Dracula's Reign
With the help of his Turkish army, Dracula seized the Walachian
throne. However, he only ruled for two months before Hunyadi forced
him into exile in Moldavia. Again Vladislav II became Walachia's
prince.
Three years later Prince Bogdan of Moldavia was assassinated and
Dracula fled the country. By now Vladislav II had become a
supporter of Turkey, and Hunyadi was sorry he had put him on the
throne. Everyone switched sides - Dracula became Hunyadi's vassal,
and Hunyadi now supported Dracula's attempt to regain his throne.
In 1456 Hunyadi invaded Turkish Serbia while Dracula invaded
Walachia. Hunyadi was killed, but Dracula killed Vladislav II and
took back his throne.
He established his capital at Tirgoviste - you can still see the
ruins of his palace there. And nearby a statue of Vlad Tepes still
stands. He is considered an important figure in Romanian history
because he unified Walachia and resisted the influence of
foreigners.
But it's Dracula's cruelty that most non-Romanians remember. After
becoming prince, Dracula supposedly invited many beggars and other
old, sick and poor people to a banquet at his castle. When his
guests had finished eating their meal and drinking a toast to him,
Dracula asked them, "Would you like to be without cares, lacking
nothing in this world?"
Yes, they said enthusiastically.
So Dracula had the castle boarded up and set it on fire. Nobody
made it out alive - and that was the end of their problems, as he
had promised. "I did this so that no one will be poor in my realm,"
he said.
According to another story, he invited 500 boyars to a banquet and
asked them how many princes had ruled in their lifetimes. They said
they had lived through many reigns. Shouting that this was their
fault because of their plotting, Dracula had them all arrested on
the spot. The older ones were impaled; the others were marched 50
miles to Poenari where they were forced to build a mountaintop
fortress. They worked a long time; when their clothes fell off,
they worked naked. Most of them died, of course. And of course
Dracula seized the boyars' property and passed it out to his
supporters. In that way he created a new nobility, loyal to
him.
(The ruins of the Poenari fortress can still be seen. You have to
climb nearly 1,500 steps and cross a little bridge to reach it.
It's now called Castle Dracula, but several places are called that.
Another "Castle Dracula" is Bran Castle, near the town of Brasov.
Although Dracula may have stayed there occasionally, it certainly
wasn't his home.)
Dracula liked to set up a banquet table and dine while he watched
people die. His favorite form of execution was impalement. It was
slow; people could take days to die. He liked to impale many people
at once, arranging the stakes in fancy designs. Nothing was too
brutal for Dracula - he enjoyed having people skinned, boiled
alive, etc. He prided himself on making the punishment (supposedly)
fit the crime.
By 1462, when he was deposed, he had killed between 40,000 and
100,000 people, possibly more. He always thought up some excuse for
these executions. He killed merchants who cheated their customers.
He killed women who had affairs. Supposedly he had one woman
impaled because her husband's shirt was too short. He didn't mind
impaling children, either. Afterwards he would display the corpses
in public so everyone would learn a lesson. It's said that there
were over 20,000 bodies hanging outside his capital city. Of
course, the stories about Dracula's cruelty might have been
exaggerated by his enemies.
Despite all this, Dracula's subjects respected him for fighting the
Turks and being a strong ruler. He's remembered today as a
patriotic hero who stood up to Turkey and Hungary. He was the last
Walachian prince to remain independent from the Ottoman Empire. He
was so scornful of other nations that when two foreign ambassadors
refused to doff their hats to him, he had the hats nailed to their
heads. He was opposed to the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches
because he thought foreigners, operating through the churches, had
too much power in Walachia. He tried to prevent foreign merchants
from taking business away from his citizens. If merchants disobeyed
his trade laws, they were, of course, impaled.
Dracula created a very severe moral code for the citizens of
Walachia. You can guess what happened to anyone who broke the code.
Thieves were impaled, even liars were impaled. Naturally there
wasn't a lot of crime in Walachia during his reign.
To prove how well his laws worked, Dracula had a gold cup placed in
a public square. Anyone who wanted to could drink from the cup, but
no one was allowed to take it out of the square. No one did.
A visiting merchant once left his money outside all night, thinking
that it would be safe because of Dracula's strict policies. To his
surprise, some of his coins were stolen. He complained to Dracula,
who promptly issued a proclamation that the money must be returned
or the city would be destroyed. That night Dracula secretly had the
missing money, plus one extra coin, returned to the merchant. The
next morning the merchant counted the money and found it had been
returned. He told Dracula about this, and mentioned the extra coin.
Dracula replied that the thief had been caught and would be
impaled. And if the merchant hadn't mentioned the extra coin, he
would have been impaled, too.
Dracula Overthrown
In 1462 Dracula attacked the Turks to drive them out of the Danube
River valley. Sultan Mehmed II retaliated by invading Walachia with
an army three times larger than Dracula's. Dracula was forced to
retreat to his capital, Tirgoviste. He burned his own villages and
poisoned wells on the way so that the Turkish army wouldn't have
any food or water.
When the sultan reached Tirgoviste, he saw a terrifying scene,
remembered in history as "the Forest of the Impaled." There,
outside the city, were 20,000 Turkish prisoners, all impaled. The
sultan's officers were too scared to go on - Dracula had won
again.
Although the sultan retreated, Dracula's little brother Radu did
not. The Turks had provided him with an army in hopes that he could
seize Dracula's throne. Many of Dracula's boyars abandoned him to
join Radu. Radu's army pursued Dracula to his fortress at Poenari.
Dracula's wife was so frightened that she threw herself from the
upper battlements. The Turks seized the castle, but Dracula managed
to escape through a secret tunnel. There were still some peasants
around he hadn't impaled, and they helped him flee from
Walachia.
He went to the new king of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus, for help.
Instead the king had him imprisoned in a tower. Dracula remained in
Hungary while Radu ruled Walachia as a puppet for the Turks. After
the first four years he was allowed to move into a house. He became
a Catholic to please the Catholic Hungarians. He ingratiated
himself with the Hungarian royal family, and even married one of
its members (possibly the king's cousin).
But he was still the same old Dracula. He impaled rats and birds
for fun. Once a thief broke into his house and a Hungarian captain
followed him to arrest him. Dracula didn't kill the thief - he
killed the officer. Why? Because the officer was a gentleman, and
should have known not to enter a house uninvited.
