Vlad the Impaler (Part II)

Imprisonment in Hungary

Matthias Corvinus came to Transylvania in November 1462. The negotiations between Corvinus and Vlad lasted for weeks, but Corvinus did not want to wage war against the Ottoman Empire.   At the king's order, his Czech mercenary commander, John Jiskra of Brandýs, captured Vlad near Rucăr in Wallachia.

To provide an explanation for Vlad's imprisonment to Pope Pius II and the Venetians (who had sent money to finance a campaign against the Ottoman Empire), Corvinus presented three letters, allegedly written by Vlad on 7 November 1462, to Mehmed II, Mahmud Pasha, and Stephen of Moldavia.  According to the letters, Vlad offered to join his forces with the sultan's army against Hungary if the sultan restored him to his throne.  Most historians agree that the documents were forged to give grounds for Vlad's imprisonment. Corvinus's court historian, Antonio Bonfini, admitted that the reason for Vlad's imprisonment was never clarified.  Florescu writes, "[T]he style of writing, the rhetoric of meek submission (hardly compatible with what we know of Dracula's character), clumsy wording, and poor Latin" are all evidence that the letters could not be written on Vlad's order.  He associates the author of the forgery with a Saxon priest of Brașov.

Vlad was first imprisoned "in the city of Belgrade" (now Alba Iulia in Romania), according to Chalkokondyles.  Before long, he was taken to Visegrád, where he was held for fourteen years.  No documents referring to Vlad between 1462 and 1475 have been preserved.  In the summer of 1475, Stephen III of Moldavia sent his envoys to Matthias Corvinus, asking him to send Vlad to Wallachia against Basarab Laiotă, who had submitted himself to the Ottomans.  Stephen wanted to secure Wallachia for a ruler who had been an enemy of the Ottoman Empire, because "the Wallachians [were] like the Turks" to the Moldavians, according to his letter.  According to the Slavic stories about Vlad, he was only released after he converted to Catholicism.

Third rule and death

Matthias Corvinus recognized Vlad as the lawful prince of Wallachia, but he did not provide him military assistance to regain his principality.  Vlad settled in a house in Pest.  When a group of soldiers broke into the house while pursuing a thief who had tried to hide there, Vlad had their commander executed because they had not asked his permission before entering his home, according to the Slavic stories about his life.  Vlad moved to Transylvania in June 1475. He wanted to settle in Sibiu and sent his envoy to the town in early June to arrange a house for him.  Mehmed II acknowledged Basarab Laiotă as the lawful ruler of Wallachia.  Corvinus ordered the burghers of Sibiu to give 200 golden florins to Vlad from the royal revenues on 21 September, but Vlad left Transylvania for Buda in October.

Vlad bought a house in Pécs that became known as Drakula háza ("Dracula's house" in Hungarian).  In January 1476 John Pongrác of Dengeleg, Voivode of Transylvania, urged the people of Brașov to send to Vlad all those of his supporters who had settled in the town, because Corvinus and Basarab Laiotă had concluded a treaty.  The relationship between the Transylvanian Saxons and Basarab remained tense, and the Saxons gave shelter to Basarab's opponents during the following months.  Corvinus dispatched Vlad and the Serbian Vuk Grgurević to fight against the Ottomans in Bosnia in early 1476.  They captured Srebrenica and other fortresses in February and March 1476.

Mehmed II invaded Moldavia and defeated Stephen III in the Battle of Valea Albă on 26 July 1476.  Stephen Báthory and Vlad entered Moldavia, forcing the sultan to lift the siege of the fortress at Târgu Neamț in late August, according to a letter of Matthias Corvinus.  The contemporaneous Jakob Unrest added that Vuk Grgurević and a member of the noble Jakšić family also participated in the struggle against the Ottomans in Moldavia.

Matthias Corvinus ordered the Transylvanian Saxons to support Báthory's planned invasion of Wallachia on 6 September 1476, also informing them that Stephen of Moldavia would also invade Wallachia.  Vlad stayed in Brașov and confirmed the commercial privileges of the local burghers in Wallachia on 7 October 1476.  Báthory's forces captured Târgoviște on 8 November.  Stephen of Moldavia and Vlad ceremoniously confirmed their alliance, and they occupied Bucharest, forcing Basarab Laiotă to seek refuge in the Ottoman Empire on 16 November.  Vlad informed the merchants of Brașov about his victory, urging them to come to Wallachia.  He was crowned before 26 November.

