The story does not tell us how long the construction of the castle took — undoubtedly a matter of months, since they simply refortified the earlier abandoned fortress. We do not know the number of victims who fell down the precipice, under the burden of the stones and materials they carried up the mountain, nor the number who died from sheer fatigue and hunger. But the work went on under Dracula's vigilant eye until the castle was completed. In the eyes of the Wallachian peasants, as well as in the lines of the histories, this macabre episode helped establish Dracula's reputation for cruelty, and the mass punishment at Tîrgovite was in part responsible for creating his nickname, “the Impaler,” which henceforth clung to his name. The building of Castle Dracula, carefully planned by Transylvanian specialists in the art of fortress building, was also significant in that it constituted a violation of both Turkish and Hungarian prescriptions that explicitly forbade “a vassal” to protect himself in this manner.
The castle was built on the plan of an irregular polygon, perforce limited by the shape of the narrow plateau, approximately 100 feet wide and 120 feet long, at the summit of the ridge. Its style was that of other Romanian mountain fortresses, which were of Byzantine and Serbian rather than Teutonic design. The surviving semicircular bastions on the southern side and the thick walls built of brick and stone, as well as the strong natural location, made the fortress virtually impregnable and allowed the defenders the possibility of crossfire, in accordance with the latest techniques of war. From what few remains survive, the visitor can still detect the outlines of two of the original five towers, connected by ruined walls, barely visible under a heavy overgrowth of every variety of Carpathian wild flower, greenery, and fungus. The central, or main, tower is in the classical cylindrical form. The thickness of the walls, of stone reinforced on the outside with brick, confirms the popular tradition that Dracula doubled the width of the walls of the earlier fortification so as to be able to withstand the heaviest Turkish cannon fire. These walls, protected by conventional battlements, were originally quite high, and from afar give the impression of forming part of the mountain itself.
Within the fortress there was little room for extensive maneuvering. Each tower could have housed only about twenty to thirty soldiers and an equal number of retainers and servants. Within the main courtyard it would have been difficult to drill more than one hundred men. In the center of that courtyard there was a well, no longer discernible, which was the source of the water supply. According to folklore, there was also a secret passage leading from the well into the bowels of the mountain, emerging in a cave on the banks of the Arge River. This was probably Dracula's escape route, used in the autumn of 1462 when he fled to Transylvania. The tunnel, say the peasants, was built solidly and reinforced with grooved stones and by boards so as to prevent any mountain cave-ins. The cave along the riverbanks of the Arge is referred to by the villagers as pivni, which in Romanian means cellar, by a stretch of the imagination, the cellar deep below the castle at the base of the mountain. A few feet away from the presumed entrance of the secret passage are the remains of a vault. This vault may well constitute the only vestige of a chapel on the site.
When the Turks finally reduced Transylvania to a vassal state in the sixteenth century, Castle Dracula lost all strategic significance and was abandoned as a fortress. What little survived was in great part destroyed by the frequent earthquakes that have their epicenter in the north Carpathian Mountains. These quakes have been recorded about every thirty years in Romania from 1741 onward. This pervasive destruction, however, has served some of the superstitious-minded peasants well in their belief that a “Dracula curse” is associated with this “evil” place. There are those who believe that abandoned fortresses are the domain of the forces of darkness and that one should not pry too deeply into their past — certainly not seek any treasures, even though a golden flame sometimes lights up the sky at night and is taken to mean that the ill-gotten gold accumulated by Dracula still lies in the fortress vaults. Legends such as these are by no means unique to Romania. However, they may help explain why those peasants assigned to various tasks in this lonely place will greet the visitor with the sign of the cross (much as in a Bela Lugosi movie) and are solidly armed with Bibles, intended as a defense against all the evil forces that surround them.
