Vlad the Impaler_ The True Story of Dracula
In June 1462, a vast Ottoman army under Sultan Mehmed II advanced on the city of Targovište
in Wallachia.
After weeks of gruelling ambushes and pitched battles, resulting in thousands of Turkish
deaths, the Ottomans were preparing for a siege of the Wallachian capital.
But when a detachment of Ottoman cavalry was sent ahead of the main force, they encountered
a sight that shook them to their core.
They discovered a forest of impaled bodies.
There were over 20,000 Ottoman captives rotting in the summer heat before the walls of Targovište.
The forest of stakes stretched for two miles in a vast crescent up to half a mile wide.
This macabre sight was more than the Ottomans could take.
The scale of the horror, the astonishing extremism of it, broke their spirit and the Sultan and
his army retreated from Targovište.
The architect of this horrific victory was Vlad III Dracula.
His cunning, his military brilliance and above all his extremism had saved his country and
his people.
But these very traits, the extremism of Vlad the Impaler, his willingness to do anything,
to go further than anyone else to achieve victory and his refusal to compromise, would
ultimately mean his downfall.
This is the incredible story of Vlad the Impaler.
Vlad was born sometime between 1428 and 1431, the son of Vlad II Dracul.
He was born into a time of great conflict between the Christian kingdoms of the Balkans
and Central Europe and the Ottoman Turks who were determined to conquer them.
Vlad was born into a Wallachian aristocracy called the Boyars.
The social structure of Wallachia was quite simple.
They were the free peasants who worked the land, the Boyars who ruled over them and above
them all was a prince known as the Voivode.
There was no simple succession between the Voivodes of Wallachia.
Voivode rulers had to be of the royal line ultimately descended from Bazarab I but none
served for very long and there were many usurpations by brothers, cousins and bastard sons of the
two main factions.
The great enemy of the Draculesti faction was the Danesti.
The succession was, in practice, about who was the strongest and this often came down
to who could retain the support of external allies.
Wallachia was squeezed between larger, more powerful kingdoms.
Vlad's father as Voivode of Wallachia simply had to submit to one overlord or another,
namely his mighty neighbours the Kingdom of Hungary to the north or the Ottoman Turks
to the south.
To understand Vlad the Impaler, we must first look at the actions of his father.
The choices of Vlad II Dracul, his allies and enemies and the horrific manner of his
death would all have a profound impact on the character of his son Vlad III Dracula
and the often extreme actions that he took in his life.
To become Voivode, Vlad II had courted the powers of Central Europe, especially the Kingdom
of Hungary.
In fact, this was where the famous name of Dracul, meaning dragon, came from.
The Order of the Dragon was a chivalric order created by Sigismund of Luxembourg who was
king of Hungary and eventually Holy Roman Emperor.
Its primary purpose was to defend Christendom from the Ottoman Turks and Vlad II as an ally
of Sigismund was welcomed into the order.
Becoming known as Dracul, this name was extended to his sons in the form of Dracula and his
clan, his descendants, would become known as the Draculesti.
But when Sigismund died in 1437 and Hungary was weakened, Vlad II sought instead to ally
with the Ottoman Turks to the south.
The Ottomans always threatened invasion across the Danube and without Hungarian support,
the Wallachians had no hope of resisting.
And so Vlad II travelled to the Ottoman capital at Aderne, formerly the Byzantine city of
Adrianople, to pay homage to Sultan Murad II and where he agreed to pay an annual tribute
and to provide military support to the Ottomans in their coming attack on Hungary.
Allying with the Ottomans seems rather to go against his oaths to defend Christendom
from the Muslim Turks but this was the reality of ruling Wallachia.
Protecting your own position, keeping enough of the boyars on your side and ensuring your
peasants were not wiped out in an invasion was a balancing act where every decision had
potentially terrible consequences.
To openly defy the Sultan would have meant the invasion of Wallachia, thousands of Wallachians
killed and taken as slaves and Vlad's own death and replacement as voivode by a boyar
rival who was willing to make peace.
And so Vlad II tried to play both sides as best he could but after supporting an Ottoman
attack on Hungarian Transylvania, he was paid a visit by one of the great men of the age,
John Hunyadi.
The Transylvanian Hunyadi, as one of the most powerful nobles of Hungary, was the leading
opponent to Ottoman expansion and would be at different times a terrible enemy and a
staunch ally to both Vlad II and Vlad III.
And now in 1440, Hunyadi, who would soon be regarded as the greatest military commander
in the Balkans and was already a noble of great influence in Hungary, decided to bring
Wallachia back under Hungarian control using both the carrot and the stick.
In the next Ottoman invasion of Transylvania, Vlad II supported Hunyadi.
And when the Ottomans were crushed, the Sultan demanded Vlad come to Aderne to explain himself.
To defy the Sultan's order would have invited an invasion of Wallachia and so in 1442, Vlad
went down to Aderne where he was immediately seized and imprisoned by the Sultan.
Along with his two young sons, Vlad, who was between 11 and 14 years old and Radu, who
was about 7 years old.
Now Vlad II had been well aware of the risks of putting himself in the Sultan's hands
and so he left his eldest son behind to rule in his absence.
Murchia II was only about 15 years old and as his father and younger brothers were now
Ottoman captives, he could not side with Hungary against the Sultan.
Because of this, Hunyadi invaded Wallachia, deposed young Murchia II and made Vlad II's
cousin Bazarab into the voivode of Wallachia in return for his support of Hungary.
After about a year, Vlad II was released by the Ottomans and he returned to retake Wallachia,
making himself voivode once more with the support of his son Murchia and the Boyar faction
that had remained loyal to them.
But Vlad was forced to leave his two young sons behind as hostages of the Sultan and
they would remain there for about five more years.
