by Dan Davis
“I believe Vlad the Monk has promised to extend the trade rights of Sibiu and the towns allied with it.”
“Those money grabbing fools. I already extended their rights when I took the throne and now they want more? And are willing to rebel in order to get it? Do they not fear my displeasure, Alexander?”
His face pale, the man bowed. “I cannot say, my lord.”
Vlad pursed his full lips and glanced around at me. “It seems that we must put down two rival factions and two rival rebellions. Is there anything else?”
A new man stepped forward and fell to one knee before his prince. “My lord, I have had word only this morning from one of my sons that a third candidate for your throne has declared himself. I do not know much but it is another one of the Danesti clan. A son of Dan II, named Basarab Laiot.”
Vlad raised his eyebrows and scoffed. “And who is backing this Basarab Laiot, who is the son of my father’s great enemy?”
“I do not know, my lord. All I know is that he made a series of promises to boyars in Wallachia and Transylvania and he has promised great things for certain Saxon towns.”
Dracula thanked the man and looked around at his lords, one after the other. “Is that all? Or are there any other of my father’s enemies or offspring in open rebellion?” His men shuffled their feet and glanced sidelong at each other. “Just three, is it? Well, three is enough, do you not think? It is clear that our enemies mean to overwhelm us with problems. While I attack one, the other will come in behind me and assault my lands or attempt to pin me between them. But we shall do nothing so foolish as that.”
Vlad broke off, looking up at the arches of the vaulted ceiling above.
“Shall we assemble the army, my lord?” one of his men said, as if prompting his overwhelmed prince.
“In time, certainly,” Vlad said, looking down again and searching the faces of every one of us present. “But this is a war on many fronts. Their claims that I am a Turkish lackey must be countered by the truth. And we shall move first of all to strike them in their most precious, most sensitive, most beloved parts.” He smiled, cupping a hand down low before him. “Their purses.”
If I had been a prince, I would have gone to war. My armies would have smashed my enemies one after the other. But Vlad had been raised to consider statecraft and had studied cunning under no less a tutor than William de Ferrers.
He countered his enemies with writ and with sanction, with declarations and proclamations. Vlad withdrew all previously awarded protections for trade for the Saxon towns and encouraged Wallachian merchants with highly favourable tariffs. He imposed exceedingly disadvantageous terms on all Saxon merchants in his lands. There were many declarations issued, one of which required them to entirely unpack their wagons for inspection by Wallachian officers and merchants at Târgoviște. Every time I passed by, there were Saxons complaining and arguing with the officials while their produce was spread across the square being poked and ruined by grinning Wallachian customs officers. The Saxons were forced to sell to Wallachian merchants at far lower prices than they could have received further along the trade routes.
All his economic warfare frustrated the Saxons and reduced their revenues enormously, while boosting Vlad’s. It also meant that the entire Wallachian merchant and artisan class became besotted with their new prince and he had swiftly won the loyalty of another caste in his nation.
The Saxon merchants of course did everything that they possibly could to avoid Vlad’s newly empowered customs officials and so Vlad had a perfectly legal cause to bring them and their cities to heel.
“Now it is time, Richard,” Vlad said to me one morning as I entered his hall. “We shall put the sluji to good use at last.”
“Against the Saxons?” I said. “I would much rather take them south to raid across the Danube to kill Turks. That is why we made them.”
Vlad scowled. “In fact, Richard, we created them to kill William’s Blood Janissaries. Not ordinary Turks.”
I sighed. “They are not yet battle hardened. They need honing further before facing William’s men on the field.”
“Well then,” Vlad said, spreading his arms. “What difference does it make if they kill Saxons or Turks? Both are the enemies of Wallachia. Both are the enemies of Vlad Dracula. Anyway, Richard, by this rebellion the Saxons know they weaken a Christian kingdom in the face of the Turk. By rebelling against me they are working in concert with the Turk, if not in full collusion with him. It is a good and proper thing for a commander to test his men before throwing them into battle, yes. The sluji have trained together and now we will see how well they fight together? We must know. And these are the only battles they will see before Mehmed and William come. And come they will.”
I knew that Eva and the others would disagree with our immortals being used to attack Christians but nothing Vlad said was incorrect. It was one thing to see them march and camp and deploy but we had to see the sluji in action to be confident in them. And anyway, the Germans could be bloody well damned for their treachery, as far as I was concerned.
“Very well.”
And so we put the sluji to the test.
***
Both the towns of Sibiu and Brasov deserved to be punished. They were the most Saxon of districts in Transylvania and they were also within the duchies of Fogaras and Amlas, which were possessions of the Prince of Wallachia. And so Vlad was in his rights to order Sibiu to give up its support for Vlad the Monk and Brasov was formally instructed that they were harbouring a traitor to the crown in Dan III.
Neither city so much as sent a letter of response to Vlad’s demands.
While a light rain fell beneath a low grey sky, I approached the assembly field outside of Târgoviște leading my five hundred mounted sluji as well as the servants who would provide their blood and all other logistical support. There were hundreds of horsemen present but there was not the army I had expected to see.
Vlad had brought his bodyguard and a small number of boyars and their own retinues.