Only two sketches of the castle have been made from the village knoll facing it across the Arge River. The older painting was done by a Swiss artist, Henri Trenk, in 1860 (the picture is now located at the fine arts museum in Bucharest). Another watercolor, completed in 1885, can be attributed to Ion Butculescu, an amateur historian, a lawyer and relative of one of the authors. At the time of the painting, two of the castle's towers were still clearly discernible.
Of whatever else was within the fortress, there is not a trace today, although the houses of attendants, the princely stables, the pens for domestic animals that provided the castle's needs, the various outhouses that were customarily erected near small fortifications of this nature, and the cell where Dracula's treasure was stored are readily imagined. So is the drawbridge, which evidently existed before the present slender wooden bridge to the peak. The towers must have had some openings, for the peasant ballads speak of candlelight visible from a distance at night.
It is only within the last few years, because of interest generated by the Dracula story, that the country's commission on historic monuments has belatedly decided to shore up the existing towers and battlements. The idea seems to be less to reconstruct the castle than to avoid further deterioration. The walls, however, have been built up to what was probably their original size, so their thickness is apparent, and two of the towers are again quite visible. For Dracula, however, this edifice represented his mountain retreat, his eagle's nest in the Transylvanian Alps, essentially a place of refuge, where the awesome beauty of nature provided a substitute for the perfidy of men.
Many of the old families sought refuge either on their distant mountain estates, in the Transylvanian duchies of Amla and Fgra, or else they fled to Turkey to await better times. The old boyar class had been virtually decimated, both by impalement and as a result of the sufferings and privations connected with the construction of the castle on the Arge. All in all, only two out of every three members of the old council in existence at the beginning of the reign survived. Among those names that disappear from the rosters was that of a forebear of one of the co-authors (the man resurfaces only after 1462, in the council of Dracula's brother Radu the Handsome, after Dracula's downfall). The figure given by the German narratives, of 20,000 boyars impaled, is clearly exaggerated. The upper council rarely had more than a dozen spokesmen and six to ten of these held court titles. A somewhat larger figure, however, can be accounted for in terms of boyar families, members of the lesser nobility and the larger number of leading citizens of Tîrgovite.
To replace these boyars, Dracula created a Napoleon-style nobility of his own. Unlike the custom previously practiced, when a nobleman's confiscated land was given to another member of the same family, Dracula offered confiscated lands and fortunes to new men, some of them of plebeian origin, who thus owed their power entirely to the new prince and had a vested stake in the survival of the regime. A study of the rosters of the boyar council from 1456 to 1462 shows that almost 90 percent of the members were men of lowly class, many of them former free peasants. In addition to these new functionaries, Dracula created a new position, called the arma. The duty of the arma was to administer the prince's new style of justice, to impose the decisions voted upon by the council, and to execute those guilty of crimes against the state. Some of the armai were Romanians, though many were foreigners — Hungarians, Serbs, Turks, even gypsies and Tatars — adventurers for the most part who were well paid and devoid of principles. They were Dracula's “impalers par excellence,” the “axes” who fulfilled his awful handiwork. Beheim decries the savage mores prevailing at Dracula's court and denounces the venality, fickleness, and cruelty of the courtiers. His reg
ime of terror certainly could not have endured long without the presence of such mercenaries. There were, however, lack of harmony and bitter conflicts even among the armai, who did not have a solid basis of allegiance to the prince, beyond self interest. This tenuous courtier loyalty and the lack of solid support from native boyars, as we will see, help explain the mass defection that occurred at the end of Dracula's reign and ultimately caused his fall.
The same hiring principles applied to other court functionaries, diplomatic envoys, governors of palaces and castles: in fact, all Dracula incumbents. A particularly useful addition to the new regime were the viteji, a military nobility recruited from the free peasant landowning class (moneni), who were honored for their bravery on the field of battle. They undoubtedly constituted the officer corps in the large popular army that was raised in times of danger. In addition to a wartime army, Dracula also needed an independent military force that he could use in peace time for repression and policing purposes. For this task he used his personal guard, the sluji. He also had a fairly large force stationed at frontier points such as Rucr, and forces assigned to his castles under the authority of their governors. They invariably recruited among the free peasants of the respective areas. The establishment of all these military forces was further aimed at reducing the power of the original boyars.
