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“It wasn’t an army at all. The idiots had brought a totality of fifteen thousand men with them. As my father told Hunyadi, the sultan often took that many on hunting expeditions!”
“I’m assuming this Hunyadi guy didn’t listen.”
“He informed my father that a Christian knight was worth a hundred of the sultan’s ‘rabble.’ Rabble!” Mircea’s voice was bitter. “When the Janissaries, Murad’s elite military corps, were among the best-armed, best-trained soldiers in the world. They were trained from the time they were children—Christian children whom the Turks took as devshirme, a sort of tax, on areas they conquered.”
“I wouldn’t think slaves would be all that thrilled about fighting for their masters.”
“These weren’t slaves in the American sense. The Janissaries were among the elite of Ottoman society, respected and feared, even by free men. They had known nothing but military service their whole lives. They ate and drank it. At that time, they didn’t even marry, for fear it would distract them from their work. They threw all of their passion into warfare, and these were the soldiers against whom Hunyadi was taking a paltry force under an untested king!”
“Didn’t he know this?”
“Of course he knew. But he was a pompous, arrogant ass, and worse, a zealot. A cardinal, Cessarini, was traveling with the army, a papal appointment to see to it that God was on the battlefield.” Mircea lips twisted, but not in a smile. “If he was, he was fighting for the other side.”
“They lost?”
“We lost. Or, to be more precise, we were obliterated.” His hand stilled on my arm.
“We? You mean you were there?”
“Yes. Leading four thousand cavalry from Walachia.”
“But if your father knew it was a lost cause—”
Mircea sighed. “That was precisely my argument. But my father was in a difficult position. He owed his position to King Sigismund, his old mentor, who had loaned him the army he had used to seize the throne. Sigismund was dead by this time, but Ladislas had succeeded him, and he reminded my father of his obligation. There was also the fact that my father was a member of the Order of the Dragon, a Catholic military organization started for the express purpose of combating the Turkish threat.”
“So it was a religious thing?”
“It was a political thing. My mother was the devout one in the family; my father put his faith in a strong arm and a good sword, and he had need of one. There were many competitors for his throne who would have liked to do to him what he had done to the cousin he dethroned. If he gave the surrounding Catholic leaders a reason to distrust him, they might lend one of them an army, as Sigismund had done for him.”
“Then why didn’t he lead the forces himself? Why send you to do it?”
“He would have preferred to go himself, if one of us must. But he had signed a treaty with the Turks forbidding it.”
“But . . . I thought they were the enemy.”
“They were. But they also had an army far larger than our tiny force. Had it come to invasion, we would have fought bravely, but we would have lost. As it was, after the Turks made a raid, we would find whole villages nailed to crosses or impaled, or find pyramids made out of the bleached skulls of the dead.”
“Why would they do that? Why not just plunder and leave?”
“Because they wanted to be bought off, and they made sure my father had little choice. In the end, he had to sign a treaty agreeing to pay them ten thousand gold ducats a year and to refuse to lift his hand against them in battle. And to guarantee his good behavior, he had to give two of his sons as hostages.”
“That’s how your brothers ended up in a Turkish dungeon.” I’d known that Vlad, the brother better known to the world as Dracula, had gone insane in a Turkish prison. But I hadn’t known the details of how he got there.
Mircea nodded. “My father went for the treaty discussion under a flag of truce, taking my two younger brothers with him. They were supposed to be safe, but they were seized and put in chains as soon as they arrived. Vlad and Radu were carried away before the treaty was given him to sign. He knew if he failed to do so, their lives would most certainly be forfeit.”
“So he signed.”
“Yes, and was therefore put in an impossible position when Ladislas demanded his loyalty as a member of the Order, to fight alongside him on his damn fool crusade. My father couldn’t refuse without risking his throne, but agreeing would likely mean the death of his sons. He therefore agreed to send the smallest acceptable force with Ladislas, but chose me to command it, thereby keeping the letter of the treaty, if not the spirit.”
“By not lifting a hand against the Turks himself.”
“Yes.”
“I assume it didn’t work?” I really didn’t have to ask. I could read that much from Mircea’s expression.
“Nothing worked. At the battle, we were outnumbered three to one, and then that foolish, foolish king decided to make a dash for glory along with five hundred cavalry—and predictably ended with his head on a pike. The Turks paraded him around like the trophy he was. And as soon as his army saw it, they broke and ran. My forces stayed together and managed an organized retreat, which is probably why most of us survived. Virtually everyone else left their bones bleaching on the battlefield—including the cardinal, who was stripped naked by the victors and left for the carrion birds. Hunyadi, of course, escaped, as such men always do.”
“And your brothers?” I asked softly.
