Historical Background

Some of you might be aware of the fact that when Bram Stoker penned his immortal classic, Dracula, he based his vampire villain on an actual historical figure. (Some of you may not be aware of Stoker at all; in that case, procure a copy of Dracula and read it.) Stoker’s model was Vlad III ‘Dracula’ (called Tepes, pronounced tse-pesh – The Impaler), a fifteenth century voivode or prince of Wallachia of the princely House of Basarab. Wallachia is now a province of Romania bordered to the north by Transylvania and Moldavia, to the east by the Black Sea and to the south by Bulgaria. Wallachia first appears as a political entity during the late thirteenth century from the weltering confusion left behind in the Balkans as the East Roman Empire slowly crumbled. The first prince of Wallachia was Basarab the Great (1310-1352), an ancestor of Dracula. Despite the splintering of the family into two rival clans, some members of the House of Basarab continued to govern Wallachia from that time until well after the Ottomans reduced the principality to the status of a client state. Vlad III Dracula, however, was the last prince of Wallachia to retain any real measure of independence. In order to understand the life of Vlad Dracula it is first necessary to understand something about the nature of Wallachian society and politics. The throne of Wallachia was hereditary but not by the law of primogeniture (through the eldest male); the boyars or great nobles had the right to elect the voivode from among the various eligible members of the royal family. As with most elective monarchies during the Middle Ages the power of the central government tended to be dissipated among the nobility as various members of the ruling family vied for the throne. Wallachian politics also tended to be very bloody – not in itself a unique situation as you know after studying Italy during the 15th century. Assassination was a common means of eliminating rivals and many of the voivodes’ lives ended violently and prematurely. By the late fifteenth century the House of Basarab had split into two rival clans; the descendants of Prince Dan and those of Prince Mircea the Old (Dracula’s grandfather). These two branches of the royal house were bitter rivals. Both Dracula and his father, Vlad II Dracul, murdered political rivals from the Danesti upon reaching the throne.

A second crucial fact about fifteenth-century Wallachian political life was that it was surrounded by powerful neighbors. In 1453 Constantinople and the last vestiges of the Byzantine or East Roman Empire, which had blocked Islam’s access to Europe from the east for nearly one thousand years, succumbed to the armed might of the Ottoman Turks under Sultan Mehmet II ‘the Conqueror’. Long before the fall of the Imperial City, though, the Ottomans had penetrated deep into the Balkans. Dracula’s grandfather, Mircea the Old, was forced to pay tribute to the sultan early in the fifteenth century. The Kingdom of Hungary to the north and west of Wallachia reached the zenith of its power during the fifteenth century and assumed Constantinople’s ancient mantle as defender of Christendom. The kingdoms of Poland and Lithuania, united under its Jagiellon rulers since 1386, also sought to extend influence south of the Carpathians.  Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the princes of Wallachia fought desperately to maintain its precarious independence and manipulate constantly shifting allegiances among these powerful neighbors.

Vlad Dracula ruled as Prince of Wallachia on three separate occasions. He first claimed the throne with Turkish support in 1448. On this occasion he ruled for only two months (November-October) before being driven out by a Danesti claimant supported by the Hungarians. Dracula dwelt in exile for several years before returning to Wallachia to kill the Danesti prince, Vladislav II, and reclaiming the Wallachian throne (this time he was the prince with Hungarian support). Dracula’s second rule over his principality stretched from 1456 to 1462 and it was during this time that he carried out his most famous military exploits against the Turks and also committed his most gruesome atrocities.

In 1462 a Turkish army overwhelmed Wallachia and Dracula fled to Transylvania to seek the aid of the King of Hungary. Instead of receiving the assistance he expected, Vlad was imprisoned by the Hungarian king, Mathias Corvinus, where he remained for several years. For the period of Dracula’s incarceration his brother, Radu the Handsome, ruled Wallachia as a puppet of the Ottoman sultan. When Radu died (ca. 1474-1475) the sultan appointed a member of the hated Danesti clan as prince. You can well imagine that this was exactly the kind of thing that caused Vlad III extreme irritation.

Eventually, Dracula regained the favor and support of the Hungarian king. In 1476 he once again invaded Wallachia. His small force consisted of a few loyal Wallachians, a contingent of Moldavians sent by his cousin Prince Stephen the Greatand Holy of Moldavia, and a contingent of Transylvanians under their prince, Stephen Bathory. The allies succeeded in driving Basarab out of the country and placed Prince Vlad III Dracula on the throne in November of 1476. However, after Dracula was once again in control of Wallachia, Stephen Bathory returned to Transylvania taking most of Dracula’s army along with him. The Turks quickly counterattacked with overwhelming force. Dracula was killed fighting the Turks near Bucharest in December of 1476. His head was sent to Constantinople where the Sultan had it displayed on a stake to prove that the terrible Impaler was really dead.

