Vlad III, known as Vlad the Impaler (Romanian:
Vlad Țepeș, pronunciation:) or Vlad Dracula (/ˈdrækjələ/;
1428/31 – 1476/77), was voivode (or prince) of Wallachia three times
between 1448 and his death. He was the second son of Vlad
Dracul, who became the ruler of Wallachia in
1436.
Vlad and his younger brother, Radu, were held as hostages in the Ottoman Empire from 1442 to secure their father's loyalty. Vlad's father and eldest brother, Mircea, were murdered after John Hunyadi, regent-governor of Hungary, invaded Wallachia in 1447. Hunyadi installed Vlad's second cousin, Vladislav II, as the new voivode.
Vlad and his younger brother, Radu, were held as hostages in the Ottoman Empire from 1442 to secure their father's loyalty. Vlad's father and eldest brother, Mircea, were murdered after John Hunyadi, regent-governor of Hungary, invaded Wallachia in 1447. Hunyadi installed Vlad's second cousin, Vladislav II, as the new voivode.
Hunyadi launched a military campaign
against the Ottomans in the autumn of 1448, and Vladislav accompanied him. Vlad
broke into Wallachia with Ottoman support in October, but Vladislav returned
and Vlad sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire before the end of the year. Vlad
went to Moldavia
in 1449 or 1450, and later to Hungary. He invaded Wallachia with Hungarian
support in 1456. Vladislav died fighting against him. Vlad began a purge among
the Wallachian boyars to strengthen his position. He
came into conflict with the Transylvanian Saxons, who supported his
opponents, Dan and Basarab Laiotă (who were Vladislav's
brothers), and Vlad's illegitimate half-brother, Vlad
the Monk. Vlad plundered the Saxon villages, taking the captured people to
Wallachia where he had them impaled (which inspired his cognomen).
Peace was restored in 1460.
The Ottoman
Sultan, Mehmed
II, ordered Vlad to pay homage to him personally, but Vlad had the Sultan's
two envoys captured and impaled. In February 1462, he attacked Ottoman
territory, massacring tens of thousands of Turks and Bulgarians. Mehmed
launched a campaign against Wallachia to replace Vlad with Vlad's younger
brother, Radu. Vlad attempted to capture the sultan at Târgovişte
during the night of 16–17 June 1462. The sultan and the main Ottoman army
left Wallachia, but more and more Wallachians deserted to Radu. Vlad went to
Transylvania to seek assistance from Matthias
Corvinus, King of Hungary, in late 1462, but Corvinus had him
imprisoned.
Vlad was held in captivity in Visegrád
from 1463 to 1475. During this period, anecdotes about his cruelty started to
spread in Germany and Italy. He was released at the request of Stephen III of Moldavia in the summer of
1475. He fought in Corvinus's army against the Ottomans in Bosnia in early
1476. Hungarian and Moldavian troops helped him to force Basarab Laiotă (who
had dethroned Vlad's brother, Radu) to flee from Wallachia in November. Basarab
returned with Ottoman support before the end of the year. Vlad was murdered
before 10 January 1477. Books describing Vlad's cruel acts were among the
first bestsellers in the German-speaking territories. In Russia, popular
stories suggested that Vlad was able to strengthen central government only
through applying brutal punishments, and a similar view was adopted by most
Romanian historians in the 19th century. Vlad's reputation for cruelty and his patronymic
inspired the name of the vampire Count Dracula in Bram Stoker's
1897 novel Dracula.
Name
The expression Dracula, which
is now primarily known as the name of a mythological vampire, was for
centuries known as the sobriquet of Vlad III.
Diplomatic reports and popular stories referred to him as Dracula, Dracuglia,
or Drakula already in the 15th century.
He himself signed his two letters as "Dragulya" or
"Drakulya" in the late 1470s.
His name had its origin in the Romanian sobriquet of his father, Vlad
Dracul ("Vlad the Dragon"), who received it after he became a
member of the Order of the Dragon.
Dracula is the Slavonic genitive
form of Dracul, meaning "the son of Dracul (or the Dragon)".
In modern Romanian, dracul means "the devil", which
contributed to Vlad's bad reputation.
Vlad III is known as Vlad ÈšepeÈ™
(or Vlad the Impaler) in Romanian historiography.
This sobriquet is connected to the impalement
that was his favorite method of execution.
The Ottoman writer Tursun Beg referred to him as Kazıklı Voyvoda
(Impaler Lord) around 1500.
Mircea the Shepherd, Voivode of Wallachia, used
this sobriquet when referring to Vlad III in a letter of grant on 1 April
1551.
Early
life
Vlad was the second legitimate son
of Vlad II Dracul, who was an illegitimate son of Mircea I of Wallachia. He won the moniker
“Dracul” for his membership in the Order of the Dragon.
It was a militant fraternity founded by Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund. The Order of the Dragon was dedicated to halting
the Ottoman advance into Europe.
As he was old enough to be a candidate to the throne of Wallachia in 1448, his
time of birth would have been between 1428 and 1431.
Vlad was most probably born after his father settled in Transylvania in 1429.