Vlad the Impaler, the great and terrible enemy of the Turks, was in fact partly raised
by them and educated and instructed by Ottoman shooters.
But what was his life like as a hostage of the Sultan?
Before his time in Ottoman captivity, Vlad's childhood had been perfectly pleasant.
He had joined his mother, his two legitimate brothers and his father when they all went
to the Wallachian capital Togoviste in 1437 and there young Vlad began his training as
a knight.
He was taught how to fight with the sword, the bow and the lance and he excelled especially
at horsemanship.
He also learned Italian, French and Hungarian as well as Latin for international diplomacy.
The religion of the Boyars was Orthodox Christianity, but Roman Catholicism had an influence too
and because of the influence of Catholic Hungary on his father, young Vlad was also instructed
in the Catholic faith at an early age.
The schism between Catholic and Orthodox Christians in Europe was for some people a greater concern
than the struggle between Christianity and Islam and this schism was extremely important
in the politics of the region.
When Vlad and Radu were raised by the Ottomans, their education as princes continued because
the Turks intended for them to be potential vassals when they came of age.
There was therefore no attempted conversion to Islam.
That would have been counterproductive.
The Turks wanted to produce tame Christian princes who would deliver a principality along
with its taxes, produce and slaves for the Sultan.
Vlad did become fluent in Turkish and he had contact with the future Sultan and his great
enemy Mehmed II who was just a few years younger than Vlad.
We can only imagine the details of their relationship.
In some ways they had a similar character and both would become lifelong soldiers.
Both would attempt to centralize ever more authority under themselves at the expense
of their nobles.
Although the future Sultan would have a vast empire to command in his endless wars of conquest
while Vlad would have to fight repeatedly for his throne and in defence of his people.
Vlad chafed under his Turkish captors and was whipped frequently as punishment.
No doubt this along with the frustrations of his captivity had a lasting emotional impact.
It was rather different for his younger brother Radu who in later life would be known as Radu
the Handsome due to his exceptional good looks and by all accounts he had a far more accommodating
nature than did Vlad.
And he became a favourite of Mehmed II who was a few years older than Radu.
As Sultan, Mehmed II would have 5 wives and 4 children and he maintained a royal harem
of other women as was the custom.
But there are accounts that he also loved and lay with boys and that he did the same
to the young Radu the Handsome.
To what extent these accounts are true is hard to say.
Perhaps they helped to fuel the hatred Vlad had for the Turks and the Sultan.
And whatever happened, it seems that this period of captivity was when Vlad and Radu
began to fall out and as men they would be great enemies and whatever horrors were inflicted
upon them in their captivity, Vlad would turn against the Turks while Radu turned entirely
towards them.
Their father negotiated with Sultan Mehmed II in the summer of 1447 and no doubt the
fate of the boys was a bargaining chip that encouraged Vlad Dracul to make favourable
terms.
Unhappy at this renewed close relationship, John Hunyadi invaded Wallachia intending to
remove Vlad II and replace him with a more pro-Hungarian boy vote.
And this was when the faction of Wallachian boyars who were opposed to Vlad's faction
decided to rebel.
The Daneshti clan captured Vlad Dracul's oldest son Murcia II, they burned out his
eyes with hot irons and then they buried him alive.
Vlad Dracul managed to make it out of Targoviste and fled south towards the Danube, perhaps
intending to reach the Turks, but he was caught and killed by Vladislav II of the Daneshti.
John Hunyadi momentarily claimed Wallachia for himself but thought better of it.
He rewarded the pro-Hungarian boyar factions who had supported him by making Vladislav
II of the Daneshti clan into the boy vote of Wallachia.
There is a story, a legend perhaps, that a loyal retainer of Vlad II named Kazan carried
the dead prince's sword and his collar with the insignia of the Order of the Dragon to
young Vlad Dracula at Edirne.
This Kazan also related in graphic detail the murders of his brother and father at the
hands of the Daneshti and it is said that Dracula now swore to kill Vladislav II in
person.
In early 1448, Sultan Murad II released young Vlad Dracula so that he might take the Wallachian
throne and bring his people back under Ottoman control.
Now this was highly unlikely because he had few soldiers, little money and no power.
He was between 17 and 20 years old and he had not been in Wallachia for 5 or 6 years
so he did not have the network of political influences necessary to make a move on the
throne.
But there was an opportunity.
In October 1448, the Hungarians clashed with the Ottomans in a huge battle on the plain
of Kosovo.
With the Hungarians were Germans and Bohemians and Wallachians under Vladislav II.
It was a great throw of the dice by Hunyadi to crush the Ottoman forces and throw back
the endless invasions.
But the Christians lost the battle.
And so while the Voivode was still 200 miles away, Dracula reached Targoviste with a small
force of horsemen supplied by or at least paid for by the Ottomans.
There he claimed the throne.
He also tried to have Vladislav II seized on his return.
But Dracula's men failed.
Vladislav then rounded up the Wallachian troops returning piecemeal to Wallachia and rode
against the young usurper.
Vastly outmatched, Dracula was defeated in battle and he fled.
His first period of rule was just 2 or 3 months long.
And where else could he flee to but back to Edirne?
However, Vladislav II's overlords, the Hungarians, had been defeated and the Voivode of Wallachia
sought terms with the Turks, moving into the Ottoman orbit.
Dracula sensed that his life was in danger from hosts who might no longer need him to
be their pet Voivode, so he fled to Moldavia.
He was safe there from Hungarian and Ottoman interference and soon Bogdan II would become
the Voivode of Moldavia.
Bogdan was related to Dracula by marriage and young Vlad grew close to Bogdan's son
who would go on to become Stephen the Great.
During this period, Dracula fought with Stephen and Bogdan II against the forces of Poland.
Dracula's stay ended when Bogdan II was murdered and usurped by his brother Petra Aran in October
1451.