“Where are the cannons?” I asked Vlad, riding to him. “Where are the infantry?”
“Cannons, Richard?” Vlad asked, innocently, while his men laughed. “Infantry?”
I came close enough to him to drop my voice. “You want to take these towns, do you not? How do you expect to do it quickly without destroying the walls or storming them? If you expect my men to storm the walls of these wealthy places, one after the other, I will lose scores at least and possibly hundreds. You will throw away all I have built with the sluji if you mean to do such a thing.”
“You fear I mean to overrule your command of your men, Richard?” he asked. “Do you worry that I will command them and they will obey?”
I was confused and caught off-guard because that had not even occurred to me. The fact that he jumped right to that raised my hackles and I was about to tell him he was welcome to try when he smiled.
“I jest, Richard, I jest. No, you are quite right, of course. I do not have time to make a siege of these places, one after the other. While I am in one place, the other will run riot. No, no. We will simply destroy their lands instead. Each town has a dominion filled with productive villages. Well, we will burn every village and drive off all their people. All the merchants we find shall be killed, of course. Soon enough, the towns will capitulate. And if they do not, well, my dear friend Michael Szilágyi has given his word that he will bring his army down upon them with all the cannons and infantry that we might possibly need. Either way, the Saxons will give up before they are conquered. All they care about is money. Shall we depart?”
Our cavalry force moved swiftly across the mountains in spring 1458, passing by the Turno Ro, the Red Tower, which the Wallachians swore was stained red due to the blood of all the Turks who had bled upon its walls in their futile attempts to take it. Absurd, of course, but they seemed to believe it. Our destination was the valley of the River Hirtibaciu. These were the lands of Saxons who continued to support Vlad the
Monk and so the people there were rebels. Their punishment would be death.
“We must not do this,” Eva said when we were about to order the men into the valley. “We did not make this brotherhood of blood to make war on the innocent.”
“They are not innocent. They are rebels.”
“Do not be so pig-headed,” she muttered. “You know this is wrong.”
“Very well, this is wrong,” I snapped, speaking quietly so that no one would know I was arguing with my woman. “But this is the path we are on. This path leads to William’s head on a spike and so it is our path.”
“Unleashing our men on women and children?”
“I will order them to leave the women and children unharmed,” I said.
She scoffed and walked away, because of course such a thing was absurd. Even so, I ordered the men to spare the lives of the women and to let the children flee.
“This will spread panic,” I said, projecting my voice over them all. “And send hungry mouths to Sibiu, which will cause them to surrender.”
The sluji broke off into companies, each commanded by a captain. Walt and Rob took the strongest, the steadiest of them in their companies. Claudin, Garcia, and Jan, took the rest. They knew their business and the sluji brought fire and death to the villages of the valley. The men they found were killed. Some of my men delighted in making spectacles of it, forcing their kin to watch as their menfolk were executed, sometimes in artful ways.
Rob made sure to protect the children at least, as best as he could, but even he struggled to keep the women from being violated. One might as well attempt to stop a white-topped wave from reaching a rocky shore. Such is the way of war. Everything a man does must be to make his own people strong so that war does not descend on his lands.
Thus, the valley of Hirtibaciu was turned to a smouldering ruin. Without resting, we moved on to the lands around the town of Brasov.
First, we destroyed the village of Bod. The houses were burned, as were the fields and the trees, and the waters were poisoned with corpses. Everyone was killed, other than a handful who were taken prison so that they could be publicly executed back at Târgoviște.
The village of Talme we also burned to the ground and every person slaughtered.
Any Saxon merchants who were captured attempting to flee the area were tortured before they were killed. At Birsei, a community of six hundred merchants were captured trying to force their way clear of our encirclement. They had banded together in hopes of overcoming us. But they were merchants and we were soldiers.
“Do you know,” Vlad said, his voice ringing out over them. They were tied up, on their knees, in a great mass. Many were bruised and bleeding and most had ropes around their necks tying them one to the other lest they attempt to flee again. “Do you know that I have promised to impale every Saxon merchant I find in these lands?”
The wind was the only answer. Somewhere, a man groaned in agony, physical or spiritual, and many of Vlad’s men laughed.
“Why is it then that you would stay?” Vlad asked them. “Can it be that you do not fear impalement?”
Again, they hung their heads.
Stephen cursed under his breath beside me. Even Serban looked sickened.
“Where is Eva?” I asked him.
Serban did not look at me. “I think the mistress would not wish to see more men put on sticks,” he said.
“She ain’t the only one,” Walt muttered.
“Impalement does not seem to frighten the Saxons overly much,” Vlad called to his men, as if he was astonished. “I think we must try other methods. Have them boiled.”
When it was clear that the prince was not joking, great cauldrons were brought from the kitchens of grand houses, fires were lit, and one or two bound men at a time were dumped into the boiling water. The fires had to be built high and hot and hundreds of men brought wood for the fires for hours on end. Every so often the executions would have to be stopped while masses of boiled skin were scraped from where it accumulated on the sides of the cauldrons. The screams of the dying were nothing when compared to the sobbing and begging of the Saxons who lay shivering on the ground watching their friends boiling to death before them. It was hard work for the Wallachians, but their prince had set them the task and they were committed to seeing it done. At the end, a couple of dozen merchants were released before their time was up.