Atrocities

More than anything else the historical Vlad Dracula is known for his inhuman cruelty. Impalement was Dracula’s preferred method of torture and execution. Impalement was and is one of the most gruesome ways of dying imaginable. Dracula usually had a horse attached to each of the victim’s legs and a sharpened stake was gradually forced into the body. The end of the stake was usually oiled and care was taken that the stake not be too sharp, otherwise the victim might die too rapidly from shock. Normally the stake was inserted into the body through the anus and maneuvered through the body until it emerged from the mouth. However, the permutations of impalement were many, and victims were impaled through other bodily orifices or more simply through the abdomen or chest. Accounts tell of infants impaled along with their mothers, pinned to the chest. Victims were sometimes impaled so that they hung upside down on the stake.

Death by impalement was slow and excruciatingly painful. Victims sometimes endured the torture for hours or days before dying. Dracula often arranged the stakes in mass impalement in various geometric patterns (most common was a ring of concentric circles), especially near the gates of defeated towns or the city of an enemy. Often, the height of the stake indicated the social rank of the victim. Decaying corpses might be left on stakes for months and thousands were often impaled at a single time. Ten thousand, for example, were impaled in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu (where Dracula had once lived) in 1460. And the previous year on St. Bartholomews Day, Dracula had thirty thousand merchants and boyars from the Transylvanian city of Brasov impaled together. One report tells that an invading Turkish army turned back in fright when it encountered thousands of rotting corpses impaled on the banks of the Danube. In 1461 Mohammed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, a man not noted for his squeamishness, was sickened by the sight of twenty thousand impaled corpses rotting outside of Dracula’s capital of Târgovişte; the warrior sultan turned over command of the campaign against Dracula to his subordinates and returned to Constantinople.

One of the most famous contemporary depictions of Vlad III (a woodcut) shows Dracula feasting amongst a forest of grisly stakes while a nearby executioner cuts apart other victims. Impalement was Dracula’s favorite but by no means his only method of torture. The list of tortures and types of execution meted out by this guy reads like an inventory of hell’s tools: nails in head, cutting off of limbs, blinding, strangulation, burning, cutting off noses and ears, mutilation of sexual organs (especially in the case of women), scalping, skinning, exposure to the elements or to wild animals and boiling alive all make appearances in the historical accounts.

No one was immune to Dracula’s attentions. His victims included women and children, peasants and great lords, ambassadors from foreign powers. However, the vast majority of his victims came from the merchant and boyar classes of Transylvania and his own principality of Wallachia. Many, especially the Romanians themselves, have attempted to justify Dracula’s actions on the basis of nascent nationalism and political necessity. Many of the merchants in Transylvania and Wallachia at the time were ethnic Germans who were seen as parasites preying upon the Romanian natives of Wallachia, while the boyars had proven their disloyalty time and time again. Vlad III Dracula’s own father and older brother had, indeed, been murdered by unfaithful boyars. However, many if not most of Dracula’s victims were Wallachians and few deny that he derived a perverted pleasure from his actions.

Dracula began his reign of terror almost as soon as he attained authority in Wallachia. His first significant act of cruelty may have been motivated by a desire for revenge as well as a need to solidify his power. Early in his reign he gave a feast for his boyars and their families to celebrate Easter. Dracula was well aware that many of these same nobles were part of the conspiracy that had assassinated his father and buried his elder brother, Mircea, alive.  During the feast Dracula asked his noble guests to tell him how many princes had ruled during their life times. All of the nobles present could name several princes. One answered that at least thirty princes had held the throne during his life. None apparently had seen less than seven reigns. Dracula immediately had all the assembled nobles arrested. The older boyars and their families were impaled on the spot. The younger and healthier nobles and their families he marched north from Targoviste to the ruins of a castle in the mountains above the Arges River. Dracula was determined to rebuild this ancient fortress and make it suitable as stronghold and refuge. He enslaved the boyars and their families for a period of several months,  forcing them to rebuild the old castle with materials from another nearby ruin. According to the reports they labored until the clothes fell off their bodies and then continue working naked. Few of the old aristocracy of Wallachia survived the ordeal of building Castle Dracula.