Basarab Laiotă returned to Wallachia with Ottoman support, and Vlad died fighting against them in late December 1476 or early January 1477.  In a letter written on 10 January 1477, Stephen III of Moldavia related that Vlad's Moldavian retinue had also been massacred.  According to Leonardo Botta, the Milanese ambassador to Buda, the Ottomans cut Vlad's corpse into pieces.  Bonfini wrote that Vlad's head was sent to Mehmed II.

The place of his burial is unknown.  According to popular tradition (which was first recorded in the late 19th century), Vlad was buried in the Monastery of Snagov.  However, the excavations carried out by Dinu V. Rosetti in 1933 found no tomb below the supposed "unmarked tombstone" of Vlad in the monastery church. Rosetti reported: "Under the tombstone attributed to Vlad there was no tomb. Only many bones and jaws of horses."  Historian Constantin Rezachevici said Vlad was most probably buried in the first church of the Comana Monastery, which had been established by Vlad and was near the battlefield where he was killed.

Family

Ancestors of Vlad the Impaler

Vlad had two wives, according to modern specialists.  His first wife may have been an illegitimate daughter of John Hunyadi, according to historian Alexandru Simon.  Vlad's second wife was Jusztina Szilágyi, who was a cousin of Matthias Corvinus.   She was the widow of Vencel Pongrác of Szentmiklós when "Ladislaus Dragwlya" married her, most probably in 1475. She survived Vlad Dracul, and first married Pál Suki, then János Erdélyi.

Vlad's eldest son, Mihnea, was born in 1462.  Vlad's unnamed second son was killed before 1486.m Vlad's third son, Vlad Drakwlya, unsuccessfully laid claim to Wallachia around 1495.  He was the forefather of the noble Drakwla family.

Legacy

Reputation for cruelty

First records

Stories about Vlad's brutal acts began circulating during his lifetime.  After his arrest, courtiers of Matthias Corvinus promoted their spread. The papal legate, Niccolo Modrussiense, had already written about such stories to Pope Pius II in 1462.  Two years later, the pope included them in his Commentaries.

The Meistersinger Michael Beheim wrote a lengthy poem about Vlad's deeds, allegedly based on his conversation with a Catholic monk who had managed to escape from Vlad's prison. The poem, called Von ainem wutrich der heis Trakle waida von der Walachei ("Story of a Despot Called Dracula, Voievod of Wallachia") Matei Cazacu, was performed at the court of Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor in Wiener Neustadt during the winter of 1463.  According to one of Beheim's stories, Vlad had two monks impaled to assist them to go to heaven, also ordering the impalement of their donkey because it began braying after its masters' death.  Beheim also accused Vlad of duplicity, stating that Vlad had promised support to both Matthias Corvinus and Mehmed II but did not keep the promise.

In 1475, Gabriele Rangoni, Bishop of Eger (and a former papal legate), understood that Vlad had been imprisoned because of his cruelty.  Rangoni also recorded the rumor that while in prison Vlad caught rats to cut them up into pieces or stuck them on small pieces of wood, because he was unable to "forget his wickedness".  Antonio Bonfini also recorded anecdotes about Vlad in his Historia Pannonica around 1495.  Bonfini wanted to justify both the removal and the restoration of Vlad by Matthias.  He described Vlad as "a man of unheard cruelty and justice".  Bonfini's stories about Vlad were repeated in Sebastian Münster's Cosmography.  Münster also recorded Vlad's "reputation for tyrannical justice".

... Turkish messengers came to [Vlad] to pay respects, but refused to take off their turbans, according to their ancient custom, whereupon he strengthened their custom by nailing their turbans to their heads with three spikes, so that they could not take them off.— Antonio Bonfini: Historia Pannonica

German stories

Works containing the stories about Vlad's cruelty were published in Low German in the Holy Roman Empire before 1480.  The stories were allegedly written in the early 1460s, because they describe Vlad's campaign across the Danube in early 1462, but they do not refer to Mehmed II's invasion of Wallachia in June of the same year.  They provide a detailed narration of the conflicts between Vlad and the Transylvanian Saxons, showing that they originated "in the literary minds of the Saxons".

The stories about Vlad's plundering raids in Transylvania were clearly based on an eyewitness account, because they contain accurate details (including the lists of the churches destroyed by Vlad and the dates of the raids).  They describe Vlad as a "demented psychopath, a sadist, a gruesome murderer, a masochist", worse than Caligula and Nero.  However, the stories emphasizing Vlad's cruelty are to be treated with caution because his brutal acts were very probably exaggerated (or even invented) by the Saxons.

