Greetings, readers. Today, I’d like to talk to you about Dracula. Not the new 3-D film Dario Argento is working on (and remind me to tell you sometime about him scaring the hell out of me at Monster Mania 14), nor Gary Oldman, Christopher Lee, Bela Lugosi, and only peripherally Bram Stoker. No, today I’d like to talk about Vlad III, commonly called “The Impaler.” This Wallachian Voivode (variously translated as Prince, Baron, and Count) is popularly known as a bloodthirsty sadistic maniac, whose adopted name, “Dracula” was co-opted by Bram Stoker as the name of a powerful and malevolent vampire in 1897.

Vlad III has…well, he’s kind of been given the shaft by history, if you’ll pardon the pun. Todd MacFarlane released an action figure of Vlad the Impaler in his “MacFarlane’s Monsters: Faces of Madness” series, and in 2002 Miranda Twiss wrote a book entitled The Most Evil Men and Women in History, and Vlad’s face is on the cover, alongside Hitler, Stalin, Rasputin and Idi Amin. But is Vlad III really one of the most evil men to ever live? Is that justified? What led Vlad III to become “the Impaler”?

Born November 25th, 1431 to Vlad II Dracul, future Voivode of Wallachia (a province of what is now modern-day Romania) young Vlad III was soon given a royal education, geography, languages, sciences, and combat arts. In 1437, Vlad III was initiated into the Order of the Dragon, an organization his father had joined in 1431.

A word on the Order of the Dragon. “Dracul,” Vlad II’s adopted name, is old Romanian for “Dragon,” despite being regularly translated in the modern day as “Devil,” (the difference between old Romanian and the modern form of the language), and making “Dracula” then translating as “Son of the Dragon.” The Order of the Dragon was a Hungary-based knightly order of chivalry; it’s stated purpose was the defense of the Cross and the protection of the Christianity from its enemies — specifically, the Ottoman Empire (modern day Turkey and surrounding environs). The reference to the Dragon is a reference to St. George and the dragon he slew.

In 1436, Vlad II Dracul ascended the throne of Wallachia. In 1442, he was ousted by political rivals, and courted the Ottomans for support in regaining the throne. As a sign of loyalty, Vlad II sent his sons Vlad III and Radu to the Ottoman court as hostages. Radu submitted to the Ottomans, eventually converting to Islam. Vlad III, on the other hand, was regularly whipped and beaten for verbally abusing his captors every opportunity he got. Eventually, Vlad III was released and educated by the Ottomans, picking up Logic, Turkish, Persian, and horsemanship.

In 1447, Vlad II Dracul was assassinated, as was his firstborn son, Mircea II. To prevent Wallachia from being taken over by the Hungarians, the Ottomans swept in and put Vlad III on the throne. Though Vlad was soon ousted by Janos Hunyadi, his father’s assassin, Vlad’s knowledge of the inner workings of the Ottoman Empire and burning hatred for the Turks impressed Hunyadi, who made Vlad an advisor.

in 1453, the Ottomans conquered Constantinople after a prolonged seige, and began pushing into mainland Europe. Hunyadi launched a counterattack in Serbia, while Vlad led his own counter-invasion into Wallachia, retaking it from the Ottomans after a bloody three-year campaign in which Vlad killed the opposing commander in hand-to-hand combat.

So, Vlad was now once again Voivode of Wallachia.  His beloved country has been plunged into darkness by war — crime is rampant, agriculture production is at an all-time low, and trade has dwindled to nothing.  The Boyars, the noble class of Romania (of which, recall, Wallachia was a part), were feuding amongst themselves and raping the country into the grave.  Vlad was determined to renew his country’s former glory.  First order of business: strengthen his political power-base by torturing and executing Boyars and elevating men of common birth to their position, ensuring the loyalty of these newly-elevated men.

Next order of business, once Wallachia was settled back on the path to prosperity, was to deal with the Ottoman Empire.  In 1459, Pope Pius II called for a Crusade against the Ottomans, a call that was met with apathy by European leaders with the exception of Vlad.  Vlad could not afford apathy; the Ottomans were at his gates, practically, looking to take control of the Danube River to prevent the Holy Roman Empire from using it to launch naval attacks against the Ottoman Empire. As expeditionary forces of Turks entered Wallachia, Vlad ambushed them, one by one, impaling every last Turk and Bulgarian soldier he could lay hands on, living or dead.  Vlad even pushed into Ottoman-controlled Bulgaria, trying to send a strong enough point to Sultan Mehmed II regarding the folly of entering Wallachia.

