Deception by Decree
Vlad Dracul's various games of pretense in dealing with Hungary and the Turks reached a breaking point in 1445 when his son, Mircea II, attacked the Ottoman-held fortified city of Giurgiu on the strategically located banks of the Danube River in southern Wallachia. In Dracul's imprudent concept of diplomacy, he could use the assault to indulge the Holy Roman Empire while simultaneously claiming to the Turks that Mircea had essentially gone rogue and was out of his control.
The duplicity backfired, and Dracul was quickly compelled to return Giugiu to Ottoman control and reaffirm his treaties with the Turks to avoid an all-out confrontation. The outcome proved to be a diplomatic success with the Ottoman Empire and a tactical disaster with Hungary.
The Fall of Dracul
Janos Hunyadi, the sworn enemy of the Ottoman Turks, was elected as regent of Hungary in 1446, giving him full authority to conduct military campaigns at will. This was a troubled time for the Hungarian Empire, with the Ottoman Turks looming from the south and east, German threats from the west, and political enmity within the nobility of Hungary. Despite this turmoil, Hunyadi launched a punitive assault on Wallachia in 1447, defeating the forces of Vlad Dracul and Mircea II and driving Dracul into hiding.
In Romanian history, it's said that Mircea was captured by members of the Wallachian nobility, or boyars, near the capital of Targoviste (sometimes spelled Tirgoviste) who'd fostered pro-Hungarian sentiments and tired of Dracul's regime of flip-flopping his loyalties with the Turks and the Christian world. The boyars blinded Mircea with the tip of a red hot poker and buried him alive.
Vlad Dracul himself was hunted down and killed near the Romanian city of Balteni, leaving the throne open to another of Janos Hunyadi's personal choices as regent of Wallachia — Vladislav II — who was considered unrelentingly loyal to the authority of Hungary.
In 1448, Janos Hunyadi's armies, with the aid of Vladislav II, launched an attack against the Turkish stranglehold on the strategically vital Danube River near Kosovo. The ensuing battle was a disaster for the Christian armies and resulted in the flight of both Vladislav and Hunyadi. En route home, Hunyadi was taken prisoner by Serbian ruler George Brankovic, who had no love for Hunyadi's authority and whose Hungarian principality of Serbia had been estranged from Hungarian rule. Hunyadi was forced to barter for his release by arranging marriage between his son, Matthias Corvinus, and Brankovic's daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Cilli, in a matchup of purely political purposes.
Moldavian Exile
Janos Hunyadi's imprisonment and Vladislav's military trouncing presented Vlad Dracula with the opportunity to finally own what he felt was his birthright — the crown of Wallachia. With the aid of the Ottoman Turks, Vlad Dracula assumed the throne. His exceptionally short-lived reign lasted just one month.
Backed by neighboring feudal warlords, Vladislav took back Wallachia and drove the frustrated Dracula once again into the relative safety of the Turks. From there, and later with his uncle Bogdan in Moldavia, Dracula plotted his return to power for eight years.
During this time, a most surprising relationship developed between Dracula and the mastermind of his father's overthrow and death; Janos Hunyadi himself. When Bogdan was assassinated by a rival in 1451, Dracula was forced to flee once again — this time to Hungary and into the hands of Hunyadi.
The term boyar describes the landholding gentry of eastern Europe, who were considered nobility by birthright and were the ruling class of most countries and principalities. By custom, the boyars normally elected their own monarchs with selections from specific ruling families, or houses. Boyars ruled their own land with relative autonomy but were expected to show loyalty to their rulers and set aside common disputes and power struggles in defense of the kingdom.
The Doorway to Power
The unlikely combination of Vlad Dracula's guile and Hunyadi's political savvy soon proved advantageous to both men. After years of captivity, training, and failed indoctrination with the Turks, Dracula knew the mind-set and inner workings of the Ottoman-Turkish Empire, which made him an invaluable resource to Hunyadi. No doubt, Dracula's hatred of Turks was instrumental in the arrangement, and Dracula became one of Hunyadi's most trusted advisors.
