Vlad III Dracula’s Army

Vlad III Dracula’s official title was voivode. Some take it to mean “Prince” but in his case the term voivode more accurately means “Warlord”.

Although he was fairly intelligent and highly educated in politic Vlad wasn’t, by feudal standards, a “prince” at all. By European standards he technically wasn’t even considered royalty. His father and brother were both murdered, leaving him absolutely nothing when he returned to his home country. 

No immense family fortune, no crowns, no servants, no castles, and no armories. While he most certainly was a champion and leader it was for one of the poorest and most under-privileged groups in Europe - the Romanians.

He was not like the Hungarians or Ottomans with their immense armies of knights dressed in shining, well-kept armor and fleets of highly skilled assassins riding atop their well-trained warhorses with overflowing artillery carts following close behind their hordes. Vlad was lacking the one essential resource which was fundamental for the making of such armies; AKA ducats. Gold and silver.

While not “poor” by Romanian peasant standards of the time, Vlad simply could not afford to pay the wages or provide the same privileges such as food and housing that other lords of his time could. This makes his achievements even more impressive when you think about the fact that most of his “soldiers” probably fought on his behalf out of sheer loyalty to him and/or his state of Wallachia - and indeed they did.

Vlad Dracula’s armies were actually mostly guerilla armies. Armies made entirely out of his own (ill-fitted) group of peasant men (and sometimes women). This rag-tag group of Romanians would have been sparsely outfitted with whatever shields, daggers, swords, and chainmail that they either had laying around or could makeshift themselves out of local materials.

It is clear to see why Vlad preferred calculated, low risk military strategies such as targeted blows, sneak attacks, and night raids. It was to minimize the lose of soldiers on his side who rode into battle with nothing but a dull saber and the knitted shirts on their backs. It was such a situation in Wallachia that not even every other man would have had a horse but maybe one in every four or five would have had a horse or donkey to their name.

What comparatively little coin Vlad did have was spent - not on wages for hired-assassins - but mostly on bribes, artillery, and gunpowder.

DRAGON OR DEVIL?

And finally there is the matter of that name—Dracula!

Had Bram Stoker not come across a copy of William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, in which he learned of a 15th-century Romanian prince named Dracula who fought the Ottoman Turks, we might today have a forgotten 19th-century novel about a Count Wampyr—the author’s original choice for his main character’s name. Happily for literary posterity, however, Stoker responded positively to the name Dracula: Drakul is Romanian for “dragon,” but it also means “devil,” as in those distinctive Romanian landscape features Gregynia Drakuluj (Devil’s Garden) and Gania Drakuluj (Devil’s Mountain).

That may be all there is to it. Stoker might never have known about Dracula’s other Romanian sobriquet, Vlad Tepes, or “Vlad the Impaler.”

A portrait of Vlad Tepes hangs in Ambras Castle, Austria, alongside one of a man so hirsute he resembles a were-wolf and another of a person who lived with a lance sticking through his head. Vlad won a place in this notorious “Chamber of Curiosities” because he was considered the archetype of the bloodthirsty ruler. This reputation had been fostered by a series of best-selling German pamphlets that depicted him, in one case, dining serenely while severed limbs covered the ground and all around him bodies hung from sharpened stakes.

Over the past several decades, a fierce debate has erupted about whether Stoker knew of Vlad’s bloodthirsty reputation. If so, did he model his Dracula directly on that historical figure? The debate is not merely academic; many, if not most, tourists visiting Romania today equate Count Dracula with Vlad the Impaler. And many, if not most, Romanians object to this misconception, for Vlad is a national hero as the defender of their country. Celebrated in poems and ballads, his statue gazes over Romanian towns, and his visage has appeared on commemorative stamps. Under no circumstances, therefore, should Vlad be associated with the world’s most famous vampire. Some locals, perceiving a business opportunity, shrug their shoulders and opt not to sweat the distinction; others justifiably resent the Vlad-vampire conflation as a myth imposed on them from outside.

No doubt both camps are correct. Whatever sins may be attributed to Vlad, however, vampirism cannot be counted among them. True, Vlad was accused in the old German pamphlets of dipping his bread in the blood of his victims. But it’s unlikely that Bram Stoker knew much about him. The general traits of Stoker’s vampire seem to have been settled when he was still known as Count Wampyr; from Vlad, Stoker borrowed only the more dramatic name—and perhaps the hint of a proud military past. Otherwise, the fictional Count Dracula owes more to the traditional villain of Gothic romance than he does to the historical prince of Wallachia.

