Dracula, Prince of Many Faces

by Radu R Florescu

  In March 1460, Dan III, with the support of Braovians, took the offensive against Dracula. He seized Fgra and Amla, traditional fiefs of the Wallachian princes, and arrested and killed Dracula's supporters along the way. Then Dan organized a full-scale invasion of Wallachia, though he failed to arouse the local Romanian population. The main encounter with Dracula took place at the Wallachia-Transylvania border, near Rucr. Dan lost the skirmish, and only seven of his boyars managed to escape.

  A macabre fate awaited Dan himself. Upon his capture by the Wallachians, Dracula “ordered his priest clothed in the formal liturgical funeral vestments to read the mass for the dead,” a kind of extreme unction for Dan, who was very much alive. Then Dracula forced the unfortunate prince to dig his own grave, following which Dracula himself cut off Dan's head. Beheim again makes reference to Vlad's perverted sense of humor in stating that “he reserved for Dan a death worthy of ‘The Prince’ he styled himself.” He killed all the captured boyar followers of Dan by impalement.

  Once Dan and his main supporters were out of the way, the Braovians sent their leading citizen, Johann Gereb, to negotiate a truce with Dracula. But Dracula was not ready to sign the peace with any Transylvanian township, so long as other rivals there, such as Vlad the Monk, still constituted a threat to his throne. His ally Mihály Szilágy had repeatedly demanded that Sibiu abandon its support of Vlad the Monk, but without results. Dracula therefore determined to bring this formidable opponent to his knees as well.

  Thus, during the summer of 1460 Dracula organized his final raid on Transylvania. This time he attacked townships and villages in the district of Amla known as the “Land of the Forest” or Unterwald, where Vlad the Monk was hiding. The meistersinger Beheim gives the exact date of the attack as falling on the feast day of Saint Bartholomew in the year 1460: August 24. Dracula struck in the early morning after “passing through the great forest” with his cavalry force. He burned the town of Amla and impaled all the citizens, a priest having led the procession to the burial scene. (It is interesting to note that 114 years later, in 1574, Catherine de’ Medici and her son, Henry, the duke of Anjou, made Saint Bartholomew's Day equally infamous through one of the most brutal mass exterminations in history, the Saint Bartholomew Massacre, when all the Protestant leaders in Paris were killed.)

  Dracula's raid on Amla was aimed at eliminating any remaining dissident resistance and at killing rival contenders to his throne, especially Vlad the Monk. Dracula knew, for instance, that one of the principal advisers of the dead Dan III, the boyar Bogdan Doboca, was hiding in the village of ercaia, in the Fgra district. So he had the entire village razed to the ground; it had to be completely repopulated in the following century. Similar was the fate of the village of Mica. The narrator Beheim tells us that Dracula burned or destroyed half the communities in the Amla district, including the capital city by that name. He “assembled all the citizens and all those he could find” from other villages and hanged them on hooks and pitchforks, after having had his men hack them to pieces with knives, swords, and sabers. Amla was reduced to a ghost town, as it still is today, and other villages such as Slite, Apodul de Sus, and Tilica were similarly destroyed. Beheim claims that altogether some 30,000 Germans were killed during this Dracula raid on the district of Amla.

  No help for the Germans was forthcoming from the Hungarian king, Matthias, or the Transylvanian governor, Mihály Szilágy, whose forces were instructed to observe neutrality. Matthias, who had not as yet consolidated his authority, had shown little interest in this brushfire that was burning within the confines of his realm, despite the human toll. Dracula, on his part, had studiously avoided attacking the king's garrisons posted at various fortresses within the areas that he had terrorized.

