Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds

by Leslie Carroll

  Throughout his brutal reign he would employ other methods of torture as well. He was fond of mutilation, dismembering and disfiguring, and scalping—both the headslicing form we would recognize as a former practice of some Native American tribes, and the eastern European version where slits are made in the victim’s head and the skin is peeled back from the face. Vlad also enjoyed boiling his enemies alive, and leaving his victims to die of exposure or animal attacks.

  Vlad hit upon a particularly ingenious method of dispatching the boyars and their families who had survived the Easter 1457 impaling unscathed. But he wanted to be sure they made themselves useful while they were dying. Sparing neither women nor children, he force-marched the nobles (who were still arrayed in their holiday finery) fifty miles up the Argeş River to the foot of a craggy mountain. At the mountain’s summit stood the ruin of a stone castle. Vlad had decided to renovate this remote “eagle’s nest” and make it his residence in times of political crisis. He put his captives to work rebuilding what would become the Poenari Fortress, also known as Castle Dracula. Those at the bottom of the mountain slaved over hot ovens making bricks. A human chain moved the building materials up the side of the cliff, as the last group of slaves did the castle’s reconstruction work at the summit. Untold noble families died during this literally backbreaking work, their clothes shredded to tatters, their bodies starving and exhausted.

  Vlad’s overweening distaste for the aristocracy led to his preferment and promotion of members of the laboring classes. He drew from the lower ranks of society to staff the three types of defense forces he created to police his principality: The viteji was the military unit that would lead the Wallachian army into foreign wars. The sluji were Vlad’s national guard, also in charge of chasing criminals and flushing out his domestic political enemies. And the force that no one wanted to encounter was the armasi—Vlad’s institutionalized execution force. The armasi were highly trained in various forms of weaponry, but the tool they wielded with the most zeal and frequency was the stake, the hallmark of Vlad’s cruelty. For this the prince would eventually earn the nickname Vlad Tepes, or “Vlad the Impaler” in Romanian. He was an equal opportunity impaler as well. His victims came from all walks of Wallachian life, from corrupt noble to cheating merchant to petty thief. And he practiced other methods of execution with equal dexterity. One day Vlad decided to round up all the beggars he could locate—the lame, the halt, and the homeless—and invite them to a grand feast. He genially plied them with spirits and after the ragtag guests were good and drunk he set fire to the hall, immolating every last one of them.

  Another cornerstone of Vlad’s reign was his crackdown on morality, with a particular focus on maintaining female chastity. Adulteresses as well as unmarried girls and widows who deigned to have sex had their breasts hacked off or were impaled on a hot stake inserted into their vaginas and forced through their body until it emerged from their mouths. Even Vlad’s mistress (so much for his own morality!) wasn’t spared. After her purported pregnancy turned out to be either a lie or merely a false alarm, he slit her open from belly to breasts, and declared, “Let the world see where I have been.” Vlad allowed her to wallow in her agony, contemplating what he saw as her falsehood as she suffered a painfully slow demise.

  But Vlad’s brutal treatment of his mistress wasn’t personal; he was equally cruel to complete strangers, if he judged the women guilty of immorality. Before one man’s unfaithful wife was impaled, she was skinned alive in Târgovişte’s public square, and her skin was set aside on a nearby table for all to gawk over. A peasant woman was impaled for being an indifferent housekeeper after Vlad encountered her shabbily attired husband. To compensate the man for his loss, Dracula found the widower a new wife, but first he made sure to show her what he’d done to her predecessor for failing to properly look after her mate.

  What did Vlad’s own wife think of this? one wonders. Somewhere along the line, he did acquire a spouse, though historians differ as to her origin. She may have been a Moldavian noblewoman or she may have been a highborn Transylvanian. In any case, her opinion, if she dared to voice one, is as lost to posterity as her name, although she was reputed to be lovely, innocent, and kind. Their marriage was most likely an arranged (or forced) one, and it is doubtful that she had any choice in the matter.

  Unsurprisingly, Vlad’s method of ruling with an iron fist (or stake) didn’t thrill everyone. The peace he had made with the neighboring Transylvanian cities of Brasov and Sibiu upon claiming the throne didn’t last long. Within the year many of the citizens revolted against his tyranny. Most of the rebels were Saxon German craftsmen who had been accustomed to trading freely in Wallachia and who therefore objected strenuously to the high tariffs Vlad had imposed on their wares.

