Vlad the Impaler and the Politics of Terror

Set aside the cape, the castle and the coffins. In this episode Sophie cuts through twelve decades of gothic fiction to find the real Vlad III of Wallachia - a fifteenth-century military commander of genuine strategic brilliance who deployed terror not as sadism but as a calculated instrument of statecraft in a small principality squeezed between the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary.  His infamous forest of the impaled turned back Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople.  His methods were extreme.  His situation was genuinely existential.  Both things, Sophie argues, are necessary to understand the man that Bram Stoker turned into a vampire.  Her modern comparison - a contemporary leader of a small, nuclear-armed state who has similarly weaponized fear as his primary instrument of geopolitical survival - will provoke and is entirely intended to.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Music by Gregor Quendel from Pixabay 

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2599997/episodes/18768959

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Vlad the Impaler and the Politics of Terror, a podcast by Sophie Manners. Hello and welcome back. I'm Sophie Manners, Professor of European History at Queen's College, Cambridge, author of biographies of people whose reputations have been complicated by subsequent centuries, wearer of a scarf that a Romanian visiting scholar described this morning as charmingly non threatening, which I suspect was a comment on more than the scarf. And today your guide through a life that requires me to do something I attempt in every episode, but which this particular subject makes unusually demanding. Find the person inside the legend. The legend in this case is rather large. It involves a vampire. It involves Transylvania, which is a real place and not, I want to emphasize, actually populated by the undead, though I appreciate that Bram Stoker has made this harder to communicate than it ought to be. It involves a castle on a crag, a black cape, and an improbable quantity of coffins. It involves, in short, approximately a hundred and twenty-seven years of gothic fiction, film, theatre, and Halloween costuming that has descended on a specific fifteenth century Wallachian military commander with the comprehensiveness of a very enthusiastic fog and has made the actual history almost entirely invisible beneath the atmosphere. I am going to do my best to find the actual history, because the actual history is, as is so often the case in this series, considerably more interesting than the legend, and also in ways that I think are genuinely instructive, considerably more disturbing, because real political violence in the service of real state power is more disturbing than fictional vampirism, and it should be. His name was Vlad. Specifically, Vlad III, commonly known as Vlad the Impaler or Vlad Dracula, was Voivode of Wallachia during three separate reigns fourteen forty eight, fourteen fifty six to fourteen sixty two, and fourteen seventy six. He was born, probably in fourteen thirty one, in Sigishora, in what is now Romania. He died in battle, probably in December, near Bucharest. He was forty five years old approximately. He governed a small principality in southeastern Europe for a total of roughly eight years across three separate periods, interrupted by exile, imprisonment, and the kind of dynastic instability that makes the Tudor succession look straightforward. He was, in his own lifetime, regarded across Europe as a Christian hero, a brutal tyrant, and a military commander of unusual effectiveness. Often simultaneously, depending on who was doing the regarding, he was not a vampire. I realise this goes without saying, and yet here we are. Let us begin where his story begins, which is not in Wallachia, but in the Ottoman court, as a hostage at eleven years old. This is the biographical fact about Vlad that the Gothic tradition most completely erases, and it is the one that most completely explains everything that followed. Vlad was born in the house of Dracules as the son of Vlad II Dracul. His father's name Dracul came from the Order of the Dragon, a chavalric order founded by the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, and dedicated to defending Christendom against the Ottoman Turks. Dracul meant the dragon, Dracula meant son of the dragon. The subsequent conflation of Dracul with the Romanian word for devil Drac is a later development, linguistically convenient for Gothic novelists and historically misleading. He was the son of the dragon, not the son of the devil, and the distinction is not trivial. Wallachia in the fourteen thirties was one of the most politically volatile corners of Europe. In Vlad's lifetime, Wallachia was a small principality, squeezed between Christian Hungary and the expanding Ottoman Empire. Its voivodes paid tribute to the Sultan, yet were also expected to support Hungarian campaigns, a balancing act that often ended in invasion or deposition when loyalty was questioned. Vlad's father, attempting to navigate this impossible position, had sent his two younger sons, Vlad and his brother Radu, to the Ottoman court in fourteen forty two as human guarantees of Wallachian loyalty. They were hostages. They were