Rise of Vlad Tepes - Targoviste 1462 - Ottoman History DOCUMENTARY

Amidst the shadows of 15th century Wallachia, one name echoed through the halls of terror. Vlad III, known to the world as Dracula, son of the dragon, ruled with an iron fist and a thirst for vengeance. A figure both feared and revered, his story was one forged in blood, betrayal, and the twisted echoes of a brutal past. His reign was marked by ruthless cruelty and unwavering determination, leaving a legacy that would inspire legends. But who was the man behind the myth? Welcome to our latest video on the history of the Ottoman Empire, in which we will explore the life and times of one of the most formidable enemies the Sultans of Osman ever faced, Vlad Dracula of Romania. Formidable as he might have been, you'll exceed him pretty fast when you build your arsenal with our sponsor today, Warpath. 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Get it in the App Store, on Google Play or on PC for free, and join over 30 million others in this top-rated test of Battlefield courage. Link in the description or use our QR code on screen. For many centuries, the Wallachians of Eastern Europe, also known as the Vlachs, had been at the epicenter of countless converging civilizations, such as the Eastern Romans, Bulgarians, Pechenegs, Kuman Kipchaks, and the Mongols. However, the origins of the Principality of Wallachia as an independent polity began in the early 14th century. By the start of the century, the numerous Orthodox Vlach boyars of the Lower Danube and the Southern Carpathians had been nominal vassals of the mighty Kingdom of Hungary. Seeking independence from their Catholic overlords, the petty Vlach lords of this region united under the leadership of Basarab I, and by doing so, achieved a surprising and decisive victory over the Hungarians at the Battle of Thessada in 1330. In spite of gaining independence, Wallachia was to spend the rest of its existence surrounded by its more potent neighbors. By the 1390s, the Ottoman armies had absorbed the majority of Bulgaria and vassalized Serbia after the Battle of Kosovo. With Muslim raiders now raiding north of the Danube, it seemed like the Vlachs were the next in a long list of peoples that had submitted to the Ottoman war machine. In spite of the odds, a stubborn and energetic Mechir I of Wallachia was to hinder such ambitions for over 30 years. During his reign, the voivode achieved what many in Christian Europe could not during the period, defeating the Ottoman Sultan in open battle, not only once but twice at the Battles of Karambasa and Robina in 1394 and 1395. Ushering in a military golden age, Mechir was able to keep his principality independent from both the Hungarians and the Ottomans, even managing to expand his realm into northern Dubruja, the Lower Danube Delta, and parts of Transylvania by the end of the century. Despite these successes, this golden age would end with the death of Mechir in 1418 and what followed was a constant violent civil war between the two cadet houses of the Basarab dynasty, the Daneshti and Strakuleshti. During this instability, the lands of the realm contracted, while members of each cadet house pledged their allegiance to either Hungary or the Ottomans for political and military support against fellow rival claimants. As a result, Wallachia had become a crucial buffer state for both the Hungarians and the Turks in their wider wars across the Balkans. By the 1440s, Vlad II of Wallachia would play an unwinnable balancing game of trying to gain favor with both of the two royal courts of Buda and Edirne for the survival of his regime. This entailed the voivode constantly switching allegiances between the two sides and even giving away his second and third eldest sons, Vlad and Redu, as political hostages to the sultan's court. However, such acts of playing both sides proved futile, as the voivode was dethroned by his Daneshti relative, the pro-Hungarian Vladislav II, who had the military backing of John Hunyadi. The voivode was killed in 1447 along with his eldest son Mechir II. According to Balkan chronicles, the boyars of Targovište ripped out Mechir's eyes before proceeding to bury him alive. At the same time, Vlad himself fled into hiding before being brutally assassinated in the marshes near the capital. Meanwhile, the young sons of the slain Wallachian ruler would continue to live in the sultan's court of Edirne for a number of years, where they were given an Ottoman education and trained alongside the elite janissaries. Yet, an opportunity arose for the older of the two boys, Vlad, in the fall of 1448, when the Ottoman and Crusader armies of Murad II and Hunyadi faced off at the Second Battle of Kosovo. Wallachia had been left virtually undefended during the military campaign, as Vladislav II and his army had marched alongside the Crusader host, thus allowing Vlad to easily usurp power in the country as a pro-Ottoman ruler. However, his reign would last only two