Titans of History

Usually his victims were impaled. Death was excruciating and could take hours, as the stake eventually made its way through the guts and out of the mouth. Executing thousands at the same time, he would organize the stakes in concentric circles round his castles, and forbid anyone to remove the victim, often dining in the presence of rotting flesh—the higher the rank, the longer the stake reserved for them. Other methods of execution included skinning and boiling, and he once hammered nails into the heads of foreign ambassadors who refused to remove their hats at his court. Such was his bloodthirstiness that it was also rumored he drank the blood of his victims and feasted on their flesh.

In the winter of 1461–2, he crossed the Danube and pillaged the Ottoman-controlled area between Serbia and the Black Sea, killing 20,000 people. As Sultan Mehmet II gathered tens of thousands of troops for a revenge mission, they arrived on the banks of the Danube to see 20,000 Turkish prisoners whom Vlad’s armies had impaled, creating a forest of bodies on stakes.

Despite a daring attempt to infiltrate the enemy camp in disguise and kill the sultan, Vlad was overwhelmed by the scale of the Ottoman onslaught. As the Turks surrounded his castle in 1462, his wife jumped from the window, while Vlad fled, and the Ottomans installed his younger brother Radu on the throne. Captured by the Hungarians, Vlad spent the next ten years in custody, dreaming of regaining his throne while impaling mice and birds on miniature stakes. Somehow, he secured the backing of the Hungarians again, remarrying into the Hungarian royal family and winning support for his invasion of Wallachia in 1476, when he briefly deposed the new ruler, Basarab the Elder of the Danesti. Once again, however, he was no match for the invading Ottomans, and he was killed near Bucharest, perhaps even by his own men, his head removed and sent back to Constantinople, where it was displayed on a stick.

RICHARD III

1452–85

And thus I clothe my naked villainy

With old odd ends stolen out of holy writ,

And seem a saint when most I play the devil.

Richard III in William Shakespeare,

Richard III, Act 1, scene 3

Richard III was the hunchbacked usurper whose infamous murder of his own two nephews, one of them the rightful king of England, brought about his own destruction. Since he lost his throne to the Tudors, it was they who wrote the history of Richard III to assert the claim of their own dynasty, probably exaggerating his pitiless ambition and physical deformities.

Richard was the second son of Richard, 3rd duke of York, and Cecily Neville, daughter of Ralph Neville, 1st earl of Westmorland and granddaughter of John of Gaunt. An ugly child with protruding teeth, he grew up during the War of the Roses, fought between the rival dynastic houses of Lancaster and York. After the triumph of the Yorkists in March 1461, in a struggle that saw his father killed in battle, Richard’s eldest brother became King Edward IV.

From 1465 Richard was raised in the house of his cousin Richard Neville, later known as the Kingmaker, although there is no reason to believe that young Richard set his sights on the throne at this stage. He gave every sign of loyalty to his brother Edward, for which he was duly rewarded, gaining land and positions of influence. After the Lancastrians had briefly reinstated Henry VI as king in 1470, forcing the York brothers into exile in The Hague, Richard joined Edward on his campaign of 1471, in which Henry VI was deposed for a second time.

An able general and skilled administrator, Richard was entrusted with control of the north of England during Edward’s reign, and earned a reputation for fairness and justice. He acquired a string of castles in Yorkshire, Durham and Cumbria during the Yorkist campaigns, but his loyalty—shown for example in a successful campaign that Richard waged on Edward’s behalf against the Scots in 1481—meant that the king tolerated his brother’s growing influence.

In 1478, Richard may have allowed himself to dream of the crown for the first time when George, the middle York brother, was executed for treason, possibly at Richard’s behest, thus removing another potential obstacle to the throne. But it was when Edward IV died unexpectedly on April 9, 1483 that his ambitions were truly laid bare. Next in line to the throne was the twelve-year-old Edward V, followed by his nine-year-old brother, Richard of Shrewsbury, the two sons of the king’s beautiful wife, Elizabeth Woodville. As the lord protector of the late king’s will, Richard swore allegiance to his young nephew, but less than a month later he seized first Edward, then his younger brother, and imprisoned them both in the Tower of London.