Dracula's Wars: Vlad The Impaler and His Rivals

By James Waterson

The real Dracula was far from Bram Stoker’s well-mannered aristocrat. Better known as Vlad the Impaler, he was named for his favoured execution method: running a spear through his victim’s lower body, then standing them upright so it skewered their vital organs. In a world ruled by petty tyrants and constantly at war, the young Dracula was held hostage by the Turks while his father was assassinated and his brother was buried alive. Finally released, Dracula conducted an almighty purge, surrounding his palace with noblemen impaled on stakes. Then he turned his attention to military campaigns against the Turks and Bulgars to consolidate his power. Yet to Romanians and the Pope he was a hero and liberator, fighting to protect his kingdom and countrymen from invasion in a complex and treacherous time. And, as an initiate in the Order of the Dragon, Dracula also played a vital (if not entirely noble) part in the fight against the Ottoman war machine. In this full account of Vlad Dracula, James Waterson details the good and the bad of this warlord prince, offering a fascinating insight into the violent end of the Middle Ages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jul 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9780750969161

James Waterson

James Waterson was born into a London family of Royal Marines and Paratroopers. Fatherly advice however steered him away from a military career and into academia and teaching. He is a graduate of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and received his Masters degree from Dundee University. He worked and taught in the United States and China for a number of years and now divides his time between the Middle East and Italy whilst trying to makes ends meet. The Ismaili Assassins is his second book and grew out of his travels in Iran. His first book, The Knights of Islam, a history of the slave soldiers of Islam, was published in 2007 by Greenhill Books. He continues to work at producing a life of the Crusader Bohemond of Taranto but knows it will never be finished.

Book preview

For RO&DO&37

The old centuries had, and have, powers of

their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.

Jonathan Harker’s Journal, 15 May

Bram Stoker, Dracula

We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us … but what if we are only an afterglow of them?

J.G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Szekelys – and the Dracula as their heart’s blood, their brains, and their swords – can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Habsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach. The warlike days are over.

Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace; and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told.¹

I have acknowledged the intellect, passion, humour and numerous kindnesses of two of my former tutors at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the introductions of a total of four previous volumes. I am pleased to once again have the opportunity to express my ongoing debt to Dr Brian Williams and to Dr David Morgan. I thank the former for having set the undergraduate essay ‘Discuss Ottoman relations with the Serbs from the Battle of the River Maritz to the fall of Constantinople’ and the latter for expounding his theory ‘that you just cannot avoid the Mongols’ on day one of Eurasian History 101, which has shaped my approach to the subject ever since, and it is a pleasure to once again prove him right; for if the nascent Ottoman state was not the direct result of the collapse of the Mongol-created Sultanate of Rum then I am not entirely sure what it was.

To these superb teachers and academics I would like to add a third and somewhat belated acknowledgement. Dr Colin Heywood introduced me to the later Ottoman Empire and I can give him no higher praise than that given during a review of one of his works on Bosnia by the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies: ‘another example of his versatility and of thoughtful and careful scholarship in both its conceptual and practical aspects, unlike much Ottoman scholarship, Heywood’s prose is always a pleasure to read.’ It was also always a pleasure to listen to Dr Heywood lecture.

I would like to thank my indulgent Dubai office colleagues, Ian Milburn and Larry Neal, for their genially unimpeachable forbearance at yet another retelling of how Grousset’s classic tripartite chronology of Crusade and Jihad in the Holy Land, L’anarchie Musulmane: L’equilibre: L’anarchie Franque² could be applied mutatis mutandis to the medieval and early modern history of the Balkans as a scheme, with Dracula as both an identifiable point in its evolution, and an exemplar of the anarchic response of the medieval Europeans to the challenge of the Ottomans in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Their restraint and nodding encouragement while I expounded such ideas has led, in no small part, to the production of this volume with its overarching theme of ‘L’anarchie Européen: L’equilibre: L’anarchie Turc.’

I cannot give enough thanks to His Majesty, King Abdullah II of Jordan for his hospitality at several points in the last year and for the simple pleasure of our discussions on matters military, Middle Eastern and medieval.

In every book that I have produced thus far I have expressed my love and gratitude to my wife, Michele. This will never change; she remains the principal delight of my life.