That prince—he was actually a voivode, generally translated as “prince” or “duke”—was born in Transylvania in 1431. That was the year when Vlad’s father, in charge of guarding the Carpathian passes against the Ottomans, was summoned to Nuremberg, Germany. There, the Holy Roman Emperor inducted Vlad’s father into the Order of the Dragon, a military fraternity dedicated to defending Christendom against the Muslim Turks. As voivode of Wallachia, he became known as Vlad II Dracul, or “Vlad the Dragon.” When his son eventually succeeded him as voivode, he naturally became Vlad III Dracula — “the Dragon’s Son.”

Part of southern Romania today, Wallachia is a grassy plain bordered on the east and south by the Danube River and on the north and west by the Carpathians. As the gateway to further Ottoman expansion in Europe, it lay fully exposed to the Turkish forces patrolling the river’s south bank. Therefore, Vlad II, despite his oath to the Order of the Dragon, bought a tenuous security by paying annual tribute to the sultan. He also surrendered his two younger sons as hostages for good behavior.

By the time Vlad III Dracula became voivode in 1456, he was nursing two long-standing grievances: His years of captivity had imbued in him a deep hatred for the Turks, and the murder of his father and older brother (the brother had been buried alive) had induced a lasting enmity toward their killers, the Wallachian boyars, or nobles.

This is where the stories of Vlad’s barbarism begin. In 1457, he invited the boyars to Tirgoviste, the Wallachian capital, for an Easter feast. There, Vlad sprang a trap: He impaled those complicit in the murders of his father and brother. The others he marched off to the mountains to build his castle, where he worked them until their clothes fell from their bodies in tatters and they were forced to slave away naked.

Emboldened by his coup, Vlad terrorized the Transylvanians between 1459 and 1460, impaling 10,000 in the city of Sibiu, and 30,000 boyars and merchants in Brasov—allegedly in a single day. In the midst of these killing fields, a table was laid so that boyars who escaped punishment might join Dracula for an alfresco feast. Unfortunately, one of his guests could not stomach the spectacle; the nauseating odors of the rotting corpses, the Impaler noticed, seemed to overcome the man. The sensitive noble was therefore impaled on a stake higher than all the rest, thus permitting him to die above the stench.

Two monks passing through Wallachia were accosted by Dracula, who asked them if his actions might be justified in the eyes of God. The first monk more or less told him what he wanted to hear. The second one, however, condemned his actions as reprehensible. In most German pamphlets depicting this episode, the honest monk is hoisted aloft while the cowardly one is rewarded. In most Russian pamphlets, by contrast, the honest monk is spared.

In another tale of savagery, two ambassadors arrive from a foreign court and decline to remove their hats in the presence of Dracula. Vlad thereupon orders that their hats be nailed to their heads.

There are dozens of such stories, and most of them are clearly exaggerated. This is not to suggest that executions did not take place—death by impalement was a custom in eastern Europe and among the Turks—but the numbers and incidents are almost certainly inflated. A typical impalement seems to have involved hitching a horse to each of a victim’s legs and by those means pulling him slowly onto the point of a horizontal greased stake, driving it through the rectum and running it up through the bowels. The stake with its gory burden was then hoisted into a vertical position. Done correctly—if that is the word for it—the agony of death might be prolonged for hours. Whatever method was employed, impalement was unquestionably labor- and resource-intensive: It demanded time, men, horses, and wood. Vlad’s forces were never very large, and although he had access to abundant timber in the Carpathians, most of Wallachia was steppe.

THE FOREST OF THE SLAIN

Menaced by the Turks to his front and by rebellious nobles to his rear, bled by German merchants in Transylvania monopolizing trade and ignoring his customs duties, Vlad, cruel though he might have been, had a motive for ruthlessness. On the other side, German pamphleteers, informed by refugees that German merchants were being persecuted, had every reason to depict Vlad as a bloodthirsty sadist. In any event, as owners of newly invented printing presses quickly discovered, sensationalism sold.

We are on firmer ground, thanks to Ottoman chronicles, when war between the Wallachians and the Turks resumed between 1461 and 1462. Here, Dracula proved himself an exceptionally able commander, raiding deep into Ottoman territory and waging daring attacks by night. But his forces were greatly outnumbered, and as he retreated deeper and deeper into Wallachia, he engaged in scorched-earth tactics: burning villages, poisoning wells, and sending plague victims in disguise to sow pestilence in the Turkish camps.

The harried Janissaries crumpled beneath their crescent banners. The final straw was apparently the sight of the “Forest of the Impaled”—the rotting corpses of thousands of Turkish prisoners that stood outside the city of Tirgoviste. Sultan Mehmed II, never one to quail easily, was so sickened by the sight of ravens nesting inside the putrid carcasses that he abandoned the campaign and returned to Constantinople.

