There's a reason Vlad the Impaler became Vlad the Impaler. And the reason was not that he was an inherently evil guy. The reason was that he experienced first hand how peaceful a religion Islam is and he decided that he would have absolutely none of it.
The massacres of the past this imbecile is speaking of didn't just happen out of the blue. I also don't know if it's a good idea to bring up the past if you want to defend Islam. Just saying.
I was watching History Marche on YouTube about Vlad, and he was familiar with how the Ottomans waged war. But there was something that stuck out at me.
He invaded the Ottoman Empire to set them on the back foot. He went around burning villages, slaughtering people, putting people on spikes, even in this early time frame. Vlad, as far as these people were concerned was a Christian foreigner in the Balkans. These are ethnic fights that go back thousands of years even in this time frame. But he wasn't slaughtering Christians who weren't collaborators with the Ottoman Empire.
But the thing that stuck out to me is that during is rampage of the Ottoman border region... he got swathes of volunteers.
So, ask yourself a question. You to watch your city & homeland burn, your neighbors be impaled while alive, people getting decapitated and skinned. Real atrocious shit in your home. How utterly brutal must the oppression be by the Ottomans to make you say, "Fuck yeah, I'm joining the army of the man that did this. I'll die for it. He's the good guy. I will follow him as my king."
Jesus.
I can only imagine the hate/rage would have been similar to what the Holocaust survivors felt when they were handed Tommy Guns by American GIs who let them execute German Death/Labor Camp Guards.
Mehmed the Conqueror, the Ottoman sultan who ended the Byzantines and who Vlad battled, was a notorious pederast: among his victims were Jacob Notaras and John Sphrantzes, both reputed to be good-looking sons of the Byzantine nobility, and Vlad's own brother Radu, who was literally nicknamed 'the Handsome'. No doubt there were also plenty more unfortunate boys who he added to his harem with each new conquest, but who weren't notable enough to have their names recorded in the history books.
Is it really any surprise that the peoples of the Balkans would be so fanatically opposed to the empire that (among all the other awful things empires tended to do) harvests their sons, rapes them and then uses them as mindless jackboots with which to do the same to even more lands? Or that Vlad himself was so unrelentingly brutal to the Turks and any who supported them, not just because it may have made sense from a pragmatic perspective, but also for personal reasons?
Is it really any surprise that the peoples of the Balkans would be so fanatically opposed to the empire that (among all the other awful things empires tended to do) harvests their sons, rapes them and then uses them as mindless jackboots with which to do the same to even more lands?
I have not heard of any sort of ritualistic rape of male populations in the Balkans by the Ottomans, let alone any sort of conscription rape. It would be a highly poor decision for an army to rape men, when women are available and far more valuable as a commodity. Not to mention, the morale of conscripts is already typically low, raping the conscripts into submission would just be stupid because it would give you an absolutely worthless army (and probably one immobilized by venereal diseases).
Remember that this is south-eastern Europe. Greek pederasty was exported all over, even to Afghanistan, over a thousand years earlier. I highly doubt that pedastry or homosexuality would have been wildly taboo. If anything, if the Ottoman sultan was big on pedastry, it would have been institutionally normalized in some way within his territory.
but also for personal reasons?
It would be, yes. Vlad was utterly, ruthlessly, practical and tactical. He was undeniably competent. The only personal issue he might have taken was with the fact that he was basically passed over by the Ottomans in the first place because he was Walachian. He proved his intelligence, competence, and cunning to them.
I have not heard of any sort of ritualistic rape of male populations in the Balkans by the Ottomans, let alone any sort of conscription rape. It would be a highly poor decision for an army to rape men, when women are available and far more valuable as a commodity. Not to mention, the morale of conscripts is already typically low, raping the conscripts into submission would just be stupid because it would give you an absolutely worthless army (and probably one immobilized by venereal diseases).
