The Impaler Prince

By David John McAllister

In fifteenth-century Eastern Europe, Vlad III of Wallachia conducted a reign of terror. He had citizens impaled by the thousands. People were butchered on his merest whim. In his realm, and beyond it, men and women lived in dread of the Impaler Prince. And this Prince revelled in the horror he inspired.
He was a sadist, seen by some as a being of unequalled depravity, even as the Devil’s own spawn. But Vlad was also a man who had the qualities of a great leader: strength, courage, intelligence and commitment to an ideal. He was a crusader against the infidel who considered himself a true warrior of Christ.
Here, his story is told by four men whose lives overlapped with his; men who were influenced by him to the point of obsession. But it is also told by Vlad himself. The inner thoughts of the butcher of Wallachia are exposed. And there is much more to this sinister figure than many would have imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: May 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398452442

David John McAllister

David John McAllister spent three years in Bulgaria. He travelled from there to tour Romania. The author has also visited a number of other countries in Eastern Europe, having long been interested in that part of the world. Mr. McAllister has a daughter and two granddaughters. He currently lives with his partner in Cumbria.

Book preview

Chapter One

Gregor

The first time I ever entered a forest of people I nearly vomited. Fortunately I’d possessed enough self-control to keep the contents of my stomach where they belonged. It would have been unwise, as well as unmanly, to give in to such weakness, just in case the person I served heard about it. Our master, someone all too easily and frequently provoked to near uncontrollable bouts of rage, was unlikely to have viewed with equanimity any physical expression of distaste at his work, a work in which he took a profound and perverse pride. Once, when a nobleman had wrinkled his nose in disgust at the stench exuding from the horribly torn corpses impaled outside a vanquished city, the order was immediately given to fashion an especially long stake for this tactless individual. After being raised on it, twisting and screaming, and looking anything but noble, he was asked by his tormentor why he complained so, for surely at such a great height, far above those other victims, his nostrils could no longer be assailed by their offensive smell. Then there was the ring of dark laughter.

It did not always sit well with me that I served a ruler many regarded as a madman. I, however, did not think him such. Yes, he was vicious, sadistic, capricious and surprisingly thin-skinned, but he never seemed to lose his wits. He was clearly not insane, just evil. Yet there was something about his evil that differed from the common run of brutality and cruelty I had seen perpetrated upon the innocent during my days upon this often-foul earth. His malevolent predispositions appeared to lend themselves to more than mere personal gratification, or even the instilling of terror, rather it seemed as though for him evil were itself an object of veneration, a thing of true transcendence, and he felt privileged and elevated to be worshipping at its altar. It obviously gave him a heightened sense of achievement to know he had cloaked our land in darkness.

Which, when you think about it, was a little bizarre; for in the very year of our master’s birth his father had been sworn into the Order of the Dragon, promising to defend to the death this part of the world against the enemies of the Christian faith. The son also carried the torch of Christendom; indeed his commitment far surpassed the father’s whose double-dealing and pragmatic alliances with the infidel badly damaged his cause. When he was bloodily and treacherously murdered on the orders of the White Knight there were many who saw this as fitting. The son had mostly avoided such sordid bargaining, except for that one deal which he’d seen as necessary to secure the throne, and the fruits of that had soured rather quickly when, after only a few weeks, he’d found it prudent to flee his realm following its actual king’s belated return from campaign. The apparent fidelity to the cross, however, could not hide the fact that it would have been almost impossible to have found a man less Christ-like.

Yet he undoubtedly saw himself as a champion of Christ whose teachings he clearly treated with contempt, just as he saw himself as a benefactor of our country, despite terrorising, torturing and murdering so many of its people. He certainly tolerated no criticism of his policies, though it would have been difficult to find anyone stupid enough to voice such criticism openly. Having a sharpened, or sometimes not so sharpened, end of a wooden shaft inserted into your rectum, being raised up into an agony excruciating even to imagine let alone experience, living your last minutes or hours in a searing, blinding and quite literally gut churning universe of pain…well, the threat of that was something that tended to stifle opinions contrary to those of the ruler’s.