Historian Radu Florescu writes that Vlad was born in the
Transylvanian Saxon town of Sighișoara
(then in the Kingdom of Hungary) where his father lived in a
three-storey
stone house from 1431 to 1435.
Modern historians identify Vlad's mother either as a daughter or a kinswoman of
Alexander I of Moldavia,
or as his father's unknown first wife.
The house in the main square of Sighișoara
where Vlad's father lived from 1431 to 1435
Vlad Dracul seized Wallachia after
the death of his half-brother Alexander
I Aldea in 1436.
One of his charters (which was issued on 20 January 1437) preserved the
first reference to Vlad and his elder brother, Mircea, mentioning them as their father's
"first born sons".
They were mentioned in four further documents between 1437 and 1439.
The last of the four charters also referred to their younger brother, Radu.
After a meeting with John
Hunyadi, Voivode of Transylvania, Vlad Dracul did
not support an Ottoman invasion of Transylvania in March 1442.
The Ottoman Sultan, Murad II,
ordered him to come to Gallipoli to demonstrate his loyalty.
Vlad and Radu accompanied their father to the Ottoman Empire, where they were
all imprisoned.
Vlad Dracul was released before the end of the year, but Vlad and Radu remained
hostages to secure his loyalty.
They were held imprisoned in the fortress of Eğrigöz (now Doğrugöz),
according to contemporaneous Ottoman chronicles.
Their lives were especially in danger after their father supported Vladislaus, King of Poland and Hungary,
against the Ottoman Empire during the Crusade
of Varna in 1444.
Vlad Dracul was convinced that his two sons were "butchered for the sake
of Christian peace", but neither Vlad nor Radu was murdered or mutilated
after their father's rebellion.
Vlad Dracul again acknowledged the
sultan's suzerainty
and promised to pay a yearly tribute to him in 1446 or 1447.
John Hunyadi (who had become the regent-governor of Hungary in 1446)
broke into Wallachia in November 1447.
The Byzantine historian Michael Critobulus wrote that Vlad and Radu fled
to the Ottoman Empire, which suggests that the sultan had allowed them to
return to Wallachia after their father paid homage to him.
Vlad Dracul and his eldest son, Mircea, were murdered.Hunyadi made Vladislav II (son of Vlad Dracul's
cousin, Dan II) the ruler of Wallachia.
Reigns
First
rule
Lands ruled around 1390 by Vlad the
Impaler's grandfather, Mircea I of Wallachia (the lands on the right
side of the Danube had been lost to the Ottomans before Vlad's reign)
Upon the death of his father and
elder brother, Vlad became a potential claimant to Wallachia.
Vladislav II of Wallachia accompanied John Hunyadi, who launched a
campaign against the Ottoman Empire in September 1448.
Taking advantage of his opponent's absence, Vlad broke into Wallachia at the
head of an Ottoman army in early October.He had to accept that the Ottomans had captured the fortress of Giurgiu on the
Danube and strengthened it.
The Ottomans defeated Hunyadi's army
in the Battle of Kosovo between 17 and
18 October.
Hunyadi's deputy, Nicholas VÃzaknai, urged Vlad to come to meet him in
Transylvania, but Vlad refused him.
Vladislav II returned to Wallachia at the head of the remnants of his
army.
Vlad was forced to flee to the Ottoman Empire before 7 December 1448.
We bring you news that [Nicholas
VÃzaknai] writes to us and asks us to be so kind as to come to him until [John
Hunyadi] ... returns from the war. We are unable to do this because an emissary
from Nicopolis came to us ... and said with great certainty that [Murad II had
defeated Hunyadi]. ... If we come to [VÃzaknai] now, the [Ottomans] could come
and kill both you and us. Therefore, we ask you to have patience until we see
what has happened to [Hunyadi]. ... If he returns from the war we will meet him
and we will make peace with him. But if you will be our enemies now, and if
something happens, ... you will have to answer for it before God
— Vlad's letter to the councilors
of Brașov
In
exile
Vlad first settled in Edirne in the Ottoman
Empire after his fall.
Not long after, he moved to Moldavia, where Bogdan II (his father's brother-in-law
and possibly his maternal uncle) had mounted the throne with John Hunyadi's
support in the autumn of 1449.
After Bogdan was murdered by Peter
III Aaron in October 1451, Bogdan's son, Stephen,
fled to Transylvania with Vlad to seek assistance from Hunyadi.However, Hunyadi concluded a three-year truce with the Ottoman Empire on
20 November 1451,
acknowledging the Wallachian boyars' right to elect the successor of
Vladislav II if he died.
Vlad allegedly wanted to settle in
Brașov (which was a center of the Wallachian boyars expelled by
Vladislaus II), but Hunyadi forbade the burghers to give shelter to him on
6 February 1452.
Vlad returned to Moldavia where Alexăndrel had dethroned Peter Aaron.
The events of his life during the years that followed are unknown.
He must have returned to Hungary before 3 July 1456, because on that day
Hunyadi informed the townspeople of Brașov that he had tasked Vlad with the
defence of the Transylvanian border.