Vlad and Stephen fled across the border to Transylvania, which was dangerous because
that land was ruled by Hunyadi, but they had few options left.
From there, they fled to the Saxon colony town of Brazov, but Hunyadi and Vladislav
had word that Dracula was in the area and so he ran again to Sibiu, another Saxon town
that would give him sanctuary.
John Hunyadi became increasingly suspicious of Vladislav II's growing closeness with the Turks.
When Vladislav sent a delegation of boyars to congratulate the new sultan Mehmed II on
his ascension to the throne, Hunyadi seized the duchies of Thagoras and Amlas from the
Wallachian prince.
These were key entrance points into and across Transylvania.
And Hunyadi believed he had a ready-made replacement for Vladislav in the young Dracula and now
he took him into his service.
Dracula was even taken to Buda where he was present at Vladislav V's coronation so that
the exiled Wallachian prince-in-waiting could swear allegiance to the new king of Hungary.
Perhaps it seems astonishing that Dracula would make peace with Hunyadi, the architect
behind the deposition and murder of his father and brother.
But Dracula wanted the throne and he wanted to get his hands on Vladislav II and the other
boyars who had actually done these terrible deeds.
And if he was ever to wrest Wallachia away from the Ottomans, he needed Hungarian support.
So for once he swallowed his pride and accepted from the king of Hungary responsibility for
defence of the Transylvanian frontier.
This was a role his father Vlad II had once fulfilled for Hungary.
But now in 1451, the Transylvanian border was about to become a far more dangerous place
because Sultan Murad II had died from a stroke and his son Mehmed II was now on the
Ottoman throne and for good reason he would become known to history as Mehmed II the Conqueror.
In May 1453, the 21 year old sultan conquered Constantinople and then he turned his attention
to the rest of the Balkans.
In the face of the unstoppable might of the Ottomans, Vladislav II turned even more towards
the Turks and made further overtures to the sultan, agreeing that Mehmed's armies could
march through Wallachia.
By 1455, Mehmed was mustering men and supplies on the southern banks of the Danube.
Mehmed's forces already had control of southern Serbia but now his target would be Belgrade.
Its strategic position was vital.
Once Belgrade fell, the Danube would be open for an Ottoman fleet and army to attack Buda
and eventually even Vienna.
Hunyadi led the organisation for the defence of Belgrade, pulling in every ship and every
man he could but the Wallachians under Vladislav, now allied to the Turks, were raiding across
the border into Transylvania, tying down troops that were desperately needed in Serbia.
Negotiations between Hunyadi and Vladislav failed when the Wallachians stirred up a rebellion
against Hungary in Fagaras in April 1456.
Finally Hunyadi agreed to give Vlad Dracula what he had long been waiting for, Hungarian
support to retake the Wallachian throne.
In June 1456, Dracula set out through the past over the Carpathians at Bran with a small
force of exiled Boyars and Hungarian mercenaries determined to take the throne and to take
his revenge.
Dracula set to work gaining the support of the Wallachian Boyars, especially those of
his father's faction and all those disaffected with Vladislav II's increasing support for
the Ottomans.
It took him less than a month of travelling from valley to valley, stronghold to stronghold,
from the mountains and foothills of the north to the plains of the south before he was strong
enough to move against the murderer of his father and elder brother.
Dracula finally caught up with Vladislav II somewhere near Targoviste and cornered his
enemy.
For the two armies, Dracula made Vladislav an offer to fight him in a duel to the death,
single combat, with the victor winning all of Wallachia.
Now Dracula had no need to do this.
He could have had his men kill Vladislav or he could have taken him prisoner and had him
executed.
He could have done anything he liked instead of risking his own life and risking complete
failure in his life's mission.
But as far as Vlad Dracula was concerned, honour demanded that he face his enemy man
to man.
What is more, victory in a duel would prove to all that God was on his side.
And it was a bold statement to the watching Boyars that Vlad was not a weakling who had
men to do his killing for him.
It showed also that he was a warrior, not a politician and that he was willing and able
to get his hands dirty.
And of course, Vlad Dracula cut down his enemy and so avenged the murders of his father and
brother.
Wallachia would now be Vlad's, but the Sultan was still coming for Serbia and so Dracula
returned to his duty of guarding the Transylvanian passes against Ottoman attacks.
Because with Wallachia now allied to Hungary, John Hunyadi could move his Transylvanian
forces to Belgrade, while Mehmed II would need to keep some of his own forces guarding
the Danube against Wallachian raids.
But while this was going on, the Turks had begun the siege of Belgrade and were battering
the walls with an enormous number of guns.
Hunyadi gathered an army and a fleet and attacked the Ottoman fleet on the Danube, winning a
magnificent victory before reinforcing the city.
Mehmed II launched an assault on the breached walls but they were thrown back and routed
in a spectacular and unlikely victory.
Mehmed II retreated all the way back to Sofia and in his rage had several of his generals
executed.
This glorious victory was marred however by the death of John Hunyadi.
A plague, a common occurrence in sieges, ravaged the battered city in the days after the victory
and Hunyadi was one of its victims.
So Hungary lost its greatest soldier and Christendom lost its staunchest champion, while Vlad Dracula
lost the great lord who had once been his enemy but who had become his strongest ally.
In August 1456, Dracula was formally elected by the High Boyar Council and confirmed in
the Cathedral of Targovište with the title of Prince Vlad, son of Vlad the Great, sovereign
and ruler of Ungro-Valachia and the Duchies of Amlaš and Faragas.
As voivode, Dracula set out to work on international relations.
He wrote to the mayors of the important towns of Transylvania, to Hunyadi's son Laszlo and
to the boyars who were still not aligned with him.
He also worked to undermine the rule of the Moldavian usurper Petra Aran, intending his
cousin Stephen, who was still with him in Targovište, for the Moldavian throne.