  The Impaler decided to teach the Saxon upstarts a lesson. He stopped their carts at the borders and had the goods inspected. He made the items available to Wallachian merchants for next to nothing. And when the craftsmen objected, Vlad’s troops descended on their villages like Cossacks, pillaging, looting, and burning them to the ground. The following year, 1458, he decreed that any Transylvanian villagers caught sheltering his enemies be mercilessly slaughtered.

  The few Germans who somehow managed to survive the first wave of the 1457 onslaught were marched back to Târgovişte, where they were impaled. Those who were lucky enough to have evaded Vlad’s grasp fled to Austria and other regions within the Holy Roman Empire. There, they spread stories of Vlad’s brutality. One of these colorful narratives opens with the words: “Here begins a very cruel, frightening story about a wild bloodthirsty man Prince Dracula. How he impaled people and roasted them and boiled their heads in a kettle and skinned people and hacked them to pieces like cabbage. He also roasted the children of mothers and they had to eat the children themselves.”

  The Saxons had formulated a mighty revenge. They achieved it with the pen rather than the sword, and their efforts shaped and cemented Vlad Dracula’s enduring legacy as a human monster. In a concentrated campaign to forever besmirch his place in history, the Germans continued to avenge Vlad’s cruelty to their countrymen by printing and disseminating multiple pamphlets recounting the numerous acts of violence perpetrated by the Wallachian prince against those whom he perceived had wronged him in some way, whether they were German, Transylvanian, Wallachian, Turks, Gypsies, nobility, or peasants. The little books, with lurid titles such as “The Frightening and Truly Extraordinary Story of a Wicked Blood-drinking Tyrant Called Prince Dracula,” were incredibly graphic, and they became immensely popular. Some of the events recounted in the pamphlets are exaggerated, although Vlad’s bloody deeds scarcely required the benefit of hyperbole. Most of the atrocities were factually verifiable, including his slaughter of hundreds of people at a time through impaling, boiling them alive, or immolating them. A victim’s youth was no guarantee of leniency. On one occasion, Vlad had four hundred German boys burned alive after accusing them of spying.

  The country that would eventually give us the grisly tales of the Brothers Grimm unstintingly depicted Dracula’s barbarism in one of its many propagandist pamphlets, claiming “He devised dreadful, frightful, unspeakable torments, such as impaling together mothers and children nursing at their breasts so that the children kicked convulsively . . . until dead. In like manner he cut open mothers’ breasts and stuffed the children’s heads through and thus impaled both. He had all kinds of people impaled sideways: Christians, Jews, heathens, so that they moved and twitched and whimpered in confusion a long time like frogs.”

  Thanks to the printing press, the German pamphlets received widespread distribution during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, perpetuating the image of a bloodthirsty psychopath long after Vlad was dead and buried. According to another booklet, “He had some of his people buried up to the navel and had them shot at. He also had some roasted and flayed. . . . He had a large pot made and boards with holes fastened over it and had people’s heads shoved through there and imprisoned
them in this. And he had the pot filled with water and a big fire made under the pot and thus let the people cry out pitiably until they were boiled to death. . . . About three hundred gypsies came into his country. Then he selected the best three of them and had them roasted; these the others had to eat.”

  In 1459, Vlad was rumored to have nailed the hats (or turbans, since differing nationalities of the victims have been reported) to the heads of a foreign delegation when for some reason they angered him—possibly by refusing to remove their headgear in deference to their own culture and customs. The most popular version of the story casts the foreigners as emissaries from the Ottoman sultan, come to collect Vlad’s annual tribute of boys and money. Evidently, the Impaler was not in a giving mood that day.

  During the winter of 1459, Vlad launched what would be the most vicious raid of his reign thus far. On the hunt for an enemy, Dan III of Transylvania, he burned the town of Brasov to cinders, refusing to spare even its church. Then he impaled everyone he could find regardless of their age or gender. Surrounded by their dead and dying bodies, he sat down to enjoy a hearty dinner. An extant woodcut commemorates this grisly event. And perhaps this is where the legend of Vlad Dracula drinking the blood of his victims began—with the widespread assertion that he had dipped his bread in the blood of these massacred Transylvanians.