Dracula's sense of the exalted position of his office extended beyond reducing even the new boyars to the status of court servants. In judicial matters, although edicts still bear boyar signatures, we may safely envisage Dracula adjudicating individual cases entirely on his own. In the protocol he insisted upon at court functions, and particularly in receiving the envoys of foreign nations, his autocratic nature is again evident. He had learned these precepts from a past master in the art of ceremony and court etiquette, Sultan Mehmed himself (though the Romanian court titles and traditions were Byzantine). One event illustrating this inordinate concern for “the respect of diplomatic usage” occurred during a reception of a Genoese delegation from Caffa, narrated to us by Michael Beheim:
I have found that some Italians [i.e., Genoese] came as ambassadors to his court. As they came to him they took off their hats and hoods facing the prince. Under the hat, each of them wore a coif or a little skullcap that he did not take off, as is the habit among Italians. Dracula then asked them for an explanation of why they had only taken their hats off, leaving their skullcaps on their heads. To which they answered: “This is our custom. We are not obliged to take our skullcaps off under any circumstances, even an audience with the sultan or the Holy Roman Emperor.” Dracula then said, “In all fairness, I want to strengthen and recognize your customs.” They thanked him bowing to him and added, “Sire we shall always serve you with your interests if you show us such goodness, and we shall praise your greatness everywhere.” Then in a deliberate manner this tyrant and killer did the following: he took some big iron nails and planted them in a circle in the head of each ambassador. “Believe me,” he said while his attendants nailed the skullcaps on the heads of the envoys, “this is the manner in which I will strengthen your customs.”
In addition to creating a faithful and servile boyar class, Dracula followed the traditional policy of Wallachian princes brought up in the Romanian Orthodox faith, of dominating the church and using it as an instrument of despotism. Of Dracula's innermost religious convictions and his practices, little is known. We presume that his faith was not deep, that it did not arise from any profound theological convictions, and that it had little bearing on his personal behavior. However, Dracula was often seen in the company of Romanian Orthodox monks. He was known to be particularly fond of the monasteries of Tismana and of Snagov, both of which he often visited. He also liked ritual, a characteristic trait of Orthodox believers. Even when he imposed the death sentence, he insisted upon proper ceremony for his victims and a Christian burial. As a member of the Orthodox faith, Dracula was also sufficiently pre-Lutheran to believe that good works, such as the building of a monastery, could atone more than faith for evil deeds. In his tortured mind cruelty and religiosity were deeply intertwined, and he would occasionally use religious grounds to justify a crime. Dracula was also enough of a medievalist to take his Dragon oath seriously, seeing himself as a Christian crusader against the Infidel.
Patronage — the endowment of land, the granting of immunities and other privileges to monasteries, the building of new religious edifices — was the church's official reward for passive and submissive attitudes. The old Romanian chronicles, as well as oral tradition, credit Dracula with the foundation of several monasteries, the most famous of which was the monastery of Snagov, where his body allegedly lies buried. Dracula himself often resided at Snagov, endowed the monastery with land, and hid his treasure there in 1462 at the time of the Turkish invasion. He had also established in the basement of the edifice a torture chamber where many a boyar enemy perished. With his passion for fortifications, he had transformed the ecclesiastical complex into an island fortress, linked with the mainland by a secret underground tunnel. In times of emergency, as was the case in 1462, the island monastery could give shelter to a numerous population. Other monasteries and churches built by Dracula can be found scattered throughout the country. They were, again, essentially “good works” meant to redeem in the eyes of the Creator. The monastery of Comana, founded in 1461, and the church at Constantineti are Dracula foundations. So is the Church of Saint Nicolae at Tîrgsor, whose inscription, discovered by our late colleague Constantin G. Giurescu, reads: “By the Grace of God I voivode [prince], ruler of Ungro-Wallachia, the son of the great Prince Vlad, have built and completed the church on June 24, 1461.” The reason for the erection of this particular Dracula church has nothing to do with the commercial importance of that town, or the fact that Dracula had a princely residence at Tîrgor. It represented a belated act of atonement, particularly for the assassination of Vladislav II, which had taken place at Tîrgsor. In addition, Dracula gave donations and land to the monasteries of Govora, Tismana, and Cozia, located in northern Oltenia, where he liked to pray. Particularly meaningful were his “donations” to the holy mountain of Athos at the eastern end of the Acte peninsula in Greece, the great holy shrine and cultural center of all the Orthodox churches (Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Serbian), which never submitted to Turkish occupation, even after the conquest of Constantinople. Dracula liked to think of himself as a protector of the whole Orthodox world, not merely the Romanian church. Churches, and monasteries in particular, were obviously important to him not only as defensive fortified bastions, but in terms of general ecclesiastical policy.
