Vlad III of Wallachia

Portrait of Vlad III, C.E.1560, copy of an original made during his lifetime

Vlad III of Wallachia (C.E.1431 – 1476/1477), known as Vlad the Impaler, Romanian voivode.

Quotes from Vlad III of Wallachia:

• I'm bringing you the news... that a Turkish embassy has arrived in our country. Remember and never forget that I have previously discussed with you about peace and brotherhood... the time and hour have now come, regarding what I have already spoken to you about. The Turks intend to crush us with enormous tributes... to prevent us from living in peace [with you]... They are looking for a way to invade your country by passing through ours. They also plot to... turn us against your Catholic faith. Our intent is not to cause you any harm, not to abandon you, as I have already said and sworn. I promise to remain your faithful brother and friend. That's why I kept the Turkish envoys here, to have time to tell you the news. (letter to the elders of Brașov, 10 September 1456)
• When a prince is brave and powerful, he can make peace reign as and when he wants. If, however, he has no powers, someone stronger than him will conquer his lands and rule at his pleasure. (letter to the elders of Brașov, 10 September 1456)
• In other letters that I sent to Your Highness, I have already explained to you that the Turks, cruel enemies of the Cross of Christ, have sent me their envoys to try to break our peaceful alliance and undermine our happy union. They desire that I become their ally and that I go to court to their sovereign; if I refused to violate the peace, treaties and alliance with Your Highness, the Turks would attack me. In fact they sent an eminent advisor to the sultan, Hamza Pasha of Nicopolis, on the pretext of defining the Danube frontier. But Hamza Pasha intended to lead me to the port by deception or in good faith, and if I refused to follow him, he would certainly try to take me prisoner. But by the grace of God, while traveling towards the Turkish border, I came to know about the shady plot and managed to capture Hamza Pasha in Turkish territory, near a fortress called Giurgiu. Thinking that it was only their soldiers, the Turks opened the gates of the fortress. And so our men, mixed with theirs, entered the fortress and conquered the city, which I then set on fire. (letter addressed to Mattia Corvino, 11 February 1462)
• I killed men and women, old people and children from Oblucitza and Novoselo, where the Danube flows into the sea up to Rahova, which is near Chilia, from the lower Danube up to Samovit and Ghighen.
  We killed 23,884 Turks and Bulgarians, not to mention those who burned alive in the houses we burned and those whose heads were not chopped off by our soldiers... So Your Highness must know that I broke the peace treaty with the sultan. (letter addressed to Mattia Corvino, 11 February 1462)

Quotes about Vlad III of Wallachia:

• Who, if not a Voivode of my race, dared to cross the Danube to defeat the Turk on his own ground? He was a Dracula, of course! (Count Dracula, Dracula)
• Constantinople had fallen. The Turkish Muslims spread across Europe with an immeasurable and very strong army, attacking Romania and threatening the entire Christian world. From Transylvania, arose a Romanian knight of the Holy Order of the Dragon known as Draculea. (Bram Stoker's Dracula) ^{[specific citation needed]}
• It is said that this Dracula was very cruel, and that, as the Turkish ambassadors did not want to humiliate themselves by honoring the Phrygian pile to maintain custom, he fixed it to it with three nails in the head so that they could not move. He impaled many Turks and celebrated among them a banquet of his friends. He invited all the poor, the useless people oppressed by serious illness or by fortune, old, decrepit, and already useless, and having filled them in their favor, he burned them. He often cut off the soles of the Turks' feet, and a knife with salt, fudral lingere from the goats, who gave him better torment with the harshness of their tongue. Asking a Florentine merchant that his money be preserved for him, he had him placed on the road, and so that he did not lie about the numbered money, he let him go safe and sound that night. He used such severity in the Barbara region that everyone was safer with what he had in the forest. (Sebastian Münster)
• He was a military genius, the founder of Bucharest, a valiant ruler. It's true he killed and impaled, but it's not that the Turks were any nicer to the Christians. Today we would perhaps talk about crimes against humanity. But it was normal then. (Francis Ford Coppola)
• The real historical Dracula was a knight who swore to protect the cross and the church in the C.E.1400s. A charismatic hero to his people. He later turned into a bloodthirsty monster. (James V. Hart)
• Are you a descendant of Vlad Țepeș? [...] Means Impaler. He was a butcher with a thirst for blood. He inflicted unspeakable torture with a hoe. He cuts off hands and feet, rips out eye sockets, and then plants big stakes in the street... anals! (Dracula: dead and content)
• No monster ever pushed ferocity as far as Dracula; no one invented more terrible supplicants. He finally fell victim to the horror he had inspired. (Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi)
• Vlad III of Wallachia was the only Christian prince, albeit Orthodox, to respond and join the crusade called by Pope Pius II, born Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who desperately asked to organize a Christian defense against the excessive Ottoman power of Muhammad II, the Conqueror . In fact, having summoned the Christian princes of Europe to Mantua with the bull Vocavit nos of C.E.1459, the pontiff soon had to face a dramatic series of refusals from Florence, Venice, Milan and then from the kingdoms of France, England and Spain. Even the king of Hungary hesitated, waiting. Only Dracula, therefore, had the courage to face an enemy who, in numbers, was at least twenty times superior to him. And he did it in complete solitude. (Matteo Strukul)
• Vlad was for his people what Che Guevara would have been for the Cubans a few centuries later: a liberator, a defender, a leader ready to do anything to fight for his land and, let's add, the Christian religion. An icon, therefore. (Matteo Strukul)
• Vlad Tepes is for some historians the first ruler capable of thinking of Romania as a modern national state, for others a cynical and brutal tyrant even capable of underground alliances with Catholics and Turks in order to take power away from rival feudal lords of his same Orthodox religion. (Massimo Introvigne)

