1 of 6 Portrait of Vlad III. The Impaler or Dracula (14311476), 16th century Photo: GETTY IMAGES Portrait of Vlad III. the Impaler or Dracula (14311476), 16th century Photo: GETTY IMAGES
Long before Bram Stoker’s (18471912) book character, Dracula, sparked a worldwide vampire obsession, a European prince with an extravagant mustache gained a fearsome reputation for fending off successive waves of Ottoman invaders.
His name was Vlad the 3rd Dracula (Draculea in Romanian) and that surname didn’t give you goosebumps back then.
The name was given by his father, who was a member of the Order of the Dragon, a monarchical order of chivalry reserved only for princes and aristocrats, founded in 1408 to defend the Holy Cross and fight against the enemies of the Catholic Church. And Dracula simply meant “son of the dragon”.
But the nickname that the prince received after his death illustrated and still remembers today like no other in European history the weight of his legendary brutality: Vlad the Impaler.
Dracula was the prince of Wallachia, which is now part of Romania. He became famous across the European continent for the variety of methods he used to execute his prisoners, including beheading, boiling and burying them alive.
But the nickname comes from his favorite form of execution: the impaling. A wooden stake was carefully driven between the victim’s buttocks, sticking out just below the shoulders.
This cruel method left all vital organs intact, leaving the victim writhing in unimaginable suffering for at least 48 hours before dying.
The truth is that this way of treating defeated enemies was not uncommon in medieval Europe.
Vlad’s first cousin, Ştefan cel Mare (Stephen the Great), for example, is said to have “impaled diagonally one above the other through the navel” 2,300 Turkish prisoners. Stephen was venerated as a saint shortly after he died and was canonized by the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1992.
But the scale of the massacre that Dracula wreaked a decade before Stephen was so remarkable, even by the standards of the time, that it earned him a place in posterity.
violent youth
2 of 6 Bust of Vlad Dracula in Sighisoara, Romania, birthplace of the Romanian military hero Photo: GETTY IMAGES Bust of Vlad Dracula in Sighisoara, Romania, birthplace of the Romanian military hero Photo: GETTY IMAGES
Vladimir III Dracula was born in 1431 in the heart of Romania’s Transylvania region. He was the second son of nobleman Vlad II Dracula.
He grew up in a world of tremendous instability, in a region of Christian Europe constantly threatened by Ottoman invasion after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
At the age of 11, Vlad III. taken hostage along with his brother Radu by the Ottoman Empire to enforce the loyalty of his father, who was governor of Wallachia.
In 1447 his father was assassinated on the orders of John Hunyadi, governor of Transylvania and leading military and political figure in Hungary. In the same year, Hunyadi buried his elder brother Mircea II alive.
However, Dracula escaped and reigned in Wallachia for a short time in the autumn of 1448. Then he reigned again between April 1456 and July 1462; and finally in 1476 until his death in the same year.
the killing
3 of 6 Mehmed II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire (14511481), painted by Gentile Bellini Photo: GETTY IMAGES Mehmed II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire (14511481), painted by Gentile Bellini Photo: GETTY IMAGES
The legend of Dracula as a bloodthirsty fighter and cunning scourge of the Ottomans originated in June 1462.
After several failed attempts to capture the rebellious prince, the increasingly impatient Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II (14321481) amassed an army of 90,000 soldiers in Wallachia and commanded them personally.
However, the momentum and morale of this impressive siege suffered a severe blow when the Turkish army approached the city of Târgoviște (in presentday Romania) and witnessed a gruesome scene.
Over an area about a kilometer and a half, 23,844 captured members of Mehmed’s former Ottoman army had been impaled in a semicircle.
In the summer heat, the stench of death was unbearable, save for the raptors feeding on soldiers dead and alive, or nesting over skulls and older corpses.
