Sadistic Tyrant or Noble Prince - Vlad Tepes was indeed a great warrior

Below: The old medieval town of Sighisoara in Transylvania

We started out early the next morning and, as luck would have it, fetched up at Sighisoara on market day. On these days, outlying villagers come in horse drawn carriages to sell their produce, cheese or meats, and the market is an experience in itself for the old time feel and genuine people. One hour north of Brasov, this citadel is straight out of medieval times. As the best preserved and only inhabited walled fortress in Europe, Sighisoara certainly sees its share of Dracula fans. The house where Vlad was born still stands, and has become a quaint restaurant serving traditional Romanian cuisine, as well as contemporary foods.

Once you enter the citadel, you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve stepped back some 500 years, as little has changed inside the walls of the fortress. Passing under the 64 metre clock tower, you will be mesmerised by the medieval architecture and buildings beautifully preserved and still in use.

Radu was on form. We strolled around these ancient streets and I drank in the atmosphere. It was as though time had stood still here, and the bustling charm of the place was an experience to be savoured. Stopping at a hostelry, we ordered a bottle of local wine and sat down at an outdoor table. The sun shone warmly on my back as I sipped eagerly from my glass. Radu, his pleasant, weathered face smiling excitedly, brought out the three volumes together with some hastily scribbled notes he had made the previous evening. “Now,” he said in his inimitable, animated fashion, “on with our story. I got to thinking quite a lot last night, and I compared several accounts of the next few years of our prince’s life

“I think we can go from 1447, when Vlad’s father was assassinated in the marshes near Bălteni by rebellious boyars, because of his semi-pro-Turkish policy. In the same time, his older brother Mircea was also tortured quite brutally. He was blinded with hot iron stakes and then buried alive, after being killed by his political enemies at Târgovişte. At this point, the Sultan released Vlad, invaded Wallachia and and put the young man on the throne as his puppet ruler. But this rule was brief because soon after that, Hunyadi of Hungary himself invaded Wallachia with the Hungarian military and ousted the Turks.

“Vlad fled to Moldavia and was put under the protection of his uncle, Bogdan II. Legend has it that during his escape, he had the shoes on his horse put on backwards to confuse anyone who tried to follow him. He stayed until October of 1451, when Bogdan was assassinated. Vlad then decided to go to Hungary and try an alliance with Hunyadi. Shortly afterwards, Vlad became the Hungarian candidate for the throne of Wallachia.”

In 1456, Hungary invaded Serbia to drive out the Turks, and Vlad simultaneously invaded Wallachia with his own contingent. Both campaigns were successful, but Hunyadi died suddenly of fever. “It was at this point,” Radu told me, “that Vlad became prince of his native land and began his main reign during which he is supposed to have committed his many cruelties, and hence established his notorious reputation, earning him the title ‘the Impaler’. But we really have to look at this in context. Here was a boy who had been brutalised, witnessed unspeakable attocities performed on his beloved younger brother, and seen his family and people suffer greatly at the hands of their foreign enemies, in largely unprovoked attacks. You’ve got to admit he’d be pretty pissed off!

“But what does he do? Well, admittedly, there’s a little revenge killing spree in there, but his main aim is to gain power to stop these actions against his people, and he went about it in a fairly measured way. These were not the actions of some deranged megalomaniac.”

Revenge

In fact, as Radu had said, one of the first things Vlad did as the prince of Wallachia was seek revenge for the deaths of his father and brother. On Easter Sunday of 1459, he arrested all the boyar families whom he held responsible. He impaled the older ones on stakes while forcing the others to march from the capital to the town of Poenari. This fifty-mile trek was quite gruelling, and those who survived were not permitted to rest until they reached their destination. He then ordered them to build him a fortress on the ruins of an older outpost overlooking the Arges river. Many died in the process, and the prince succeeded in creating a new nobility and obtaining a fortress for future emergencies. What is left today of the building is now identified as ‘Castle Dracula’.

Said Radu: “Vlad’s brutal punishment techniques were well known; he often ordered people to be skinned, boiled, decapitated, hanged, burned, blinded, strangled, roasted, hacked, nailed, buried alive or stabbed - in fact, you name it and he probably did it. He also liked to cut off noses, ears, sexual organs and limbs. But - as him name suggests - his favorite method was impalement on stakes. Even the Turks referred to him as ‘Kaziglu Bey’, meaning ‘The Impaler Prince’. It is this technique he used in 1457, 1459 and 1460 against Transylvanian merchants who had ignored his trade laws.

“To balance this, we must also consider his donations to various churches and monasteries, one such place being the monastary at Lake Snagov, rumoured to be his burial place. I’ve organised a trip there for tomorrow, so you can take a look for yourself.”

I nodded thankfully in acknowledgment.

“He also fought to reduce the economic role of the nobility,” continued my guide, “and increase the rights of peasantry and reinforced some castles, like the one at Poienari, where he also had a personal house built nearby.

“Vlad was a deeply religious man,” said Radu. “He believed he had to answer completely to God for all his actions, so in his own mind his wars against his enemies were just and right. And, as we’ve already established, the punishments he dished out were not peculiar to him alone, except maybe the impaling. But these are the actions of a ruler who is trying to establish strength against his enemy. One wonders just how many people he actually killed and tortured - the propaganda machine turned in fifteenth century Wallachia just as much as it does anywhere in the world today, and it suited Prince Vlad to have his enemies believe he was a murderous tyrant - fostering this reputation was a crucial deterrent.”

Reputation of a monster

My own research had told me that in the beginning of 1462, Vlad had launched a campaign against the Turks along the Danube river. During that winter, he was very successful and managed to gain many victories, although the military force of Sultan Mehmed II was far more powerful than his Wallachian army. Knowing this, the Sultan decided to launch a full-scale invasion of Wallachia in order to transform this land into a Turkish province. He entered Wallachia with an army three times larger than Prince Vlad’s. Not having any allies, Vlad was forced to retreat towards Tirgoviste. I checked these facts with Radu.