As for the gradual expansion of the Roman Catholic faith in his realm, through monasteries established by the Hungarian king on both sides of the Carpathian Mountains (that is, in Transylvania and Wallachia), Dracula looked upon it with suspicion, seeing the monasteries as papal enclaves on his land that eluded his jurisdiction. Their power and influence offended his medieval patriotism. A number of narratives allude to a conflict between Dracula and individual Catholic abbots and monks, many of whom saw their monasteries destroyed and were lucky to escape impalement. Occasionally a monk was able to extricate himself from a difficult position by virtue of his wit, or by simple flattery. On one particular occasion described in a German narrative in the library of Saint Gall, two monks who came to visit the palace at Tîrgovite climbed to the top of the Chindia Tower and were shown by Dracula the usual scene of horror in the courtyard below, which was strewn with impaled cadavers. Dracula was evidently expecting some form of protest. Instead of reproof, one of the two monks reacted quite meekly, “You are appointed by God to punish the evildoers.” The prince hardly expected this enunciation of the doctrine of divine right, and consequently spared and rewarded the monk. His colleague, however, who had the moral strength and courage to disapprove of the crimes, was impaled on the spot.
Whenever he could, even in the case of Catholic monasteries, Dracula would replace foreign incumbents with Romania
n appointees of his own. He replaced the powerful French abbot of Cîra, in the Fgra district, who had been appointed by his father, with a native from Tîrgovite. The more radical procedure in the case of an unruly foreign abbot was impalement. (As we shall see, the spokesmen of the Catholic church got their belated vengeance by blackening Dracula's name for posterity — thus helping to pave the way for the vampire image.)
Given his opposition to the greater boyars, it would be easy to view Dracula as a proponent of the have-nots, of the peasants, who represented the great majority of Romanians in Dracula's time. Because of his predilections for raising humble men to high rank (the sluji, curteni, viteji, armai), some Romanian historians have been tempted to consider Dracula as a kind of Robin Hood, who took away from the rich and gave to the poor. It is a mistake to view Dracula as such a social crusader. He was, after all, a despot (in the modern sense) and a believer in the divine right of the sovereign. Nevertheless, in contrast to the disloyal boyars, the peasantry as a whole looked favorably upon Dracula and rallied to his cause. He in turn took up their cause. He defended the peasants from Turkish demands by refusing to pay the tribute (from 1459 onward) in both money and kind (grain, horses, et cetera), which was computed on the number of existing villages. He also steadfastly opposed all Turkish endeavors to enroll Wallachian children in the janissary corps. Romanian oral tradition emphasized his fairness to peasants in a different way, by stating that in Dracula's time the rich could not buy their way out of punishment as they had done under previous rulers with the traditional baksheesh (bribe) so prevalent in eastern Europe to this day. The peasants, in return for all this, supported Dracula fully during the Turkish campaign of 1462.
Dracula, Prince of Many Faces Page 14