by Ray Black
He was a Wallachian (Romanian) prince in real life. His real name was Vlad Tepes, or Vlad III, as his father and grandfather had also been named Vlad. He was born in 1431 and spent his formative years witnessing constant persecution of his family and clan by the Ottoman Turks and Hungarians. This was the root of his behaviour in later years, as he grew hell-bent on retribution.
Even though he was a prince by birth the Romanian system dictated that the new leader be elected by the aristocracy, who were known as boyars. That meant getting the boyars on side, which all depended on the political situation at the time.
His father, Vlad II Dracul, had become prince of Wallachia in 1436 but then been removed from power six years later due to gerrymandering over a war between the Ottomans and Hungarians. He regained the throne 1443–47 but was then assassinated on the orders of the regent of Hungary, Hunyadi. The method of death was quite unsavoury, for he had his face cut around the edges and then ripped off while still alive and conscious.
Vlad was born in Wallachia, but was raised in exile in Transylvania. His father was murdered when he was at the impressionable age of sixteen. Before this Vlad and his younger brother Radu had suffered at the hands of the Ottomans who held them hostage to force their father into siding with the them against the Hungarians, which is why he ultimately died at the hands of the latter.
While a hostage, Vlad was locked in a dungeon and harshly treated while Radu was favoured. Vlad developed a deep seated mistrust of family. His brother had sided with the Ottomans and his father had left him to rot to save his own skin.
His luck changed slightly following his father’s death when the Ottomans placed Vlad on the throne of Wallachia as a puppet ruler – Vlad III. His reign was brief as the Hungarians then invaded, but Vlad was at least free, so he fled to Moldavia, where he lived in exile with his uncle, Bogdan II, until 1451.
The next chapter saw his uncle assassinated. Vlad was left between a rock and hard place and fled to the Hungarian court. There he met Hunyadi, the very man who had killed his father. He might have been killed on the spot, but he impressed the Hungarians with his knowledge of the Ottoman court, having lived there for a number of years. Hunyadi saw the potential in having Vlad repositioned on the throne of Wallachia as an ally, so allowed him his life and freedom. He was pardoned and became political advisor to Hunyadi.
By now Wallachia was no longer in Hunyadi’s hands, so Vlad would have to wait for the right opportunity to return. That opportunity came in 1456. The Hungarians launched a campaign against the Ottomans to remove them from Serbia. Vlad took an army and simultaneously invaded Wallachia while the Ottomans were busy against the Hungarians. He became Vlad III once more and began a reign of terror for six years.
Vlad found himself surrounded by potential enemies, both real and imagined. He set about eliminating anyone who might pose a threat to his rule: namely the Ottomans, the Hungarians and his fellow Wallachian nobility, the boyars. He had enemies without and enemies within. That meant that just about everyone was in the firing line, as even the commoners and peasantry might very well side with an enemy if push came to shove. He should have been dubbed ‘Vlad the Paranoid’ such was his suspicion that no one could be trusted.
In one incident, he had a number of boyars impaled and then forced their families into hard labour, building his new castle. They toiled away until they died from sheer exhaustion and were simply replaced by others.
Vlad became something like Joseph Stalin in his relentless obsession with watching his back. Thousands of people – men, women and children – died by impalement. Many were simply thrust onto erect stakes that stood on the perimeters of cities. The sight of putrefying corpses on poles became familiar to anyone who lived within the Wallachian kingdom. Inevitably, Vlad’s attempts at omnipotence only served to degrade further the infrastructure of the nation he ruled. Anarchy and crime took hold, so Vlad had no choice but to deliver punishments to restore a semblance of law and order. With social chaos he would have been vulnerable to invasion by external enemies, so he found himself in a vicious cycle.
During the first few years of his reign, Vlad had paid a tribute to the Ottomans to prevent them from invading his territory. In 1459, the Hungarians began plans to attack the Ottomans, so Vlad stopped his payments and formed an alliance with the Hungarians. He then took an army across the River Danube and ransacked the lands between the Black Sea and Serbia. It is reckoned that he left around 20,000 dead in his wake.
His revenge on the Ottoman Turks backfired on him. In 1462, the Ottomans launched a counter-offensive with a 60,000 strong army. Vlad had less than half that number of troops and failed to prevent the Turks from taking his capital city Targoviste. He had no choice but to resort to guerrilla-style tactics. By organising relentless ambushes and raids, he eventually encouraged the Turks to leave, but they had a trick up their sleeve. They installed Vlad’s younger brother Radu as ruling monarch of Wallachia. He quickly gathered support in light of the atrocities committed by Vlad, who was chased into exile again in Transylvania.
Eventually, Vlad was caught and ‘imprisoned’ by the Hungarians. For the next twelve years he actually lived in the Hungarian court, where he married and had children. The Hungarians always viewed him as an ally, so they protected him with a view to eventually returning him to the Wallachian throne.
Interestingly, he became a Catholic Christian during this period of his life. Nevertheless, he could not let his old habits die with his new found faith. To entertain his need to inflict suffering, he would torture and impale birds and mice to watch their agonising death throes. This would suggest that Vlad had become a sadist, unable to correct his behaviour even with the teachings and guidance of the Bible.