months, because despite the Crusader's defeat in Kosovo, Vladislav returned with the remnant of his army and reclaimed his throne. After being exiled from his homeland once more, the Drakuleshti prince first sought shelter in Edirne, before settling down in the Principality of Moldavia and later in Transylvania. He would spend the next seven years building up a political base of support in Bresov, with other exiled Vlach notables in the local region. While the Ottoman and Hungarian armies were preoccupied over the fortress city of Belgrade in the summer of 1456, the exiled Voivode, seeking revenge for the past murders of his late father and brother, entered into Wallachia at the head of a mercenary force from southern Transylvania. The following war was to be short. By convincing Vladislav to engage in single combat for the fate of their homeland, Vlad succeeded in delivering a fatal blow to the man who had inflicted great pain upon him over the past decade. Upon re-entering Targoviste, the new Voivode began consolidating his power by appointing loyal followers into high political offices, while at the same time confiscating the wealth of boyars who had been faithful to the previous regime. With this wealth, Vlad constructed new fortifications and roads, reformed the army, and ultimately initiated the building of a brand new city, Bucharest. Like his late father, the Wallachian ruler also began a correspondence with the royal courts of Buda and Constantinople, in which he pledged his full loyalty to the Hungarian king, while at the same time sending a yearly tribute to the Ottoman Sultan. However, as Vlad III consolidated his power in the country, he gained a reputation for being a cruel ruler throughout Europe, as he often burned and impaled his political enemies in great showcases of brutality. Petty criminals, beggars, and even whole villages that were considered disloyal to the crown were also subjected to the stake during this reign of terror. The peak of these horrific actions against his fellow countrymen occurred during an Easter banquet in 1457 at the capital, which was later to be known by folklore as the Easter Massacre. The brutal event saw a paranoid Vlad delivering a speech in front of 200 guests, primarily consisting of boyars and their families, before ordering their execution and impalement for alleged treason against his late father and brother. This iron-fisted and cruel method of governing his realm was likely influenced by Vlad's childhood traumas stemming from his early days in exile across the Balkans. Moreover, the constantly turbulent nature of politics may have influenced the young ruler to take drastic actions to secure his throne from potential pretenders and court rivals. Whatever the reasoning was, in Vlad's new Wallachia, fear now became a unifying force with which to exert power. With Hunyadi's death in 1456 and Vlad's impalement of all allegedly disloyal Saxon merchants in Wallachia, relations between Buddha and Targovište began to sour by the end of the decade. By 1460, a new pro-Hungarian pretender, Dan III, invaded Wallachia with military support from the Saxon nobility of Transylvania. However, Dan's army was ambushed and decimated near the town of Ruca in a brief one-sided battle. After the engagement, the Daneshti prince was humiliated into digging his own grave before being beheaded by Vlad himself. In the wake of his significant victory, the Wallachian voivode invaded and pillaged a number of Saxon settlements in Transylvania, impaling thousands throughout the region. While Sultan Mehmed II was on his military campaign against Trebizond in 1461, an Ottoman delegation was sent to Wallachia as Vlad had failed to pay his annual tribute to the Sultan for the last three years. The voivode excused his failed payments on his war with the Saxon nobles of Transylvania, but the mood between the two courts had already soured a year prior with the execution of a Turkish envoy. Hamza Pasha, the provincial governor of Mykopolis, led the Ottoman delegation and was responsible for collecting the withheld Wallachian tribute, along with 1,000 Wallachian boys for the Sultan's Janissary Corps. However, his secret mission was to kidnap the Wallachian ruler and bring him to Constantinople to answer for his crimes against an Ottoman official. In spite of the secrecy of the operation, Vlad was informed about the true mission of the Turkish delegation by his many spies in the Balkans. Upon entering Wallachia at the head of a 1,000-strong cavalry host, the Ottoman governor was ambushed by Vlad and was later impaled alongside many other of his officers. In the days after this great ambush, Vlad marched on the border Ottoman fortress town of Djeru, located north of the Danube. Dressed in full Turkish military attire and speaking fluent Turkish, the voivode was able to trick the garrison of the town into opening its gates. Before long, the nearby Wallachian army stormed into the town, killing its entire