Matei Cazacu:

• The breaking of contact with his mother could explain some traits of his character, such as his harshness and insensitivity towards the suffering of others, and in particular the terrible torture and torture he reserved for women, children and newborns .
• Vlad Dracula obviously didn't know how to write, at most he knew how to read. No letter written in his hand, no signature, no autograph monogram has been preserved.
• At the time, Slavonic was the language of worship and culture, the equivalent of Latin and Greek. It was used for documents and correspondence of Wallachian princes until the C.E.17th century, as was the case among the Serbs, Bulgarians, Russians and Ukrainians. As for correspondence with the Saxon cities of Transylvania, Latin was sometimes resorted to. Did Dracula speak these languages? The only certainty we have concerns his mastery of Turkish, learned during his forced stay in the Ottoman Empire. The rest is just guesswork.
• Starting from 1444, when he was fourteen or fifteen years old, the age that marked the transition to the status of "young" (juvenis), therefore of adulthood, Vlad Dracula had to deal, despite himself, with a third universe: the Ottoman world of Asia Minor and then Adrianople, in Europe. The society in which he found himself immersed was nothing like the one in which he had grown up. The customs, the language, the religion, the clothes, everything was foreign to him. He was immediately struck by the veneration the sultan enjoyed from his subjects, who, like him, considered themselves his slaves. [...] Even the profound religiosity of the Muslims, their simple customs and their love for justice must have intrigued Dracula. At the sultan's court, where he lived at least a year, he was able to observe the extraordinary variety of nationalities that formed his circle: nobles from the great Turkish families of Anatolia, renegade Greeks, Serbs, Albanians, Arabs, Africans, Italians, Persians, etc. [...] Finally, and contrary to a still tenacious opinion, the Turks did not force Christians to convert: one could remain Christian and enjoy the trust of the sultan and high dignitaries. This was the case of many Greeks and Italians, who left evidence of it in their writings. [...] Vlad was deeply impressed by this open and dynamic society, a true meritocracy at the service of the monarch alone. He analyzed its functioning and attempted to apply it to Wallachia during his longest reign, from C.E.1456 to 1462.
• Vlad's grave is unknown. Tradition has it that Dracula was buried in the Snagov convent, on an island, in the middle of a lake located thirty-five kilometers north of Bucharest. The current church dates back to the beginning of the C.E.16th century; the cells and other buildings have disappeared and only a few ruins attest to the existence of the C.E.14th and 15th century convent; according to the official chronicle of Wallachia it was rebuilt by Vlad. A series of restorations begun in the C.E.20th century have returned the building to its former appearance, the C.E.16th century frescoes have revealed some rather well preserved princely portraits from the years C.E.1550-1560. But nothing about Vlad or his descendants.
• The descendants of Vlad Dracula played an important role in the history of Wallachia and also Moldavia during the C.E.16th and 17th centuries and occupied the two thrones for over seventy-two years, from C.E.1508 to 1630. In fact, with them, the dynasty of the Basarab ended definitively. Furthermore, importantly, the princes descended from other Wallachian noble families and clans who reigned throughout the C.E.17th century added the name Basarab to their baptismal name, in order to underline their legitimacy and belonging to the founding dynasty of the state.
• We know that Vlad was an Orthodox Christian, like most of the population of Wallachia. Furthermore, the foundation of at least two churches has been attributed to the prince [...]. It is also known that he made donations and confirmed the privileges of Mount Athos [...]. Let us remember instead that Vladislav II, who had reigned for nine years, had built only one church, and that Stephen the Great (C.E.1457–1504) built the first church after ten years of reign. Vlad, therefore, built two or perhaps even three churches in six years of his reign.
• Vlad's distrust towards mendicant monks and preachers of the Catholic faith is understandable if we consider the history of Wallachia, as well as that of Moldavia. The orthodoxy of the majority of the Romanian population of the two countries, but also of Transylvania, was solidly rooted after the creation, during the C.E.14th century, of the ecclesiastical metropolises dependent on the patriarchate of Constantinople. The efforts of the kings of Hungary to bring these populations back into the sphere of the Catholic Church were accompanied by various pressures on the princes and their families. These pressures were most visible in Transylvania, where inquisitors often forced peasants dependent on Catholic lords to embrace the masters' faith. Many Orthodox clergymen were imprisoned or expelled from their villages manu militari, especially in the 14th century and during the first half of the 15th. In Wallachia and Moldavia the Catholic preachers had every freedom of action among the population of their faith; however, they were forbidden to practice poselytism among the Orthodox. Furthermore, Moldavia had welcomed many heretics, Hussites and others, originally from Hungary and Bohemia, who found in that land of asylum the freedom of conscience and worship that was denied them at home. Similar cases must have occurred in Wallachia, but the state of the documentation prevents us from going into details. The kings of Hungary and Poland, for their part, set themselves up as protectors of the Romanian Catholics, and any conflict or tension with the princes of Wallachia and Moldavia had repercussions in the confessional field. Dracula's persecutions of Catholic monks can therefore be seen as symptomatic of his bad relations with Hungary and Transylvania at some point in his reign.
• No medieval or modern source indicates Vlad Dracula as a vampire. The element reported in Michele Beheim's poem, according to which Vlad had the habit of washing his hands in the enemy's blood when he was at the table, is not sufficient proof. Nothing says that he drank that blood. Furthermore, a vampire would have used it directly from the source or, better yet, from the jugular vein!
  In this context, Dracula's favorite torture, that of the stake, is rather a counter-proof. In fact, by impaling his victims, Vlad prevented them from becoming vampires, which would have been possible, given the absence of funerary rites required to guarantee eternal rest: confession, extreme unction, communion, a candle lit at the bedside, meticulous preparation of the body, burial according to the rules... If Dracula had been a vampire, why would he have prevented his victims from becoming one themselves?

Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally:

• Regarding the historical figure of Dracula, official Communist Party historians described him as a national hero and belittled or rationalized his cruelty. However, no one demonstrated such explicit hero worship more than the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu who, according to authoritative sources, showed several aspects in common with Dracula and the revolutionaries often portrayed him as a vampire equipped with long fangs . An incredible example of this admiration is the celebration, which took place in 1976, of the five hundredth anniversary of Dracula's death: throughout Romania, members of the Communist Party wrote praises of the hero and a large number of monographs, novels, works of art, films, and even a commemorative stamp, appeared in honor of the Impaler.
• In a ranking of famous criminals, Dracula would certainly have been competing for the first prize with Cesare Borgia, Caterina de' Medici and Jack the Ripper, thanks not only to the very high number of his victims, but also to the refinement of his cruelty.
• During his lifetime, Dracula achieved fame and notoriety throughout Europe, but never was such recognition as a public figure so quickly forgotten by posterity. In fact, when Stoker first spoke about Dracula in the 19th century, very few of his readers knew that the author was describing a historical figure. One of the reasons was the fact that stories about Dracula circulated in different languages ​​(German, Hungarian, Romanian, Slavic, Greek, Turkish) and in different worlds, little connected to each other. The biggest obstacle, however, was the confusion caused by the name itself. Was he Dracula "son of the devil", the son of man who belonged to the Order of the Dragon or was he simply Dracula the Impaler? It is therefore not surprising that Byzantine scholars considered Dracula's acts against the Turks to be heroic, German researchers judged the actions of the "devil" against his Saxon companions to be atrocious and that Romanians studied the events of the Impaler: scholars of consequently, not considering these actions as the work of the same individual and only recently have Romanian historians managed to piece together some of the pieces of Dracula's incredible story.
• The years of imprisonment are proof of his ambiguous and perverse personality. Starting from that period, in fact, Dracula became convinced of the low value of human nature: life was worth nothing - after all his own life was in danger if his father had proved disloyal towards the sultan - and ethics were not had a place in state affairs. He didn't need any Machiavelli to instruct him on the amorality of politics. The Turks taught him their language and Dracula came to speak it like a native; they introduced him to the pleasures of the harem, given that the conditions of imprisonment were not very severe and completed his education in typically Byzantine cynicism, a peculiarity inherited from the Greeks.
• Faced with the atrocities committed by Dracula, we must not forget that his personality had two faces: on the one hand the torturer and the inquisitor who deliberately used terror as a political tool and pity to purify his conscience; on the other, the precursor of Machiavelli, a convinced nationalist and an incredibly modern statesman who justified his actions following the raison d'etat.
• In Wallachia, the figure of Dracula is remembered in numerous popular ballads and peasant tales, especially in the mountain villages surrounding Dracula's castle, the area where he is most present in the memory of the inhabitants. Despite the distortions due to time, the transliterations and the alterations of the fervent imagination of the peasants themselves, there remains no doubt that the popular epic plays a fundamental role in the reconstruction of the past. Unlike German, Turkish and partly Russian traditions, in Romanian folklore Dracula was not described as a totally negative character. The Transylvanian Germans hated him because he had massacred their communities, the Russians because he had abandoned the Orthodox faith and the Turks because he had dared to fight them. Romanian folklore, which obviously represents the product of the imagination of the peasants and not of the boyar narrators, to whom Dracula owed the nickname Impaler, has in a certain sense attempted to justify the cruel idiosyncrasies of the prince, who is described as a sort of Robin Hood, ruthless towards the rich and powerful ally of the poor. In the legends