  Still, both parties had an interest in working out a settlement. On October 1, 1460, a peace treaty was signed at Braov between Dracula's representatives and the city council. There were four main provisions: (1) Braov was to surrender all the Romanian boyars who had taken shelter on its soil, while Dracula was prepared to do the same with the enemies of the city who had sought asylum in Wallachia; (2) all commercial privileges obtained by the German cities from Dracula in 1456 were to be restored, canceling the various restrictions Dracula had placed on German trade; (3) the cities of Braov and Sibiu, the various townships of ara Bîrsei, and the region of the “seven fortresses” would pay Dracula maintenance money for an army of 4,000 mercenaries to fight against any impending attack by the Turks; and finally, (4) Dracula agreed to pay the German merchants of Sibiu and Braov war compensation for the destruction of property that he had caused. That last provision must have angered Dracula a great deal. But there was little that he could do, since King Matthias himself guaranteed the peace treaty. Similar treaties were arranged with Sighioara, Bistria, and other German towns.

  Despite the fact that this treaty signified that Dracula had to abandon his protectionist economic policies, it was a kind of victory for him. For the two years from 1460 to 1462 he knew that his western front was secure, and he could afford to turn against a far more dangerous rival, Sultan Mehmed II.

  But these raids and accompanying atrocities against the Germans of Transylvania during the years 1457 and 1460 were to have a long-range impact that reached far beyond the borders of Romanian countries. Those German Catholic monks who were fortunate enough to escape from their monasteries, which had been reduced to ashes, brought with them to the west what in essence became the first Dracula “horror stories.” Thus, Dracula in his own lifetime became a subject of horror literature. At the monastery of Saint Gall in Switzerland, at Lambach near Salzburg, and at the Melk Abbey on the Danube River in Lower Austria—all Benedictine houses—these refugees related their harrowing escapes to the other monks. These stories were copied down, mostly by scribes, and in turn used at the opportune moment as propaganda against the prince by the Hungarian chancellery. Among the refugees who had fled Dracula's terror was a Bernardine lay brother who is simply referred to as “Brother Jacob.” He was to become the chief informant to the Swabian minnesinger Michael Beheim. Among the later German texts that included Beheim's account, one printed at Strassburg in 1500 was prefaced by a woodcut showing Dracula seated at a table surrounded by rows of impaled cadavers. This image suggests clearly that the bloodthirsty Count Dracula of fiction and movies was born from the loins of the bloody practitioner of terror in Transylvania.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Struggle Against Mehmed the Conqueror

  THE war between Dracula “the Impaler” and Mehmed II “the Conqueror” was bound to happen; the only question was the timing. Having grown up with Mehmed, Dracula was aware of the sultan's insatiable desire for conquests and his great ambition to be ruler of all Europe as well as Asia. Mehmed had declared, after all: “I am young and rich and favored by fortune, so I intend to surpass Caesar, Alexander, and Hannibal by far.” He planned to strike at the pillars of European civilization and bring it tumbling down into his control. Though Dracula ruled a comparatively small country, he was quite as determined and proud as the sultan himself. And he was not about to give in without a struggle to the sultan's designs on his country.

  Dracula realized that he had to avoid a two-front war at all costs. It would be difficult enough fighting the Turkish army, which would outnumber his own three to one, without having to worry about an attack from the west by the Germans of Transylvania or their allies. This was one of the major reasons behind Dracula's decision to seek a permanent peace with Transylvania. Indeed, he hoped to secure Hungarian and Saxon help in his crusade against the infidel Turks. Perhaps little did he realize that the European Christians had no deep sense of a need to unify against the Turkish onslaught, while the Turks were inflamed by the idea of the Holy War of Islam. After all, if you were a Christian who fell in battle, you no longer had the assurance that you would go to heaven as in the heyday of crusading, but if you were a Muslim, there was absolute certainty that if you died in a war for the spread of Islam,
your soul would be propelled to an earthlike paradise, where lovely young maidens would serve you tasty drinks.