The invention of movable type printing contributed to the popularity of the stories about Vlad, making them one of the first "bestsellers" in Europe.  To enhance sales, they were published in books with woodcuts on their title pages that depicted horrific scenes.  For instance, the editions published in Nuremberg in 1499 and in Strasbourg in 1500 depict Vlad dining at a table surrounded by dead or dying people on poles.

... [Vlad] had a big copper cauldron built and put a lid made of wood with holes in it on top. He put the people in the cauldron and put their heads in the holes and fastened them there; then he filled it with water and set a fire under it and let the people cry their eyes out until they were boiled to death. And then he invented frightening, terrible, unheard of tortures. He ordered that women be impaled together with their suckling babies on the same stake. The babies fought for their lives at their mother's breasts until they died. Then he had the women's breasts cut off and put the babies inside headfirst; thus he had them impaled together.— about a mischievous tyrant called Dracula vodă (No. 12–13)

These stories may have influenced Martin Luther's Beerwolf concept of a ruler who is worse than a tyrant and must be resisted by the people. In 1550, the leaders of the German city of Magdeburg included a Beerwolf clause as part of a complicated legal argument discussing when an evil ruler should be resisted under the doctrine of the lesser magistrate.

Slavic stories

There are more than twenty manuscripts (written between the 15th and 18th centuries) which preserved the text of the Skazanie o Drakule voievode (The Tale about Voivode Dracula).  The manuscripts were written in Russian, but they copied a text that had originally been recorded in a South Slavic language, because they contain expressions alien to the Russian language but used in South Slavic idioms (such as diavol for "evil").  The original text was written in Buda between 1482 and 1486.

The nineteen anecdotes in the Skazanie are longer than the German stories about Vlad.  They are a mixture of fact and fiction, according to historian Raymond T. McNally.  Almost half of the anecdotes emphasize, like the German stories, Vlad's brutality, but they also underline that his cruelty enabled him to strengthen the central government in Wallachia.  For instance, the Skazanie writes of a golden cup that nobody dared to steal at a fountain because Vlad "hated stealing so violently ... that anybody who caused any evil or robbery ... did not live long", thereby promoting public order, and the German story about Vlad's campaign against Ottoman territory underlined his cruel acts while the Skazanie emphasized his successful diplomacy calling him "zlomudry" or "evil-wise". On the other hand, the Skazanie sharply criticized Vlad for his conversion to Catholicism, attributing his death to this apostasy some elements of the anecdotes were later added to Russian stories about Ivan the Terrible of Russia.

Assertion by modern standards

The mass murders that Vlad carried out indiscriminately and brutally would most likely amount to acts of genocide and war crimes by current standards.  Romanian defense minister Ioan Mircea Pașcu asserted that Vlad would have been condemned for crimes against humanity had he been put on trial at Nuremberg.

National hero

The Cantacuzino Chronicle was the first Romanian historical work to record a tale about Vlad the Impaler, narrating the impalement of the old boyars of Târgoviște for the murder of his brother, Dan.  The chronicle added that Vlad forced the young boyars and their wives and children to build the Poienari Castle.  The legend of the Poienari Castle was mentioned in 1747 by Neofit I, Metropolitan of Ungro–Wallachia, who complemented it with the story of Meșterul Manole, who allegedly walled in his bride to prevent the crumbling of the walls of the castle during the building project.  In the early 20th century, Constantin Rădulescu-Codin, a teacher in Muscel County where the castle was situated, published a local legend about Vlad's letter of grant "written on rabbit skin" for the villagers who had helped him to escape from Poienari Castle to Transylvania during the Ottoman invasion of Wallachia.  In other villages of the region, the donation is attributed to the legendary Radu Negru.

Rădulescu-Codin recorded further local legends, some of which are also known from the German and Slavic stories about Vlad, suggesting that the latter stories preserved oral tradition.  For instance, the tales about the burning of the lazy, the poor, and the lame at Vlad's order and the execution of the woman who had made her husband too short a shirt can also be found among the German and Slavic anecdotes. The peasants telling the tales knew that Vlad's sobriquet was connected to the frequent impalements during his reign, but they said only such cruel acts could secure public order in Wallachia.

