by Ray Black
The country of Wallachia was a principality, which meant that it was ruled by a prince, rather than a king. The throne was not necessarily handed down from father to son, the new ruler had to be elected by the country’s boyars, or land-owning nobles. This caused fighting among the family members even resulting in assassinations.
Vladislav’s father, nicknamed Vlad Dracul, was hungry for the throne and did not wish to remain in the post of governor for ever. During his years spent in Transylvania he managed to gather supporters for his plan to seize the throne of Wallachia from its current ruler – a Danesti prince by the name of Alexandru I. In late1436 or 1437 Vlad Dracul killed Alexandru and became Prince Vlad II. The young Vladislav was educated at court and received training that was appropriate for knighthood.
At a young age, probably around eleven, Vladislav, along with his younger brother Radu, were taken captive by the Turks. The two brothers were valuable hostages, being sons of a local prince, and they were taken to Istanbul to be imprisoned by the Sultan Mehemet. Vlad Dracul tried unsuccessfully to bargain for their release, but this bargaining was seen as treason by the King of Hungary and he hired assassins to kill Dracul and his eldest son Mercea.
Back in Istanbul, Sultan Mehemet tried to indoctrinate the two young captives into Islam, hoping to make allies of them. He hoped to use their claim to the Wallachian throne to his advantage later on. Radu, who was a handsome lad who attracted the attention of the future sultan, converted quickly, and was subsequently released from prison. Vlad, on the other hand, was far more stubborn, and a bitter hatred and rivalry developed between the two brothers as a result of this. It has also been suggested that Vlad’s sadistic tendencies started as a result of his years spent as captive under the Sultan.
Radu, on his release in 1448, chose to remain in Turkey. Vlad, who finally seemed to have been subdued by the Sultan, decided to return to Wallachia only to find that his father had been assassinated, and his older brother Mircea buried alive. The Sultan had already taken control of Wallachia and appointed Vlad as the new prince, but his first period of rule in 1448 was short-lived. He did not want to rule his country on behalf of the Sultan, and so after a few months he fled the country, going north to Moldavia, where he stayed with his cousin and close friend Steven.
Vlad spent the next few years plotting his return to power. He knew the only way to become the true prince of Wallachia, was to oust the Turks. To do this he enlisted the help of John Hunyadi – the very man who had murdered his father and brother. However, so eager was he to regain control of the throne, Vlad was prepared to put that aside and they plotted their revenge on their common enemy, the Sultan.
When Vlad had fled from Wallachia, the Sultan had appointed his younger brother Radu as the prince. Hunyadi agreed to back Vlad with his military forces and together they were successful in driving out Radu. Vlad then retook the Wallachian throne, beginning his second and most notorious reign.
VLAD THE IMPALER
Vlad’s immediate priority when he regained his throne in 1946 was to consolidate his position in Wallachia. Vlad Dracolya was neither a good or a charitable prince. He was determined to break the power that the nobles, who preferred to support the puppet (or weak) leaders who would protect their interests. Vlad took to repeatedly raiding certain towns that came under his domain, and he murdered a great number of people during these assaults. For some unknown reason, the towns he selected for his raids seemed to be ones who had a largely German ancestry, and as a result most of the information you can find out about Vlad is from the pamphlets printed by the Germans on their newly-invented printing press.
One of his earliest actions as the reinstalled ruler of Wallachian was to punish the nobles of Tirgoviste whom he held responsible for the deaths of his father and brother. The story goes that he invited 500 boyars to a banquet and whilst they were eating he asked the nobles how many princes had ruled during their lifetimes. They said that they had lived through many reigns, admitting that it was their fault due to their years of plotting. After they had finished their meal, Vlad ordered his soldiers to surround them. The older nobles were impaled and the remainder were forced them to march fifty miles up the Arges River to Poenari. Here they were forced to build his mountain fortress labouring for many months under very difficult conditions. Those who actually survived the ordeal were subsequently impaled to death.