This was not merely repaying the favour for a relative, it was in Wallachian interests
to pull Moldavia away from the Ottomans as they were under Petra Aran and away from Poland
where they had been traditionally, and into the Hungarian sphere along with Wallachia.
And in 1457, at the head of 6,000 Wallachian soldiers, courtesy of Dracula, Stephen took
on and defeated his uncle, the murderer and usurper of his father, in two battles and
Stephen was crowned as Moldavia's prince.
At the time, it looked like Dracula's first great success, and of course it was, but Stephen
would go on to have a far longer and far greater reign than his cousin.
And Dracula had done well, but Hungary was still reeling from Hunyadi's death and the
danger of further Ottoman attacks and Wallachia could not afford open defiance of the Turks.
When Mehmed II sent ambassadors to Targovište, Vlad had to agree to a yearly tribute of 2,000
gold decats, which was no small sum, but even worse, was the agreement to allow the passage
of Ottoman armies through Wallachia so that they might assault the Hungarians in Transylvania.
In return, the Ottomans recognised Dracula as the rightful ruler, in effect promising
not to undermine his rule or invade in an attempt to place another Wallachian boyar
on the throne.
That was the power the Ottomans held over him.
Still, when they asked him to come to Constantinople to pay homage to the Sultan, Dracula refused.
Perhaps he remembered well what had happened to his father under the previous Sultan.
Perhaps he could not bring himself to stoop so low.
Thus buying himself time through diplomatic agreements with his neighbours Hungary, Moldavia
and the Ottomans, Vlad set to work on Wallachia.
He repaired and extended Ponary Castle, a potential bolt hole perched high on a steep
rock precipice in the mountains.
The rules of his agreements with the Hungarians and Turks stated that he could not build such
a fortress, but Vlad did it anyway.
He needed safe places and he was willing to push his luck with the overlords who both
needed him, at least for the time being.
He also had to project his power into the lowland plains and so he founded the fortress
of Bucharest in June 1458, building on and linking several villages in the area.
Of course, this would go on to become an important city.
He also fortified the nearby monastery of Snagov and built a line of small forts along
the plain and river.
It should be said that fortifying monasteries in the Balkans was not in the least bit unusual.
These defences were built of course to defend Wallachia from the Ottomans on the other side
of the Danube, but he needed them against internal enemies too.
Wallachia, like many mountain kingdoms in history, was fundamentally divided.
In preceding centuries, each steep-sided, narrow valley was ruled by a different clan
and its chief ruled his lands and people like a king.
By the late medieval era, these lords thrived as boyars under the voivode they elected,
but those ancient divisions were still there below the surface.
Over the previous 40 years, there had been 12 voivodes.
Despite the foreign powers sponsoring candidates, the boyars were where the real power lay in Wallachia.
Any time the sitting voivode displeased them, they could choose to back another of the royal
blood, including Vlad's younger brother Radu who still served the Ottomans.
This fundamental instability at the heart of Wallachian politics kept the voivodes in
check, and so it kept Wallachia weak in the face of its more powerful neighbours.
Dracula did not wish to be another short-lived ruler.
He did not want to leave Wallachia in the hands of a puppet of the Ottomans or the Hungarians,
and in fact, there had been rebellions against his rule from the start.
There were still partisans of Vladislav II working against Dracula, and the powerful
boyar chief Albu the Great had organised an unsuccessful revolt in the months after Dracula
took power, and still Albu maintained a private army agitating for Vlad's removal and controlling
parts of the country.
And so Dracula began a great purge of the boyars.
They say a tyrant should commit all his atrocities at once and put them behind him, rather than
dragging them out over his entire reign, and certainly Vlad did his best in that regard.
It was now when he first carried out the act that would give him his famous sobriquet.
First of all, his men ambushed Albu the Great and then impaled him and his entire family.
Only Albu's brother escaped.
He fled to the town of Brazov, which would become the main refuge for Wallachian dissidents
during Vlad's reign.
This was an extreme act, but the boyars understood.
Albu had maintained a force against Vlad, and the voivode had attacked and defeated
it.
It seemed to them that the fighting was over, and when Vlad invited them to Easter celebrations
at the capital, 200 boyars attended with their families.
Just as the guests finished their meal in the banqueting hall of the palace, the boyars
and their wives were seized by Dracula's men.
They were dragged out through the gates and impaled en masse beyond the city walls.
The act of impalement itself required a very long, sturdy pole with a sharpened end.
This point would sometimes be greased with lard to aid its entry into and through the
body, which began at the victim's rectum and ended with an exit through the mouth or throat,
by which point the victim should have mercifully expired.
The sheer horror of this method of execution is of course what makes Vlad the Impaler into
the legendary figure he is today.
What drove him to commit such appalling acts against not only his own boyar lords, but
their wives?
Well slaughtering his enemies by sword or beheading or hanging might have had the same
result in terms of removing them from the field, but mass impalement was a means to
terrorise the survivors, his enemies and even his allies.
It was a message sent loud and clear that Vlad Dracula was not to be trifled with.
He did not impale the boyars' children, but their fate was hardly much better, as
they were marched to Ponary Castle where they slaved away, firing bricks and carrying them
up the slopes to build the towers and keeps.
No doubt these children were ultimately worked to death.
And Vlad the Impaler was not done, in fact he was just getting started.
Vlad replaced much of the old aristocracy with new men who had been loyal to him, granting
confiscated boyar land to lowborn followers.
He created a new institution above the boyar council that would be responsible for carrying
out his will and he filled it with loyal men.
He also created a new military officer class, drawn from the free peasant soldiers who had
performed well on the battlefield, men who could be relied on in battle, but who also
owed their newly elevated social status to Vlad III.
And he created a small standing army, a royal bodyguard.