Second
rule
Consolidation
The circumstances and the date of
Vlad's return to Wallachia are uncertain.
He invaded Wallachia with Hungarian support either in April, July, or in August
1456.
Vladislav II died during the invasion.
Vlad sent his first extant letter as voivode of Wallachia to the burghers of Brașov
on 10 September.
He promised to protect them in case of an Ottoman invasion of Transylvania, but
he also sought their assistance if the Ottomans occupied Wallachia.
In the same letter, he stated that "when a man or a prince is strong and
powerful he can make peace as he wants to; but when he is weak, a stronger one
will come and do what he wants to him",
showing his authoritarian personality.
Multiple sources (including Laonikos Chalkokondyles's chronicle)
recorded that hundreds or thousands of people were executed at Vlad's order at
the beginning of his reign.
He began a purge against the boyars who had participated in the murder of his
father and elder brother, or whom he suspected of plotting against him.
Chalkokondyles stated that Vlad "quickly effected a great change and utterly
revolutionized the affairs of Wallachia" through granting the "money,
property, and other goods" of his victims to his retainers.
The lists of the members of the princely council during Vlad's reign also show
that only two of them (Voico Dobrița and Iova) were able to retain their
positions between 1457 and 1461.
Conflict
with the Saxons
Vlad sent the customary tribute to
the sultan.
After John Hunyadi died on 11 August 1456, his elder son, Ladislaus
Hunyadi became the captain-general of Hungary.
He accused Vlad of having "no intention of remaining faithful" to the
king of Hungary in a letter to the burghers of Brașov, also ordering them to
support Vladislaus II's brother, Dan III, against Vlad.
The burghers of Sibiu
supported another pretender, "a priest of the Romanians who calls himself
a Prince's son".[47] The latter (identified as Vlad's illegitimate brother, Vlad the Monk) took possession of AmlaÈ™, which had customarily been held by the rulers of Wallachia in Transylvania.
Description: Seven administrative units (six of them to the south, one of them to the north)
Medieval seats (or administrative units) of the Transylvanian Saxons
Ladislaus V of Hungary had Ladislaus Hunyadi executed on 16 March 1457. Hunyadi's mother, Erzsébet Szilágyi, and her brother, Michael Szilágyi, stirred up a rebellion against the king.Taking advantage of the civil war in Hungary, Vlad assisted Stephen, son of Bogdan II of Moldavia, in his move to seize Moldavia in June 1457. Vlad also broke into Transylvania and plundered the villages around Brașov and Sibiu.[52] The earliest German stories about Vlad recounted that he had carried "men, women, children" from a Saxon village to Wallachia and had them impaled.[53] Since the Transylvanian Saxons remained loyal to the king, Vlad's attack against them strengthened the position of the Szilágyis.
Description: Seven administrative units (six of them to the south, one of them to the north)
Medieval seats (or administrative units) of the Transylvanian Saxons
Ladislaus V of Hungary had Ladislaus Hunyadi executed on 16 March 1457. Hunyadi's mother, Erzsébet Szilágyi, and her brother, Michael Szilágyi, stirred up a rebellion against the king.Taking advantage of the civil war in Hungary, Vlad assisted Stephen, son of Bogdan II of Moldavia, in his move to seize Moldavia in June 1457. Vlad also broke into Transylvania and plundered the villages around Brașov and Sibiu.[52] The earliest German stories about Vlad recounted that he had carried "men, women, children" from a Saxon village to Wallachia and had them impaled.[53] Since the Transylvanian Saxons remained loyal to the king, Vlad's attack against them strengthened the position of the Szilágyis.
Vlad's representatives participated
in the peace negotiations between Michael Szilágyi and the Saxons.
According to their treaty, the burghers of Brașov agreed that they would expel
Dan from their town.
Vlad promised that the merchants of Sibiu could freely "buy and sell"
goods in Wallachia in exchange for the "same treatment" of the
Wallachian merchants in Transylvania.
Vlad referred to Michael Szilágyi as "his Lord and elder brother" in
a letter on 1 December 1457.
Ladislaus Hunyadi's younger brother,
Matthias Corvinus, was elected king of Hungary on
24 January 1458.
He ordered the burghers of Sibiu to keep the peace with Vlad on 3 March.
Vlad styled himself "Lord and ruler over all of Wallachia, and the duchies
of Amlaș and Făgăraș" on 20 September 1459, showing that he had taken
possession of both of these traditional Transylvanian fiefs of the rulers of
Wallachia.
Michael Szilágyi allowed the boyar Michael (an official of Vladislav II of
Wallachia)
and other Wallachian boyars to settle in Transylvania in late March 1458.
Before long, Vlad had the boyar Michael killed.
In May, Vlad asked the burghers of
Brașov to send craftsmen to Wallachia, but his relationship with the Saxons
deteriorated before the end of the year.
According to a scholarly theory, the conflict emerged after Vlad forbade the
Saxons to enter Wallachia, forcing them to sell their goods to Wallachian
merchants at compulsory border fairs.
Vlad's protectionist tendencies or border fairs are not documented.