Savior or psychopath, it seems unjust that Vlad would be arrested soon afterward by the Hungarian king. Preferring a policy of appeasement toward the Ottomans, the king schemed to replace Vlad with his younger, pro-Turkish brother. After that brother died in 1476, Vlad returned to Wallachia and resumed his campaign against the Turks. Forsaken by his allies, however, he was forced to march with fewer than 4,000 men against a far larger Ottoman army. It would be his last fight.

Yet, even Vlad’s death and burial have their legendary elements. Dracula was most likely assassinated by a Turkish agent in the marshes of the Vlasia Forest near Bucharest in the last days of 1476. By all accounts, his severed head was then sent to the sultan. Whatever further indignities may have been inflicted on his body, it was said that monks eventually claimed it and ferried it across the deep waters of a lake to the island monastery of Snagov (reminiscent of the dying King Arthur’s journey to the Isle of Avalon). There, Vlad was buried in the chapel, at the foot of the altar beneath a stone slab polished smooth by generations of piously shuffling feet.

Between 1931 and 1932, Romanian archaeologist Dinu Rosetti removed that slab and found a tomb containing nothing but scattered animal bones and a few bits of ceramic. Then another—and nearly identical—stone slab was discovered near the church doors. After removing it, Rosetti beheld a coffin covered by the remains of a gold-embroidered purple pall. Inside the coffin was a headless skeleton. It was clothed in disintegrating silk brocade, and in place of the missing skull were the remains of a crown, worked in cloisonné and studded with turquoise. There was also a ring such as the sort of token a 15th-century noblewoman might have bestowed upon her favorite knight—and indeed one did bestow such a prize on Vlad II Dracul, the father, on the night of his 1431 investiture in the Order of the Dragon, and he is believed to have passed it on to his son.

Rosetti, understandably, believed he had found Dracula’s remains. Perhaps some abbot, discomfited by the notion of that man so near the altar, had moved the remains from their original crypt? However they got there, they were now transported to the Bucharest History Museum. From there, they disappeared during the chaos of World War II. They have not been seen since.

And the head? Reportedly, it was taken to Constantinople and displayed high atop a stake before the sultan’s palace, where all might behold the Impaler impaled.

The Hungarian Crown 1619

Matthias (24 February 1557 – 20 March 1619) Holy Roman Emperor, King of Germany Reign 13 June 1612 – 20 March 1619

Bethlen Gábor

The Bohemians increasingly looked to Bethlen Gábor to save them. The Transylvanian prince had his eyes set on the Hungarian crown, always a more realistic prospect than the Bohemian one. He wrote to the Bohemians on 18 August 1619, announcing he would soon join them in Moravia. This was a ploy to win their support, which would improve his position in negotiations with the Hungarians who were meeting in Pressburg. A wave of re-conversions among the leading Magyar nobles of the western and north-western counties since 1608 had given the Catholics a majority in the diet again. However, neither they nor the Protestants wanted to be drawn into the Bohemian conflict. Bethlen posed as mediator, winning backing from disaffected Upper Hungarian Protestant magnates, like György Rákóczi and Counts Szaniszló and Imre Thurzó. His envoy persuaded the Ottoman grand vizier, Mehmed Pasha, to sanction war against the Habsburgs and promise Turkish infantry as auxiliaries.


Bethlen’s intervention betrayed the problems that would bedevil all Transylvanian involvement in the war. He was convinced Frederick and the Bohemians were rich and would provide the subsidies he needed to keep his largely irregular cavalry army in the field and pay for the infantry and artillery required to take the Habsburg fortresses. For their part, Frederick and his advisers saw what they wanted: a man who claimed to have read the Bible 26 times had to be a crusader of the righteous against Habsburg Catholic tyranny. Bethlen had already demanded 400,000 talers and all of Inner Austria in June, but decided to start operations before Frederick agreed, since he needed a tangible success to convince the Bohemians and the sultan to back him. He left Cluj (Klausenburg) on 26 August with 35,000 men, while Rákóczi entered Kassa unopposed with 5,000 Upper Hungarians a week later. György Széchy and other Upper Hungarian supporters threatened Pressburg to disrupt the efforts of the loyalist Hungarian palatine, Sigismund Forgách, to organize resistance. The Upper Hungarian mining towns declared for Bethlen, but he delayed his own advance to convene a special assembly of supporters at Kassa who declared him ‘Protector of Hungary’ on 21 September, effectively deposing Forgách. Ferenc Rhédey was sent with over 12,000 horsemen across the Little Carpathians into Moravia, while Bethlen resumed his advance with the rest of his army towards Pressburg, destroying a Habsburg detachment sent to save it.