garrison. Soon after the capture of Djeru, Vlad would launch perhaps one of the most violent expeditions in medieval European history by invading Ottoman Bulgaria at the start of 1462, with most of the Ottoman army still campaigning in distant Anatolia. Hundreds of defenseless villages and towns were set ablaze and their populations were massacred by impalement, including thousands of women and children. All in all, over 28,000 Turks and Bulgarians were killed in only a few weeks and thousands more fled south towards Constantinople, sharing gruesome stories of the Wallachian ruler along the way. On top of the mass killings, all Ottoman supply depots in northern Bulgaria and crossing points over the Danube were burnt down. Upon hearing of the horrific news coming out of the Balkans, an ever-so-rageful Mehmed II rushed back to his capital to prepare for war. Mustering the largest Ottoman army seen since his siege on Constantinople nine years prior, the Sultan was eager to punish his vassal, whom he had grown up with since his days as a prince in Edirne. With a grand army of 60 to 80,000 strong and a fleet of over 170 ships, Mehmed personally marched on Wallachia in April of 1462. Also with the Sultan was Prince Rudi, Vlad's younger brother, who had spent the last two decades living at the Ottoman court. Unlike his elder brother, the Wallachian prince had been a steadfast friend to Mehmed and was deemed loyal enough to command 4,000 Janissaries for the campaign to come. Having fully embraced Ottoman customs during his time in captivity, Rudi was promised control over Wallachia by the Sultan once his brother was overthrown and executed. As Ottoman forces amassed, Vlad began mustering a host himself, between 10,000 to 20,000 strong, made up chiefly of peasants, mercenaries and a corps of elite Wallach cavalry. Like Mircea I before him, the Wallachian voivode planned on using guerrilla tactics in familiar terrain to defeat a numerically superior foreign foe. Military assistance from Hungary was also anticipated, but with no updates about a Western army arriving to support them by summer, Vlad started getting ready to confront the impending Ottoman attack on his own. By June 1462, the and began crossing the Great River from the port towns of Vidin and Nikopolis. Although the Wallachians heavily contested the landings, Turkish artillery power in Nikopolis had won the Ottoman army a bridgehead into the country. Meanwhile, the Ottoman navy, under Grand Vizier Mahmud Pasha, began bombarding the town of Braila, Wallachia's only port settlement, setting it ablaze. After a few days of crossing the Danube, Mehmed's host began marching north toward Vlad's capital in full force. While marching up north, Ottoman Akinci raiders, led by Mihailolu Ali Bey, fanned out and began pillaging and burning the Wallachian countryside, killing many in retribution for Vlad's killings earlier in the year. During this chaos, the Wallachian ruler ordered a scorched earth policy along Mehmed's line of march to the capital. Wells were poisoned, livestock killed, crops burned, towns abandoned, and guerrilla warfare commenced in the region's many dense forests and thick marshes. Although effective in preventing the fall of the fortress town of Bucharest to Mehmed, such tactics proved largely ineffective in stopping the Ottoman army in its march to the Wallachian capital. Reluctant to engage in a set-piece battle, Vlad planned to launch an assault on the Ottoman camp south of Targoviste during the night of June 16th to 17th, aiming specifically to dismantle the Turkish command structure by eliminating the Sultan himself. In the hours before the ambush, the Wallachian ruler disguised himself as a Turkish merchant to enter the Ottoman camp and locate the Sultan's tent. Launching his night ambush at 11pm, Vlad's host of 7-10,000 men attacked the Ottoman camp in two detachments. With torches lighting the night sky and sounds of horns echoing off tents, an air of chaos filled the Ottoman camp as Wallachian light cavalry surprisingly broke through its wooden palisades. Simultaneously, Wallachian troops disguised in captured Turkish military attire wreaked havoc on already confused Ottoman troops, many of which were slain in their sleep. For hours, the night-time struggle continued as Vlad spotted the Sultan's tent in the distance. However, in the chaos, the Wallachian ruler instead broke into the Grand Vizier's nearby tent, which was empty. As sunrise approached, Mehmed remained safe and sound, and his janissaries had managed to stabilize the situation. Feeling satisfied in inflicting significant Ottoman losses, estimated to be as high as 10,000, Vlad ordered his host to retreat into the dense forests east of the capital. Regardless, in this frenetic retreat, over 1,000 Wallachians would be killed and beheaded by the Akinci raiders of Mihailolu Ali Bey. With that, the infamous night attack at Targoviste concluded. Although unsuccessful at killing the Sultan, Vlad's