Notes

1    Count Dracula, Johnathan Harker’s Journal, 8 May. Stoker, B., Dracula, 1897.

2    Grousset, R., Histoire des Croisades et du Royaume Franc de Jerusalem, Tome I: L’anarchie Musulmane et la Monarchie Franque, Plon, Paris, 1934; Histoire des Croisades et du Royaume Franc de Jerusalem, Tome II: Monarchie Franque et Monarchie Musulman l’equilibre, Plon, Paris, 1935; Histoire des Croisades et du Royaume franc de Jérusalem, Tome III: La Monarchie Musulmane et l’anarchie Franque, Plon, Paris, 1935.

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

A Note on Transliteration, Titles and Dates

Timeline

Maps

Introduction: Why Dracula?

1  An Ottoman Creation? The Europe into which Vlad Tepes was Born

2  The Dragon’s Son: Vlad II Dracul’s Deeds and the Youth of Dracula

3  To Catch a Sultan: Dracula’s First Reign

4  The Fall: Dracula’s Loss of Wallachia

5  Death and Resurrection: Dracula’s Return to Power, Murder and Immortalisation

6  Aftermath, History and Myth: The Legacies of Dracula and his Rivals

Further Reading

Plates

Copyright

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION, TITLES AND DATES

There are many, many ways of rendering both Turkish and the Cyrillic languages of the Balkans into English. I have generally opted for the most commonly used ‘short’ forms of names rather than the more scholarly forms, simply because the vast swathe of names that the reader encounters whilst reading any history of the medieval Balkans means that any familiar faces are welcome.

For city and country names I have used the nomenclature of the period. The Balkan cities are given their European names rather than Turkish names unless that change has remained ‘permanent’ (or has at least lasted down to our day) as this is how they are most commonly denoted in other texts that the reader might be led to review.

Diacritical marks have generally been omitted for the sake of clarity, and uncommon or unique terms have been italicised; for example, voivode, a vassal prince.

TIMELINE

MAPS

INTRODUCTION:

WHY DRACULA?

The nosferatu do not die like the bee when he sting once. He is only stronger; and being stronger, have yet more power to work evil. This vampire which is amongst us is of himself so strong in person as twenty men; he is of cunning more than mortal … he is brute, and more than brute; he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not …¹

Vlad Tepes or Vlad Dracula was, in many ways, a walking shadow and a poor player that did strut and fret his hour upon a stage filled with characters who outshone him by far. His contemporaries included such luminaries as Mehemmed II, Jonas Hunyadi and George Skanderbeg.

So, why review his life and deeds?

The answer to this lies in the very nature of Dracula. He epitomises the petty tyrants that made up so many of his predecessors, successors and rivals and who composed the body politic of the Balkans in the medieval age. Equally, his dubious vassalages to this or that overlord are no more or less complex than those of virtually every other minor Balkan prince of the same period, and can act as a study in the way that Eastern Europe reacted to the rapid incursions and stunning victories of the Ottomans in this same period. His tactics, approach to warfare and the armies that he built are likewise a version in miniature of the military changes that were occurring right across Europe in the fifteenth century.

Also, Dracula’s tale is full of feats of daring and ferocity, and that should be reason enough to look at his life. He was also perhaps cursed, as the Chinese phrase has it, to ‘live in interesting times’ and the action in which he was enmeshed, in order that we can fully comprehend it, requires us to look beyond the Balkans and to other deeds undertaken both in the further reaches of Western Europe and in Asia Minor and the Levant.

Almost continual warfare raged across Europe during the period 1300 to 1500 with France, England and Scotland confronting each other during the Hundred Years War, the Wars of the Roses torturing England, and politico-religious wars blazing across the rest of Europe. The confrontations between Muslims and Christians in the Balkans and in Spain, and between the Ottomans and their Turkish ‘cousins’ the Mamluks of Egypt and the Turcomen of Iran and Anatolia, as well as the last bitter flaring up of the great Turko-Mongolic conflagrations of the thirteenth century, made the period one of true political and military revolution.

Dracula died an ignoble death, little mourned and apparently of little political contemporary consequence. That he has been heard of since, and indeed achieved an apparent immortality, is of course due largely to his metamorphosis at the hands of Bram Stoker into the vampire count of Victorian horror fantasy.