The situation looked dire for the Habsburgs. Garrisons along the Military Frontier declared for Bethlen, leaving only Komorn, Raab and Neutra loyal. Forgách could muster only 2,500 men in the field, while a mere 2,650 under Archduke Leopold held Vienna with a further 560 in Krems and the other Danube towns. Bucquoy and the main army of 17,770 was away around Tabor and Pisek in south-west Bohemia, with Dampierre and 8,600 along the Moravian frontier. The timing was significant. Ferdinand was still on his way back from his coronation in Frankfurt, while the Bohemians had just declared their Confederation and elected Frederick. Bucquoy was obliged to abandon his advance against Prague, leave 5,000 men to hold his current positions and race with the rest to save Vienna.


Panic again gripped the Lower Austrian population as Bethlen’s light cavalry crossed the Danube at Pressburg and swarmed across the area to the south during late October. Refugees crowded into the city, while the rich fled over the Alps. Bucquoy had joined Dampierre, but decided not to risk the emperor’s only army as it was outnumbered three to two by Hohenlohe, Thurn and Rhédey approaching from Moravia. He retreated across the Danube at Vienna, burning the bridge on 25 October. Though they controlled the entire north bank, the Confederates could not reach the city on the other side, and were obliged to march east to cross downstream at Pressburg. Bethlen used the lull to consolidate his position in Hungary. Having captured Forgách at Pressburg, he forced him to convene a diet on 18 November to start the process of deposing Ferdinand as king. The Confederates finally crossed the river on 21 November, and moved west again on the south side, defeating Bucquoy’s attempt to delay them at Bruck five days later. The Lower Austrian Protestants moved 3,000 men east towards Krems, cutting the Habsburg forces off from the other side.


For a third time within a year, the enemy was at the gates of Ferdinand’s capital. Undaunted, the emperor dodged snow, refugees and Transylvanian marauders to re-enter the city. Leopold had made careful preparations since the last attack, stockpiling enough food to feed the 20,000 soldiers and 75,000 civilians who were now inside the city. The besiegers again appeared without heavy artillery and Bucquoy had torched the surrounding countryside so that it could not now sustain the 42,000 troops ringing Vienna. Heavy rain worsened their plight, especially among the Bohemians who had gone months without pay. The promised Turkish auxiliaries had yet to appear. The mutual disillusionment between Bethlen and his allies added to tensions in the Confederate camp where disease halved their effective strength. The final straw was news on 27 November that Transylvania had been attacked. The siege was abandoned a week later, with all the contingents hurrying home except the Bohemians, who remained in Lower Austria
 

10 Fascinating Facts About The Real Dracula

10 Fascinating Facts About The Real Dracula - Listverse

Creepy Bram Stoker's version of Dracula is one of the most timeless monsters in literature, and one of the first examples of a "classic vampire"-elegant, brooding, and with a thirst for human blood.

DRACULA BETWEEN FICTION AND HISTORY.

By Dinu Matei, Calgary, Canada.


First published in "Calgary Philatelist", issue #34, February 1999, pp.3-6.



Vlad Tepes, pronounced 'tzepesh', or Vlad the Impaler, ruled the Principality of Wallachia (part of Romania) in 1448, 1456-1462, and 1476. Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, published in 1887, made this Romanian prince famous worldwide and attributed to him an exaggerated cruelty. In Dracula, Vlad Tepes was portrayed differently from the real Vlad of history.


Vlad Tepes was born in 1428 in Sighisoara, Transylvania. His father is known in history under the name Vlad Dracul. In Romanian, 'drac' means evil. However, there are no documents reporting how evil he was. The nickname 'Dracul' came from hid membership in the Order of the Dragon. This was a military and religious brotherhood founded by the Sigismund of Luxembourg (King of Hungary) with the objective to protect the church against heresy and the Turks. In German the order is named Drachenorders, while in Latin Societates draconistarum. Members of this order wore a black cape and a medallion depicting a dragon. In the Middle Ages it was easy for ordinary people, extremely religious, to mistake the dragon with the evil, so from this confusion came the name Dracul. Vlad Tepes inherited this name from his father, and his descendants bear it as a family name. Real descendants of this family still exist today. The nickname 'the Impaler' came from the fact that Vlad Tepes used to impale his enemies. Reputed to be an evil and bloodthirsty man, he was just one of several more-or-less fierce leaders in a time when cruelty was the norm.