Remember that this is south-eastern Europe. Greek pederasty was exported all over, even to Afghanistan, over a thousand years earlier. I highly doubt that pedastry or homosexuality would have been wildly taboo. If anything, if the Ottoman sultan was big on pedastry, it would have been institutionally normalized in some way within his territory.
You might be surprised at the existence of the koceks, Turkey's equivalent to the bacha bazi of Afghanistan. They were exclusively non-Muslim boys dressed & made up specifically to seem as effeminate as possible, and were expected to dance and pleasure their masters. Tellaks (boy-attendants in Turkish baths) played a similar informal role, to the point that 'hamam oğlanı' (bath-boy) is still a synonym for homosexual in Turkish today.
While the kocek 'tradition' wasn't fully formalized until the 1600s, it grew out of centuries of informal practice in Ottoman palatial culture, of which we know Mehmed the Conqueror at minimum was an enthusiastic practitioner 200 years before the koceks were institutionalized. And as the book Islamic Homosexualities (which is cited in the above article) suggests, it was most definitely a tradition endorsed and supported by the sultans for 200 years after.
As you might guess, koceks also had a role in demoralizing the subject populations of the OE - without fighting, of course, because they were kept around for fun and not for war. Besides obviously serving as sexual outlets for whichever sultans and nobles liked to diddle boys (of which there were apparently enough to keep koceks popular for centuries), their existence also basically told said subjects 'if we can do this to your kids and you still can't shake our yoke off, what hope do you really have of escaping us?'
It would be, yes. Vlad was utterly, ruthlessly, practical and tactical. He was undeniably competent. The only personal issue he might have taken was with the fact that he was basically passed over by the Ottomans in the first place because he was Walachian. He proved his intelligence, competence, and cunning to them.
Ruthless and practical Vlad might've been, but the Impaler also knew how to nurse a grudge. For example, his extremely brutal treatment of the boyars wasn't just motivated by his desire to centralize Wallachia, but also by his knowledge of their assassination of his father and other brother. If he'd been so absolutely pragmatic as to know when to stop & not go overboard in terrorizing them, they probably wouldn't have come to hate him more than they feared him, causing them to race to the side of Radu & arrange for his overthrow in 1462.
With that in mind, I don't believe it's likely he'd have had no vengeful feelings over the Turks turning his younger brother into their boytoy and then their pet pretender against his crown. (There are also stories that Mehmed raped Vlad himself while he was still a Turkish hostage, but these aren't nearly as well-supported as the ones about Mehmed and Radu, and thus are unlikely to be true)
There's a reason Vlad the Impaler became Vlad the Impaler. And the reason was not that he was an inherently evil guy. The reason was that he experienced first hand how peaceful a religion Islam is and he decided that he would have absolutely none of it.
The massacres of the past this imbecile is speaking of didn't just happen out of the blue. I also don't know if it's a good idea to bring up the past if you want to defend Islam. Just saying.
I was watching History Marche on YouTube about Vlad, and he was familiar with how the Ottomans waged war. But there was something that stuck out at me.
He invaded the Ottoman Empire to set them on the back foot. He went around burning villages, slaughtering people, putting people on spikes, even in this early time frame. Vlad, as far as these people were concerned was a Christian foreigner in the Balkans. These are ethnic fights that go back thousands of years even in this time frame. But he wasn't slaughtering Christians who weren't collaborators with the Ottoman Empire.
But the thing that stuck out to me is that during is rampage of the Ottoman border region... he got swathes of volunteers.
So, ask yourself a question. You to watch your city & homeland burn, your neighbors be impaled while alive, people getting decapitated and skinned. Real atrocious shit in your home. How utterly brutal must the oppression be by the Ottomans to make you say, "Fuck yeah, I'm joining the army of the man that did this. I'll die for it. He's the good guy. I will follow him as my king."
Jesus.
I can only imagine the hate/rage would have been similar to what the Holocaust survivors felt when they were handed Tommy Guns by American GIs who let them execute German Death/Labor Camp Guards.