children. Vlad spent somewhere between four and six years in Ottoman captivity. He was educated there, trained there, learned Turkish, learned Ottoman military methods. He also watched at close range the machinery of one of the most powerful and most administratively sophisticated empires in the world, and he observed how it managed its frontiers, its subjects, and its enemies with a comprehensive deployment of calculated violence that was within the Ottoman framework, entirely rational and entirely systematic. In fourteen forty seven, while Vlad was still in Ottoman hands, his father was murdered. Vlad II was ousted as ruler of Wallachia by local noblemen called Boyers, and was killed in the swamps near Balteni. His elder half brother Mircha was killed alongside him, by some accounts buried alive. Vlad learned of his father's and brother's deaths, while in the custody of the empire his father had been trying to placate. He was sixteen. I want to pause on this because it matters. The boy who became the impaler was first a child hostage, then a bereaved orphan in the custody of his family's enemies, watching his principality convulse through dynastic violence that had killed his father and his brother. This does not excuse what followed. It contextualizes it. There is a difference between those two things, and the difference is important for anyone who wants to understand rather than merely react to Vlad III. He was released in 1448 and made his first attempt on the Wallachian throne that same year with Ottoman support, the irony being that the empire that had held him hostage was now the instrument through which he attempted to claim his inheritance. He succeeded briefly, and was deposed within two months. He went into exile in Moldavia, then in Transylvania, under the protection of the Hungarian regent John Hunyadi, who had also, it should be noted, ordered the deaths of Vlad's father and brother, which gives the relationship between Vlad and Hunyadi a quality of political pragmatism so pure it is almost admirable if you can set aside the family murder aspect. He reclaimed the Wallacan throne for the second and most significant time in fourteen fifty-six. And here begins the period that made his name in both the literal and the most disturbing possible sense. His primary challenge was the same one that had destroyed his father, the impossible position of a small principality caught between great powers with a domestic nobility, the Boyers, whose loyalty was available to the highest bidder, and whose habit of deposing and murdering their rulers had created a cycle of instability that made effective governance essentially impossible. Vlad knew Wallachia was caught between two giants, the Ottoman Empire to the south and the Kingdom of Hungary to the north. To survive he needed ruthless control at home. He cracked down on boyer conspiracies, often by execution. One infamous story tells of Vlad inviting hundreds of boyers to a banquet in fourteen fifty seven, and having them impaled or forced into slavery for plotting against him. Whether the banquet story is entirely accurate, partially accurate, or the work of hostile Saxon chroniclers who had their own reasons to paint Vlad as a monster, is historically uncertain. What is not uncertain is the method. Impalement was Vlad's preferred instrument of governance and terror, and he deployed it with a consistency and a scale that exceeded anything his contemporaries were accustomed to, even in an era and a region where public execution was a standard tool of state power. The method itself, a sharpened stake, typically inserted through the body in a way designed to avoid vital organs and prolonged death over hours or days. Victims were displayed publicly on the stakes, often information, geometric arrangements of the dying and the dead that communicated very specific messages about what happened to enemies of the Wallackian state. The Ottoman envoys who refused to remove their turbans in Vlad's presence reportedly had the turbans nailed to their skulls. One of the most notorious stories recounts how he received foreign envoys, Ottoman messengers, who refused to remove their headwear in his presence, citing religious custom. Offended by what he perceived as an act of disrespect, Vlad ordered that their turbans be nailed to their skulls. The story, whether or not literally accurate in every detail, captures something essential about his style of rule, symbolic violence, precisely calibrated, to communicate authority and contempt simultaneously. He was also, and this is the part that the Gothic tradition entirely omits, a surprisingly effective administrator within his own principality. Vlad is chiefly remembered for his efforts to strengthen central authority, suppress the power of rival boyers, and resist the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. He reformed the administrative structure, gave positions to men of lower rank, who were loyal to him rather than to the traditional nobility, and created a degree of internal order that Wallachia had not recently enjoyed. There are stories, possibly apocryphal, certainly in circulation during his own lifetime, of gold cups left at public wells that were never stolen, because everyone understood what happened to thieves. Whether or not the cups were real, the stories were, and they