By these and other reforms and his purges, Vlad was in some ways seeking to emulate the
centralisation he had witnessed at the Ottoman court.
He intended to make himself as much of an autocrat as the sultan was.
He also generously supported that other power in his realm, the Romanian Orthodox Church,
granting them tax immunities and other privileges, especially to monasteries, and he extended
church properties.
In return, he expected them to be his voice amongst the common people.
He especially supported the monastery of Snagov on an island in a lake a few miles from Bucharest.
This place is rumoured to be the location of Vlad's body, although no one knows for
sure.
Certainly though, he trusted the monks and they trusted him enough that they guarded
his royal treasure here at Snagov during the Ottoman invasion of Wallachia in 1462.
His relationship with the Catholic church in Wallachia was not so close during the early
part of his reign.
In fact, there is evidence of him directly attacking Catholic monasteries and even impaling
Catholic priests, but only when they defied him.
Mainly though, he replaced foreign Catholic abbots with Romanian ones.
With his external allies secured, his internal enemies purged and repressed, and his reforms
begun, Vlad in 1459 suddenly refused to pay the agreed tribute to Mehmed II.
In return for Ottoman peace, the Wallachians had to pay a carefully calculated monetary
sum and specific amounts of grain and animals to Constantinople.
The lowlands especially were so productive that the Turks saw Wallachia primarily as
a vast granary.
There was also the devshirme, the blood tax.
Although forcing slaves into a military service had a more ancient origin, the Ottoman system
was perhaps formalised by Murad I, the conqueror of Adrianople and much of the southern Balkans.
They took young Christian boys from the conquered lands and pressed them into military service
under the Sultan.
They were given the name janissaries, meaning new troops, and they came to be known as janissaries.
This was a way for the Sultan to centralise his own military power, rather than being
reliant only on his regional lords for raising troops.
Of course, the devshirme was a terrible evil.
Christian boys between 8 and 10 years old were taken from their families in the lands
subject to Ottoman power and not only would they be lost to their families forever, they
would also be made into soldiers and turned against their own people and all the enemies
of the Turks.
And in 1459 Vlad Dracula said, enough.
Hungary was now ruled by John Hunyadi's son, Matthias Corvinus, who was supported by his
uncle by marriage, Michael Szilagyi, a long time ally and friend of Dracula's.
And it was this relationship that led to further atrocities by Dracula, this time committed
against the Saxon towns of Transylvania.
It perhaps seems strange that Saxons were here at all, but these German colonies had
been founded generations earlier along the Wallachian-Transylvanian border to provide
an economic boost to the region.
The Wallachians and Transylvanians were populated by free peasants and their overlords and they
had few merchants, skilled craftsmen and artisans and no real towns.
The rulers of these lands looked at more modernised kingdoms and realised they were missing out
on potential tax revenue from the kind of economic activity that generated actual cash
instead of just crops and livestock.
So they invited Saxons to set up colonies in their lands and awarded them favourable
incentives in taxation and political freedom.
During Vlad's early reign he had maintained a positive relationship with the Saxon towns
and many had supported his war against Vladislav II.
In return he had given them a commercial treaty promising to protect them against the Ottomans
and the right to unimpeded trade across Transylvania and Wallachia.
But this close relationship changed when the Hungarians squeezed the towns for more revenue
and the town of Bistri revolted and Michael Szilagyi called on Dracula to bring the region
to heel and Dracula brought his soldiers, stormed the walls of Bistri and looted and
burned the town.
The ringleaders fled to the towns of Brazov and Sibiu and far from stamping it out, the
rebellion spread.
The Saxons, clever merchants rather than noblemen soldiers, had once began a propaganda campaign
against Dracula, spreading rumours that he was a secret vassal to Mehmed II.
They also now supported Dracula's rival boyar faction, the Danesti.
And Dan III, brother of the deposed Vladislav II, established himself in the Saxon town
of Brazov and claimed the throne of Wallachia after being elected by a group of Danesti
boyars and other lords who had fled Dracula's earlier purges.
Another rival claimant was declared in the Saxon town of Sibiu.
Vlad Dracula's half-brother, known as Vlad the Monk, was funded by the Saxon merchants
and supported by more unhappy boyars.
And a third candidate emerged from the Danesti clan, a son of Dan II called Bazarab, also
had the backing of boyars alarmed by Dracula's reforms and he was also supported by Saxon
funding.
All of Dracula's hard work was coming undone.
All the blood he had spilled to secure his throne and centralise power and now it seemed
it was not enough.
There were still so many enemies and they had moved just after he had cut off the Turks.
Clearly he had not gone far enough with his purges and punishments.
First he stripped the Saxon towns of their trade protections and encouraged the merchants
of Wallachia and the Italian republics with favourable tariffs.
This had the benefit of bringing the small but important Wallachian merchant class over
to his side against the other claimants.
But then Vlad moved against them militarily.
This campaign, waged between 1458 and 1460, would lead to Dracula's infamy being spread
across Europe by Saxon propaganda.
That's not to say their claims were untrue, but they certainly intended to rally the support
of Catholic Europe, especially in Germany, against their enemy.
Their pamphlets and woodcuts made Vlad into an inhuman monster.
The later Nurnberg Chronicle of 1488 says the following,
Sibiu and Brasov were within the duchies of Fagaras
and Amlash, which were possessions of the Prince of Wallachia within Transylvania.
Sibiu was ordered to give up its support of Vlad the Monk and Brasov was told to do the
same with Dan III.
Neither town responded to the ultimatums and so they had to be destroyed.
It's fair to say that Vlad Dracula was not a man inclined to compromise.
He was also a brilliant and brutal soldier.
At the head of a small cavalry force, he surprised the Saxons with a lightning raid through the
passes to burn the lands that supported Sibiu and Brasov.