Mehmed the Conqueror, the Ottoman sultan who ended the Byzantines and who Vlad battled, was a notorious pederast: among his victims were Jacob Notaras and John Sphrantzes, both reputed to be good-looking sons of the Byzantine nobility, and Vlad's own brother Radu, who was literally nicknamed 'the Handsome'. No doubt there were also plenty more unfortunate boys who he added to his harem with each new conquest, but who weren't notable enough to have their names recorded in the history books.
Is it really any surprise that the peoples of the Balkans would be so fanatically opposed to the empire that (among all the other awful things empires tended to do) harvests their sons, rapes them and then uses them as mindless jackboots with which to do the same to even more lands? Or that Vlad himself was so unrelentingly brutal to the Turks and any who supported them, not just because it may have made sense from a pragmatic perspective, but also for personal reasons?
I have not heard of any sort of ritualistic rape of male populations in the Balkans by the Ottomans, let alone any sort of conscription rape. It would be a highly poor decision for an army to rape men, when women are available and far more valuable as a commodity. Not to mention, the morale of conscripts is already typically low, raping the conscripts into submission would just be stupid because it would give you an absolutely worthless army (and probably one immobilized by venereal diseases).
Remember that this is south-eastern Europe. Greek pederasty was exported all over, even to Afghanistan, over a thousand years earlier. I highly doubt that pedastry or homosexuality would have been wildly taboo. If anything, if the Ottoman sultan was big on pedastry, it would have been institutionally normalized in some way within his territory.
It would be, yes. Vlad was utterly, ruthlessly, practical and tactical. He was undeniably competent. The only personal issue he might have taken was with the fact that he was basically passed over by the Ottomans in the first place because he was Walachian. He proved his intelligence, competence, and cunning to them.
You might be surprised at the existence of the koceks, Turkey's equivalent to the bacha bazi of Afghanistan. They were exclusively non-Muslim boys dressed & made up specifically to seem as effeminate as possible, and were expected to dance and pleasure their masters. Tellaks (boy-attendants in Turkish baths) played a similar informal role, to the point that 'hamam oğlanı' (bath-boy) is still a synonym for homosexual in Turkish today.
While the kocek 'tradition' wasn't fully formalized until the 1600s, it grew out of centuries of informal practice in Ottoman palatial culture, of which we know Mehmed the Conqueror at minimum was an enthusiastic practitioner 200 years before the koceks were institutionalized. And as the book Islamic Homosexualities (which is cited in the above article) suggests, it was most definitely a tradition endorsed and supported by the sultans for 200 years after.
As you might guess, koceks also had a role in demoralizing the subject populations of the OE - without fighting, of course, because they were kept around for fun and not for war. Besides obviously serving as sexual outlets for whichever sultans and nobles liked to diddle boys (of which there were apparently enough to keep koceks popular for centuries), their existence also basically told said subjects 'if we can do this to your kids and you still can't shake our yoke off, what hope do you really have of escaping us?'
Ruthless and practical Vlad might've been, but the Impaler also knew how to nurse a grudge. For example, his extremely brutal treatment of the boyars wasn't just motivated by his desire to centralize Wallachia, but also by his knowledge of their assassination of his father and other brother. If he'd been so absolutely pragmatic as to know when to stop & not go overboard in terrorizing them, they probably wouldn't have come to hate him more than they feared him, causing them to race to the side of Radu & arrange for his overthrow in 1462.
With that in mind, I don't believe it's likely he'd have had no vengeful feelings over the Turks turning his younger brother into their boytoy and then their pet pretender against his crown. (There are also stories that Mehmed raped Vlad himself while he was still a Turkish hostage, but these aren't nearly as well-supported as the ones about Mehmed and Radu, and thus are unlikely to be true)
He's referring to the young boys abducted by the Ottomans for use in the Jannisaries.
Abducted as young as 3, raped, forcefully converted to islam, castrated and then used as disposable footsoldiers.