  The Dracula campaign of 1462 must be evaluated in its European context. After the failure of the sultan's army to take Belgrade in 1456, the sultan's immediate aim was to consolidate and stabilize the front by securing the banks of the Danube River at the very least. This meant not only a renewed attempt to capture Belgrade but also control of the mouth of the Danube, the western coast of the Black Sea, and such strategic fortresses as Chilia and Akkerman, technically in Moldavian territory. One of the sultan's janissary commanders, who has left us a remarkable account of the Turco-Wallachian struggle, simply identifies himself as “the Janissary of Ostrovitza” (a site in present-day Yugoslavia). He stated the problem in a soldier's unsophisticated language: “You, my happy master, must know that so long as Chilia and Akkerman are in the hands of the Romanians and the Hungarians possess the fortress of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, we shall not be able to conquer the Balkans.” The sultan accepted this advice, and in this respect he was thinking in remarkably modern strategic terms: control of the Danube and the Black Sea were in fact interrelated. Seizure of the Danube was the primary objective, since the river, which has its source in the Black Forest of Germany, represented the traditional highway for eastern invasion of the west. It was like a dart aimed at the soft underbelly of his western enemies, a means of penetration into Europe. In addition, control over Bulgaria, Serbia, and most of Greece having been seized, it was logical that the sultan should also wish to transform Wallachia into a province of his empire. Besides, Mehmed had been irked by the ambivalent policies pursued by both Dracul and Dracula, on whose help he could not really count despite their status of vassals.

  Enea Silvio de' Piccolomini, Pope Pius II, who had succeeded the ineffectual Calixtus III in 1458, was, like Dracula, one of the few statesmen in Europe who understood the nature of the Ottoman threat. As mentioned previously, an aristocrat from Siena, educated in the traditions of Renaissance humanism, having dissipated his early youth in mundane pursuits, illicit adventures that included the fathering of several illegitimate children and the writing of profane literature, he experienced a change of heart after he entered religious life. Once ordained a priest, he devoted his skills at the Council of Basel to saving the papacy from the danger of “democratic” government implied in substituting for papal rule a college of cardinals. He also helped pave the way for the union between Orthodoxy and Catholicism at the Council of Florence in 1439.

  His unusual negotiating abilities had caught the eye of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, who invited him to serve as a chief councillor in his chancery, being virtually in charge of imperial diplomacy. He had also acted as an educator to the young king of Hungary, Ladislas Posthumus, as we know, and wrote for the exclusive use of the emperor's ward a pedagogical treatise that is still worth reading today. When elected pope, he was remarkably tolerant of dissent, to the point that the great English historian Lord Acton describes him as “the founder of freedom of speech.” In spite of, or perhaps because of, his humanistic background, Pius II understood the Ottoman threat to Europe after the fall of Constantinople and the need to organize a great crusade, which would involve not only the west but the surviving free states of eastern Europe. Well informed through a network of diplomats and spies, the pope had made a study of the sultan's psychology and modi operandi. Among the eastern European leaders, he was to become most intrigued with Dracula. He made frequent mention of his name in his Commentaries and in other treatises, at times in favorable terms.

  Pius II launched the idea of this new crusade by summoning a great council of the church in the cathedral of Mantua on September 26, 1459, with invitations sent to all the leading powers of Europe. His two-hour inaugural address drained his already feeble health but left an indelible impression on those few delegates who had cared to attend. He exhorted his spellbound audience to “take up the cross” in stirring and inspiring words. Nothing of the kind had been heard since the great crusading Council of Clermont in the eleventh century. The pope saw virtually no limit to Mehmed's ambition; he warned his audiences, “Every victory for him will be a stepping-stone to another, until after subjecting all the Christians of the west, he will have destroyed the Gospel of Christ and imposed that of his false prophet over the entire world!” To substantiate his claim and to fire up his audience, the pope brought forth witnesses, refugees from various parts of the Balkans, to describe their sufferings and privations at the hands of the Turks. But those few delegates in attendance from Burgundy, Milan, and Hungary were largely unresponsive; appeasement was the order of the day.

  The emperor Frederick III, on whose behalf the pope had worked diligently in past years, promised an infantry force of 32,000 and 10,000 cavalrymen, a promise, as it turned out, worth no more than the paper it was written on. This egoistic psychopath was more interested in consulting astrologers who told him that he still had a good chance of subverting the power of his main rival for the crown of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus.

