Executed: Torture under Vlad the Impaler

By Lisa J. Yarde

In 1499, a German pamphlet circulated through Nuremberg. It depicts a horrific scene that supposedly took place outside the Romanian city of Brasov. Hacked limbs and heads littered the ground while men and women are impaled through the stomach or torso. While the man to the bottom right carves up fallen bodies with a short ax, the solitary bearded figure to the left sits at a banquet table in clear enjoyment of the grim vista. Text accompanies the image. "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...."

Nuremberg pamphlet; Source - Wiki Commons

Vlad Dracula III, the 15th century Romanian prince of Wallachia gained such a reputation for cruel executions, he inspired Bram Stoker's famous novel and centuries of the vampire myths that still mire his past. The legends about Vlad that do not involve supernatural elements are just as terrifying as anything Stoker could imagine. Vlad's vicious enemies the Ottoman Turks thought he deserved the title Kaziglu Bey or the Impaler Prince. He earned his fearsome reputation among the Turks, his other enemies and even his own people with his favorite method of execution.

The Turks may bear some responsibility for Vlad's vices. In 1442, when Vlad was barely a teenager, his father had to surrender him and his younger brother Radu to the Turks in exchange for their military support. Initiated into painful torments with the whip by his tutors and unable to protect his brother Radu from the sexual advances of the future Sultan Mehmed II, young Vlad developed a brutal outlook on life. For six years, he survived as a hostage and must have nurtured a seething hatred against the Turks. They had forced their terms on his father, captured him and Radu, and turned his younger brother into a sycophant who forgot his Christian upbringing, embraced Islam and abandoned himself to a relationship with an Ottoman prince. Vlad might have also witnessed the execution of prisoners, a subtle demonstration from his captors of the fate awaiting him if his father rebelled. Turkish prisoners were shot with arrows, beheaded, crushed, hung, mauled by wild animals or impaled. In the latter instance, they endured the piercing stab of a sharpened pole through their rectums and were left in excruciating agony to die atop the raised pole. 

After Vlad's release from captivity in 1448, he had three terms as prince of Wallachia. During that time, the Turks had captured Constantinople, the bastion of Eastern Orthodoxy and impaled many of its Christian inhabitants. They prepared to conquer the whole of Europe.  The new Ottoman ruler Mehmed II had declared himself young, rich and favored, determined to surpass the combined ambitions of Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great and Hannibal of Carthage.

Vlad the Impaler, prince of Wallachia
Source - Wiki Commons

Vlad's revenge began with slow, deliberate purpose. During his second reign, Pope Pius II called for a crusade against the Turks who now threatened Hungary. In 1459, Vlad paid the last tribute of 10,000 ducats he would ever send the Turks.  A year later, Mehmed directed his envoys to Wallachia. Vlad detained the men and nailed their hats to their heads for failure to remove them as a show of deference. Mehmed sent a follow-up request for 500 boys for the Janissary corps. When Vlad refused, the Turks made incursions into Wallachia and stole the children. Vlad bided his time and pretended to negotiate with Mehmed, who sent the governor of Nicopolis, Hamza Bey under an escort of 1,000 cavalry to a meeting with Vlad. Vlad attacked the Turks and executed the survivors by impalement. He had the ends of the stakes oiled and required that they should not be too sharp, lest his victims die quickly. For Hamza Bey, he reserved the longest stake so the dying man could still rank highest above his fellow Turks. Over the years of successive warfare, a new type of forest rose above Wallachia - the impaled corpses of Vlad's prisoners. Mehmed's army once fled the countryside along the Danube River after encountering the gruesome display.

Vlad settled other scores by methods of impalement, with particular barbarity reserved for the nobles whom he had suspected of disloyalty and betrayal of his murdered father. At his capital in Tirgoviste, he impaled members of the nobility and on St. Bartholomew's Day, he allegedly had 20,000 men, women and children executed at the Romanian city of Sibiu while he enjoyed his lunch. When one of his soldiers covered his nose against the stench of death, Vlad had him impaled alongside the other victims with the words: "Let him join these others, but because he had been loyal until today, hoist him higher than the rest that he does not have to smell his company!"

Sources: Florescu, Radu R. & McNally, Raymond T. Dracula — Prince of Many Faces. 

Lisa J. Yarde writes fiction inspired by real-life events. She is the author of historical novels set in medieval England and Normandy, The Burning Candle, based on the life of Isabel de Vermandois, and On Falcon's Wings, chronicling the star-crossed romance between Norman and Saxon lovers. Lisa has also written Sultana and Sultana’s Legacy, novels set during a turbulent period of thirteenth century Spain,where rivalries and ambitions threaten the fragile bonds between members of a powerful family. 