tell you something about the reputation for ordered justice within his own principality that coexisted with the reputation for terror that characterized his dealings with his enemies. In fourteen fifty nine he stopped paying the tribute to the Ottoman Sultan. Vlad refused to pay tribute to the Sultan. The Ottoman Empire was furious because a prince raised by them grew rebellious, so Sultan Mehmed II decided to put an end to it. He launched preemptive strikes into Ottoman controlled territory along the Danube, informing his Hungarian ally, Matthias Corvinus by letter that he had kill by his own count, more than twenty three thousand Ottomans and Bulgarians during the winter campaign of fourteen sixty one to fourteen sixty two, even discounting for military self promotion, which inflates casualty counts across history with remarkable consistency. The campaign was significant. Mehmed II's response was one of the largest Ottoman military operations of the era. With his army of twenty thousand to thirty thousand men, Vlad was not able to stop the Turks from entering Wallachia. What he could do and did was make the occupation as psychologically and militarily costly as possible. The night attack at Tagovistate on june seventeenth, fourteen sixty two was Vlad's most audacious military operation. He led a night assault, his forces wearing Turkish clothing, on the main Ottoman camp with the specific objective of killing Mehmed II. Although the Sultan survived, the campaign's psychological climax was the forest of the impaled, thousands of bodies displayed outside Tilgovish to shatter enemy morale. He inflicted this type of torture on foreign and domestic enemies alike. Notably, as he retreated from a battle in fourteen six two, he left a field filled with thousands of impaled corpses as a deterrent to pursuing Ottoman forces. The numbers vary by source. Twenty thousand is the figure most commonly cited, though scholars have argued for considerably lower totals. What is not disputed is that Mehmed II, who had conquered Constantinople nine years earlier, and was accustomed to the visual language of military violence, was sufficiently affected by what he found outside Targovish to turn his army back. Mehmed II returned to Constantinople after being sickened by the sight of the impaled corpses outside Vlad's capital. Vlad had deployed terror as a strategic military instrument with a precision and a psychological sophistication that his contemporaries, whatever their horror at the method, were compelled to acknowledge as effective. The forest of the impaled was not sadism for its own sake, or not only that. It was a message composed in the language of bodies, addressed specifically to the most powerful military commander in the world, communicating a precise calculation, the cost of taking Wallachia will exceed the value of Wallachia. Mehmed turned back. The message was received. It did not save him. In August 1462, Vlad escaped Ottoman capture only to be intercepted by Hungarian forces. To provide an explanation for Vlad's imprisonment to Pope Pius II and the Venetians, Corvinus presented three letters, allegedly written by Vlad to Mehmed II. Most historians agree that the documents were forged. His supposed ally, Matthias Corvinus, imprisoned him on the basis of fabricated evidence, possibly because Corvinus had taken the money that the Pope and Venice had sent for the anti Ottoman campaign, and preferred not to have an inconveniently alive flad, complicating the diplomatic explanation of where it had gone. He remained imprisoned in Hungary for approximately twelve years, from fourteen sixty two to fourteen seventy four. The imprisonment was apparently not harsh by medieval standards. He retained servants, converted by the terms of his release to Catholicism, and apparently spent some of his captivity hunting and impaling mice and small birds, which is either a story invented to confirm his pathology or one of the more disconcerting biographical details available in this series, and I have included it because intellectual honesty compels me to. Vlad III's third reign, as Voivod of Wallachia, ended around Christmas, when Basarub the Elder returned with a new army and attacked. In the ensuing battle, Vlad is killed. In one version, he actually wins the battle, then goes to a nearby hill to observe the actions. However, Vlad's own men mistake him for an enemy and attack. In the ensuing confusion, Vlad slays five opponents before he was pierced through by many lances, and thus he was killed. Vlad the Impaler was ambushed by an Ottoman patrol and killed in fourteen seventy six north of present day Bucharest, Romania. He was reportedly decapitated, and his head was sent to the Sultan in Constantinople as a trophy. He was, depending on the birthdate calculation, forty-four or forty-five years old. He had ruled his principality for eight years in total, across three separate reigns. He had resisted the Ottoman Empire with methods that his contemporaries across Catholic Europe regarded, despite their horror, as effective, courageous, and broadly in the right cause. He had killed an extraordinary number of people through methods of unusual cruelty in the service of a political project, Wallackian independence from Ottman domination, that the subsequent history of that region suggests was ultimately