“Ah, now this is where many accounts really go against him,” he observed. “The greatest criticism levelled by the anti-Vlad camps is that he brutally murdered many of his own people in an act of pathological madness. The truth was, in order to maintain his chances of winning the battle, he had to make some very hard and cruel decisions. He burned his own villages and poisoned the wells along the way, so that the Turkish army would find nothing to eat or drink. Moreover, when the Sultan, exhausted, finally reached the capital city, he was confronted by a most gruesome sight: thousands of stakes held the remaining carcasses of some 20,000 Turkish captives, a horror scene which was ultimately nicknamed the ‘Forest of the Impaled’.

“This terror tactic must have had a very profound effect on the Turks and the Sultan, who were tired, hungry and on the point of dropping. They admitted defeat. These were desperate times, and a lot was at stake. Just think of how many people are killed in our modern wars - nothing’s really changed, things were just done a little differently back then. And it suits historians and authors to have wicked, evil tyrants upon whom to base their characters.”

Following his retreat from Wallachian territory, Mehmed left the next phase of the battle to Vlad’s younger brother Radu, the Turkish favourite for the Wallachian throne. At the head of a Turkish army and joined by Vlad’s detractors, Radu pursued his brother to Poenari castle on the Arges river. “This must have saddened Vlad a great deal,” said Radu. “This was, in his eyes, his great failure in life coming back to haunt him. His own beloved brother standing against him was proof positive to Vlad of just how much Radu hated him, indeed blamed him, for all that had happened to them as children. And the tragedy didn’t stop there; Vlad’s first wife, Elisabeta, rather than surrender to the advancing Turks, committed suicide by leaping from the towers of their castle into the waters of the Arges River below. Now, many accounts say her name was not ever recorded, but one of my three books states that it was indeed Elisabeta, though I can’t vouch definitely for its authenticity. I do find it curious that this was the name Francis Ford Coppola used in his movie about Dracula though, so he must have got this from somewhere. I doubt he has a copy of my grandmother’s book, so I would guess that this is recorded somewhere else too.

Incarceration

“Devastated at his wife’s suicide, Vlad escaped across the mountains into Transylvania and appealed to Matthias Corvinus for aid, but was arrested and imprisoned in a royal tower near Buda, where he remained a prisoner for twelve years. Unlike the film though, I really don’t believe any of this turned him against God.

“During his imprisonment, Vlad was able to gradually win his way back into the graces of Hungary’s monarch and subsequently, according to rumour, married the sister of Matthias Corvinus. During Vlad’s incarceration, Wallachia was ruled by his brother, Radu cel Frumos (the Handsome), who was still the puppet of the Ottoman sultan.

“In 1476 Vlad and Prince Stephen Bathory of Transylvania invaded Wallachia with a mixed force of Transylvanians, a few dissatisfied Wallachian boyars and a contingent of Moldavians sent by Vlad’s cousin, Prince Stephen the Great of Moldavia. Radu had died a couple of years earlier and been replaced on the Wallachian throne by another Turkish candidate, Basarab the Old, a member of the Danesti clan. For a short period of time, Prince Vlad managed to reclaim and hold the throne, but soon a large Turkish army entered Wallachia determined to return Basarab to the throne.

“Prince Vlad was finally killed in battle against the Turks near the then small town of Bucharest in December of 1476. Some reports indicate that he was assassinated by disloyal Wallachian boyars just as he was about to sweep the Turks from the field. Other accounts have him falling in defeat, surrounded by the bodies of his loyal Moldavian bodyguard (the troops loaned by Prince Stephen of Moldavia remained with Vlad after Stephen Bathory returned to Transylvania).

“Still other reports claim that, at the moment of victory, our prince was accidentally struck down by one of his own men,” said Radu. “His body was decapitated by the Turks and his head sent to Constantinople where the sultan had it displayed on a stake as proof that ‘the Impaler’ was dead. As I said earlier, he was reportedly buried at Snagov, an island monastery located near Bucharest.”

“So what was the reaction to his death among his own people?” I wanted to know.

“They were devastated,” explained Radu. “Here was a man who had led them through their darkest hour, been a fair and just prince and probably one of the strongest rulers they had ever had. A very religious man, he had staunchly upheld the Christian teachings - you see, not many people think of Vlad Ţepeş as a Christian, but he most certainly was - a devout one at that. Now does that really fit in with the evil murderer portrayed in history and legend?”

Monastery at Snagov

Ultimately, of course, we all have to make up our own mind. My journey throughout Prince Vlad’s land took me to one last place as Radu had promised, the monastery at Snagov. The village is a short jog north of Bucharest, and is a worthwhile trip for any Dracula enthusiasts. The most notable feature is the lake, in the centre of which is located an island. On this island lies the monastery which actually does house Vlad’s tomb. Whether his body was ever really in there is apparently a matter for conjecture, but it’s hard to imagine how anyone could have got this wrong.

The Monastery at Snagov, reputedly Vlad’s burial place

My whole journey into Vlad’s life had been a real eye-opener, and had certainly opened my mind to the possibility of a different man than the one we all think we know so much about. As Radu had said, it sometimes seems to suit writers and historians to milk a subject for all its dark, dramatic worth - look at the demonisation of Richard III, the accuracy of which is now in some considerable doubt - and I suppose all we can ask for is balance. So, next time you’re about to make a rash judgment about this famous Wallachian ruler, at least consider the other side to the story. Surely, as time marches inexorably on, and we too are consigned to history, it’s all any of us would ask.