  Having unsuccessfully led a revolt against Vlad, Dan III met a gruesome fate as well. Vlad caught up with him, and invited the man to his own funeral, where he made Dan recite his own eulogy and dig his own grave. Then Vlad beheaded him.

  In 1461 Vlad decided to stage an attack against the Turks, cutting a bloody swath through Bulgaria, beheading and burning his victims. He kept meticulous tallies of the numbers of people he slaughtered in each town he ravaged. The total number of deaths in some places reached nearly seven thousand—probably close to the entire population of some of the villages. In the winter a surprise raid along the southern bank of the Danube considerably raised his body count. Vlad couldn’t resist the urge to brag about his bloody triumphs to the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus, the son of his late ally and sometime nemesis János Hunyadi. “I have killed men and women, old and young . . . 23,884 Turks and Bulgarians without counting those whom we burned alive in their homes or whose heads were not chopped off by our soldiers.” As proof, he sent along samples of his handiwork: two sacks stuffed with heads, ears, and noses.

  With a force of sixty thousand men-at-arms, the Turkish sultan, Mohammed II, launched a counterattack against Vlad in the spring of 1462. Vlad was outmanned militarily but he managed to repulse the sultan by repelling him. An unknown Turkish chronicler wrote of the sight that greeted the Muslims upon their arrival at the gates of the capital city of Târgovişte: “In front of the wooden fortress where he had his residence he set up at a distance of six leagues two rows of fences with impaled Hungarians, Moldavians, and Wallachians (and Turks, we may add). In addition, since the neighboring area was forested, innumerable people were hanging from each tree branch.” An unnamed Greek chronicler of the day observed that “Even the emperor [the sultan], overcome by amazement, admitted that he could not win the land from a man who does such great things and above all knows how to exploit his rule and that over his subjects in this way.”

  And just in case Mohammed and his army weren’t turned back by the sight of twenty thousand impaled corpses, Vlad poisoned his own principality’s wells and burned the crops so the Turks would not find anything worthwhile to conquer.

  The sultan turned back, but assigned one of his military leaders (who just happened to be Vlad’s half brother, Radu, now a Muslim convert) to lead the Turkish forces in Wallachia. “Radu the Handsome” managed to convince the terrified Wallachians to abandon their bloodthirsty prince. This entailed fleeing the realm. People from every stratum of society, from boyar to peasant, took to the roads. Many of the latter joined Radu’s army.

  Radu declared himself prince of Wallachia and put Vlad on the run. The sadist was out of allies. He managed to reach Castle Dracula by the end of 1462, but Radu’s forces followed him. What supposedly happened next may belong more to the realm of legend, or at least apocrypha, because the specific feat of archery at the core of the story is virtually impossible to achieve.

  Vlad was purportedly tipped off that Radu’s army was waiting for him. The informant was a former servant of Vlad’s who was now a Turkish slave. This brave slave is said to have fired an arrow from the ground (near the army’s camp, presumably) that managed to sail through just the right window (and medieval turrets have narrow arrow slits for windows), landing—thwomp—in the middle of a candle, as the whoosh of air extinguished the flame. The virtuous but unnamed Mrs. Vlad, noticing that the candle was out, went to relight it and discovered a note attached to the arrow shaft, warning Vlad that his half brother had the castle staked out.

  Unwilling to be taken prisoner by Radu and the Turks, Vlad’s wife allegedly exclaimed that she “would rather have her body rot and be eaten by the fish of the Argeş than be led into captivity by the Turks.” Then she threw herself from the turret into the riverbed below. The area of the Argeş tributary where her body landed was nicknamed “the Princess River” or Rîul Doamnei, “the Lady’s River.”

  Neither Vlad nor his wife had given much concern to the fate of their young son, not-so-charmingly named Mihnea cel Rău, “Mihnea the evil”—though in Vlad’s family, perhaps the name was intended to be a compliment. After receiving the warning from his former servant, Vlad fled the castle with Mihnea and twelve of his retainers; but when the boy’s horse was spooked by cannon fire, leaving the child clinging to his mane, Vlad pressed on and never looked back. His goal was to meet up with the king of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus, and demand the king’s aid in exchange for having defended his territory in the past.