unsuccessful, regardless of what he did or didn't do. Books describing Vlad's cruel acts were among the first bestsellers in the German speaking territories. The pamphlet literature that circulated about him across Europe after his death was, by the standards of the era, enormously popular, among the first mass produced, printed, sensationalist content in European history, and instrumental in shaping the image of Vlad as a monster, of inexplicable personal sadism, rather than a military commander deploying extreme methods in an extreme strategic context. That image filtered through four centuries and Bram Stoker's imagination produced Count Dracula. Count Dracula produced the castle, the Cape, the coffin, and the annual Halloween market worth approximately eleven billion dollars. History, as I have noted before, has a very fine sense of irony. All accounts of his life describe him as unrepentantly ruthless, but only the ones originating from his Saxon detractors paint him as exceptionally sadistic or somehow insane. His tenacious efforts against the Ottoman Empire won him many staunch supporters in his lifetime, not just in modern day Romania, but in the Kingdom of Hungary, Poland, the Republic of Venice, and even the Holy See. This is the central biographical tension, and it is not resolvable by choosing one side or the other. Vlad III was a military commander who used terror, deliberately, strategically, at scale, and As an instrument of state power and military deterrence. He was also a man who fought with genuine courage and genuine effectiveness against one of the most powerful empires in the world on behalf of a small principality that had almost no other instruments of defence. Both things are true. They were performed by the same person in the same campaigns, with the same hands. The Romanian tradition has largely made him a national hero. The Western European tradition has largely made him a monster. Both traditions are doing the same thing, selecting the dimension of the man that serves the story they need to tell, and setting aside the rest. He was more complicated than either tradition permits. He always was. Now the Tees Picture a ruler of a small but strategically positioned state, surrounded by vastly more powerful neighbours who each have clear designs on his territory, someone who understood with exceptional clarity that the conventional military options available to him were insufficient, that the resources of his state could not match the resources of his enemies in direct confrontation, and who therefore developed an approach to power that operated outside the conventional rules of military engagement. Picture someone for whom terror was not an end in itself, but a strategic instrument deployed deliberately, on a scale sufficient to communicate a specific message to specific audiences, calibrated to produce a specific effect. Someone who understood that the psychological dimension of power, what your enemies believe you are capable of is as militarily real as the physical dimension, and who manipulated the psychological dimension with a precision that his enemies consistently underestimated until they encountered it directly. Picture someone whose reputation in their own lifetime was deeply divided along the axis of who was looking to their own people and to the allies who shared their strategic interests. They were a defender, a strong man, a guarantor of survival in conditions where survival was not assured. To their enemies and to the neutral observers who had no stake in the outcome, they were a monster, someone whose methods exceeded what civilized governance was supposed to permit, who had crossed a line, who had made themselves illegible as a legitimate political actor through the extremity of their conduct. Picture someone whose regime fell not to the external enemies they had fought so effectively, but to a combination of internal betrayal, the treachery of supposed allies, and the specific vulnerability of a state too small and too exposed to sustain itself indefinitely against the forces arrayed against it, regardless of the calibre of its ruler. Picture someone whose image after death was immediately weaponized by enemies who found the image politically useful, by propagandists who needed a face for a specific kind of threat into something larger and simpler, and more legible than the actual person. A myth built on the real foundation of real violence, but inflated well beyond its original dimensions, and deployed for purposes that had nothing to do with the specific political context that produced the original behaviour. Who is this? It is Kim Jong un I hear from here several reactions I want to acknowledge. The first is the reaction of people who consider Kim Jong un too contemporary and too live a political figure, for the comparison to be intellectually comfortable. I understand this. The second is the reaction of people who feel the comparison is morally irresponsible, that equating a fifteenth century military commander with a twenty first century dictator who presides over one of the most systematically oppressive states in human history is a category error. I want to address this carefully. I am not claiming moral equivalence between Vlad III and Kim Jong un. The situations are different in ways that are historically significant. Vlad