopes of traversing the River Olt so they could strike deep into Wallachia and directly at Târgoviște.
And another detachment came to force a crossing from Philipopolis in Bulgaria which would cover the first army’s flank.
We were waiting for them.
The Turkish advance force tried to send men to the northern bank but we came out quickly from the woodland, took up firing positions and blasted them with our hand-gunners and crossbowman.
When the Turks fell back, we also retreated into the trees.
I expected that they would come again the next day but they were willing to be patient and instead moved their forces to Turnu. We had burned it the year before but our scouts had watched the Turks carefully rebuilding it and so knew it was a likely crossing point.
It was the dark of the night when they came in force.
We fought with everything we had but trying to organise peasants into effective night fighting units was harder than I could have imagined. Even so, it was the cannons that did it. Dozens of them fired through the night, their flashes lighting up the darkness and the cannonballs crashing into our positions across the river. Men and horses were killed and the living were panicked. We could not hold where we were and so we fell back, enabling even more of their boats across.
They even brought light cannons across with them and they dug in on our side of the riverbank. Our cavalry did their best to break them and drive them back into the river, charging repeatedly down on them, but the Turks had so many troops that no matter how many we killed, the men behind them continued digging defensive ditches until finally our horsemen could not approach the cannons.
Our war wagons had a commanding position above the landing area and our hand-gunners fired from the backs of them over and over, killing hundreds of Turks and wounding more.
More and more barges came across and we simply could not hold them. When morning came we counted seventy barges ferrying Janissaries across. Still, we attempted to hold them on the thin strip of land along the bank there. For hours, it was a close-run thing. We managed to kill hundreds of Janissaries, at least, and they were precious men the Sultan could ill afford to lose.
Vlad was everywhere, shouting encouragement as he rode from position to position. “We are holding them!” He rode close to the enemy and, taking a crossbow, shot at them before riding back to his cheering men. “Throw them back!”
While we focused on our side of the river, we did not pay attention to what was occurring across the water. The Sultan was there, and William and his Red Janissaries too, but we could not get to them and so we ignored them for now. But they had ordered up every one of their great cannons and positioned them in an arc. When the order was given, all one hundred and twenty cannon fired at once.
Our war wagons were hit, smashing them and sending shards of oak and limbs of hand-gunners spinning across our positions. Wallachian cavalry were blasted apart.
The shock of it alone almost broke our poor army. Even I had never heard a cacophony like it. A hundred and twenty massive cannons firing at once seemed enough to shatter the very world, splitting first the air and then the ground beneath our feet. It did not shatter the Wallachians but we knew we could not stand against such a bombardment and so Vlad ordered a retreat.
Without those Turkish cannon on the far shore, I do not doubt we could have sent the massive army back over the river by the end of the day.
As it was, we were defeated. And the Sultan’s army was in Wallachia.
***
“There he is,” Rob whispered. “Do you see him?”
“Yes, yes,” Serban said at my side. “He is there. No, there, my lord.”
Peering through the trees from a high ridge, I saw the banner and the man riding at the centre of the party. “By God, he looks just like him.”
“Rather more handsome than Vlad,” Eva said, squinting beside me.
“You cannot possibly tell at this distance,” I said, glancing at her.
“Certainly I can,” Eva replied. “He is a most striking young prince.”
Vlad Dracula’s younger brother, Radu, had joined the Sultan’s army. Indeed, it was common knowledge that the Sultan intended to place Radu on the throne as Voivode of Wallachia once Vlad had been defeated. What is more, he had four thousand of his own horsemen with him. Radu was completely and totally under the spell of Mehmed and William.
“Do you reckon he’s an immortal?” Walt whispered.
“Why don’t you go ask him?” Rob said.
“What did Vlad say about it?” Eva asked. “Was his handsome brother turned?”
“Quiet, all of you. He is here, that is all that matters. With him here, it is worth the risk.”
The Turks had moved slowly north from the river. We knew they were coming for Târgoviște. They were so focused on destroying Vlad’s capital that they ignored the fortress at Bucharest and the fortified monastery of Snagov. Mehmed did not want to waste time and men on taking places that ultimately matt
ered little in his conquest. If Vlad could be removed and Radu put in his place, all the smaller places should either give up or could be conquered without consequence.
We knew we had little hope of winning a set-piece battle on the open field.
Instead, we started a type of war that I had fought before, in France and other places. Along the line of advance and for miles around, all grain stores were burned, as were the crops in the field. Every source of water was poisoned, and the livestock and peasantry were driven into the north where they would be safe.
As the Turks advanced up the valleys and through the dense forests, we harried them everywhere they went. Every scouting party, every group sent out for forage, we pounced on them and killed them.
Our purpose was to kill as many as possible, of course, but even more it was to break their spirit. To make it so that every man was afraid in his heart to face us.
We also damned small rivers and diverted their waters to create swathes of waterlogged marshland to slow down the progress of the army, especially of their supply wagons and most of all the dreaded but enormously heavy cannons.
Our peasants may not have been professional soldiers but they excelled at digging the earth. And so we had them dig man traps everywhere. Steep, deep pits with wickedly spiked stakes at the bottom which the peasants delighted in smearing with bog water and human and animal shit. These traps were covered with thin sticks and leaves to disguise them.
It was a scorching summer. By denying the Turks access to water, they suffered deeply from thirst and heat exhaustion as they advanced. The sheer size of their army worked against them and they spent thousands of men relaying water for miles and even then it was never enough. Without enough fresh water to drink, they certainly did not have enough to wash with, and they grew filthy and, rather quickly, disease spread. The camp sickness began killing almost as many as we did.
So their days were spent in misery as they crept forward in agonising thirst, afraid of each step and fearful of leaving the core of their army lest they be murdered most horribly.