Like Dracula, the legacy of the medieval age has also reverberated down into the modern world. It has continued to light the way to dusty death for so many in the Balkans, particularly at the beginning and at the end of the twentieth century. This means that the period, the individuals who shaped its history and their deeds remain of vital interest. I have aimed, in this volume, to make sense of the actions of Dracula and his rivals. This is no easy task; it is often hard in the history of the Balkans to discern an intelligible pattern of intent among its rulers or to ascertain reason or morality. Despite this and the sometimes apparently random, chaotic and near-nihilistic acts that these characters not infrequently undertook, I hope I have revealed their acts as being much more than simply ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing’.

Note

1    Van Helsing, Mina Harker’s Journal, 30 September. Stoker, B., Dracula, 1897.

1

AN OTTOMAN CREATION?

THE EUROPE INTO WHICH

VLAD TEPES WAS BORN

He may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be some one of the household who bid him to come; though afterwards he can come as he please.¹

The world that Vlad Dracula was born into was one of petty tyrants, and even today, after the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the collapse of the Communist Bloc in the late twentieth century, we are once again in a period defined by ‘Balkanisation’. Indeed, the history of the region has, almost perpetually, been defined by fragmentation with, at best, non-cooperation between neighbours and, at worst, straightforward hostility.

It was not always so but the progressive disasters that struck the Byzantine Empire from the close of the eleventh century onwards through to the Latin–Venetian Crusader conquest of Constantinople in 1204 and the spectacular implosion of a Serbian successor state after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 left behind a prickly assortment of nationalities, faiths and affiliations with little cohesion, led far too often by men of narrow vision and debased motives.

The tenuous hold of the Latin emperors of Constantinople, and of their Venetian allies, ended in 1261 when Alexius Strategopoulos, a general of Michael Palaiologos the Emperor of Nicaea, whilst reconnoitring in the vicinity of Constantinople discovered that the city was virtually undefended. The majority of the city’s Latin and Venetian forces were off besieging an island in the Black Sea, and whilst Strategopoulos did not exactly stroll into Constantinople he was certainly the recipient of a great deal of help and advice from the populace and was unhindered by any defence worth the name by the Latin forces. A small detachment of Nicaeans entered through an undefended portal in the land walls and opened the city to the main army.

Baldwin II, who had been emperor for some thirty-three years, fled and the Latin Empire died quietly:

By the providence of God the city of Constantine again became subject to the Emperor of the Romans, in a just and fitting way, on the 25th July, in the fourth indiction, in the 6769th year since the creation of the world, after being held by the enemy for fifty-eight years.²

The hyperbole of the Byzantine historian George Akropolites notwithstanding, nothing can disguise the fact that Michael had, in fact, gained little more than the opportunity to regain the seat of his illustrious predecessors. No Byzantine emperor would ever again wield the power of a Justinian or even an Alexius and the city was a shadow of its former glory.

Indeed, the events of 1261 presaged much of what was to occur in the Balkans throughout the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Michael’s success against the Latins was due largely to his alliance with Bulgaria and a treaty with Genoa, by which he granted it privileges similar to those enjoyed by the Venetians in the former Byzantine Empire. A Genoese fleet ferried the Nicaean army across the Straits to Thrace, and that it did so was no surprise. Bitter rivalry between the two main Italian maritime republics in the eastern Mediterranean was a feature of the entire crusading period³ and it would continue to damage European attempts to meet the challenge of the Ottomans in the eastern Mediterranean in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries despite repeated papal interdictions.⁴

Furthermore, the forces of the restored Byzantine Empire remained weak. Improvements in the economic condition and security of Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries appear to have been matched by a downturn in the economy of the eastern Mediterranean. There was a lack of ‘external security’ in the Balkans following the loss of Byzantium’s eastern Anatolian colonies after 1071, and through the incursions of the Bulgars into the Danube valley in the 1180s and the Vlachs throughout the Balkans in the 1190s. In fact the Greek Empire’s agricultural production and manufacturing output actually grew over the eleventh century, but there was an economic decline in the empire in the same period that became so acute that the first debasement of gold coinage since the fourth century was made in this period. This economic deterioration was related to a rise in the influence of the Byzantine aristocracy, whose acquisition of lands made the peasantry dependent on local ‘feudal’ lords and made direct revenue collection by the state increasingly difficult.⁵

The effects of the economic embarrassment of the state can be seen in the empire’s naval dependence on Venice in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, leading to its concession of toll-free passage through Byzantine waters following Venetian ravaging of the Greek coastline and islands in 1125 and a further extension of rights following more Venetian ‘gunboat diplomacy’ in 1175. By the time of the Massacre of the Latins in 1182 there were approximately 60,000 Venetians in Constantinople.