operated in a world of near universal political violence in which the specific methods he deployed, however extreme by his contemporaries' standards, existed on a spectrum of recognized, if condemned, practice. Kim Jong un operates in a world with an extensive international legal framework for human rights and the laws of war, which his state has systematically violated on a scale and with a comprehensiveness that places it in a different moral category. I say this clearly. What I am claiming is structural rhyme, and the rhyme, when you examine it, is one of the most precise available. Kim Jong un was born on january eighth, nineteen eighty four, though even this seemingly simple biographical fact has been disputed, with some sources suggesting 1983 or 1982 in the specific manner of authoritarian states that find biographical ambiguity politically useful. He is the third ruler of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the state founded by his grandfather Kim Il sung in 1948, which has maintained the most comprehensively isolated and internally surveilled population on earth across three generations of the same family, an achievement of institutional continuity that requires a very specific combination of ideology, violence, and the management of information. He came to power in December 2011, following the death of his father, Kim Jong il, at around 27 years old, extraordinarily young for the effective ruler of a nuclear armed state, having been educated partly in Switzerland and partly in the opaque internal world of the Pyongyang elite. He consolidated power rapidly and ruthlessly, executing his uncle Jiang Song Thak in 2013, a man who had been one of the most powerful figures in the North North Korean state, along with a number of other senior officials in a process of internal purging that eliminated potential rivals with a thoroughness that Vlad's suppression of the boyers would have recognized. The parallels begin here and extend into the strategic. First, the small state in an impossible geopolitical position. Wallachia was squeezed between the Ottoman Empire and Hungary. North Korea is positioned between China, South Korea, backed by the United States, and Japan. In both cases, the state is too small and too poor to match the conventional military capability of any of its significant neighbors. And in both cases, the reader's response has been to develop instruments of deterrence that operate outside conventional military competition, flag used impalement. Kim Jong un used nuclear weapons, but the specific instrument is different. The strategic logic if I make the cost of attacking me high enough, you will not attack me is recognizably similar. Second, the deliberate deployment of terror as a strategic instrument. Vlad's forest of the impaled was a message composed in the language of bodies, addressed to Mehmed II, communicating a calculation about the cost of occupation. Kim Jong un's nuclear and ballistic missile program is a message composed in the language of weapons technology addressed to the United States and its allies, communicating a calculation about the cost of regime change. Both men understood that the psychological dimension of deterrence, what your enemies believe you are capable of is the instrument most likely to prevent the attack that your conventional forces could not repel. Third, the internal dimension of terror. Flad's terror was not directed only at external enemies. He used impalement against his own nobility, against domestic rivals, against anyone who threatened the consolidation of central authority he was attempting to establish. Kim's terror is systematic, uninstitutional, the network of political prison camps, Quan Liso, in which an estimated one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand North Korean citizens are detained in conditions of which we have testimony from survivors, and which include forced labour, systematic violence, starvation, and execution. The scale of Kim's internal terror dwarfs Vlads, it is not comparable in scale, and I will not pretend otherwise, but the function, the use of extreme violence against internal populations as an instrument of political control, is structurally cognate. Fourth, the divided international reputation. Vlad was simultaneously regarded as a Christian hero by his European allies and as a monster by his enemies and neutral observers. Kim Jong un is simultaneously regarded as a necessary stabilizing force by China, which does not want a failed state and an American allied unified Korea on its border, and as a uniquely dangerous and illegitimate ruler by the international community represented by the United Nations, which has passed multiple resolutions condemning the DPRK's human rights record and nuclear program. The specific content of the division is different. The structural fact of a divided international reputation organized along the axis of strategic interest is recognizably similar. Fifth, the weaponised posthumous image. The pamphlet literature about Vlad was among the first mass produced political propaganda in the age of print, designed to amplify his image as a monster for specific political purposes. The imagery of Kim Jong un, the nuclear tests, the ballistic missile launches, the hairstyle, the military parades, the global saturation of a specifically