Much to Dracula's benefit, tensions began developing between Hunyadi and Wallachia's Vladislav II. New threats from the Ottoman Turks forced Hunyadi to the defense of the city known today as Belgrade in Serbia, and Dracula was entrusted with his own troops to protect the borders of Wallachia.
The battle for Belgrade in early 1456 was a convincing victory for Hunyadi and his forces, but just three weeks after the Turks relinquished their ground and retired from the war, Hunyadi's own life was taken, not by battle, but by plague. With the flight of the Turks and Hungarian power in flux after Hunyadi's passing, the doorway to Wallachia was now wide open for Vlad Dracula.
Impalement was a hideous form of torture and execution, and it became Vlad Dracula's hallmark death sentence. A sharpened stake was forced through a victim's body, often with the use of ropes and horses, and then mounted into the earth vertically with the body dangling from above. Although the shock of such horrific abuse was enough to kill almost instantly, Dracula's minions took great care to perfect the “art” of impaling in order to prolong the agony as long as possible — sometimes for days.
Sticking It to the Masses
Dracula invaded Wallachia the same year Hunyadi died and subsequently overran the defenses of Vladislav's forces. It's said that Dracula himself dispatched Vladislav in hand-to-hand combat and took his head to ensure a permanent ending to Vladislav's reign. Dracula's primary objective for gaining absolute control of the throne was to undermine the power of the boyars, for whom he had little use and who'd been so instrumental in the deaths of his father and brother.
During the Easter festival in 1457, Dracula called the boyars of Targoviste to assemble for a grand feast. Dracula questioned each of the noblemen, asking how many princes of Wallachia they had known during their lives. According to the German minstrel, Michel Beheim, who wrote the poem Story of a Bloodthirsty Madman Called Dracula of Wallachia, the oldest boyars thought there had been at least 30 princes, some thought 20, and the youngest responded with seven. Dracula's response to their answers was decisive:
“How do you explain the fact that you have had so many princes in your land? The guilt is entirely due to your shameful intrigues.”
Legend has it that Dracula then seized 500 of the boyars and had them impaled. Although the number is undoubtedly exaggerated, there's little doubt that the oldest were executed in sufficient numbers to gain Dracula's reputation and the permanent appellation, Vlad Tepes, which translates into English as the unmistakable “Vlad the Impaler.”
In an interesting twist of historical character use in cinema, the name of Hungary's Matthias Corvinus was partially appropriated for the vampire films Underworld and Underworld: Evolution, in which the male protagonist, Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman), was imbued with a genetic immunity to an undisclosed plague. Corvin's fifth-century ancestor, Alexander Corvinus (Derek Jacobi), developed the immunity after his village was wiped out and was described as a Hungarian warlord who was effectively the first true immortal.
Vlad Dracula replaced the boyars he disposed of with personal choices from the lower classes in a clever and efficient effort to ensure loyalty. For these recently endowed boyars, any attempt to replace their new monarch with another ruler would undoubtedly mean that their questionably gained powers would be stripped away by the established nobility.
Dracula's intense suspicion of the boyars of Wallachia was well-founded, and he used every means at his disposal to keep the pack at bay. He altered the makeup of his royal court to eliminate the older and more hostile boyars and replaced them with boyars of his own choosing. The established boyars were also economically tied to merchants of German origin in Transylvania. Dracula dealt a financial blow to the aristocracy by establishing trade sanctions against the merchants and regularly raided key trade communities.
Maintaining law and order in Wallachia became a prime focus of his regime, and virtually every sentence for any crime — no matter how large or small — was death by impalement. Dracula showed no mercy for miscreants.
One of the most famous legends about his intolerance illustrates his no-nonsense position. It's said that Dracula placed an ornate golden cup in the shallows of a stream near Targoviste from which passersby could freely quench their thirst. For the length of his rule the cup remained in use, but never stolen, for no one dared incur the inevitable wrath that would follow.
