Titans of History

Vlad III, hospodar

(prince) of Wallachia, claimed he was saving his Christian people from the Muslim Ottomans, but he was more interested in wielding his personal power in the treacherous intrigues of local dynastic and imperial politics. He was a degenerate, murderous sadist who displayed a cruelty so savage that he inspired the legend of Dracula. Yet the story of Dracula is tame compared with the reality. Murdering tens of thousands of people—from crippled peasants and vagrants to nobles and foreign ambassadors—he became known as the Impaler Prince: his favorite method of execution was to impale his victims on sharpened wooden stakes, oiled at the tip and inserted into their intestines. Vlad was most likely born in a military fortress, the citadel of Sighisoara, Transylvania (part of today’s Romania) in 1431. His family name was Dracul, meaning dragon, handed down through his father, who had been a member of the Order of the Dragon—which Vlad also joined at the age of five—a secret organization created by the holy Roman emperor to uphold Christianity and resist Muslim Ottoman incursions into Europe. His mother was a Moldavian princess and his father Vlad II, a former prince of Wallachia, exiled in Transylvania.

When Vlad was a child, his father, under threat of attack from the Ottoman sultan, had been forced to reassure the Turks of his obedience by sending two of his sons, including Vlad, into Ottoman custody in 1444. The experience, lasting four years, in which he was beaten and whipped for his insolence and fiery character, left Vlad with a hatred of the Turks.

Wallachia (also in modern-day Romania) was not a traditional hereditary monarchy and although Vlad had a claim to the throne, his father’s exile put him in a weak position. His elder brother, Mircea II, ruled briefly in 1442, but was forced into hiding the following year and eventually captured by his enemies in 1447, who burned out his eyes and buried him alive. Wallachian politics were duplicitous and brutal: Vlad’s young brother, Radu the Handsome, later enlisted the help of the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II to oust his brother.

In 1447, the same year Mircea was killed, boyars (regional noble families) loyal to John Hunyadi, the White Knight of Hungary, also captured and murdered Vlad’s father, claiming he was too dependent on the Ottomans. The Ottomans invaded shortly afterward to assert their control in the region and installed the seventeen-year-old Vlad as a puppet prince in 1448, only for Hunyadi to intervene again and force him to flee to Moldavia. Vlad subsequently took the bold step of traveling to Hungary—with which Wallachia had repeatedly been at war. Impressing Hunyadi with his anti-Ottoman credentials, he eventually became Hungary’s preferred candidate for the Wallachian throne.

In 1456, as the Hungarians attacked the Ottomans in Serbia, Vlad used the opportunity to invade and take control of Wallachia, killing his rival Vladislav II from the Danesti clan, and taking the throne back for the Draculs. On Easter Sunday, he invited the leading boyars to a banquet, killing the oldest and enslaving those who were still young enough to work. Many died working on new fortifications for Vlad’s castles in conditions so severe that their noble finery disintegrated, leaving them naked.

Establishing Tirgoviste as his capital, Vlad was determined to make Wallachia a great kingdom, with a prosperous and healthy people. To him, however, that meant eradicating the nobility, as well as anyone else perceived as a drain on the country’s resources. Among his targets were the poorest and most vulnerable—vagrants, the disabled and the mentally ill—thousands of whom he invited to a feast in Tirgoviste, only to lock them in the hall and burn them alive as soon as they had finished eating. (It was dangerous to accept an invitation from Vlad, but even more dangerous to refuse.) Vlad also persecuted women accused of immoral acts such as adultery—their breasts were cut off, and they were then skinned or boiled alive, and their bodies put on public display. German merchants living in Transylvania, whom he regarded as foreign parasites, were also the object of the wrath of Vlad. On St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1459 he ordered the execution of 30,000 merchants and boyars from the city of Brasov—10,000 more followed in Sibiu the following year.