Free The Borgias by G.J. Meyer Page A

victories, and when news of it reached the Vatican, it sparked wild jubilation.
    Calixtus, convinced that a miracle had occurred, ordered it to be celebrated annually, thereby making the Feast of the Transfiguration a permanent feature of the liturgical calendar. Good news rarely lasted long where the conflict with the Turks was concerned, however. Just a month after his victory, Hunyadi fell victim to an outbreak of plague probably precipitated by the heaps of rotting corpses in and around Belgrade. Capistrano died of the same cause in October. Nevertheless,what they and Carvajal had achieved stood as proof that the Ottomans were not invincible and that much could be achieved if the Christians learned to cooperate.
    The same lesson could be drawn from the accomplishments of Scarampo and his fleet during the eighteen months that they were active in the eastern Mediterranean. In the course of 1457, from their base on the island of Rhodes, the cardinal’s men drove Ottoman forces from the Aegean islands of Lemnos, Thassos, and Samothrace, briefly took possession of the city of Corinth and even of the Acropolis at Athens, and defeated a Turkish fleet at Mytilene. These were inspiring achievements for a small force operating far from home, or should have been. Scarampo sent repeated appeals for more ships, more men, more money. Calixtus tried to help but had little left to give. When he summoned the nations of Europe to a general congress to open in Rome that December, the result was fresh disappointment. Not enough delegates were on hand for discussions to begin in earnest until March, and two months after that the congress was abandoned, having accomplished nothing. Still unsupported, unable to deliver a decisive blow, Scarampo performed a great service nevertheless. Until finally obliged to return to Italy, he kept the sultan’s navy distracted, divided, and off balance. His expedition, like the defense of Belgrade, became a painfully vivid lesson in what might have been.
    It is likely that much of Europe owed its safety and survival, at this juncture, to what was happening in the East. The regions where Roman Christianity gave way to the Orthodox faith became the setting for exploits of an epic character. Though most Italians paid little attention, great things were accomplished decade after decade and made an immense and lasting difference. One of the most brilliant of the heroes was Stephen III, who in 1457 at age twenty-four was crowned prince of Moldavia in what is now Romania and immediately launched into a career that over the next forty-seven years would see him defeat one invasion after another by various, always numerically superior, enemies. He won forty-six of his forty-eight battles, repelling a lifelong series of Turkish attacks while also having to fight off the attempts of his Roman Catholic neighbors, Hungary and Poland in particular, to take possession of his homeland. Somehow he managed to improve theprosperity and enrich the cultural life of Moldavia in the midst of endless peril, and after his death he would be canonized a saint by the Orthodox Church.
    Better remembered today, for macabre and not entirely imaginary reasons, was Vlad III of Wallachia, like Moldavia an independent principality in the fifteenth century and today part of Romania. Known even in his own time as Dracula (son of the dragon), and to the Turks as “the impaler prince” for his favored method of dispatching enemies, he became voivode or ruler of Wallachia a year before Stephen took charge of Moldavia and was about the same age. Despite his lurid reputation, he was on the whole a good if severely firm ruler, and the intensity of his hatred for the Turks is explained by his life story. In boyhood he had become a hostage of the sultan, his father surrendering him and a brother as security for good behavior, and he was regularly beaten for recalcitrance. The Turks ultimately killed his father and blinded and buried alive an elder