Come 1475, Vlad had regained his freedom and prepared to reclaim the Wallachian throne. By now his brother Radu had died and Basarab – another Ottoman ally – was ruler of Wallachia. Vlad managed to usurp Basarab quite easily, but his Hungarian army returned home once he was back in power, so that his position was vulnerable.
Vlad found that the Wallachian boyars and peasants alike had had enough of his depravity towards them, so they naturally reasoned that continued rule by Basarab would be a better option. The Ottomans sent in an army to find Vlad with barely 4,000 defenders of his throne.
Vlad didn’t stand a chance and met his death in 1476. No one knows exactly how he died, but his head was removed and preserved in honey. It was then sent to Istanbul (Constantinople until 1453), where it was displayed by the Sultan as proof that the scourge of the Turks was dead – Kazikli Bey, as they called him. Appropriately enough, his head was exhibited impaled on a wooden stake.
There can be little doubt that Vlad the Impaler’s compulsion to torture, maim and kill his fellow humans was the result of a personality flaw. He seems to have practised just about every form of cruelty available to him and been the inspiration for the phrase ‘man’s inhumanity to man’.
The list includes: blinding, boiling and burning, scalping, skinning and strangling, removal of ears, noses, lips and limbs, mutilation of sexual organs, impalement with wooden stakes and nails, and exposure to the elements and wild animals.
Ironically, his interest in Christianity and eventual conversion to Catholicism may have encouraged his cruelty. The reason is that Christianity holds with the idea of an afterlife, so Vlad may have reasoned that he was doing nothing more than freeing people’s souls from the shackles of their earthly existence. Catholicism also offers confession, so that the absolution of sins is achieved. In other words, he gave himself license to become Dracula the monster in the name of Christianity itself.
It seems that a number of internal and external agents came together in Vlad the Impaler. The result was a human with an absence of compassion for his species or any other. The act of inflicting suffering on others became the very lifeblood on which he voraciously fed, so perhaps that is the notion that Bram Stoker had of him when he metamorphosed Vlad into Count Dracula the supernatural v
ampire.
Cesare Borgia
Fratricide is the term used to describe the act of murdering one’s own brother. That was the kind of crime that Cesare Borgia thought nothing of committing to get what he wanted from life, but then his whole family were no saints.
The Borgias are famed for their patronage of Renaissance artists in Italy, including Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. The family actually originated from Spain, and they became leading players in the game of wealth, power and political influence in Renaissance Europe, which was centred on Italy. They used plenty of underhand tricks to secure and maintain their position, such as poisoning rivals. The family spoke Valencian to one another as a means of privacy and security to ensure that outsiders had difficulty in obtaining intelligence about their dealings.
Cesare Borgia was born in 1476. He was the younger and favoured son of Pope Alexander VI. He initially became Archbishop and then Cardinal of Valencia – an area on the eastern coast of Spain – in his early twenties, thanks to the nepotism of his father. In 1497, he was implicated in the murder of his elder brother Giovanni, the Duke of Gandia. It seems that his motive was to acquire the undivided attentions of the pope, as he was envious of Giovanni’s position and wanted to free himself from his ecclesiastical duties to pursue a secular career. He duly resigned in 1498 and embarked on his new journey.
The pope made Cesare the papal legate (ambassador to the pope) in France, where he formed a political alliance with King Louis XII. Before long he was made Duke of Valentinois in south-east France. By 1499, he had married the sister of the king of Navarre, a Basque region in north-east Spain. He now took advantage of the Second Italian War, which saw the French invade Italy, to take control of the Romagna region in north-east Italy. By 1501, the Pope had made him Duke of Romagna. He then added to his territory by taking areas to the south, including Urbino, Elba, Piombino and Camerino. In order to make certain of his position, he rounded up many of his political rivals and had them summarily murdered by strangulation at the Castle of Senigallia.
Having done all he could to assert his power Cesare was dealt a blow. In 1503, his father was killed by poison and then he too was poisoned. Cesare managed to recover, but the political landscape had suddenly changed, leaving him vulnerable. The new pope, Pius III, had Cesare arrested, but died under suspicious circumstances after a pontificate of only twenty-six days. Things got worse for Cesare. While he was still weak from poisoning, an enemy of his named Giuliano della Rovere tricked his way into the papacy to become Pope Julius II, who would become known as the ‘Warrior Pope’. To make things worse, King Louis XII of France now turned against Cesare, leaving him compromised and in decline.
Cesare had his titles and lands taken from him. He was then arrested in Naples and extradited to prison in Spain as the result of an agreement between Julius II and the monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella. He escaped from prison in 1506 and fled to Navarre, where his brother-in-law King John III gave him refuge. Cesare died only a year later in battle defending Viana.