So we lived in a grip of iron. It was a grip made hard and firm because of the bitter grievances which seethed in the very heart of our leader. To be fair, he had much to be bitter about: Together with his younger brother, he had spent years at a foreign court, both boys almost certainly the constant victims of homosexual rape, their father seemingly indifferent to their fate. That must have been galling. Not many tears could have been shed by either of them when the old bastard was murdered. None the less, the death of the boys’ father must have emphasised the treacherous nature of the world, especially as their elder brother also perished, after being beaten, blinded and buried alive. And, of course, after finally managing to extricate himself from the lascivious clutches of his ‘hosts’, his first tenure as master of his realm had been short-lived. Bleak months of hiding in mist shrouded forests and swamps followed. Finally, he’d sought refuge at the court of his uncle. There he seemed happy for a time. Then the old man was butchered, decapitated at a wedding feast by his own brother. Once again flight appeared the only option. It was not surprising an already sour disposition soured even more, became positively acrid. Hatred came to course through his veins, turning the blood in them to ice, or alternately, to magma.

It must have been ice when he finally arrived at the court of the White Knight. He coolly and calmly requested sanctuary from the man primarily responsible for the eradication of a father and sibling; and surprisingly he was granted it. But times had changed: old alliances having disintegrated; the allegiances of the White Knight were no longer the same. He had quarrelled with the king of our master’s former realm, once a fast friend, and needed someone reliable to counter the influence of what was, in effect, a new foe. So the embittered refugee was made lord of a strategically important frontier kingdom, a potentially useful position for eventually reclaiming his own throne. And that chance finally came after his patron succumbed to fever when returning home from war against the infidel. Before the year witnessing this event was finished, our master was once more in control of the realm he’d so grudgingly left years before. No one there quite knew what to expect. They soon found out.

Ion

It was the Easter festival of the year of our Lord 1457. My father and I attended the feast given by the new voivode at his capital Tirgoviste. I was very apprehensive, my father less so. He seemed relatively unconcerned about the young man a seat the throne these past few months. Just before we entered the royal banqueting hall, I tried to express my concern:

Do you think we should be attending this meal? I’m not so sure our recently anointed ruler is so well disposed to people like us. I’ve heard rumours, things about him: Bad things.

So? There are always rumours. Anyway, what exactly should we fear? He needs us. The rulers always need the nobles, him especially. The last time he was voivode, his reign lasted less than two months. He knows how precarious his position is.

But he won the throne only after killing Vladislav II, and he killed him in personal combat, hacking him to pieces, a warrior like Vladislav. This is not a man of straw.

Neither was his father, and look what happened to him. Stop worrying; remember who really has the power, and what actually constitutes power.

My father seemed very pleased with himself, but I was not so sure he understood power quite as well as he thought he did. Yet despite my reservations we entered the banqueting hall.

We ate meats and fruits and cakes and drank wine. Some of the nobles and their families drank far too much wine. It made them talkative, and careless in their talk. There were certain men who began to stink of arrogance as well as the vine. I grew more and more ill at ease. I looked in the direction of our host. His face was inscrutable, but his eyes seemed to smoulder. After a time he arose from his seat. He was not tall, but he was broad and muscular, and exuded a feeling of strength, strength of the will as well as the body. He turned to one particularly voluble young man and asked him: How many voivodes have you known to rule this land in your lifetime?

The drunken fool laughed. Oh, I don’t know; perhaps twenty, perhaps more. His answer was stupid and arrogant, and it was not accurate. He could have counted on the fingers of one hand how many voivodes he’d known. The point he was, in his stupor, trying to make was that rulers came and went, while nobles like him remained, and they were the ones who truly decided who would rule and who would not. Next to such people the voivodes were as leaves blown on the breeze.

I saw our host’s face darken. He was in his mid-twenties, little older than me, but his features seemed to betray the experience of a dozen lifetimes, and a resentment to match. Suddenly, the doors to the hall burst open. A moment later dozens of soldiers were milling among us. My apprehension had proved justified. I saw my father’s bewildered face as efficient hands were laid on him, and he was bundled quickly from the room. A moment later I too was dragged away.

I spent the night in a dark, damp, stinking cell with a number of the wives and children of men whose complacency had helped to put them there. I didn’t know where my father was. I felt very alone, somehow remote from those around me. The wailing and sobbing of many of them irritated me. Some of the women were really making a meal of it. Yes, they were understandably terrified. Who knew what fate awaited come the morning. But lamentations do not change destinies. I sat silent, trying to remove my mind from this place of grief and worry. But that too was pointless. So the night passed slowly, interminably.