Most Romanian artists have regarded Vlad as a just ruler and a realistic tyrant who punished criminals and executed unpatriotic boyars to strengthen the central government.  Ion Budai-Deleanu wrote the first Romanian epic poem focusing on him.  Deleanu's Țiganiada (Gypsy Epic) (which was published only in 1875, almost a century after its composition) presented Vlad as a hero fighting against the boyars, Ottomans, strigoi (or vampires), and other evil spirits at the head of an army of gypsies and angels. The poet Dimitrie Bolintineanu emphasized Vlad's triumphs in his Battles of the Romanians in the middle of the 19th century.  He regarded Vlad as a reformer whose acts of violence were necessary to prevent the despotism of the boyars. One of the greatest Romanian poets, Mihai Eminescu, dedicated a historic ballad, The Third Letter, to the valiant princes of Wallachia, including Vlad.  He urges Vlad to return from the grave and to annihilate the enemies of the Romanian nation:

You must come, O dread Impaler; confound them to your care.

Split them in two partitions, here the fools, the rascals there;

Shove them into two enclosures from the broad daylight enisle 'em,

Then set fire to the prison and the lunatic asylum.

 — Mihai Eminescu: The Third Letter

In the early 1860s, the painter Theodor Aman depicted the meeting of Vlad and the Ottoman envoys, showing the envoys' fear of the Wallachian ruler.

Since the middle of the 19th century, Romanian historians have treated Vlad as one of the greatest Romanian rulers, emphasizing his fight for the independence of the Romanian lands.  Even Vlad's acts of cruelty were often represented as rational acts serving national interest.  Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol was one of the first historians to emphasize that Vlad could only stop the internal fights of the boyar parties through his acts of terror.  Constantin C. Giurescu remarked, "The tortures and executions which [Vlad] ordered were not out of caprice, but always had a reason, and very often a reason of state."  Ioan Bogdan was one of the few Romanian historians who did not accept this heroic image. In his work published in 1896, Vlad Țepeș and the German and Russian Narratives, he concluded that the Romanians should be ashamed of Vlad, instead of presenting him as "a model of courage and patriotism".  According to an opinion poll conducted in 1999, 4.1% of the participants chose Vlad the Impaler as one of "the most important historical personalities who have influenced the destiny of the Romanians for the better".

Vampire mythology

The stories about Vlad made him the best-known medieval ruler of the Romanian lands in Europe.  However, Bram Stoker's Dracula, which was published in 1897, was the first book to make a connection between Dracula and vampirism.  Stoker had his attention drawn to the blood-sucking vampires of Romanian folklore by Emily Gerard's article about Transylvanian superstitions (published in 1885).  His limited knowledge about the medieval history of Wallachia came from William Wilkinson's book entitled Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia with Political Observations Relative to Them, published in 1820.

Stoker "apparently did not know much about" Vlad the Impaler, "certainly not enough for us to say that Vlad was the inspiration for" Count Dracula, according to Elizabeth Miller.  For instance, Stoker wrote that Dracula had been of Székely origin only because he knew about both Attila the Hun's destructive campaigns and the alleged Hunnic origin of the Székelys.   Stoker's main source, Wilkinson, who accepted the reliability of the German stories, described Vlad as a wicked man.   Actually, Stoker's working papers for his book contain no references to the historical figure, the name of the character being named in all draughts but the later ones 'Count Wampyr'. Consequently, Stoker borrowed the name and "scraps of miscellaneous information" about the history of Wallachia when writing his book about Count Dracula.

Appearance and representations

Pope Pius II's legate, Niccolò Modrussa, painted the only extant description of Vlad, whom he had met in Buda.  A copy of Vlad's portrait has been featured in the "monster portrait gallery" in the Ambras Castle at Innsbruck.  The picture depicts "a strong, cruel, and somehow tortured man" with "large, deep-set, dark green, and penetrating eyes", according to Florescu. The color of Vlad's hair cannot be determined, because Modrussa mentions that Vlad was black-haired, while the portrait seems to show that he had fair hair.  The picture depicts Vlad with a large lower lip.

Vlad's bad reputation in the German-speaking territories can be detected in a number of Renaissance paintings.  He was portrayed among the witnesses of Saint Andrew's martyrdom in a 15th-century painting, displayed in the Belvedere in Vienna.  A figure similar to Vlad is one of the witnesses of Christ in the Calvary in a chapel of the St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna.

[Vlad] was not very tall, but very stocky and strong, with a cold and terrible appearance, a strong and aquiline nose, swollen nostrils, a thin and reddish face in which the very long eyelashes framed large wide-open green eyes; the bushy black eyebrows 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 connected [with] his head from which black curly locks hung on his wide-shouldered person.— Niccolò Modrussa's description of Vlad the Impaler