Cesare Borgia relied on the nepotism of his father, Pope Alexander VI, to achieve all of his aims in life – papal patronage. This was made abundantly clear when his career dramatically came to an end with the death of the pope. He evidently failed to forge a reputation for being a self-made man as a result of this assistance, which is why his enemies immediately went in for the kill as soon as he no longer enjoyed the protection of the Catholic Church. If anyone ever needed an illustration of what people really think about nepotism then they should look no further than Cesare Borgia. In essence, he was nothing more than a spoilt child given licence to cheat his way into power. That power shrivelled away like a burst balloon once his father was no longer there to keep it inflated.
Given Cesare Borgias credentials, it may seem odd that in some quarters he is thought of as something of a hero. The reason for this is that he happened to be rather handsome and cut a fine figure. This made him something of a ladies’ man and inspired historians to see him as something more than the wing-hider that he really was. None more so than a contemporary of his named Niccolo Machiavelli.
Machiavelli was an Italian statesman and political philosopher who was completely taken in by Borgia’s charms when he met him in person and stayed at court over the winter 1502–3. He began by writing admiring reports of Borgia’s exploits and despatching them to Florence. In 1532, he published a book titled The Prince, which was modelled on Cesar Borgia. The book was a work of philosophy in which he advised that it is necessary to employ unethical practises to acquire power and then use it effectively. Basically, the message was to imitate Borgia.
In modern-day language, we use the term ‘Machiavellian’ to describe people who are unscrupulous, corrupt and scheming in their political dealings. Machiavelli and Borgia would have considered those qualities to be virtues, but the term is used as a pejorative term in this day and age. An example is the way in which certain governments in Russia think it is perfectly acceptable to remove political enemies by killing them, rather than tolerating their opposing points of view. Truly democratic and ethical governments consider this to be Machiavellian, which amounts to saying that they are lacking in ethical substance and are politically primitive in their conduct.
To Cesare Borgia’s credit, he did personally employ Leonardo da Vinci at one point, although not as an artist, but as a military engineer and architect. Da Vinci joined Borgia in 1500 and worked for him over a five-year period. He travelled with his patron to different parts of his territory, helping to improve Borgia’s defences. An example of this collaboration was the design of the port at Cesenatico on the Adriatic coast.
Borgia’s reputation as a cold-blooded killer stems from his general behaviour. He was always unnecessarily cruel and unsympathetic towards the peoples that he invaded and readily resorted to murder to manipulate the political situation. For example, he had his own brother-in-law, the Duke of Bisceglie, assassinated because he had had a quarrel with Borgia and was related to enemies of his father, the pope. He was the third husband of the famous Lucrezia Borgia. In fact, the first assassination attempt left him fighting for his life, so Cesare sent in the assassins again to finish the job.
On another occasion he double-crossed the Lord of Faenza, Astorre Manfredi, while on a military campaign in Romagna. Manfredi agreed to surrender on condition that his life be spared. Borgia immediately broke his word and had Manfredi put to death.
It is fair to say that Cesare Borgia was really something of a cad, for he would take whatever road he deemed necessary to achieve his goals without any sense of honour or shame. As is often the case with cads though, he was apparently rather charming and affable as a personality, which helped him to beguile people into a false sense of security before taking their lives.
He may have thought that he was somehow blessed by his abilities and skills until it became abundantly clear that he had none and no one really trusted him or liked him once his father was removed from the picture. In the end, it came down to the adage ‘be nice to people on the way up, as you might meet them again on the way down’. Clearly his journey down was spectacularly precipitous because he found that he had no allies to speak of. He had failed to inspire friendship or loyalty in anyone and was treated like a common criminal – the exact opposite of what he evidently aspired to be.
Henry VIII
When King Henry VIII came to the throne in England the year was 1509. Pope Julius II (Warrior Pope), the man who had destroyed Cesare Borgia in Europe, would remain in power for another four years. The relationship between England and the Catholic Church had already become strained under the rule of Henry VII, and things were about to get a lot worse. Henry VIII was what people now term a ‘control freak’. He liked to live according to his own rules and found the rulings of the Vatican more than he could bear.
In 1502, Henry became Prince of Wales and heir to the English throne because his elder brother Arthur had died. In the same year that he became king,
Henry married his brother’s widow Catherine of Aragon, who happened to be the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, who had imprisoned Cesare Borgia until his escape. Catherine was, of course, a devout Catholic and Henry married her out of a sense of duty to his family and nation. He was eighteen years of age and ruggedly handsome, while his first wife was twenty-four and no oil painting.
For the next two decades Henry ran a successful court and excelled at his duties as head of state. He had an athletic physique and an alert mind, making him effective both in the field of battle and in matters of government. That part of his reign was dominated by political dealings abroad with the French, Spanish and Italians, who were always at war over territory. This did much to propagate his annoyance at the Catholic Church, to which the foreigners all looked for instruction and guidance.
He was even more intolerant of the teaching of Martin Luther, who promoted a version of Christianity called Protestantism, so called because it ‘protested’ at the extravagancies of the Catholic Church. Henry played his part in attacking Luther by publishing a written assault titled the Assertio. In reaction, followers of Luther would used the term ‘catholic’ to denote an undiscerning mind, as in the phrase ‘catholic tastes’, alluding to the Catholic Church’s liking for gaudy decorations and embellishments.