Eventually, morning arrived. The heavy door of the cell was opened by guards whose entry further heightened the hysteria around me. We were all bundled out and taken into the courtyard outside the castle. It was a cold, sharp dawn, and the eastern sky was portentously crimsoned. On the ground before us were three, maybe four, dozen wooden stakes. The ends of some were very sharp; others not so sharp, a few almost blunt. My sense of foreboding deepened. I saw my father in the courtyard. He still looked bewildered. The voivode was also there. His face was difficult to read. He paced to and fro for a while. Presently, he stopped, stood still, and commenced giving his men their orders. And then it began. From the rumours I had heard I was perhaps more prepared than many of the others there, although the wooden stakes in front of us were something of a clue. Frightened screams rang out, and not all from women. The elder men were dragged, one after the other, to the floor by the voivode’s henchmen. Lower garments were ripped away, the stakes driven into place. And the sounds of the screams changed: agony replaced terror. The clamour seemed to fill heaven and earth.

Those of us not subject to impalement had to watch atrocity after atrocity. The blunter stakes were waxed at their ends and reserved for those men for whom the voivode had a particular hatred, men he desired to die more slowly. My father was one of these. I could do nothing: a sword was at my throat. I saw the guards kill two youths who tried to move forward in suicidal attempts to help their kinsmen. I saw a woman beaten to death for refusing to get back on her feet after she had collapsed in shock. So I watched while my father had that blunt instrument pushed into him. But he was old, and his health was not good, so, mercifully, there was no protracted death for him. His initial spasms proved fatal. He passed quickly. The voivode seemed annoyed at that, and I thought his frustration might be taken out on me. But he just resumed giving directions to his thugs. In fact, he showed surprisingly little emotion during this obscene bloodbath. That was one of the most terrifying things of all. It was as though it meant little more to him than the felling of so many trees in the forest.

About forty people found themselves aloft before it was over. Later, there were those who said hundreds died that day, but that was unnecessary exaggeration: what actually happened was terrible enough. The courtyard bristled to fullness with the raised dead and dying, the stakes on which they were borne were smeared with blood and excrement. The air vibrated with screams too awful to describe. Some of the spared had wretched violently in disgust, and the floor was spattered with vomit. The whole place stank. Hell seemed to have appeared on earth, a most visceral hell. My fingers and toes tingled with an intensity of horror. I tried to place my mind somewhere else, but with even less success than when I was in the cell a little while before.

Presently, the voivode viewed his handiwork with an approving smile, as though he found it good, and gave the order for the removal of we survivors to his new, partially built castle at Poenari, about fifty miles away. He obviously wished to use us as slaves for the task of its completion. With both deftness and utter brutality he had decapitated the aristocracy and made it so those left were either exploited and humiliated, or cowed. He really had showed us what true power was. My father had most definitely got it wrong. Pity coupled with rage. I knew that most of those labouring on the castle would perish, especially since the majority were women, children and old men, but I, was determined on survival. After what I had witnessed my life possessed but one purpose. I had to live. Corpses cannot avenge anyone.

Vlad

I was very hungry. What I had done at Brasov had heightened my appetite, and it was always good to eat in the open air. The food was delicious, the wine sweet, and the screams of those deserving of death made an excellent, almost musical, accompaniment to the feast. These greed consumed fools had not been content with the generous trading concessions I had granted them but had desired only to continue fleecing my realm unashamedly and had then tried to undermine me by backing someone else for a position that was mine by right of birth, not to mention blood and sweat. Their agonies were well earned. Even so, I looked around, seeking signs of squeamishness from my troops; I was pleased to find them remarkably complacent; even the servants waiting upon the banquet table wore bland faces. But there was a look of disgust from a visiting nobleman from Poland who had accompanied me on my mission of vengeance.

Is there a problem? I asked him, restraining my tone.

How can you stand the smell? All that congealing blood and the emptied bowels…it’s nauseating, he replied in a most supercilious way, while looking at me like I was someone who ate his own shit.

Just enjoy the food, I said, trying to dampen the heating rage inside me. Partake of my hospitality.

