Innholdsfortegnelse for MW X1.4 i Medieval World Culture & Conflict Magazine

This particular issue of Medieval Warfare owes a lot to Alice Isabella Sullivan, our Assistant Editor. As an expert in the medieval history of the Balkans, Alice was well versed in this issue’s theme: Vlad III of Wallachia, better known as Dracula. She was also able to put together a great team of experts on this man and his era, which allows us to give you a really strong set of articles about Vlad, including his famous night raid against an Ottoman army, as well as his ultimate downfall. We imagine that a lot of readers will know about the fictional Dracula, but the real person, Vlad the Impaler, certainly has a very interesting story to tell. The issue also takes you to eleventhcentury England to see the resistance against…

While Hereward – which literally means ‘warden of the army’ – sounds like a nom de guerre, it was actually his given name. He was born circa 1036 into the Anglo-Saxon minor nobility of Lincolnshire. His ethnic background included Danish and Breton blood as well as Anglo-Saxon. Timelines of Hereward’s life and career are somewhat ambiguous, but individual well-documented incidents provide anchor points that enable the reconstruction of a fairly accurate picture. According to the Gesta Herewardi, an early twelfth-century text written at Peterborough Abbey, he was exiled in 1054 at age seventeen or eighteen for habitually violent and disruptive behaviour. Following his instincts, the “stout but agile” youth spent the next decade as a mercenary, first in Cornwall and Ireland, then in Flanders. Throughout much of this time he…

When the Ottoman state first formed at the end of the thirteenth century, few would have predicted that it would become a huge multi-ethnic empire. By the end of the fourteenth century it had expanded into the Balkans and had decisively defeated a major crusader invasion at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1395. However, in 1402 the Ottomans were defeated by the Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur, causing them to lose much of their strength and territory. It would take decades to recover, allowing even the diminished Byzantine Empire a reprieve. As the century progressed, the Ottomans started to make steady gains into southeastern Europe, but found themselves fighting another rising power, the Kingdom of Hungary. The two states would have an ongoing rivalry for the rest of the century, until the…

First published in French in 2004, this book is one of the most scholarly and comprehensive historical studies on Vlad III, his times, and afterlives. Cazacu details Vlad’s early life, his reigns and exiles, his conflicts with the Ottomans and other enemies, his reimagining through propaganda images and tales, and his later afterlives as conceived through Bram Stoker’s famous novel and the vampire culture to which it contributed a new and famous protagonist. Under the guidance and editorial expertise of Stephen Reinert of Rutgers University, Nicole Mordarski, Alice Brinton, and Catherine Healey completed the English translation of Cazacu’s text, making this work available to broader audiences for the first time. The English translation was published by Brill in 2017. Dracula weaves excerpts from primary sources with clear explanations and historical…

Keeping Vlad the Impaler in custody undoubtedly meant a considerable wasting of military talent and resources. After the brutal treatment of Ottoman envoys and later the daring and repeated attacks against the sultan himself, Matthias Corvinus sacrificed Vlad for his immediate goals. Seeking peace with the Ottomans in order to deal with domestic troubles and the competition with the Holy Roman Empire, Matthias sent Jan Giskra, the commander of his Black Army, to capture Vlad and take him to prison. However, the Wallachian leader was a very special prisoner in the Visegrád fortress. He was presented to foreign envoys as a bizarre attraction through his reputation as both sadistic tyrant and fearless war hero. Twelve years later, in 1474, the situation changed dramatically. After having crushed his long-time adversary Uzun…

Abraham ‘Bram’ Stoker - the author who reimagined and propelled Vlad III as Dracula onto the international scene – is of Irish heritage, born in Dublin on 8 November 1847. Although he published his first short story at 24 years of age and wrote many novels and theatrical stories after that, Dracula became his most successful literary achievement. Stoker researched the novel not ‘on the ground’ in the Wallachian and Transylvanian regions of modern Romania, in the Carpathian Mountains, or in Eastern Europe, but in English reading rooms, at the British Library, the library in Whitby, and other places that afforded him access to primary and secondary sources. These allowed him to slowly build his characters and the storyline. The novel was released on 26 May 1897 with the first…

