Vlad II’s alliance with the Ottoman Turks was disliked by many of the leading men (‘boyars’) of Wallachia, including the statesman and warrior Janos Hunyadi, who had expelled the Turks from Transylvania in 1442. In 1447, Hunyadi led a revolt of the boyars against Vlad II. Vlad was assassinated and his son Mirea was buried alive after his eyes were gouged out. Sultan Murad granted Vlad II’s other two sons their freedom, and Vlad returned at once to his homeland. Radu chose to stay in Turkey.
The young Vlad, called Vlad Dracula (‘son of Dracul’), was not turning his back on the Turks. With the help of the Turkish cavalry, he wrested his father’s throne from the boyars and proclaimed himself Vlad III of Wallachia. This first period of occupation of the throne was short-lived, for Janos Hunyadi soon ousted him and put his own man in Vlad’s place.
Whether it was that dreadful killing of his father and his brother, plus the ensuing homeless years of conspiring and building up connections and relationships in the tangled, dangerous politics of the Christian-versus-Ottoman Turk world that turned Vlad Dracula into a ruthless killer, apparently enjoying the spilling of blood for its own sake, or whether he was born with a mind attuned to bloodlust, history does not tell us. What we do know is that when he eventually got his throne back in 1456, Vlad Dracula treated the boyars who had opposed him and his father with quite extraordinary cruelty.
He started off by handing out to the boyars a punishment meted many times throughout history: inviting one’s enemies to dinner, then murdering them all. Vlad’s version, carried out after a feast celebrating Easter Sunday, involved long-term torture rather than simple death for most of those at the feast. The healthy among them were put to work on building him a new castle, Poenari, on the river Arges. They were treated like animals: beaten and tortured for the slightest reason, ill-fed and ill-clothed. Many worked naked in the harshest weather as their clothes wore into shreds. And, of course, many died.
What happened to the old, weak and infirm among the boyars invited to that Easter Sunday feast was an even greater pointer to the way in which Vlad was to operate in the coming years. He impaled them on stakes, setting them up in a public place so that his subjects could watch them die, slowly and in hideous pain. This was the start of a career that would have future generations calling him Vlad the Impaler.
Over the years, Vlad’s methods became more and more twisted and psychopathic. A near-contemporary etching shows Vlad’s victims impaled on stakes pushed through their bodies, from front to back and through the neck. Other accounts of his impalements describe how the stakes were pushed up through the body, through the anus in the case of men, or the vagina in the case of women. He impaled large numbers at a time, often setting the stakes in circles and other patterns in the ground. He is said to have impaled 30,000 merchants outside the Tirgoviste city walls because they transgressed trade laws.
Vlad delighted in all forms of torture. His victims had their eyes gouged out, were eviscerated, decapitated, dismembered, boiled in oil and burnt. He once had a mistress disembowelled in public for having – perhaps mistakenly, perhaps dishonestly – told him that she was pregnant. Rumour had it that Vlad ate the bodies and drank the blood of his victims. The etching that showed men and women impaled on stakes, also depicted men hacking up and boiling body parts while Vlad, hands outstretched, sat waiting at a table covered with a white cloth for the cooked flesh to be set in front of him.
In his own kingdom, Vlad imposed his dreadful catalogue of punishments on the sick, the poor, the dishonest, the lazy and the work-shy. His aim, he said, was to make Wallachia a well-ordered, crime-free society where only the healthy, happy and prosperous had a place.
When Vlad took his methods beyond his own borders into the valley of the river Danube in 1461, he came unstuck, partly because he had not taken into account the full measure of Mehemmed II, who had succeeded his father as sultan of Turkey in 1451. When Vlad attacked but failed to subdue the Turks along the Danube, largely because the sultan’s army there was too strong, he made an abortive attempt at murdering the sultan in his tent. He succeeded only in enraging Mehemmed, a man whose actions, including the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, were to earn him the title of Conqueror. Mehemmed ordered the invasion of Wallachia.
Vlad retreated into the heart of his kingdom, razing villages and poisoning wells as he went so that the Turks could find no forage. Those Turkish soldiers he captured were impaled. Sultan Mehemmed is said to have found at one place in Wallachia a veritable forest of stakes, each with its dead, decomposing and stinking Turkish soldier impaled on it. Sultan Mehemmed chose to make a tactical withdrawal from Wallachia. Soon, he had sent in another force, this one led by Vlad’s brother, Radu. As this force neared Vlad’s castle of Poenari, his wife chose suicide over capture by the Turks and leaped to her death from the castle battlements. Vlad escaped into the mountains and made his way into Transylvania, leaving his throne for Radu to mount.
Years of exile now followed for Vlad Dracula. In Transylvania, he fell into the hands of King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, who had been remarkably successful in driving the Turks out of his land. Matthias Corvinus took Vlad to Hungary and imprisoned him. After a time, ‘imprisonment’ turned into guest status, with the occasional reporting back to the king. Vlad Dracula even married the king’s cousin. And in exile he continued his habit of impaling living creatures on stakes, though now he was reduced to small animals and large insects.
In the end, fortune once again favoured Vlad Dracula. His brother Radu in Wallachia had been making too many concessions to the Ottoman Turks and had turned the Order of the Dragon out of Wallachia. In 1467, King Matthias Corvinus gathered together a Christian force, led by him and Prince Stefan Bathory of Transylvania. With Vlad Dracula in its train, they drove the Turks out of Wallachia (now ruled by a prince called Basarab the Old, Radu having died of syphilis) and Moldavia. As was only to be expected, Vlad Dracula’s path back to his throne was marked by burnt and subdued villages and thousands of stakes on which were impaled the bodies of Turkish soldiers. Because he was a Christian destroying the infidel, Vlad’s favourite method of execution was this time officially approved by the pope in Rome.
Vlad Dracula died fighting the Ottoman Turks. Sultan Mehemmed, never likely to acquiesce in the Christian takeover of Wallachia, soon sent a huge force against him. Vlad could not count on the support of Wallachia’s boyars, and when his final battle came in 1476 he was greatly outnumbered. No one knows the manner of Vlad Dracula’s death, only that he died fighting fiercely for his throne.
Vlad Dracula was resurrected in spectacular style in the 19th century. It was a time when interest in the Gothic merged with Romanticism to create a feverish interest in the occult, in bloodsucking vampires, in devil-worship and much else. When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, his classic vampire horror story, it is not surprising that one of his main inspirations was Vlad Dracula. Vlad was not a vampire, and he had not worshipped the devil. But his name – another meaning of ‘dracul’ in Romanian was ‘devil’ – and his habit of impaling people on stakes, then eating their bodies and drinking their blood, certainly made him a prime candidate for the lead in a story about vampires, which could only be destroyed by driving a stake through their body.
Henry V at Agincourt