This has to be one of the most unlikely gay relationships in history. An LGBT romance between the younger brother of the real Dracula – Vlad the Impaler – and the Ottoman sultan, Mehmed II. Dracula’s kid brother, Radu the Handsome (yes, he really was called that), overthrew Vlad with help from Mehmed. The two men had formed the most intimate of bonds in the royal bedchamber.
Sultan of an invincible empire
The story takes place in the mid-15th century as the Ottoman Turks put an end to the ancient Christian Byzantine empire, taking the capital Constantinople in the year 1453 and then moving on to seize the entire Balkans. This was not a good time to be a Christian ruler in south-eastern Europe. It seemed as if the Ottomans were invincible, ruling the whole of Asia Minor, the Levant, Arabia, and north Africa. Nothing could stand in their way.
The father of Vlad and Radu – Vlad the Second, ruler of Wallachia – had adopted the name ‘Dracul’ after being inducted into the Order of the Dragon. Dracul means dragon in the native tongue.
He tried to resist Ottoman encroachment and was punished by the sultan – forced to hand over his two legitimate sons as hostages. The other brother could not wait to return to Wallachia where he eventually ascended to the throne earning the name Vlad the Impaler on account of his cruelty towards Turkish war captives. They were impaled in their hundreds while – depicted in one contemporary image – Vlad sat having his dinner nearby.
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Radu gets to like his Ottoman host
Radu was not so keen on leaving the gilded Ottoman court. Especially when he was allowed to have rooms in the newly built Topkapi palace, which you can still visit in Istanbul – the city that had previously been Constantinople. Radu converted to Islam and learned the Qur’an by rote. His relationship with the sultan seems to have deepened and the two men formed the most intimate of bonds.
Within Ottoman high society, homosexuality was very common, though maybe not officially tolerated. Nevertheless, poets of the period explicitly extolled the virtues of same sex love.
Christian commentators were left aghast down the centuries at what appeared to be a complete acceptance of gay love in the Ottoman empire. The Archbishop of Thessalonica, Gregory Palamas (1294-1359) spent a year at the Ottoman court and wrote that ‘they live by their bows and swords, rejoicing in enslavement, murder, raiding, looting, wantonness, adultery, sodomy. And not only do they indulge in such practices, but they think that God approves them’.
In the fifteen century, a chronicler, Theodore Spandounes commented:
‘They are the most self-indulgent men in the world. They keep many women because their law encourages the propagation of children. But they also cohabit with quantities of men. For all that Mohamet explicitly forbade sodomy and recommended the stoning of those guilty of it, this vice is commonly and openly practiced without fear of God or man.‘
The relationship between the brother of Dracula and the Ottoman sultan
The Byzantine chronicler Laonikos Chalkokondyles (1423-1470) wrote that the sultan had forced himself on Radu:
He was in love with the boy and invited him for conversation, and then as a sign of his respect he invited him for drinks to his bedchamber. The boy did not expect to suffer such a thing from the sultan, and when he saw the sultan approaching him with that intention, he fought him off and refused to consent to intercourse with him.
On that occasion, the young Radu stabbed Mehmed in the leg, ran off, and hid in a tree. Doctors treated the flesh wound and Radu came down from his hiding place. Incredibly, he then agreed to become the sultan’s lover after this violent start. Mehmed then helped Radu to overthrow his own brother and become ruler of Wallachia.
Up until the 19th century, the Ottomans were famed for their liberal attitude on sexuality even legalising homosexuality to a degree in 1858 – well ahead of western Europe. Today, however, in modern Turkey things are not so liberal.