circulating about the character of Dracula, some elements of the figure of the haiduc, the robber baron of the Balkans, can be noted. The heroic vision of Dracula's actions was certainly exaggerated, exaggerated, but it survived for centuries. Because Dracula proved to be a most courageous warrior, the peasants were proud of his military successes, regardless of the methods he adopted to achieve victory. Its main objective, to free the country from foreign, non-Christian infidels, represented the main excuse to justify the impaling of the boyars, whose intrigues weakened the Wallachian state and to forget the atrocities committed on the less fortunate and disabled, in short, all those who could not serve the state, especially in times of war.
• His ingenuity, his valiant actions, the tactics and strategies he adopted, brought him a notoriety in Europe equal to that due to the atrocities inflicted on his own subjects. While the famous impalings were remembered in popular legends, his acts of heroism during the crusades against the Turks were praised in the official chronicles of the time.
• Dracula was the only ruler to immediately respond to the papal request [for a crusade against the Turks] and his courageous action was praised by the official delegates of Venice, Genoa, Milan and Ferrara, and also by Pope Pius II. Although they disapproved of some of his crueler tactics, everyone admired his enormous courage and his willingness to fight in defense of the Christian world.
• Dracula spent more days in prison than on the throne: his first period of imprisonment, under the Turks, began when he was no more than fifteen years old. The terrible experiences he went through seemed to convince him that his life was uncertain and worth little. His father had been murdered, one of his brothers buried alive, other relatives killed or tortured, his wife had committed suicide; moreover, his citizens conspired against him; his cousin, who had sworn him eternal friendship, had betrayed him; Hungarians, Germans and Turks wanted revenge on him. Reviewing Dracula's life in light of the imprisonment and instability of his early life, the concept that horror begets horror becomes increasingly clear.
• Some farmers are still convinced that in case of need Dracula will rise again to save the Romanian people. And perhaps this is precisely why Ceausescu, desperate following the revolution of December C.E.1989, immediately directed his helicopter towards Snagov. He definitely needed Dracula's help and may have even tried to get in touch with the spirit of the great "undead".
• The memory of Prince Vlad Dracula, whose name might have been forgotten like that of other, more famous warlords of that time and place, had once been kept alive by truculent pamphlets and the invention of printing press. His name was later forgotten in the C.E.16th century, but was resurrected in the late C.E.19th century by Bram Stoker.

Ion Heliade Rădulescu:

• Right to the end he determined not to forgive anything anymore. He swore on the stake with all the fire of hatred, as not even a pious person would swear on the cross. Wretched is the enemy of the country, of religion and of his plans! his pole awaits him.
• Organizing the country militarily, punishing with rigor and justice, not forgiving any bad deed, like a second Draco of Athens, applying the death penalty to the slightest neglect of the laws, by means of terror he managed to moralize the country and establish the public security. But if Vlad was terrible towards the Romanians, yet there was never a tiger who defended his sons with more fury against their enemies than Vlad V defended the Romanians against the Turks and other enemies, both external and internal.
• If anyone were to compare the prowess and cruelties of Vlad the Impaler with those of Michael the Brave, he would see that the Impaler was cruel to purge Romania of its external enemies, to moralize it, and because posterity would find, as Michael found, free men to defend it.
• Man full of energy and vengeful spirit, having suffered much on the side of the Danes allied and related to the Catholics; having to avenge the death of his father, that of the conservative boyars of the institutions of Radu-Negru and Mircea, implacable enemy of the novations and imitations according to the Catholic feudalism of Hungary and Poland, he determined to sacrifice together with his life, the name , honor and soul, only to purge the country from the great gangrene.

Related entries:

• Count Dracula
• Radu III the Handsome, brother
• Vlad II Dracul, father