  But Matthias didn’t exactly welcome Vlad with open arms. Instead he threw him in prison, incarcerating him temporarily in a nearby castle. Some sources claim that Matthias had received false information that Vlad was secretly plotting against him. Whatever the reason, Vlad remained in Matthias’s custody; and after making sure that the tales of Vlad’s cruelty were disseminated far and wide, Matthias threw his support behind the new prince of Wallachia, Vlad’s half brother, Radu.

  Under heavy guard Matthias brought Vlad to the Hungarian city of Buda, where the Impaler spent the next twelve years as his prisoner in a fortress known as Solomon’s Tower. To keep his talent for torture from becoming rusty, Vlad allegedly amused himself by brutalizing rodents and birds in his cell.

  Accounts regarding the duration of Vlad’s incarceration vary. His twentieth-century biographer Radu Florescu believes that Dracula actually spent only four years—from 1462 to 1466—in captivity and that over the dozen years he remained in Hungary he and Matthias reached an accord. A fifteenth-century Hungarian court chronicler, who noted that Vlad was rather popular among certain segments of society, wrote that by imprisoning him, Matthias had “acted in opposition to general opinion,” and consequently reversed his decision to detain him. During Vlad’s incarceration he received guests from all over Europe, who regarded him as a hero mostly for his vigorous and largely successful efforts to keep the Turks at bay.

  So Matthias offered Vlad a deal: Convert to Roman Catholicism and marry into the Hungarian royal family and you will be released. It wasn’t a difficult decision. Vlad renounced the Eastern Orthodox religion into which he was born, became a Catholic, and married Matthias’s cousin, Countess Ilona Szilágy. Not much more is known of Ilona beyond her name and her immediate lineage. We don’t know what she looked like or how she felt about being wedded to one of the fifteenth century’s greatest monsters.

  By 1474 Vlad had been released. With his second wife and their two young sons, he moved across the river to Pest, where they set up housekeeping. The older boy was named after his father, while the name of the second son has been lost to history. Ilona was also the stepmother to Mihnea cel Rău, Vlad’s “evil” son by hi
s first marriage.

  The following year Vlad was back in the saddle, joining forces with Matthias and Vlad’s Transylvanian cousin Stephen to defeat the Turks in Bosnia. War began near the start of 1476 and Vlad demonstrated that neither imprisonment nor wedlock had diminished or dulled his penchant for cruelty. He “tore the limbs off the Turkish prisoners and placed their parts on stakes,” according to Nicolas of Modrussa, the papal envoy in Budapest.

  It is from this legate to Pope Pius II that we have the only surviving physical description of Vlad Dracula: “He was not very tall, but very stocky and strong with a cruel and terrible appearance, a long straight nose, distended nostrils, a thin and reddish face in which the large wide-open green eyes were enframed by bushy black eyebrows, which 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 supported the head, from which black curly locks were falling to his wide-shouldered person.”

  Fresh from his triumph over the Turks, Vlad deemed that it was time to retake the throne of Wallachia. His half brother, Radu, had died, replaced by a man named Basarab Laiota. In the battle for the crown fought in November 1476, each side lost ten thousand men, yet Vlad emerged the victor.

  But not long afterward, on December 14, 1476, his luck finally ran out. The forty-five-year-old Impaler was killed near Bucharest during another skirmish with Basarab’s army. Two different accounts of his death have emerged. In one, Vlad was beheaded and his head was, fittingly, mounted on a spike and delivered to the Turkish sultan as a trophy, while his body was buried in the nearby monastery at Snagov, which rests in the middle of an island. At the time of Dracula’s death, Snagov was a fortified complex like any other typical medieval town. The monastery may have had darker uses then, too. Decapitated skeletons with the heads placed in the hollows of their owners’ abdomens were discovered in an area beneath the floor that Dracula may at one time have used as a prison and torture chamber. Local peasant lore includes lurid tales of prisoners being thrust through a trapdoor in the floor, where they’d immediately become impaled on the spikes erected below.