Slaughtering and impaling villages and burning their homes and fields, Saxon merchants abroad
in the country were tortured and impaled.
These acts would be amplified through later propaganda in German pamphlets that described
Dracula boiling 600 Saxon merchants alive, which although true to the spirit of the campaign,
would have been impractical in reality.
But the campaign of terror worked.
The Saxons of Brasov begged Michael Szilagyi to call Dracula off and offered to hand over
Dan III and his supporters and to pay 10,000 florins for war damages.
But Szilagyi's nephew Matthias Corvinus, the King of Hungary, arrested Szilagyi and Brasov
reneged on its promises.
The King went one step further and threw his support behind Dan III against Vlad Dracula.
Once again the tables had turned on Dracula.
His extremism was almost successful, but it also made him more enemies.
Still, compromise was not in his nature and he went back to work burning and slaughtering
until he smashed through the suburbs of Brasov itself.
Here is where he is said to have dined beneath a forest of the impaled and their hacked off
limbs in sight of the townsfolk on the walls.
Roman propaganda tells us he happily dipped the bread of his breakfast into the blood
of his victims.
And in 1460 Dracula captured Dan III.
He had a grave dug for his rival while Dan waited beside it and even had to listen to
his own funeral service before Vlad beheaded him.
And then unsurprisingly he had Dan III's supporters impaled.
Dracula killed thousands of the Transylvanian Germans but eventually, Ptahios Corvinus
organised a fragile peace.
Dracula would pay for some of the damages his campaign had caused while the Saxons were
required to pay an annual sum to Dracula to maintain a 4,000 strong mercenary army, in
theory to help Dracula defend them against the Ottomans.
Because war against the Turks was coming.
In the face of continued Ottoman expansion through Serbia and the Sultan's plans to
cross the Danube to take Wallachia and Moldavia, the Christian kingdoms declared and organised
a crusade.
And now Dracula would go to war against the Turks.
As the forces of Christendom readied for action, Dracula's old friend and ally, Michael Szilagyi,
was captured by the Ottomans while on reconnaissance in Bulgaria.
They tortured him for information on Hungary's military preparations but presumably they
were not happy with his answers or lack thereof because Szilagyi was executed by being sawn
in half.
Now comes another legendary moment in Dracula's life, during a visit by Ottoman envoys.
They had come to discover the Wallachian intentions in the coming crusade and to make a final
attempt to bring the voivode back on side.
That must have been a faint hope.
Dracula had stopped paying tribute and the Turks had ever since been launching raids
on Wallachia across the Danube for plunder and to take Wallachian peasants, especially
children for the Ottoman slave markets.
When these raiders were captured, Dracula had been having them impaled and now the Sultan
had executed one of Dracula's few allies in a deliberately brutal fashion.
So tension was running high when the envoys came to Dracula's court.
The prince's men instructed the diplomats to remove their turbans as a sign of respect.
The envoys explained that the turban was not the equivalent of a Christian's hat and
that their custom demanded that the turbans never be removed.
Dracula then strengthened their custom by having three spikes driven through each of
their heads, pinning the turbans in place forever.
Coming to terms at this point was highly unlikely but communication was still ongoing between
voivode and sultan and Mehmed II decided to use this correspondence to trick Dracula into
putting himself in danger so he could be seized and killed.
Hamza Pasha, the Bey of Nicopolis and the Greek in his service, Thomas Katavoulinos,
offered to meet Dracula at Gerjou, an important fortress on the Danube.
When Dracula was almost at the fortress, the Ottomans sprung their trap and ambushed the
Wallachians.
But Dracula was a step ahead of them.
The Turks had in fact ambushed a decoy party and the Wallachians in turn ambushed the Turks.
Dracula then rode on to Gerjou with a select group of his men, all dressed as Ottoman soldiers.
At the gates of the fortress, Dracula presented himself as an Ottoman officer and influent
Turkish demanded they let him in.
Once inside, his men attacked and started killing the garrison until the stunned Turks
surrendered.
Dracula had in effect declared war and he did not sit back and wait for the Ottoman
invasion.
Instead, during the winter of 1461-62, he led his horsemen back and forth across the
Danube, raiding deep into Ottoman Bulgaria at phenomenal speed, attacking Turkish forces
from Serbia all the way to the Black Sea.
He divided his cavalrymen into small raiding parties that moved quickly and lived off the
land to cause havoc and disorder, while Dracula sought to capture or destroy all the fortresses
along the Danube that the Turks meant to use for their invasion of Wallachia.
In February 1462, Dracula wrote the following in a letter to Matthias Corvinus in Buda.
Quote, I have killed men and women, old and young, who lived at Oblusica at Novoselo,
where the Danube flows into the sea, up to Rohova, which is located near Chilia, in the
lower Danube, up to places such as Samovit and Zizan.
We killed 23,884 Turks and Bulgars, without counting those whom we burned in homes or
whose heads were not cut by our soldiers.
Thus your Highness must know that I have broken the peace with the Sultan.
End quote.
Along with his letter, Dracula sent the King of Hungary two large bags of the heads, noses
and ears that he and his men had cut off their enemies.
The 1,000 Ottoman troops that he had captured after the ambush near Zizou were force-marched
to Targoviste and impaled.
Two especially tall stakes were made for the treacherous Hamza Pasha and Thomas Catevalinos.
Dracula hoped to have done so much damage to the Ottoman preparations that their invasion
would be delayed, giving him more time to prepare Wallachia.
However, the resources of the Ottoman Empire were truly vast.
The Grand Vizier Mahmud, with an army of 18,000 men, rushed to capture Brila, a port
on the Wallachian side of the Danube.
After taking it, Mahmud struck north into Wallachia on a vast raiding mission, doing
to Wallachia what Vlad had done to Bulgaria.
But when the Turks returned, loaded with booty, to recross the Danube, Dracula attacked and
won a great victory.