“In my great mercy, I have decided to grant your freedom,” Vlad pronounced. “You fortunate fellows will return to your homelands. If any of my men lay eyes on you again, you shall suffer a fate worse than the one you have just avoided.”
It was not mercy of course. Vlad wanted the tale to spread to the other towns. And spread it did, not just to the Saxons of Transylvania but to all German-speaking peoples and beyond. The tales of Vlad’s bloodthirsty depravity had begun.
As promised, Michael Szilágyi brought his forces down from Hungary and besieged Sibiu in October 1458 and though he did not take it, the Saxons towns as one agreed to come to the negotiating table.
Just as Dracula had predicted.
The murder and terror we had inflicted had shaken their resolve and the Saxon rebels gave in. In November, the burghers of Brasov agreed to surrender the would-be prince Dan III and his supporters to Vlad Dracula. They even agreed to pay Szilágyi ten thousand florins in restitution for the revenues they had withdrawn from Hungary. In return, they would have their previous commercial rights and privileges restored.
And all was well. Vlad congratulated all of us on a campaign of terror well waged. The sluji had done their part superbly, following the orders of their captains. They had drunk the blood of their enemies only when no mortals could bear witness and they now felt themselves blooded as a company. When we returned to the valley of Poenari, I told them I was proud of them and that with peace on our northern border, we would soon face their true enemies the Turks in battle.
Sadly, that was not to be. Not yet.
King Mattias Corvinus Hunyadi was not his father. He was far more ruthless and far less honourable. The king was displeased at the way the rebellion had been handled. Indeed, he was furious at the amount of blood that had been spilled and he felt that the terror we caused had blackened his name by association. In order to distance himself from the massacres, he had Szilágyi captured and imprisoned and it was clear to all parties that everything Szilágyi had agreed in the negotiations no longer had value.
Even more astonishing for us, for Vlad Dracula, was the King Mattias Corvinus declared his support for the rebel Dan III.
“It is all falling apart already,” Stephen said when we heard. “Corvinus hates Dracula.”
We were in our camp, seated around a table in my tent. The company busied itself outside while we discussed what it might mean for us.
“He fears him,” I said, nodding. “Fears his resolve.”
“We should all fear his resolve,” Stephen replied. “What happens to us, to the sluji, if Vlad is overthrown? With the King of Hungary for an enemy, with a replacement prince in his pocket, surely it is all but certain.”
“Keep your voices down,” Eva snapped.
“The treaty with the Saxons is finished,” Stephen said, leaning forward. “And so we are at war with Brasov again when it is the Turks we are here to fight. We have our immortal army, but they are being squandered on these ridiculous dynastic squabbles. We wanted a king who was strong. And now we have Vlad who is still unable to suppress his nobles or his other vassals despite the evil he wreaks and what is more we find that the King of Hungary is favouring a new prince for Wallachia.”
“These people are mad,” Walt said. “No offence, Serban.”
Serban looked up from his position guarding the entrance to the tent and looked away again.
“Do you doubt that Vlad will emerge victorious?” I asked them. “Even without our help, I would not doubt him.”
“He is a perfectly capable soldier,” Stephen said. “But with so many enemies how can he eve
r—”
“He is more than capable, Stephen,” I said, surprised at the fervour with which I found myself speaking. “He is decisive and he leads his men well, whether peasant or lord. He knows how men think. His own and his enemy’s. We are committed, now. We cannot abandon the sluji here and I fear that they would not follow me away from Wallachia. Not without Vlad’s permission at least. Not yet. We must make it so that Vlad emerges victorious. That is our path to throwing the sluji against the Blood Janissaries.”
“Everything you say is true,” Rob said. “But this way of waging war does not bring glory. Only blood.”
“Well then that is lucky for us,” I said. “For blood is what we need.”
They were not amused, and I could not blame them. It did not get any better and indeed, it grew to be far worse.
Early in the year, we raided the valley of the River Prahova, destroying the villages there which belonged to Brasov. We burned crops and killed everyone in our path. We reached Brasov swiftly, and they were not expecting us for many days yet. Much of the town lay outside its walls, having grown through its success so that many homes, large and small, lined the roads toward the town.
Unprotected by a wall, we smashed our way right into those suburbs and captured hundreds of residents.
Outside the walls of Brasov, Vlad ordered the prisoners be impaled.
They were raised aloft in their hundreds, writhing and screaming in full sight of the residents lining the walls. Those residents were the friends, business partners, and family, of the prisoners dying upon the stakes outside. On the walls, they screamed and begged and hurled insults, wailing as they watched their kin dying in the most horrific way imaginable.
Even the veterans of my Company of Saint George quailed at the sight and the sound of it and most of them walked away. But I could not. The sheer horror of it was breath-taking. In all my years, all I could recall that was the like of it was the massacres of the Mongols. They had dreamed up satanic punishments for their conquered foes but they were a savage, barbarian people. To see Christians killing Christians in such a fashion was a fresh horror that stunned me.