Instead, in 1476 Vlad emphasized that he had always promoted free trade during
his reign.
The Saxons confiscated the steel
that a Wallachian merchant had bought in Brașov without repaying the price to
him.
In response, Vlad "ransacked and tortured" some Saxon merchants,
according to a letter that Basarab Laiotă (a son of Dan II of
Wallachia)
wrote on 21 January 1459.
Basarab had settled in Sighișoara and laid claim to Wallachia.
However, Matthias Corvinus supported Dan III (who was again in Brașov)
against Vlad.
Dan III stated that Vlad had Saxon merchants and their children impaled or
burnt alive in Wallachia.
You know that King Matthias has sent
me and when I came to Èšara
Bârsei the officials and councilors of Brașov and the old men of Țara
Bârsei cried to us with broken hearts about the things which Dracula, our
enemy, did; how he did not remain faithful to our Lord, the king, and had sided
with the [Ottomans]. ... [H]e captured all the merchants of Brașov and Țara
Bârsei who had gone in peace to Wallachia and took all their wealth; but he was
not satisfied only with the wealth of these people, but he imprisoned them and
impaled them, 41 in all. Nor were these people enough; he became even more evil
and gathered 300 boys from Brașov and Țara Bârsei that he found in ...
Wallachia. Of these he impaled some and burned others.
— Basarab Laiotă's letter to the councilors
of Brașov and Țara Bârsei
Dan III broke into Wallachia, but
Vlad defeated and executed him before 22 April 1460.
Vlad invaded southern Transylvania and destroyed the suburbs of Brașov,
ordering the impalement of all men and women who had been captured.
During the ensuing negotiations, Vlad demanded the expulsion or punishment of
all Wallachian refugees from Brașov.
Peace had been restored before 26 July 1460, when Vlad addressed the
burghers of Brașov as his "brothers and friends".
Vlad invaded the region around Amlaș and Făgăraș on 24 August to punish
the local inhabitants who had supported Dan III.
Ottoman
war
The Ottoman
Sultan, Mehmed
II, who invaded Wallachia during Vlad's reign
Konstantin Mihailović (who served as a janissary in
the sultan's army) recorded that Vlad refused to pay homage to the sultan in an
unspecified year.
The Renaissance historian Giovanni Maria degli Angiolelli likewise wrote that
Vlad had failed to pay tribute to the sultan for three years.
Both records suggest that Vlad ignored the suzerainty of the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed II,
already in 1459, but both works were written decades after the events.
Tursun
Beg (a secretary in the sultan's court) stated that Vlad only turned
against the Ottoman Empire when the sultan "was away on the long
expedition in Trebizon" in 1461.
According to Tursun Beg, Vlad started new negotiations with Matthias Corvinus,
but the sultan was soon informed by his spies.
Mehmed sent his envoy, the Greek Katabolinos, to Wallachia, ordering Vlad to
come to Constantinople.He also sent secret instructions to Hamza, bey of Nicopolis, to capture Vlad after he
crossed the Danube.
Vlad found out the sultan's "deceit and trickery", captured Hamza and
Katabolinos, and had them executed.
After the execution of the Ottoman
officials, Vlad gave orders in fluent Turkish to the commander of the fortress
of Giurgiu to open the gates, enabling the Wallachian soldiers to break in the
fortress and capture it.
He invaded the Ottoman Empire, devastating the villages along the Danube.
He informed Matthias Corvinus about the military action in a letter on
11 February 1462.
He stated that more than "23,884 Turks and Bulgarians" had been
killed at his order during the campaign.
He sought military assistance from Corvinus, declaring that he had broken the
peace with the sultan "for the honor" of the king and the Holy Crown of Hungary and "for the
preservation of Christianity and the strengthening of the Catholic faith".
The relationship between Moldavia and Wallachia had become tense by 1462,
according to a letter of the Genoese
governor of Kaffa.
Having learnt of Vlad's invasion,
Mehmed II raised an army of more than 150,000 strong, that was said to be
"second in size only to the one"
that occupied Constantinople in 1453, according
to Chalkokondyles.
The size of the army suggests that the sultan wanted to occupy Wallachia,
according to a number of historians (including Franz
Babinger, Radu Florescu, and Nicolae Stoicescu).
On the other hand, Mehmed had granted Wallachia to Vlad's brother, Radu, before
the invasion of Wallachia, showing that the sultan's principal purpose was only
the change of the ruler of Wallachia.
The Ottoman fleet landed at Brăila (which
was the only Wallachian port on the Danube) in May.
The main Ottoman army crossed the Danube under the command of the sultan at
Nicoplis on 4 June 1462.
Outnumbered by the enemy, Vlad adopted the scorched
earth policy and retreated towards Târgoviște.
During the night of 16–17 June, Vlad broke into the Ottoman camp in an attempt
to capture or kill the sultan.
Either the imprisonment or the death of the sultan would have caused a panic
among the Ottomans, which could have enabled Vlad to defeat the Ottoman army.
However, the Wallachians "missed the court of the sultan himself"
and attacked the tents of the viziers Mahmut Pasha and Isaac.