Impalement was a particularly sadistic form of execution, as the victims would suffer excruciating pain for many hours, and sometimes, days until they succumbed to death. While impalement was Vlad’s favourite form of punishment he did like to employ other methods such as boiling, quartering, decapitation or burying alive.
While it is impossible to be one hundred percent certain that all the stories about Vlad are true, there are certainly many accounts of his life that seem to verify his cruelty. Here are some of the stories that led to his reputation:
Two ambassadors arrived from the Sultan to give a message to Vlad. When they entered into his throne room he ordered them to remove their turbans. It was considered to be very rude if you did not remove your headgear in the presence of a prince. The Turks, however, took exception to this and refused to comply. They felt that as the Sultan and Vlad were already arch enemies, it wouldn’t really matter if they insulted him, and also to them the turbans were sacred they represented their Muslim religion. What they didn’t realise was that by refusing Vlad’s request they had made a very grave mistake. Vlad, who was incensed by the refusal to comply with his orders, told his guards to seize them and said that if they weren’t prepared to remove their turbans then they should have them nailed to their heads. Vlad watched in utter delight as the Turks writhed and screamed in pain as large nails were driven into their skulls.
Vlad did not have a very pleasant way of dealing with the sick or the poor people under his domain, for he had no respect for such weakness. He only wanted people that could help him achieve his political, economic and military objectives. He started to notice that the number of poor, vagrants, beggars and cripples had become very numerous in his land. He issued an invitation to all the poor and sick in Wallachia to come to Târgoviste for a great feast, saying that no-one should go hungry under his rule. When they arrived in the city the poor, cripples, beggars alike, were all ushered into a great banqueting hall where a fabulous feast was spread out for them. Vlad’s guests ate and drank late into the night, at which time the prince appeared on the scene. ‘What else do you desire? Do you want to be without cares, lacking nothing in his world?’ asked the prince. Needless to say they all agreed thinking that their ruler was going to do something about their pitiful situation. However, to the contrary, Vlad ordered that the banquet hall be boarded up and set on fire. Not one of the guests managed to escape the fire and Vlad justified his actions by saying ‘in order that they represent no further burden to others so that no-one will be poor in my realm’.
Vlad was so adverse to evil that should he find out that anyone had stolen, lied or committed some injustice, the culprit would be immediately impaled. It didn’t matter whether he was a nobleman, a priest, a monk, or just a common man, they could not escape the punishment of death. He created a very severe moral code by which the citizens of Wallachia had to live, and needless to say there was very little crime during his reign.
As an example of how well his laws worked, Vlad placed a gold cup in the middle of a public square. Anyone who was thirsty was permitted to drink from the cup, but no-one was allowed to take it outside of the square. No one ever did.
A visiting merchant once left his money outside all night believing it to be safe because of the strict laws in the town. However, in the morning he discovered his coins had been stolen. He immediately reported it to the prince who put out a proclamation that the money must be returned or the city would be destroyed. Vlad himself had secretly taken the money and he returned it to the merchant with one extra coin. When the merchant counted the money the next morning he found that all the c
oins had been returned, but he had in fact one extra. He told Vlad about this, to which he replied that the thief had been caught and would be impaled. He also added that if the merchant had not mentioned the extra coin, then he too would have been executed.
The incident that perhaps he will be best remembered for and did the most damage to his reputation, took place in the town of Brasov. The merchants of Brasov refused to pay their taxes in spite of repeated threats from Vlad. Angered by their disloyalty, Vlad led an assault on Brasov in 1459 and burned down the entire place, impaling many of the captives on a place called Timpa Hill. This scene has been immortalized in a rather gruesome woodcut which appeared as a frontispiece in a pamphlet that was printed in Nuremberg in 1499.
