Mid Theme Visit: Country Links - Romania and Egypt

 

Mid-Theme Visit: Country Links

Romania and Egypt

Welcome, and I hope you have a pleasant time reading this country links article. As is the case again and again, an empire is the answer to this link, between a Southeast European country and a Northeast African country. Sitting in the middle, is Turkey, which at the time of this incident, was ruled by the Ottomans, and had expanded far and wide. Now, to will get into specifics.

Imperial Mayhem

The Ottoman empire started at the end of the 13th century, in 1299, by Osman I, having previously stuck to itself. It had a good run for over a century and a half, raiding lots of places. But in 1453, this success would explode with conquest, when Sultan Mehmed II took Constantinople, now Istanbul, from its ruler, Constantine XI. As explored in my previous articles, Norse Expansion: Raid to Trade, and Mongol Empire: Conquer then Respect, Constantinople was a major connecting hub, joining the western and eastern worlds. Once the Ottomans took it, it opened so much access not just to Europe, but gave them the economic, and subsequently military power to expand south, to Africa too, over the coming century.

This expansion leads to the topic of this article. Now, the Ottomans seized many Southeast European territories, and a few of these, were Romanian regions, though separately, as at this stage, Romania was not yet a united country. Particularly interesting though, was the capture of Wallachia in 1462. This is because Mehmed II, who was still in power, had a long history with the infamous ruler at the time, or voivode. This was Vlad III, notoriously known to a lot of us as Vlad the Impaler, due to his preferential execution of mass impalements, to send messages. Vlad had lived at the Ottoman court from 1442, aged just 11 due to his father Vlad II needing to prove loyalty to Mehmed’s father, Sultan Murad II.

But unfortunately, this childhood connection did not spare Vlad’s Wallachia from Mehmed’s imperial gaze, as he conquered it in the Night Attack of Targoviste. Just over a decade later, in 1475, Moldavia, under Voivode Stephen III, was also taken over by Ottomans. These conquests are what lead to Romania’s link with Egypt. This is because, in 1389, per the order of Sultan Murad I, Mehmed II’s great-great grandfather, every 4-5 years, children of Christian countries would be conscripted into the Ottoman imperial army. This tradition was called devshirme.

Linked to this, Mehmed II’s grandson, Selim I, pushed into Egypt in 1516, to quash competition the Mamluk rulers were causing, triggering the Ottoman-Mamluk war as Sultan Al-Mutawakkil III was not budging. This war also involved the Ottoman imperial army, which the Christian children, now adults, of the Romanian regions were apart of, helping with the invasion.

In this way, the link between Romania and Egypt was military, as people from modern Romanian regions helped the Ottomans conquer Egypt.


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