It is really very striking how little was written in English, until quite recently, on the history of medieval warfare. Before the late nineteenth century there was a good deal of writing about war, but little was about medieval history. The Classical education dominated the scholarly world, and leading soldiers such as Maurice of Nassau (d.1625) drew on ancient works for ideas on the organization, discipline, and tactics of armies. From the late fifteenth century, the European elite looked to the classical world for models of behaviour and often regarded the ‘Middle Age’ as simply a period of darkness and ignorance. It was not entirely forgotten, for the memory of 1066 and that of the archers of Agincourt was burned into the English consciousness. All over Europe there were antiquarians…

Dracula: Essays on the Life and Times of Vlad the Impaler Edited by Kurt W. Treptow The Center for Romanian Studies, 2019 ISBN: 978-1592110094 The Ottoman ‘Wild West’: The Balkan Frontier in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries By Nikolay Antov Cambridge University Press, 2017 ISBN: 978-3030220259 The Ottoman Threat and Crusading on the Eastern Border of Christendom during the Fifteenth Century By Liviu Pilat and Ovidiu Criste Brill, 2018 ISBN: 978-9004278851 Vlad III Dracula: The Life and Times of the Historical Dracula By Kurt W. Treptow The Center for Romanian Studies, 2020 ISBN: 978-1592110285 From Nicopolis to Mohács: A History of Ottoman-Hungarian Warfare, 1389-1526 By Tamás Pálosfalvi Brill, 2018 ISBN: 978-9004365841 The Grand Turk: Sultan Mehmet II - Conqueror of Constantinople and Master of an Empire and Lord of Two…

What is behind “Dracula"? After all the popular accounts that have elevated the Wallachian voivode to a mythical figure, historians can now provide facts. A German-Romanian team formed around the University of Giessen in Germany has been working since 2009 on the largest research project to date on Vlad III. The main objective is to publish all surviving historical sources ever produced by, around, and about the historical Dracula until the year 1650. The team hunts, evaluates, translates, and publishes all documents and chronicles, including many unknown, hitherto unpublished, or unused by historians who wrote about Vlad in the past. The five-part series Corpus Draculianum, edited by Thomas Bohn, Adrian Gheorghe, and Albert Weber is intended for historians, students, and history buffs. The authors have worked in more than thirty…

Following his victories in Serbia and Bosnia, Vlad the Im- paler wished to seize the throne of Wallachia for a third time. However, support from his overlord, Matthias Corvinus, in terms of money and men, was lacking. It would be early November of 1476 before Vlad was given the orders to attack Wallachia, together with Stephan Báthory, the Hungarian commander-in-chief. The Wallachian and Hungarian forces attacked Târgoviște on 8 November. The result was a pyrrhic victory for Vlad, losing a large part of his troops and failing to capture Basarab the Elder, who fled to the south along with his treasure. Had Basarab fallen or been captured, the war would have ended. This failure was to prove fatal. A few days before the battle of Târgoviște, Moldavia’s Stephen the Great…

Possibly the most famous medieval wrought-iron cannon, Mons Meg is preserved at Edinburgh Castle in Scotland. She is some 404 cm (13’ 3”) long and she fired a stone shot some 46 cm (18”) in diameter weighing in the region of 130 kg (290 lb). However, what makes her so important is the documentary evidence of her manufacture found by Claude Gaier in the archives in Belgium. He discovered that she was made in 1449 in Mons in present-day Belgium in the workshops of the renowned arms dealer and supplier Jehan Cambier. This makes Mons Meg the earliest securely dated wrought-iron cannon. She was subsequently given as part of the dowry of Philip the Good’s great-niece, Mary of Guelders, to James II, king of Scotland in 1457. Mons Meg had…