The Latin Empire’s financial woes between 1204 and 1261 are a good indication of what Michael was winning back for the Greeks. It was throughout its brief life chronically short of manpower and money and appears to have been unattractive even to adventurers from the West. By example, during the poverty-racked reign of the last emperor 1,000 Latins were in the service of the Saljuq Turks against the Mongols. Pope Gregory IX even resorted to pleading with the Count of Brittany to crusade for the Latin emperor rather than for Outremer. Henry of Romania neatly summarised the situation: ‘there is nothing lacking to [our] complete possession of the Empire save an abundance of Latins.’

Given the above it is not surprising that the restoration of Michael Palaiologos to Constantinople depleted Byzantium’s Anatolian border of troops. Between 1204 and 1261 there was a definite lessening in the westward movement of Turkish nomads in Anatolia as the Byzantine ruling elite’s enforced Anatolian exile in Nicaea and Trebizond required them to defend the region, and to at least attempt to reduce a rapacious tax regime that had been applied to the peasantry of Anatolia. These crushing taxes had commonly caused desperate peasants to join the nomad Turks.

This partial renascence of Byzantine Anatolia ended abruptly with the move back across the Bosporus of the Byzantine aristocracy. The westward movement of the Turkish war bands that thrived in the hinterland between the Byzantine Empire and the Saljuq Sultanate of Rum began afresh. Later, of course, the Byzantines’ internecine struggles for power would even lead to active invitations to these same Turkish nomads to fight in the Greek civil wars.

Byzantium was a hollow shell of its former self. Its territories embraced a corner of north-western Anatolia, Thrace, Macedonia, Thessaly and a smattering of small holdings in the Peloponnese. Most of Greece still lay in Latin Frank hands, and all of the north-western Balkans was lost irretrievably. Venice and Catholic Hungary controlled Dalmatia and Croatia, and even Michael’s ally, Bulgaria, remained wary of too close an alliance with the old Orthodox power. That the Latin Empire of Constantinople failed to last in fact had less to do with a renascence of Greek power than a failure on the part of the Latins to ally themselves with the Vlacho-Bulgar states and ‘diplomatic ineptitude’⁶ in dealings with the native populace. Any actions of the Latin emperor were also hampered by a constitution that favoured the Venetians and fief holders far more than the central authority. A not dissimilar position faced the Byzantine emperors in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The power of the aristocracy had been enhanced by the simple fact that the emperors needed every ounce of Greek support they could gather, and the empire resembled more and more the feudal entities by which it was now surrounded.

Of course the Latin Empire had failed to gain the support of the emerging Balkan states because of what we might today term confessionalism, but what was to the medieval mind a much more straightforward question of faith, salvation and identity. Identity was a potent concept in the Middle Ages and particularly so in the Balkans. The sometimes vicious attempts to suppress religious dissent in this period, and the lack of a unified and coherent response between Catholic and Orthodox Europe to the Ottoman threat, only make sense as long as we keep this idea of identity in mind. Medieval communities were defined by their religion, and religion also demarcated each community’s political allegiances. Leaders who ‘switched’ their allegiances from Catholic to Orthodox or vice versa risked losing all allegiance from their lords and from the ‘peasant base’. It was not for nothing that Thomas Aquinas compared those who slipped from the true faith to counterfeiters, as both eroded the secular foundations of society.⁷

A distinct religious and cultural identity seems to have been arrived at by Western Europeans during the High Middle Ages. This appears as an element of the changes to the Western European mindset over the Crusades period. There was a change from the desire to make pilgrimage to the Holy Places to one of the ‘holy right’ of the Latins as holders of the only true Christian creed to conquer Christendom and beyond for the Catholic faith. As an example of this, Robert of Clari justified the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the need to remove the relics from the schismatic Greeks to the safety of the West.⁸

Furthermore, the outlook of Western Europeans appears to have been affected profoundly by a notion of ‘universal’ Crusades. Helmond of Bosau discussed the attitude of the Second Crusade’s participants: ‘to its initiators it seemed that one part of the army should be sent to the eastern regions, another to Spain and a third against the Slavs ...’ Certainly during the