Monthly Archives: February 2024

When the King of Hungary created the Order of the Dragon in 1408, one of the knights to receive this honor was the illegitimate son of the Voivode of Wallachia (modern Romania). When the legitimate son died, Sir Vlad of … Continue reading →

The national hero of Albania has the improbable (to our eyes) name of Skanderbeg. He was born George Kastriotis to a family that owned/ruled somewhere between 3 and 20 villages with a castle (“Kastrioti” implies “owner of a kastro, Greek … Continue reading →

Mehmet II wanted to become the legitimate Byzantine Emperor, in addition to being its Turkish conqueror. Now they pulled out a long-ago event forgotten by the Greeks: remember that one renegade son of an Emperor had converted to Islam and married a … Continue reading →

The last siege of Constantinople took 57 days. The old core city had been built at the point where the Bosphorus met the Mediterranean and some smaller rivers fed into it with a long inlet, shaping the city’s site into … Continue reading →

During the 1440s, the Ottoman Sultans continued to push back their frontier in Europe. Murad II made his 12 year old son Mehmet king, but he had to be called back in 1444 to confront the Hungarian-Wallachian army at Varna … Continue reading →

A threat to the young Ottoman state even more serious than Timur’s invasion came in the form of Bedreddin, a Turkish sheikh, judge, and mystic. It was important to the Ottomans to create a unified state by enforcing Sunni Islam … Continue reading →