  England was in no position to join any crusade, since the Wars of the Roses were still exhausting the country. The imperial German representative, Gregor von Heimburg, was totally uncooperative, giving social strife and boundary disputes among the German states as his excuse. The ever-timid French king Charles VII and his successor, Louis XI, the Spider King, were more absorbed with succession to the kingdom of Naples than crusading against Mehmed. In Italy, King Alfonso V, who had paid lip service to crusading, had died on July 27, 1458, and his bastard son, Ferrante, soon recognized by the pope as rightful ruler, was more concerned in resisting French ambitions.

  The overall attitude of indifference was best revealed in the words of the famous Sigismondo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini, member of one of the most powerful families of Italy, who combined the cleverness of a fox with the courage of a lion. Replying to a critic who had faulted him for favoring the Turks, he said, “I serve him who pays me more,” and actually made war with the pope. This cynical reply also reflected thinking in Florence, Milan, Genoa, and Venice, all deeply interlocked in political or commercial competition with one another. Venice, the greatest maritime power in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean, whose possessions were most immediately threatened by the Turkish advances, made financial demands of the pope which they knew were impossible to fulfill: payment for 8,000 men to man their ships, 50,000 cavalry, and 20,000 infantry—all to be covered by the empty papal treasury.

  Among the central and eastern European states, George Podbrady, king of Bohemia since 1458, was not really interested in fighting the Turks, who did not yet threaten his own borders. It took all his efforts to restore the badly shattered authority of the crown of Saint Wenceslas after the religious and civil disobedience by Catholics and the successors of the Hussites. The Polish king, Casimir IV, also duke of Lithuania, had evidently learned the lesson of his predecessor, Ladislas III, who had died at the debacle at Varna in 1444. Poland was too distant and involved in its own struggles against the German Teutonic Order to do much else than protest by diplomatic notes. The Russian ruler, Ivan III, grand duke of Moscow, was even more geographically remote from the scene and was clearly preoccupied with internal feudal and religious strife. Russia was still not free from the Tatar yoke. Stephen of Moldavia, Dracula's cousin and ally, evinced little interest in crusading at that time, and instead vented his wrath against the Hungarian king, who had given shelter to the man responsible for the assassination of his father. He chose to place himself as a vassal to the Polish king and waited upon events to determine his future course of action. Even the Albanians, who had resisted for so long under their great hero Skanderbeg and upon whom the pope counted for aid, took this inopportune moment to sign a three-year truce with the Turks.

  Ironically, both at Mantua and later at Rome, representatives of eastern Asiastic powers, mostly Muslims, showed more enthusiasm for the war against the Turks than did western European Christians. Amon
g them, the sultan's own brother-in-law, Uzun Hazan, “Lord of the White Sheep,” who controlled part of Iran, was ready to fight and promised to raise 5,000 troops. The lord of “Little Armenia” came to Rome with an offer of 150,000 troops. Sensing support in numbers and dreaming of the possibility of an eastern coalition that could help launch a two-front war against the Ottoman Empire, Pope Pius II sent a monk in papal service, Fra Ludovico da Bologna, on a mission to various eastern capitals to gather support for such a project. As a result, some strange and obscure characters came to the Roman curia: among them was a certain George VIII of Imeretia, self-styled “King of the Persians”; a prince of Georgiana or Great Iberia, the sustenance of whose corpulent body reportedly required two hundred pounds of meat a day. Other exotic types were Dadian Liparit, ruler of Mingrelia, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, who declared that he would raise 60,000 troops, and Rabia, lord of Abkhazia; Ismail Bey of Sinop also promised to help the war effort. The lord of Karaman in Asia Minor, a perennial enemy of the sultan, promised to raise 40,000 “Goths and Alans” to fight under the banner of the surviving Greek emperor of Trebizond against Mehmed II.

  The Congress of Mantua formally came to a close on January 14, 1460, when the pope issued a bull proclaiming the three year crusade, implying the usual pardon of sins to all who undertook it. A new religious association, the Order of Saint Mary of Bethlehem, was created to commemorate the occasion. One hundred thousand gold ducats was to be raised by the Roman curia to pay for a force of 50,000 men. But even the pope admitted one month later that the odds for success were not in his favor.