Throughout his reign Dracula systematically eradicated the old boyar class of Wallachia. The old boyars had repeatedly undermined the power of the prince during previous reigns and had been responsible for the violent overthrow of several princes. Apparently Dracula was determined to provide a secure footing for his own rule. In the place of the boyars he executed, Vlad III promoted new men from among the free peasantry and the middling social stratum; men who would be loyal only to their prince. Many of Dracula’s acts of cruelty can be interpreted as efforts to strengthen and modernize the central government at the expense of feudal powers of the nobility and great towns.

Dracula was also constantly on guard against the adherents of the Danesti clan. Some of his raids into Transylvania may have been efforts to capture would-be princes of the Danesti. Several members of the Danesti clan died at Dracula’s hands. Vladislav II was murdered soon after Dracula came to power in 1456. Another Danesti prince was captured during one of Dracula’s forays into Transylvania. Thousands of the citizens of the town that had sheltered his rival were impaled by Dracula. The captured Danesti prince was forced to read his own funeral oration while kneeling before an open grave before his execution.

Dracula’s atrocities against the people of Wallachia were usually attempts to enforce his own moral code upon his country. He appears to have been particularly concerned (obsessed?) with female chastity. Girls who lost their virginity, adulterous wives and sexually active widows were all targets of Dracula’s cruelty. Such women often had their sexual organs cut out or their breasts cut off. They were also often impaled through the vagina on red-hot stakes that were forced through the body until they emerged from the mouth. One report tells of the execution of an unfaithful wife: Dracula had the woman’s breasts cut off, then she was skinned and impaled in a square in Targoviste with her skin lying on a nearby table. Dracula also insisted that his people be honest and hard working. Merchants who cheated their customers were likely to find themselves mounted on a stake beside common thieves.

Evidence

Much of the information we have about Vlad III comes from pamphlets published in Germany and Russia. The German pamphlets appeared shortly after Dracula’s death and, at least initially, may have been politically inspired. At that time Matthias Corvinus of Hungary was seeking to bolster his own reputation in the Holy Roman Empire and may have intended with such pamphlets to justify his less than vigorous support of a man who admittedly was his vassal. The pamphlets were also a form of mass entertainment in a society where the printing press was just coming into widespread use. Similar to the subjects of supermarket tabloids of today, the cruel life of the Wallachian tyrant was easily sensationalized. These pamphlets were reprinted numerous times over the thirty or so years following Dracula’s death; strong proof of their popularity.

The German pamphlets painted Dracula as an inhuman monster who terrorized the land and butchered innocents with sadistic glee. The Russian pamphlets took a somewhat different view. The princes of Moscow were at this time (c.1470s)  just beginning to build the basis of what would become the Tsarist Russia. They were also having considerable trouble with disloyal, often treasonous boyars. In Russia, Dracula was (and still is among some scholars) presented as a cruel but just prince whose actions were directed toward the greater good of his people. Despite the differences in interpretation, the pamphlets, regardless of their origin, agree remarkably well on the specifics of Vlad III. The degree of agreement between the various pamphlets has led most historians to conclude that at least the broad outlines of the events described actually occurred.

Romanian verbal tradition provides another important source for the life of Vlad III Dracula. Legends and tales concerning the Impaler have remained a part of folklore among the Romanian peasantry to this day. These tales have been passed down from generation to generation for over five hundred years. Through constant retelling they have become somewhat garbled and confused and they are gradually, post-1990s, being co-opted by Romanian’s tourist industry. However, they still provide valuable information about Dracula and his relationship with his own people. Many of the tales contained in the pamphlets are also found in the verbal tradition, though with a somewhat different emphasis. Among the Romanian peasantry Dracula is remembered as a just prince who defended his people from foreigners, whether those foreigners be Turkish invaders or German merchants. He is also remembered as somewhat of a champion of the common man against the oppression of the boyars. Dracula’s fierce insistence on honesty and the employment of locals is a central part of the verbal tradition. Many of the anecdotes demonstrate the prince’s efforts to eliminate crime and dishonesty from his domain. However, despite the more positive interpretation, the Romanian verbal tradition also remembers Dracula as an exceptionally cruel and often capricious ruler. There are several events that are common to all the pamphlets, regardless of their nation of origin, and also appear in verbal tradition. For example, in some versions the foreign ambassadors received by Dracula at Tirgoviste are Florentine, in others they are Turkish and the nature of their offense against the prince also varies from version to version. However, all accounts agree that Dracula, in response to some real or imagined insult by these ambassadors, had their hats nailed to their heads. Some of the sources view Dracula’s actions as justified, others view his acts as crimes of wanton and senseless cruelty.