It was recorded that Dracula killed 10,000 of the Ottoman army.
This victory brought Mehmed II into the field in 1462 with a vast army designed to conquer
Wallachia once and for all and to turn it into a province of the Empire.
There were at least 60,000 regular troops and 30,000 auxiliaries, including Bulgarians,
Serbians and Anatolians, and they brought with them 120 cannon.
There was essentially no hope for Wallachia.
They were vastly outnumbered and outmatched in terms of troop quality.
After all of Vlad's purges of the Boyars and his organisational reforms, Wallachia had
lost much of its elite and even more of those Boyars opposed to Dracula fled for Transylvania
at this critical time.
This left Wallachia a corps of horsemen 10,000 strong, while the rest of Dracula's forces
were peasant soldiers raised through a mass levy of 20,000 infantry.
Unfortunately if there was to be any hope at all, Wallachia needed allies.
Unfortunately none were forthcoming and Wallachia was on its own.
The Turks brought a fleet from the Black Sea up the Danube to ferry their vast army across.
Dracula fought hard to stop the river crossing, contesting the probing attacks before a massive
battle at Ternu.
What made the difference, more even than the huge numbers and the excellent soldiers of
the Ottomans, was their artillery pounding the Wallachian positions on the north bank.
The Ottomans then ferried across light artillery in their first wave.
The Turkish soldiers dug trenches after they crossed to help defend against the relentless
Wallachian cavalry assaults that were striving to throw them back into the river.
Inspired by the Hussites in Bohemia and previously employed against the Turks by Hunyadi, Dracula
also employed war wagons with men shooting from inside with early firearms.
By all accounts it was a close run thing and the difference was certainly the barrages
from those 120 cannons.
Eventually though all the Ottoman infantry, including the Janissaries, had been ferried
across and the vast army advanced into Wallachia.
Mehmed II had also brought with him his replacement, Puppet Voivode.
Mehmed's younger brother, Radu the Handsome, rode at the head of 4,000 horsemen of his own.
The Ottoman army moved relentlessly towards the capital of Targoviste.
Dracula had no hope of defeating the Turks in a pitched battle and instead he began a
guerrilla war.
Grain stores and crops were burned, livestock and peasants were driven away to the north
and most importantly, wells were poisoned and small rivers were dammed and diverted
to create marshes and bogland.
It was June and the problem of getting enough water for the vast horde slowed the Ottoman advance.
As they moved slowly through the dense forests, the Turks were ambushed repeatedly.
Dracula's peasant army even dug huge man traps and covered them with timber and leaves.
The Ottomans were soon suffering from severe dehydration in the scorching summer heat and
Every night, the army had to stop and dig massive earthworks to defend from the relentless
night assaults.
Foraging parties, guards and anyone outside the defensive camps were taken by the Wallachians
in the darkness and impaled.
What's more, a terrible camp sickness soon spread through the Ottoman army and their
advance slowed further.
The Turks were deeply affected by these torments and yet the weight of their numbers and the
will of their Sultan drove them on through the scorched earth towards the highlands and Targoviste.
Dracula had grown up with the Turks and he knew Mehmed II personally.
He understood the mind of his enemy.
He knew that he could not kill them all but he could perhaps break their spirit and make
the cost of conquering Wallachia too great to stand.
And so, as the Ottoman army made camp in the lands around his capital, Dracula tortured
captive Ottoman officers until they revealed the location of Mehmed II's camp.
And then he gathered all his best remaining cavalry, perhaps 7 to 10 thousand troops and
went to kill the Sultan.
On the night of the 17th of June, Dracula led the assault known as the Night Attack
at Targoviste.
They came in with flaming torches, shooting arrows and slashing through the Turks with
their swords, penetrating deeper and deeper toward the Sultan's magnificent great tent.
It was torn down by raging Wallachian horsemen and the residents dragged out into the torchlight.
It was not the tent of the Sultan but of two wazirs who were immediately executed.
When Dracula finally found Mehmed's tent, it was surrounded by the Sultan's Janissaries
who stood shoulder to shoulder and shot their firearms and arrows into the Wallachians,
driving them away.
To get past the outer guards at the start of the attack, Vlad and his men had posed
as Turks, calling out the passwords in Turkish that they had tortured from Ottoman prisoners.
And now they continued to sow confusion amongst their enemies, shouting out false orders in
Turkish to disrupt the Ottoman response.
But with the element of surprise fading, momentum stalling and the far greater numbers of the
Turks beginning to tell, the Wallachians were forced to withdraw.
The Ottomans lost perhaps 15,000 men while the Wallachians around 5,000, most of them
in the fighting retreat.
Vlad had come very close but it wasn't enough and eventually Mehmed II advanced to the walls
of Targoviste.
Its defences had been made formidable by Dracula and the Sultan was perhaps already considering
returning home instead of losing more men to thirst and disease in a prolonged siege.
But when his men found the forest of 20,000 impaled Turks stretching for two miles outside
the city, they had finally had as much as they could take.
As the Ottomans retreated, Dracula scored another victory, driving the enemy back across
the Danube.
But his country was reeling from the assault and his people were on the verge of collapse.
But what the Ottomans could not do by force, they would complete by cunning and it would
lead to Dracula's downfall.
When he retreated from Wallachia, Mehmed II left Vlad's little brother Radu behind.
Dracula had saved his people from conquest but at terrible cost.
The land was burned, the waters poisoned, families left fatherless.
Now Radu was here, backed by a small Ottoman contingent to offer them peace and prosperity
under his leadership.
All the disaffected Wallachian factions that Vlad had offended over the years soon flocked
to Radu, helped no doubt by bottomless bags of Ottoman coin.
The Saxon towns of the north especially threw their political and financial weight behind him.
Where Vlad was an extremist, Vlad the Handsome knew nothing but compromise.