Having failed to attack the sultan's camp, Vlad and his retainers left the
Ottoman camp at dawn.
Mehmed entered Târgoviște at the end of June.
The town had been deserted, but the Ottomans were horrified to discover a
"forest of the impaled" (thousands of stakes with the carcasses of
executed people), according to Chalkokondyles.
The sultan's army entered into the
area of the impalements, which was seventeen stades
long and seven stades wide. There were large stakes there on which, as it was
said, about twenty thousand men, women, and children had been spitted, quite a
sight for the Turks and the sultan himself. The sultan was seized with
amazement and said that it was not possible to deprive of his country a man who
had done such great deeds, who had such a diabolical understanding of how to
govern his realm and its people. And he said that a man who had done such
things was worth much. The rest of the Turks were dumbfounded when they saw the
multitude of men on the stakes. There were infants too affixed to their mothers
on the stakes, and birds had made their nests in their entrails.
— Laonikos Chalkokondyles: The Histories
Tursun Beg recorded that the
Ottomans suffered from summer heat and thirst during the campaign.
The sultan decided to retreat from Wallachia and marched towards Brăila.
Stephen III of Moldavia hurried to Chilia (now Kiliya in Ukraine)
to seize the important fortress where a Hungarian garrison had been placed.
Vlad also departed for Chilia, but left behind a troop of 6,000 strong to try
to hinder the march of the sultan's army, but the Ottomans defeated the
Wallachians.
Stephen of Moldavia was wounded during the siege of Chilia and returned to
Moldavia before Vlad came to the fortress.
The main Ottoman army left
Wallachia, but Vlad's brother Radu and his Ottoman troops stayed behind in the Bărăgan Plain.
Radu sent messengers to the Wallachians, reminding them that the sultan could
again invade their country.
Although Vlad defeated Radu and his Ottoman allies in two battles during the
following months, more and more Wallachians deserted to Radu.
Vlad withdrew to the Carpathian Mountains, hoping that Matthias Corvinus would
help him regain his throne.
However, Albert of Istenmező, the deputy of the Count of the Székelys, had recommended in
mid-August that the Saxons recognize Radu.
Radu also made an offer to the burghers of Brașov to confirm their commercial
privileges and pay them a compensation of 15,000 ducats.
Imprisonment
in Hungary
Renaissance palaces of Matthias
Corvinus's summer residence at Visegrád
(engraving from the 1480s)
Matthias Corvinus came to
Transylvania in November 1462.
The negotiations between Corvinus and Vlad lasted for weeks,
but Corvinus did not want to wage war against the Ottoman Empire.
At the king's order, his Czech mercenary commander, John Jiskra of Brandýs, captured Vlad near Rucăr in
Wallachia.
To provide an explanation for Vlad's
imprisonment to Pope Pius II and the Venetians (who had sent money to
finance a campaign against the Ottoman Empire), Corvinus presented three
letters, allegedly written by Vlad on 7 November 1462, to Mehmed II,
Mahmud Pasha, and Stephen of Moldavia.According to the letters, Vlad offered to join his forces with the sultan's
army against Hungary if the sultan restored him to his throne.
Most historians agree that the documents were forged to give grounds for Vlad's
imprisonment.
Corvinus's court historian, Antonio
Bonfini, admitted that the reason for Vlad's imprisonment was never
clarified.
Florescu writes, "[T]he style of writing, the rhetoric of meek submission
(hardly compatible with what we know of Dracula's character), clumsy wording,
and poor Latin" are all evidence that the letters could not be written on
Vlad's order.
He associates the author of the forgery with a Saxon priest of Brașov.
Vlad was first imprisoned "in
the city of Belgrade"
(now Alba
Iulia in Romania), according to Chalkokondyles.
Before long, he was taken to Visegrád,
where he was held for fourteen years.
No documents referring to Vlad between 1462 and 1475 have been preserved.
In the summer of 1475, Stephen III of Moldavia sent his envoys to Matthias
Corvinus, asking him to send Vlad to Wallachia against Basarab Laiotă, who had
submitted himself to the Ottomans.
Stephen wanted to secure Wallachia for a ruler who had been an enemy of the
Ottoman Empire, because "the Wallachians [were] like the Turks" to
the Moldavians, according to his letter.
According to the Slavic stories about Vlad, he was only released after he
converted to Catholicism.
Third
rule and death
Matthias Corvinus recognized Vlad as
the lawful prince of Wallachia, but he did not provide him military assistance
to regain his principality.
Vlad settled in a house in Pest.
When a group of soldiers broke into the house while pursuing a thief who had
tried to hide there, Vlad had their commander executed because they had not
asked his permission before entering his home, according to the Slavic stories
about his life.
Vlad moved to Transylvania in June 1475.
He wanted to settle in Sibiu and sent his envoy to the town in early June to
arrange a house for him.
Mehmed II acknowledged Basarab Laiotă as the lawful ruler of Wallachia.
Corvinus ordered the burghers of Sibiu to give 200 golden florins to Vlad from
the royal revenues on 21 September, but Vlad left Transylvania for Buda in
October.