By 1462, the end of the period of his second reign, Vlad the Impaler had killed between 40,000 and 100,000 people, and possibly more. Despite all this and his strict laws, Vlad’s subjects still respected him for fighting the Turks and for being a strong ruler.
OVERTHROWN
During Vlad’s second reign, Wallachia had been, for the most part, free from any form of invasion. However, a new Sultan, Suiliman II, had come to power and once again the Ottoman empire turned its greedy eyes towards Wallachia. Vlad was informed by his spies of the overpowering strength of the invading Turks. He knew that his army was not strong enough to survive an open battle, and so he undertook a very desperate mission.
Waiting for the cover of dark, Vlad and a few of his elite army, stole into the Turkish camp in the hopes of catching the Sultan offguard and killing him. Vlad thought that the Turks might lose heart if they lost their leader, and retreat. Vlad’s venture was almost successful, the Sultan was wounded, although not fatally, and the prince’s entire army managed to escape without any casualties.
However, this assault on the Sultan did not stop the Turks from attacking. Vlad immediately retreated to his castle at Târgoviste and got ready to flee. His wife, believing that it would be impossible to escape the enormous Turkish army, committed suicide by leaping off a cliff into a river, which subsequently became called Princes River. Vlad suffered another tragedy when he was escaping through the forest on horseback with his servants. One of the servants who had been given the job of carrying Vlad’s infant son, dropped the baby. The pursuing Turks were too close by now for Vlad and his party to stop, and so they had to leave the child behind. Vlad was devastated, in one day he had lost his wife, his beloved son, and his home.
In search of help Vlad went to King Mathias of Hungary, but his reputation had finally caught up with him and some of the people that Vlad had persecuted had managed to reach the king first. They told the king that Vlad was an ally of the Turkish army and that he was coming to him as a spy. When Vlad arrived he was seized and he was imprisoned in a tower.
When the Turks arrived at Târgoviste they were greeted by a horrifying scene, the impaled heads of thousands of their spies. Before Vlad had fled he had also burned his own villages and poisoned the wells, so that the invading Turks would not have access to any food or water. The Turks took what was left of the ruins of the city but, after only a few days, the Black Plague broke out amongst the soldiers and they were forced to retreat.
Meanwhile, Vlad who had been imprisoned for several months, had caught the eye of the King’s sister, Ilona. She used her influence on her brother and talked him into allowing Vlad to go free. Vlad, who was partially pardoned, married Ilona, and was given a large home within the city. He lived there for several years with his new wife, and she provided him with another son.
Once the King totally trusted Vlad he allowed him to leave the city, and he returned to Wallachia to claim the throne for the third time. He built up a new capital called Bucharesti (now called Bucharest, and the modern-day capital of Romania). Not long after retaking the throne, a peasant came to Vlad with a young boy clutching his hand. He told the prince that he had found him as a baby in the forest many years ago on the night of the Turkish attack. Vlad was to his delight reunited with his long lost son, and he greatly rewarded the peasant.
THE DEATH OF DRACULA
Vlad the Impaler died in battle, over the age of fifty, when he was fighting near Bucharest in December 1476. It is rumoured that he either died at the hands of a Turkish assassin posing as a servant, or that he was accidentally killed on the battlefield by his own men because he had disguised himself as a Turk to confuse the enemy. The Sultan, delighted to have at last defeated his quarry, displayed Dracula’s head on a pike in Constantinople just to prove that he was actually dead. He was eventually buried at the island monastery of Snagov, but excavations in 1931 failed to turn up any sign of his body! Some will remember him as a cruel fiend, while others will remember him as a fierce defender of his kingdom. However he is portrayed he was certainly a cruel, sadistic and ruthless murderer.
The Witch Doctor
In the year 1989 in Mexico, sixty people went missing. One person came to the fore in the ensuing investigations and that was a leader of a bloodthirsty band of sadistic drug-runners. He was young and handsome, bisexual, and a self-proclaimed psychic and cultist.