Romanian principalities Wallachia and Moldova shared a border with the Ottoman Empire in the Middle Ages. This empire was one of the most powerful in the world and was trying to expand towards Europe. In order to gain trust from the Sultans, many children from the noble Romanian families were sent voluntarily to Istanbul as hostages. Vlad and one of his brothers were no exceptions. Vlad Tepes returned to Wallachia after his father was killed and another brother was blinded with a burning stake and buried alive. These two facts are said to be the origin of Vlad Tepes' cruelty. As mentioned earlier, torture and cruelty was normal in the whole Europe during the Middle Ages.


Other cruelties attributed to Vlad Tepes were killing 'unchaste' women and 'bad' wives, killing entire families suspected of disloyalty, killing poor, blind, crippled, sick, vagabonds, and beggars, nailing hats to heads of disrespectful visitors, and cannibalism. This came from an intense propaganda campaign launched by Matei Corvin (King of Hungary at that time and one of his big enemies) due to envy of Vlad's successes against the Turks, and by German merchants from the city of Brasov (Kronstadt in German) who were opponents to Vlad Tepes' economic politics. Turk and Russian traditions also depict Vlad Tepes as a cruel and bloodthirsty man.


During Vlad Tepes' time, Wallachia was a crime-free country. The Turks wanted to invade the country but were defeated several times and kept at the south of the Danube River (in Bulgaria nowadays). For his successful military campaigns against the Turks, Vlad Tepes was named "magnifico Vlad voivoda" in an Italian document. He was not considered a vampire during this time, but a hero and strong ruler of his country. He is first mentioned as an extremely cruel man in a book published at Lübeck, Germany, in 1471.


Bram Stoker never visited Romania. He was inspired by the evil deeds of Countess Elizabeth Bathory who lived in Transylvania about 150 years later than Vlad Tepes. She used to kill young girls and used their fresh blood to take baths, hoping this would help her to remain forever young. For these crimes she was sentenced to death and walled alive into a castle room in 1610. For similar accusations a French nobleman was beheaded in France during the same period.


Vlad Tepes' tumultuous life as well as the harshness of his punishments tempted many writers. A fashion of Dracula the Vampire Count was born with great success, and many books and more than 100 movies were done on the subject. We can assume that Count Dracula was created thanks to the inspiration provided by Transylvanian history, where old castles such as the one attributed to Dracula set the mood for bloody ghosts and terrifying vampires. Bram Stoker possibly chose the name Dracula because it suggested the macabre. He needed a male hero for his novel, published at a time when the crimes committed by Jack the Ripper in London were on the front pages of British newspapers. The novel Dracula has very few historical truths in it. Bram Stoker himself knew very little about the real Vlad Tepes. The action of the book takes place in Transylvania, but he never ruled that province, just Wallachia. The title of Count did not exist for Romanian noblemen during the Middle Ages; Vlad Tepes was in fact a Royal Prince. However, Bram Stoker's description of the Romanian localities and many geographical places are real.


Located on a cliff in the Carpathians, 'Dracula's Castle' is actually named Bran Castle, after a pass between Transylvania and Wallachia. It was built by the German merchants from Brasov in 1377 to keep under control the inland and outland commercial traffic. Restored several times, in this century the castle was the residence of Queen Maria of Romania in the 1920s, and is now converted into a museum.


Vlad Tepes was depicted on Romanian stamps on several occasions. First was in 1959 when Bucharest, the capital of Romania, celebrated 500 years since it was for the first time mentioned in a document, signed by Vlad Tepes himself. This document is kept in the National History Museum of Romania, in Bucharest. It, along with the portrait of Vlad, is depicted on a beautiful engraved miniature sheet issued by the Romanian Postal Administration. This portrait is the only known portrait of Vlad and is kept in an Austrian monastery in the Tirol. Based on the same painting, Vlad Tepes' figure appeared on a stamp issued by Romania in 1976, when 500 years since his death were commemorated. Two more stamps were issued in Romania in 1997, one depicting him as a Prince of Wallachia and another depicting him as Dracula. Bran Castle and Poenari Castle (one of the real residences of Vlad, now in ruins) are depicted on two labels that separate the stamps. Bran Castle was depicted also on a stamp issued in 1929, while images from Vlad Tepes' home town appear on a set issued in 1997. Several special postmarks, postal stationery, and postcards depicting him and/or Bran Castle were issued over the years. Matei Corvin, King of Hungary, who kept Vlad Tepes imprisoned for ten years and who finally executed him, is pictured on several stamps issued in Hungary. Vlad Tepes in buried at the Snagov Monastery, near Bucharest.