night-time ambush proved a huge morale shock to the Ottoman army, which had already been exhausted after weeks of marching through the scorched fields of Wallachia. Two weeks after the crossing of the Danube, the weary Ottoman army arrived beneath the walls of Targoviste and began preparing for a siege. However, surprisingly, the capital's gates were left open, as its local populace had abandoned the city and fled to the Carpathian Mountains in the days prior. As Mehmed's host occupied Targoviste, an even more shocking development was discovered in the city's outskirts. To the horror of the army, thousands of their brethren-in-arms and slain countrymen were found impaled in a massive forest of mounted stakes. The rotten corpse of Hamza Pasha was also found on top of the highest stake, symbolizing his high ranking within the Ottoman military. As the deathly forest of stakes was cleared, Mehmed installed Prince Radu in power to gather the support of the local boyars against Vlad. This would prove to be easy, as many such boyars and merchants of Wallachia had been disenfranchised during Vlad's reign of terror and the recent Ottoman war, and so they hurled their support to the more charismatic Radu. Within only weeks, Vlad's support in the country collapsed, and many settlements like Bucharest opened their gates to the new ruler of Wallachia. With his Wallachian campaign seeming to be winding down, Mehmed and his host began marching east towards the port town of Braila, where the Ottoman fleet had been docked. During his eastern march, the Sultan had also sent a military detachment to assist Vlad's cousin, Stefan III of Moldavia, in his siege on Wallachian-held Kiliye. After his night ambush, Vlad had garrisoned the Black Sea fortress with 7,000 soldiers, diverging his total strength against the Ottomans to the west. Despite Mehmed's advancing host, this move was to prove vital, as the opportunistic Moldavian voivode was forced to lift the siege after suffering major losses against the defenders and being wounded in the ankle. Returning from Kiliye, the Wallachian voivode decided to ambush Mehmed's army one last time, in an attempt to reclaim his realm. However, this attempt was to prove fruitless, as the Ottoman host, encamped near the town of Buzau, was able to easily repel the ambush during the evening of June 22nd or 23rd. During the engagement, over 2,000 Wallachians fell dead, and later, their heads were mounted on Turkish lances. Losing all momentum from his victory at Kiliye, Vlad would retreat towards the Carpathians in defeat, with the remnants of his once-mighty host. As most of Vlad's supporters defected to Radu after the great defeat, Mehmed concluded his Wallachian campaign on June 28th by entering Braila and sailing with his forces back to Constantinople. Meanwhile, the new Wallachian ruler, with the help of Ottoman auxiliary troops, would spend the rest of the summer chasing Vlad and his supporters in the northern reaches of his realm. Having cornered the Impaler prince at his favorite residence at Poinarik Castle, all seemed over for him, but in a surprising move, Vlad was able to slip out of the siege and cross the border into Hungarian Transylvania. However, being politically isolated due to his past campaign of terror in the local region, Vlad found little support for his cause to retake his throne. Not wanting to start a war with the Ottomans over Radu's ascension and unable to trust him for his past transgressions against the crown, Vlad was imprisoned by local Hungarian authorities by the fall of 1462. The infamous Wallachian voivode, who had impaled tens of thousands of his subjects and countless foes during his reign of terror, was set to spend the next 13 years in a jail cell in the town of Visigrad. During his captivity, tales of his cruelty spread across wider Europe, often depicting the former Wallachian voivode as a bloodthirsty monster resembling the devil. Fast forward to the 19th century, however, and Vlad III Dracul would become an integral part of Romanian national identity, being seen as a brave Romanian ruler who had defied Ottoman aggression with his cruel but effective tactics. With Wallachia once again entering into Ottoman vassalage in 1462, here came the end of the most infamous chapter of Vlad's life, but his story was not yet concluded. In the next episode of our series on the Ottoman Empire, we will look at Sultan Mehmed II's wars in Europe against Skanderbeg, Venice, and Genoa, so make sure you are subscribed and have pressed the bell button to see it. Please, consider liking, subscribing, commenting, and sharing it helps immensely. Our patrons and youtube members can watch more than 200 exclusive videos, join their ranks via the link in the description or by pressing the join button under the video to watch these weekly videos, learn about our schedule, get early access to our videos, access our private discord, and much more. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one.