Soon, 60,000 Ottoman soldiers with 30,000 supporting irregular troops entered Wallachia.  They were greeted by a forest of stakes, upon which were impaled perhaps as many as 20,000 Turks who had entered Wallachia during prior raids.  Vlad, meanwhile, was in the Wallachian hills with 20,000 to 40,000 peasant militiamen.  If he failed — if Wallachia and the Danube fell to the Ottomans — there would be precious little to prevent the Ottomans from expanding and conquering as far as Rome.  So he did what he had to do — in addition to the psychological weapon element of the forest of impaled Turks, he launched a series of guerrilla raids against the Sultan’s armies.

Vlad instituted Scorched Earth policies, poisoning water supplies and digging trenches and creating marshes to slow and fatigue the Ottoman army.  He rounded up sufferers of leprosy, syphilis, tuberculosis and the bubonic plague and sent them to mingle with the Sultan’s soldiers.  On June 16th/17th, 1462, Vlad launched a daring night attack — known as The Night Attack, and considered one of the finest military actions in Romanian history — in an attempt to assassinate the Sultan himself.  As is, some 23,000 Turks and Bulgarians were slain, but Mehmed II was not dissuaded, instead marching as far as the Wallachian capital of Targoviste — where he found another 20,000 staked Ottomans.  Demoralized, Mehmed and his army returned to Turkey.  This pretty much marked the end of Ottoman attempts to annex Wallachia.

Vlad had won, though he would continue to fight the Ottomans until his death at their hands in 1476, at the age of 45.  His corpse was decapitated, and his head put atop a stake in Constantinople.

***

What can be said about Vlad the Impaler? Even in his own lifetime, there was a marked dichotomy in how he was viewed.  In Eastern Europe, he was venerated as a hero and a liberator, almost like a Romanian George Washington.  In Western Europe, Vlad was seen as a blood-maddened sadistic tyrant who burned whole cities to the ground and staked everyone he could get his hands on.  Reports of how many people Vlad put on stakes ranges from 40,000 to 100,000, with some stories reporting an additional 80,000 burned alive.

The problem is, reports of Vlad’s cruelty were spread throughout the west by his “ally,” King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary in the form of an illustrated pamphlet.  Corvinus’ reasons for spreading such rumors were simple, and as old as politics itself: Corvinus had raised quite a bit of money throughout Europe to fund wars against the Ottomans, and then that money just…disappeared.  And to divert attention from his own jingling pockets, Corvinus raised a shaking finger and said “Look! Look! Vlad’s ramming sharpened wooden spikes up peoples’ asses!” Only, y’know…he probably said it in Latin.  A number of similar propaganda manuscripts against Vlad circulated through Russia and what is now Germany, as early as 1462, in large part written by people Vlad had opposed, who took the opportunity to present the Impaler as sadistic and/or violently insane.

A lie told enough times becomes the truth, they say, and this is especially true in the study of history, even more so in the history of pre-modern times.  In many cases, there are very few primary source documents to begin with, and what few we have are biased.  Our sole account of Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul is his own, and we know of the madness of Caligula strictly from Suetonious’ account in his Lives of the 12 Caesars.  For centuries, Vlad III was known to Western Europe almost solely from anti-Vlad propaganda, which has biased generations of historians against him.

I’m not writing this to declare Vlad III a saint.  I’m not going to pretend he didn’t kill tens of thousands of people in one of the most gruesome and excruciating ways imaginable.  But I am pointing out that he wasn’t doing it for shits and giggles.  Western Europe was in serious trouble if the Ottoman Empire expanded too far.  By 1453, they’d already swallowed the Byzantine Empire.  If they’d expanded further and been able to take the Holy Roman Empire (which was a bunch of squabbling principalities, incapable of putting up a united front of defense against the organized Turks)…basically all of Europe would have quickly followed, and the Ottoman Empire would have stretched from Spain (which was controlled by North African Muslims, or Moors, at the time and had been for nearly a thousand years) nearly to Mongolia.  Western civilization would have been overwhelmed and replaced by Middle Eastern civilization.

Vlad III and his 20,000 peasant militiamen, standing between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, allowed the world as we know it today to exist.  If Vlad had been less tenacious, less of a tactician, less willing to descend into the depths of Hell’s own depravity to protect his nation…we might not have had the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution…and this man is considered one of the most evil to ever live?

Hell, the main reason Vlad III’s name has even resurfaced, that he’s even remembered today at all, is because Bram Stoker heard some Romanian vampire myths and, when he did some research into Romania, stumbled across a few anecdotes of Vlad III’s cruelty, and felt that Vlad’s adopted name, Dracula, Son of the Dragon, was appropriate for the villain of his vampire novel.  Vlad the Impaler’s name is now inseparable from the legend of the vampire, as evidenced by the multitude of “vampire tours” offered in Romania today, many of which stop at Vlad III’s castle and at one or both of his rumored burial places.

And honestly? I think Vlad III Dracula deserves better than that.

Tags: bram stoker, Dracula, history, Hungary, impalement, Ottoman Empire, Romania, Vampire, vampires, vlad the impaler