Our last story in the section delves into the mysterious world of black magic and cult worship. The success of a cult relies on the charismatic appeal of their leader to attract and control the number of their followers. For many reasons, one of them probably being fear, the cult members tend to follow their leader’s every order without question or hesitation. This might have something to do with the threat of death that accompanies a hint of anything but total obedience.
ADOLFO DE JESUS CONSTANZO
Adolfo Constanzo was born in Miami on November 1, 1962, the son of a teenage Cuban immigrant. His father died when he was very young and he moved with his mother to Puerto Rico, where she married for the second time. Adolfo was baptized in the Catholic faith, and served the church as an altar boy. When he was ten, the family returned to Miami. A year after the move Adolfo’s stepfather died, which left his mother well provided for and he was now totally in her care.
They lived in an area called Little Havana and it wasn’t long before the neighbours started to notice that there was something peculiar about Aurora Constanzo and her son. Some people thought she was witch and anyone that got on the wrong side of her would find a headless chicken or goat on their front doorsteps the following morning. Adolfo was introduced into the santeria cult when he was about nine years old. It is a cult that believes the life and power of the gods reside in stones secured beneath an altar. Animal sacrifice and spirit-possession are also elements of Santeria. Adolfo would have regular trips to Puerto Rico for instruction in voodoo, and in the year 1976 he was apprenticed to a practitioner of palo mayombe. Palo mayombe combines aspects of traditional African Kongo religion with Catholicism and Spiritism. Adolfo’s occult godfather had made a lot of money from working with local drug dealers and the young Adolfo was greatly influenced by his powerful beliefs.
Much to his mother’s delight, Adolfo started displaying psychic powers and predicting the future. He began to foretell events with frightening accuracy and even predicted the shooting of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Adolfo took to petty crime and was subsequently arrested in 1981 on two charges of shoplifting, one involving the theft of a chainsaw. When he was released he declared that he would become a man of evil and worship his own devil. It was also around this time that he started showing bisexual inclinations, with a strong preference for male lovers.
In 1983 this handsome young devil-worshipper was assigned a modelling job in Mexico, were he spent his free time reading tarot cards and telling peoples’ fortunes. It was while he was in Mexico that he gathered his first followers. His disciples at this time included Martin Quintana, a homosexual psychic Jorge Montes, and Omar Orea who had been obsessed with the cult since the age of fifteen. In1984 Adolfo moved permanently to Mexico and Quintana and Orea became his lovers. They shared an apartment in a strange mènage à trois. It wasn’t long before he had quite a following as his reputatio
n spread throughout the city. Constanza soon realized that he could make money from his spells and offered ritual cleansings to those who felt they have been cursed. He also started making money out of sacrificial animals charging:
roosters - $6
goats - $30
boa constrictors - $450
zebras - $1,100
African lion cubs - $3,100
True to the lessons given to him by his mentor, Constanzo went out of his way to be accepted by wealthy drug dealers. One of the services he offered them was to make them invisible to police and bulletproof to their enemies by casting spells. It was all hocus-pocus of course, but they were taken in and were prepared to pay good money to this charming young man. According to one of the ledgers that Constanzo kept, one drug dealer in Mexico City paid him as much as $40,000 for his magical services over a period of three years. Constanzo knew it was important to stay in with these drug barons because not only could he earn a lot of money, but get on the wrong side of the gun-toting crooks and he could end up dead. As his medicinal rituals grew he realised that he needed more powerful ingredients. It was around mid-1985 that Adolfo and three of his disciples decided to rob a Mexico City graveyard for human bones to start his own nganga. A nganga is a cauldron of blood employed by the practitioners of palo mayombe.
The mystery surrounding Adolfo Constanzo was enough to lure a real cross-section of society. But what was even more amazing was the power he seemed to have over law enforcement officers, for some reason they saw him as God. Indeed, in his own right, Adolfo was a minor god and everyone seemed to worship him.