Vlad bought a house in Pécs that became
known as Drakwlya haza ("Dracula's house" in Hungarian).
In January 1476 John Pongrác of Dengeleg,
Voivode of Transylvania, urged the people of Brașov to send to Vlad all those
of his supporters who had settled in the town, because Corvinus and Basarab
Laiotă had concluded a treaty.
The relationship between the Transylvanian Saxons and Basarab remained tense,
and the Saxons gave shelter to Basarab's opponents during the following months.
Corvinus dispatched Vlad and the Serbian Vuk
Grgurević to fight against the Ottomans in Bosnia in early 1476.They captured Srebrenica and other fortresses in February and March
1476.
Mehmed II broke into Moldavia and
defeated Stephen III in the Battle of Valea Albă on 26 July 1476.
Stephen Báthory and Vlad broke into Moldavia, forcing
the sultan to lift the siege of the fortress
at Târgu Neamț in late August, according to a letter of Matthias Corvinus.
The contemporaneous Jakob Unrest added that Vuk Grgurević and a member of the
noble Jakšić family also participated in the struggle
against the Ottomans in Moldavia.
Matthias Corvinus ordered the
Transylvanian Saxons to support Báthory's planned invasion of Wallachia on
6 September 1476, also informing them that Stephen of Moldavia would also
break into Wallachia.
Vlad stayed in Brașov and confirmed the commercial privileges of the local
burghers in Wallachia on 7 October 1476.
Báthory's forces captured Târgoviște on 8 November.
Stephen of Moldavia and Vlad ceremoniously confirmed their alliance, and they
occupied Bucharest, forcing Basarab Laiotă to seek refuge in the Ottoman Empire
on 16 November.
Vlad informed the merchants of Brașov about his victory, urging them to come to
Wallachia.
He was crowned before 26 November.
Basarab Laiotă returned to Wallachia
with Ottoman support, and Vlad died fighting against them in late December 1476
or early January 1477.
In a letter written on 10 January 1477, Stephen III of Moldavia
related that Vlad's Moldavian retinue had also been massacred.
According to Leonardo Botta, the Milanese ambassador to Buda, the Ottomans cut
Vlad's corpse into pieces.
Bonfini wrote that Vlad's head was sent to Mehmed II.
The place of his burial is unknown.
According to popular tradition (which was first recorded in the late 19th
century),
Vlad was buried in the Monastery of Snagov.
The excavations carried out by Dinu V. Rosetti in 1933 found no tomb below the
supposed "unmarked tombstone" of Vlad in the monastery church.
Rosetti reported: "Under the tombstone attributed to Vlad there was no
tomb. Only many bones and jaws of horses."
Historian Constantin Rezachevici said Vlad was most probably buried in the
first church of the Comana Monastery, which had been established by
Vlad and was near the battlefield where he was killed.
Family
Vlad had two wives, according to
modern specialists.His first wife may have been an illegitimate daughter of John Hunyadi,
according to historian Alexandru Simon.
Vlad's second wife was Jusztina Szilágyi, who was a cousin of Matthias
Corvinus.
She was the widow of Vencel Pongrác of Szentmiklós when "Ladislaus
Dragwlya" married her, most probably in 1475.
She survived Vlad Dracul, and first married Pál Suki, then János Erdélyi.
Vlad's eldest son,
Mihnea, was born in 1462.
Vlad's unnamed second son was killed before 1486.
Vlad's third son, Vlad Drakwlya, unsuccessfully laid claim to Wallachia
around 1495.
He was the forefather of the noble Drakwla family.
Legacy
Reputation
for cruelty
First
records
Stories about Vlad's brutal acts
began circulating during his lifetime.
After his arrest, courtiers of Matthias Corvinus promoted their spread.
The papal legate, Niccolo Modrussiense, had already written about such stories
to Pope Pius II in 1462.
Two years later, the pope included them in his Commentaries.
The meistersinger
Michael
Beheim wrote a lengthy poem about Vlad's deeds, allegedly based on his
conversation with a Catholic monk who had managed to escape from Vlad's prison.
The poem, called Von ainem wutrich der heis Trakle waida von der Walachei
(Story of a Bloodthirsty Madman Called Dracula of Wallachia), was performed at
the court of Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor
in Wiener Neustadt during the winter of 1463.
According to one of Beheim's stories, Vlad had two monks impaled to assist them
to go to heaven, also ordering the impalement of their donkey because it began
braying after its masters' death.
Beheim also accused Vlad of duplicity, stating that Vlad had promised support
to both Matthias Corvinus and Mehmed II but did not keep the promise.
In 1475 Gabriele Rangoni, Bishop
of Eger (and a former papal legate),
understood that Vlad had been imprisoned because of his cruelty.
Rangoni also recorded the rumour that while in prison Vlad caught rats to cut
them up into pieces or stuck them on small pieces of wood, because he was
unable to "forget his wickedness".
Antonio Bonfini also recorded anecdotes about Vlad in his Historia Pannonica
around 1495.
Bonfini wanted to justify both the removal and the restoration of Vlad by
Matthias.