He had the backing of the Ottomans and with him in charge, the Ottomans would not invade again.
A desperate people welcomed what only he could offer them.
The turning tide became a torrent and Vlad's political support swiftly vanished and he
had no forces with which to contest Radu's growing army.
By the end of the year of his victory over the Turks, Vlad Dracula fled across the mountains
of Transylvania and Radu III began his rule as voivode of Wallachia.
Radu's army chased Dracula from castle to fortress but Vlad got away.
In Transylvania he had word from Matthias Corvinus that he would meet him and perhaps
provide him with Hungarian forces to retake his throne.
A desperate Vlad had few other options but it was a trick and Dracula was captured in
the king's name.
He would not suffer a terrible captivity however, far from it.
The Hungarians found it useful to hold a rival for the Wallachian throne in their possession
to encourage the current one to remain on his best behaviour.
Dracula was further honoured by a position in the Hungarian army and he was even offered
marriage into the Hungarian royal family in exchange for converting from Orthodox to
the Catholic faith.
In the coming years, the Ottomans continued to chip away at the Balkans, especially Albania
under Skanderbeg and an Ottoman backed Wallachia under Radu III began to clash with Moldavia
under Stephen the Great.
Stephen defeated Radu in battle and the handsome coward ran away, leaving his treasure, his
magnificent clothes, his standards and, astonishingly, his wife and daughter.
The defeated, humiliated Radu died of disease and Bazarab III, supported by the Ottomans,
took the throne of Wallachia.
Back in Hungary, Dracula's time was coming again.
To secure Hungarian support, he married Ilona, the daughter of Vlad's old ally Michael Csillagy.
She was the king's cousin and so Vlad was now part of the Hunyadi clan.
He had two sons with her and, along with an older, illegitimate son, they lived together
at the Hungarian court.
The extremist had become rehabilitated and even respectable in the eyes of the European
nobility.
When the Ottomans moved to conquer Moldavia in 1474, they were supported by 17,000 Wallachian
troops under Bazarab III.
The Turks had an enormous force of 120,000 men, but they were brilliantly defeated by
Stephen at Vazlou in January 1475.
In the face of this stunning defeat, the Wallachian forces not only fled, they turned on the Ottomans,
they attacked them and seized Turkish battle standards.
This was intended to prove Bazarab's loyalty to Stephen and to the Hungarians.
It did not work and Stephen, now one of the great heroes of Christendom, moved to have
Bazarab replaced by Stephen's cousin Vlad Dracula.
Before that could happen, Dracula was required by the Hungarians to assist in a campaign
in Bosnia, where he was tasked with capturing Srebrenica from the Ottomans.
This newly reformed, respectable Vlad had lost none of his cunning however and he disguised
his Hungarian troops as Turks and rode into Srebrenica during market day, taking the enemy
by complete surprise.
He then burned the city to the ground, plundered everything of value and impaled every Turk
that he found.
It seems then that Vlad had not changed in his essential character, but that did not
put off the Christians fighting against Ottoman aggression.
A papal legate wrote the following,
Although the peasants had always loved Dracula, the boyars of Wallachia must have wondered
what awaited them when Vlad rode back into their lands in 1476 to claim the throne for
the third and final time by overthrowing Bazarab III.
This time, Vlad had allied soldiers from Hungary, Transylvania, Serbia and Wallachia and Vlad's
invasion was coordinated with the Moldavian army under Stephen attacking from the east.
Bazarab however had the support of 18,000 Ottoman troops and a bloody battle was fought
that could have gone either way.
But a defeated Bazarab fled for the Turks and Vlad Dracula was crowned voivode in late
November 1476.
It was an incredibly unlikely return to power and Europe rejoiced at the news.
One of Christendom's most famous soldiers would now, alongside his cousin Stephen, stop
the relentless advance of the Turks and perhaps even turn back the tide.
But less than a month later, Dracula would be dead.
The exact circumstances of his death are shrouded in mystery but he was likely killed in a battle
near Bucharest.
The story goes that Vlad's 2,000 men were ambushed by Bazarab, returned from the Turks
with 4,000 Ottomans.
Another story is that Vlad was assassinated in camp by a Turkish assassin before the skirmish
took place.
Another story says it was a case of mistaken identity and he was accidentally killed by
his Moldavian soldiers in the confusion of battle, mistaking him for an Ottoman.
One version has him so killed because he was in disguise as a Turk, a victim of his own cunning.
Of course, the legend of Dracula demands that something poetic or tragic occurred at the end.
But the death in battle of a lifelong soldier and knight is hardly unusual or surprising.
Whatever really happened, after he died, his head was claimed by Janissaries and sent back
to Mehmed II who ultimately impaled it on a spike in Constantinople.
Whether this story also is a little too perfect is hard to say.
The final resting place of his body is also a mystery.
The story goes that it was found by local monks and buried in the chapel of the monastery
at Snagov.
Vlad III Dracula was contemporaries with greater and more successful men than he had been.
John Hunyadi, Stephen the Great, Skanderbeg and his great enemy, the warmonger Sultan
Mehmed II all held more power for longer and won more battles than Dracula.
But even in this era of the most horrific bloodshed, his willingness to go so far beyond
the limits of conventional conduct has helped turn his story, and not theirs, into legend.
Vlad features in my novel Vampire Impaler, book 6 of my historical fantasy series The
Immortal Knight Chronicles.
It features many of the great battles of the era like Varna, Kosovo, the fall of Constantinople,
the Battle of Belgrade and the night attack at Targoviste.
There's a link to this series and all my books in the video description.
Thank you to my Patrons for making this video possible.
If you enjoy these long videos and want to see more like it, please support the channel
on Patreon.
There's a link in the video description.
Now please watch this video on the life of Richard the Lionheart.
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