constructed image of threat, is political propaganda on a global scale, some of it produced by his own state and some of it produced by his critics, but all of it operating in the same territory. The image as a strategic instrument, deployed to communicate something about power, danger, and the cost of confrontation. Where do the parallels strain? Vlad operated in a context where the violence he deployed, however extreme, was legible within the political culture of the era. Impalement was a known punishment, political executions were common. The line Vlad crossed was one of scale and consistency rather than of kind. Kim's regime operates a system of political prison camps that constitutes, by the evidence available, one of the most comprehensive ongoing violations of human rights in the contemporary world. The moral weight of these two situations is not equivalent, and the historical context does not make them equivalent. Vlad was, as best the evidence allows us to determine, primarily fighting for his principality's survival against an external existential threat. The degree to which Kim Jong un's regime represents the genuine interests of the North Korean population, as opposed to the interests of the Kim family and the governing elite, is a question that the regime's structure of information control makes very difficult to answer, and which the testimony of defectors and the evidence of the prison camps answers in a specific and damning direction. And Vlad died in battle at forty five, fighting for his throne in the field. The comparison of endings is not available, since Kim Jong un is, at the time of my recording this, alive and in power. History has not yet delivered its verdict on his arc, and I am appropriately cautious about what that verdict will look like. The verdict of lad. And I say this not because his methods were more defensible. They were not, but because his story is structurally complete in a way that Kim's is not. Because the trajectory from the hostage child in the Ottoman court through the Three Reigns and the Night Attack, and the Forest of the Impaled, and the twelve years of imprisonment, and the final battle, and the decapitated head sent to Constantinople, that trajectory is finished and available in its entirety for the historian's assessment. And because when I look at it entire, I find something that neither the vampire legend nor the monster pamphlets, nor the Romanian national hero tradition quite managed to contain a man of genuine, terrible coherence. He was what he was from the beginning, the boy who watched his father and brother killed by his domestic enemies, the hostage who spent years in the custody of his geopolitical enemies, the ruler who concluded from all of this, that the world was organized around power, and that the most effective form of power was fear, and that fear required demonstration, and that demonstration required a willingness to do things that other people would not do. He was right, in the specific and narrow sense that his methods worked. The forest of the impaled turned Mehmed II back, and Mehmed II had just conquered Constantinople. He was right that fear was the most available instrument to a small poor principality with limited conventional military options. He was also, by any standard of human decency that transcends his specific historical moment, comprehensively and monumentally wrong, and holding both of those things at once, the tactical effectiveness and the moral catastrophe, the strategic coherence, and the human horror is what it means to look at Vlad III honestly. As a historian rather than as a legend maker or a romantic. I grew up in Kingston upon Thames. We are not accustomed in Kingston upon Thames to the specific political conditions that produce a Vlad III. We are accustomed to the river and the scones and the orderly cue. I find Vlad genuinely alarming in a way that is not about the stake, but about the calculation, the cool, consistent, entirely rational decision making of a man who had concluded that terror was the language his world understood, and that he was going to speak it fluently. That is what keeps me as a historian reading the accounts at two in the morning. Not the vampire never the vampire. The man Vlad III Dracula, born probably fourteen thirty one in Sigishora, Transylvania, died december fourteen seventy six, near Bucharest, Wallachia, Voivod of Wallachia three times, known in his lifetime as a Christian hero and an unparalleled monster, simultaneously by different audiences, known to posterity primarily as the distant inspiration for a fictional vampire. He deserves better than the vampire. He does not deserve better than the history. They are, in his case, the same thing, and both are more than sufficient to keep you up at night. I'm Sophie Manners. Thank you for being here. Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally's In Search of Dracula is the most accessible serious history of the real Vlad, and remains useful despite its age. For the Romanian nationalist traditions, very different reading of the same man, the contrast is instructive. And if you are ever in Romania, the drive through the Carpathian Passes in autumn is one of the most genuinely beautiful things in Europe. The landscape I can tell you earns its reputation. Leave the Cape at home. Good night.