He described Vlad as "a man of unheard cruelty and justice".
Bonfini's stories about Vlad were repeated in Sebastian Münster's Cosmography.
Münster also recorded Vlad's "reputation for tyrannical justice".
... Turkish messengers came to
[Vlad] to pay respects, but refused to take off their turbans, according to
their ancient custom, whereupon he strengthened their custom by nailing their
turbans to their heads with three spikes, so that they could not take them off.
— Antonio Bonfini: Historia
Pannonica
German
stories
1499 German woodcut showing Dracule
waide dining among the impaled corpses of his victims
Works containing the stories about
Vlad's cruelty were published in Low German
in the Holy Roman Empire before 1480.
The stories were allegedly written in the early 1460s, because they describe
Vlad's campaign across the Danube in early 1462, but they do not refer to
Mehmed II's invasion of Wallachia in June of the same year.
They provide a detailed narration of the conflicts between Vlad and the
Transylvanian Saxons, showing that they originated "in the literary minds
of the Saxons".
The stories about Vlad's plundering
raids in Transylvania were clearly based on an eyewitness account, because they
contain accurate details (including the lists of the churches destroyed by Vlad
and the dates of the raids).
They describe Vlad as a "demented psychopath, a sadist, a gruesome
murderer, a masochist", worse than Caligula and Nero.
However, the stories emphasizing Vlad's cruelty are to be treated with caution
because his brutal acts were very probably exaggerated (or even invented) by
the Saxons.
The invention of movable
type printing contributed to the popularity of the stories about Vlad,
making them one of the first "bestsellers" in Europe.
To enhance sales, they were published in books with woodcuts on
their title pages that depicted horrific scenes.
For instance, the editions published in Nuremberg in
1499 and in Strasbourg in 1500 depict Vlad dining at a table
surrounded by dead or dying people on poles.
... [Vlad] had a big copper cauldron
built and put a lid made of wood with holes in it on top. He put the people in
the cauldron and put their heads in the holes and fastened them there; then he
filled it with water and set a fire under it and let the people cry their eyes
out until they were boiled to death. And then he invented frightening,
terrible, unheard of tortures. He ordered that women be impaled together with
their suckling babies on the same stake. The babies fought for their lives at
their mother's breasts until they died. Then he had the women's breasts cut off
and put the babies inside headfirst; thus he had them impaled together.
— About a mischievous tyrant
called Dracula vodă (No. 12–13)
Slavic
stories
There are more than twenty
manuscripts (written between the 15th and 18th centuries)
which preserved the text of the Skazanie o Drakule voievode (The Tale
about Voivode Dracula).
The manuscripts were written in Russian, but they copied a text that had
originally been recorded in a South Slavic language, because they contain
expressions alien to the Russian language but used in South Slavic idioms (such
as diavol for "evil").
The original text was written in Buda between 1482 and 1486.
The nineteen anecdotes in the Skazanie
are longer than the German stories about Vlad.
They are a mixture of fact and fiction, according to historian Raymond T.
McNally.
Almost half of the anecdotes emphasize, like the German stories, Vlad's
brutality, but they also underline that his cruelty enabled him to strengthen
the central government in Wallachia.
For instance, the Skazanie writes of a golden cup that nobody dared to
steal at a fountain
because Vlad "hated stealing so violently ... that anybody who caused any
evil or robbery ... did not live long", thereby promoting public order,
and the German story about Vlad's campaign against Ottoman territory underlined
his cruel acts while the Skazanie emphasized his successful diplomacy.
On the other hand, the Skazanie sharply criticized Vlad for his
conversion to Catholicism, attributing his death to this apostasy.
Some elements of the anecdotes were later added to Russian stories about Ivan the Terrible
of Russia.
National
hero
The Cantacuzino Chronicle was
the first Romanian historical work to record a tale about Vlad the Impaler,
narrating the impalement of the old boyars of Târgoviște for the murder of his
brother, Dan. The chronicle added that Vlad forced the young boyars and their
wives and children to build the Poienari Castle. The legend of the Poienari
Castle was mentioned in 1747 by Neofit I, Metropolitan of Ungro–Wallachia,
who complemented it with the story of Meșterul Manole, who allegedly walled in
his bride to prevent the trumbling down of the walls of the castle during the
building project. In the early 20th century, Constantin Rădulescu-Codin, a
teacher in Muscel County where the castle was situated, published a local
legend about Vlad's letter of grant "written on rabbit skin" for the
villagers who had helped him to escape from Poienari Castle to Transylvania
during the Ottoman invasion of Wallachia. In other villages of the region, the
donation is attributed to the legendary Radu Negru.
Rădulescu-Codin recorded further
local legends, some of which are also known from the German and Slavic stories
about Vlad, suggesting that the latter stories preserved oral tradition. For
instance, the tales about the burning of the lazy, the poor, and the lame at
Vlad's order and the execution of the woman who had made her husband too short
a shirt can also be found among the German and Slavic anecdotes. The peasants
telling the tales knew that Vlad's sobriquet was connected to the frequent
impalements during his reign, but they said only such cruel acts could secure
public order in Wallachia.