Villains: Prince Vlad III of Wallachia

By Lisa J. Yarde

Vlad III of Wallachia

Also known as Dracula (son of the Dragon or devil) and Vlad Tepes (the Impaler), the legendary life of this fifteenth century Wallachian prince is filled with accounts of his excessive cruelty. He also inspired the Gothic nightmares of Bram Stoker's Dracula, about an undead count who preys upon the innocent to sustain his life. Dracula wasn't the first vampire in fiction of the Victorian era, but he's arguably the most popular. The mysteries behind the real history of Vlad III of Wallachia have made it possible to mire the past in fantastical imaginings of him as an enduring vampire. 

Who was the real man behind the legend? A murderous villain who impaled his enemies and innocents alike by the thousands, worthy of the vampire stories associated with his legend? A fighter, like his father, who protected his land from the invading Turks? Or, perhaps the truth lies in between; he might have been a pragmatic man, born into a violent time, who used brutal tactics to ensure his country’s survival.

Vlad Dracul

Vlad III was born in 1431, in what is now modern-day Romania. His father Vlad Dracul became Prince of Wallachia and a member of the Catholic military Order of the Dragon, dedicated to fighting the Turkish invasion from the east. His mother’s identity is uncertain, but she may have been his father’s second wife, Cneajna, daughter of Prince Alexandru of Moldavia. Vlad III had brothers; Vlad the Monk (illegitimate; born around 1425), Mircea II (born 1428) and Radu the Handsome (born 1435).  Vlad Dracul ruled a vast territory where hundreds of nobles or boyars vied for power in a state weakened by the persistence of the Turks.

Two momentous events in the youth of Vlad III might have inspired his enduring hatred of the Turks. In 1437, his father signed an agreement with the Sultan Murad II, betraying the tenets of the Order of the Dragon. Five years later, when Vlad III was eleven, Murad II seized him and his brother Radu for their father’s half-support of the Turkish invasion of Wallachia. Radu would live with the Turks until 1468, but Vlad III stayed from 1442-1448. When his brother Mircea II revolted against the Turks, the family risked the lives of the two young boys. They were never harmed, but young Radu had to bear the sexual advances of Prince Mehmed II. During his confinement, Vlad III learned much from his Turkish captors about the fickle nature of politics, and more about cruelty and vice.

Radu the Handsome

In 1447, Vlad Dracul died, assassinated while escaping from disloyal boyars. The nobles captured his son Mircea II, blinded him with a red-hot poker and buried him alive.  A year later at the age of seventeen, the Turks released Vlad III, who later seized the vacant principality of Wallachia. He only held it for two months. He bided his time in Moldavia until 1456, when a council of boyars supported his new reign. They would soon regret their actions.

In the spring of 1457, after having dug up his brother’s remains and seeing the proof of his terrible demise, Vlad III invited two hundred boyars from the city of Tirgoviste and their families to a feast. The elder noblemen and their wives were impaled on sharpened, wooden stakes. The young and able-bodied were marched along the Arges River to the site of the future Castle Dracula. Vlad III also roamed the countryside in disguise and inquired after the condition of his poorest people. Yet, he could be cruel to them – he once invited all the beggars to a banquet in Tirgoviste, where his men locked the doors and burned the occupants alive. As Vlad said, “These men live off the sweat of others, so they are useless to humanity.” Clearly, the Prince of Wallachia wasn’t interested in social reform.

Mehmed II

However, Vlad III reserved his greatest cruelty for the Turks. In 1459, when Sultan Mehmed II sent his emissaries to collect the poll tax and tributes of Wallachian boys into the Janissary order, Vlad nailed the ambassadors’ hats to their heads. When the Turks later attacked, Vlad’s men ambushed them and impaled their leader on the highest stake, based on his rank. Since he spoke Turkish, Vlad was also able to infiltrate Turkish ranks and destroy their camps.

The Venetians and Genoese lauded Vlad’s efforts, but hostility toward the Prince of Wallachia at home and the betrayal of his younger brother Radu placed his rule in jeopardy. King Matthias Corvinus, Vlad’s suzerain, imprisoned him for ten years. The Turks placed Radu the Handsome on the Wallachian throne, where he reigned as Radu III. Upon his release, Vlad married the cousin of Matthias Corvinus, by whom he had two sons. His first wife had committed suicide by jumping into the Arges River, rather than surrendering to the Turks.  In 1476 after Radu’s death, Vlad tried to regain Wallachia, but he was assassinated two months later.

Historians believe that tales of Vlad’s extreme cruelty can be attributed to propaganda by Matthias Corvinus, who was less than helpful in Vlad’s fight against the Turks. Romanian patriots have portrayed Vlad as a patriot, but it is hard to deny the evidence of his villainy toward his own people. 

Lisa J. Yarde writes fiction inspired by real-life events. She is the author of On Falcon's Wings, a medieval novel chronicling the star-crossed romance between Norman and Saxon lovers. She has also written the medieval novels Sultana and Sultana’s Legacy, both set during a turbulent period of thirteenth century Spain.