The macabre forest bothered Mehmed’s forces, and Dracula’s soldiers spent months using disguises and guerrilla tactics to gradually eliminate their opponents until the survivors finally retreated.
was he crazy
4 of 6 ‘The Night Attack on Târgovişte’, a battle between the forces of Vlad the Impaler and Sultan Mehmed II in 1462, painted by Theodor Aman Photo: GETTY IMAGES ‘The Night Attack on Târgovişte’, a battle between the Troops of Vlad the Impaler and Sultan Mehmed II in 1462, painted by Theodor Aman Photo: GETTY IMAGES
Currently, many of Vlad’s atrocities could be defined as the actions of a highfunctioning sociopath.
In addition to treating soldiers, Vlad also sacrificed animals to deprive his enemies of food and transportation. He also practiced biological warfare and encouraged people suffering from leprosy, syphilis, plague and tuberculosis to “wear Turkish clothes and mingle with the soldiers”. [inimigos]”.
Other episodes that took place in the private sphere also contained elements of purely pathological malice.
In one such instance, he was enraged at what he considered to be the disrespectful attitude of the Italian ambassadors, who did not remove their caps in front of him, and simply nailed their caps on their heads.
On another occasion, Vlad invited a crowd of elderly, poor, sick, blind, and disabled people to a big feast at a restaurant in Târgovişte only to have them conventbound and burned alive. He later celebrated the event as “the elimination of the socially inferior”.
But was Vlad a “vampire”?
Apparently, Dracula wasn’t in the habit of drinking blood and with so many dead, there would be liter upon liter if he wanted it.
But there is a story that after Vlad burned down a suburb of Transylvania and impaled the prisoners, he sat down to dinner and watched as his men chopped off the victims’ limbs.
And according to the account, he “drenched his bread in the blood of the victims” because “the sight of human blood gave him courage.”
Seemingly real details like these fueled the mass production and sale of pamphlets that spread his legend after his death.
Although it is believed that Bram Stoker, who read about the Romanian prince before writing Dracula (1897), may have based the protagonist of his book on him, there are no documents to confirm this.
The author’s notes on the book mention “Dracula,” but the historical account from which these notes are derived only mentions his name, not the facts that made the prince so well known.
How did he die?
5 of 6 Vlad the Impaler eating lunch while watching his victims, in a 1560 Germanic engraving Photo: GETTY IMAGES Vlad the Impaler eating lunch while watching his victims, in a 1560 Germanic engraving Photo: GETTY IMAGES
Vlad probably died in late December 1476, just beginning his third term as ruler, amid a clash with Turkish forces and his Romanian rival, Basarab 3° Laiotá.
A Turkish national was hired to pose as one of his servants and apparently attacked him from behind. Vlad was valiantly defended by his bodyguard until he was eventually murdered and beheaded.
The Turks took his head to Constantinople and nailed it to a high place as a final act of revenge.
Local monks found his back in a forest near Bucharest (now the capital of Romania) and placed it in their crypt in the monastery on Snagov Island, in homage to his reputation as a great, almost lonely defender of European Christianity.
But the Russians of his day considered him a heretic for abandoning orthodox Christianity to embrace Roman Catholicism. This aroused the suspicion that he would find no rest in his grave. This is how the first version of the vampire legend came about.
How is he remembered?
6 of 6 Cover of a 1901 edition of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula Photo: GETTY IMAGES Cover of a 1901 edition of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula Photo: GETTY IMAGES
There are currently two seemingly opposing trends.
One of them is that of the bloodthirsty tyrant.
The gruesome pamphlets detailing his heinous deeds became bestsellers in the 15th and 16th centuries. With that, the reallife Dracula offers a fascinating example of a horror genre that was popular long before the era of novels a kind of dark entertainment. based on reality, probably secretly read.
The other aspect is that of the national hero.
For much of the 15th century, almost no ruler in European Christianity was willing to fight against what were then their greatest political and religious enemies, the Muslim Turks.
The powerful Ottoman Empire had taken the ancient holy site of Constantinople in 1453 and besieged the entrances to Vienna, Austria, in 1529.
Dracula’s campaigns against Mehmed II were in part a result of Romania’s geographical location. And they were almost certainly as pragmatic as the various battles he fought and the atrocities he committed against Christians, including a series of murders of monks.
But his status as the savior of Romanian Christianity was enduring and extraordinary.