Most Romanian artists have regarded
Vlad as a just ruler and a realistic tyrant who punished criminals and executed
unpatriotic boyars to strengthen the central government. Ion Budai-Deleanu
wrote the first Romanian epic poem focusing on him. Deleanu's Èšiganiada
(Gypsy Epic) (which was published only in 1875, almost a century after its
composition) presented Vlad as a hero fighting against the boyars, Ottomans, strigoi
(or vampires), and other evil spirits at the head of an army of gypsies and
angels. The poet Dimitrie Bolintineanu emphasized Vlad's triumphs in his Battles
of the Romanians in the middle of the 19th century. He regarded Vlad
as a reformer whose acts of violence were necessary to prevent the despotism of
the boyars. One of the greatest Romanian poets, Mihai Eminescu, dedicated a
historic ballad, The Third Letter, to the valiant princes of Wallachia,
including Vlad. He urges Vlad to return from the grave and to annihilate the
enemies of the Romanian nation:
You must come, O dread Impaler,
confound them to your care.
Split them in two partitions, here
the fools, the rascals there;
Shove them into two enclosures from
the broad daylight enisle 'em,
Then set fire to the prison and the
lunatic asylum.
— Mihai Eminescu: The Third
Letter
In the early 1860s, the painter
Theodor Aman depicted the meeting of Vlad and the Ottoman envoys, showing the
envoys' fear of the Wallachian ruler.
Since the middle of the 19th
century, Romanian historians have treated Vlad as one of the greatest Romanian
rulers, emphasizing his fight for the independence of the Romanian lands. Even
Vlad's acts of cruelty were often represented as rational acts serving national
interest. Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol was one of the first historians to
emphasize that Vlad could only stop the internal fights of the boyar parties
through his acts of terror. Constantin C. Giurescu remarked, "The tortures
and executions which [Vlad] ordered were not out of caprice, but always had a
reason, and very often a reason of state." Ioan Bogdan was one of the few
Romanian historians who did not accept this heroic image. In his work published
in 1896, Vlad ÈšepeÈ™ and the German and Russian Narratives, he concluded
that the Romanians should be ashamed of Vlad, instead of presenting him as
"a model of courage and patriotism". According to an opinion poll
conducted in 1999, 4.1% of the participants chose Vlad the Impaler as one of
"the most important historical personalities who have influenced the
destiny of the Romanians for the better".
Vampire
mythology
Further information: Nosferatu
(word) and Count Dracula
The stories about Vlad made him the
best-known medieval ruler of the Romanian lands in Europe. However, Bram
Stoker's Dracula, which was published in 1897, was the first book to
make a connection between Dracula and vampirism. Stoker had his attention drawn
to the blood-sucking vampires of Romanian folklore by Emily Gerard's article
about Transylvanian superstitions (published in 1885). His limited knowledge
about the medieval history of Wallachia came from William Wilkinson's book (Account
of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia with Political Observations
Relative to Them), published in 1820.
Stoker "apparently did not know
much about" Vlad the Impaler, "certainly not enough for us to say
that Vlad was the inspiration for" Count Dracula, according to Elizabeth
Miller. For instance, Stoker wrote that Dracula had been of Székely origin only
because he knew about both Attila the Hun's destructive campaigns and the
alleged Hunnic origin of the Székelys. Stoker's main source, Wilkinson who
accepted the reliability of the German stories described Vlad as a wicked man.
Actually, Stoker's working papers for his book contain no references to the
historical figure. Consequently, Stoker borrowed the name and "scraps of
miscellanous information" about the history of Wallachia when writing his
book about Count Dracula.
Appearance
and representations
Pope Pius II's legate, Niccolò
Modrussa, painted the only extant description of Vlad, whom he had met in Buda.
A copy of Vlad's portrait has been featured in the "monster portrait gallery"
in the Ambras Castle at Innsbruck. The picture depicts "a strong, cruel,
and somehow tortured man" with "large, deep-set, dark green, and
penetrating eyes", according to Florescu. The color of Vlad's hair cannot
be determined, because Modrussa mentions that Vlad was black-haired, while the
portrait seems to show that he had fair hair. The picture depicts Vlad with a
large lower lip.
Vlad's bad reputation in the
German-speaking territories can be detected in a number of Renaissance
paintings. He was portrayed among the witnesses of Saint Andrew's martyrdom in
a 15th-century painting, displayed in the Belvedere in Vienna. A figure similar
to Vlad is one of the witnesses of Christ in the Calvary in a chapel of the St.
Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna.
[Vlad] was not very tall, but very
stocky and strong, with a cold and terrible appearance, a strong and aquiline
nose, swollen nostrils, a thin and reddish face in which the very long
eyelashes framed large wide-open green eyes; the bushy black eyebrows made them
appear threatening. His face and chin were shaven, but for a moustache. The
swollen temples increased the bulk of his head. A bull's neck connected [with]
his head from which black curly locks hung on his wide-shouldered person.
— Niccolò Modrussa's description
of Vlad the Impaler
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