After a few minutes I motioned one of my most trusted men over to whisper an order in his ear. On hearing it he stepped back from me and smiled. I smiled in return.

Comparatively little time passed before he returned with three other men, all carrying a long, long stake, much longer than those with which I’d impaled the Saxon scum from Brasov.

You were complaining about the smell, my friend, I said to the visiting Pole. Perhaps this will help. I nodded to those in the know. The man was grabbed and dragged to the ground. He kicked and struggled violently, but to no avail. You bastard, he shouted at me.

Such ingratitude, I replied.

There then issued from him a stream of profanity I found rather distasteful. I was glad when it was replaced by his screams of pain once the stake was inserted.

Up, up, up, I said, and he was raised, pride of place, above the other suffering and dead, atop his elegantly long instrument of destruction.

His face was the most beautiful picture of human agony; his screams sweeter than the songs of Orpheus. I watched him writhe for a gratifying span of time. After drinking fully of the scene, I asked him why he continued to object so, for was he not above the smell which had so offended his sensibilities; and as though in reply his whole body gave an almost comical spasm. I could not help but laugh.

I resumed eating…and drinking. Some idiot later spread the rumour that my goblet was filled with blood from those perishing before me. Many believed this absurd calumny. Did people really think I was capable of such a disgusting practice? Did they actually regard me as some foul creature who consumed human blood? Sometimes I wondered whether those I governed were worthy of my efforts on their behalf. The Saxon merchants and their hangers-on had bled my realm dry for years, now their commercial tyranny was ended. Similarly, two years previously, I had, in one swift action, broken the grip of the boyars. But there was little gratitude from my other subjects for this. I knew that most of the peasants were less than enthusiastic about my reign. Well, I certainly wasn’t going to tolerate grumblings from that stinking, simple-minded, unlettered rabble.

I felt a new rage rising and tried to subdue it lest it spoil my pleasure in the day’s work. I dwelt on the scene before me which still radiated its own beauty: the contorted bodies providing ornaments of pain and blood and death at the foot of Timpa Hill, while flame and smoke rose from the suburbs beyond. Time passed in this delightful way, but as the westering sun lengthened the shadows, screams turned to groans, writhing to twitching, and more of the dying became the dead. I grew bored. Draining the last of the wine in my goblet, I got up from my chair and gave orders for the servants to begin gathering together the things that needed to be taken back to camp. Before leaving, I took a long look at the tableau for which I was responsible. For a full minute I stood stock still in the slanting light and cooling air, and at the end of that minute gave my verdict of on the impaled of Brasov: Leeches.

The Crow

I was not particularly surprised to hear about the massacre at Brasov, the city’s leading citizens having backed a rival of Vlad’s. Also, its merchants had been more than just a little greedy in their commercial dealings with the kingdom of Wallachia. None the less, his retribution was terrible. But, as many knew, some to their cost, he’d exacted terrible retribution before. He was most passionate in vengeance. No, I wasn’t surprised.

I understood him as much as anyone could understand someone like him. After all, we were cousins; though I did not unduly dwell on that. And I knew myself to possess more insight than the overwhelming majority of men; also, we did have certain things in common. We had both lost a father and elder brother, and each of us had endured a period of captivity. It is natural to want revenge after you have been held against your will and suffered some of the humiliations that stem from being powerless. Yet many powerless people simply remain such and are downtrodden until the day they finally depart the earth. Vlad and I, however, were elevated to positions of authority. For him the memory of having once been subject to those he regarded as his inferiors was especially galling. When chances came to right wrongs, real or imagined, he indulged them, and in the most sadistic fashion. I did find his penchant for anal impalement disgusting. But, then again, I’d never been sodomised by Ottoman gaolers. My worst moment during imprisonment was hearing of my brother Lazlo’s execution, bad enough, especially as I thought at the time it might foreshadow my own demise. But I could barely imagine how things were for Vlad, raped, quite possibly every other day, held face down by the sweat-soaked or nauseatingly perfumed, men who saw a boy like him a dish too delectable to resist. His bitterness and rage were understandable. However, he seemed to take his resentment out on anyone who even remotely got on the wrong side of him.

I tried to be more focused. In this part of the world a man can have enemies enough without carelessly creating more. And this was a time for unity in the face of the infidel. The same empire that had spawned Vlad’s captors and tormentors had driven into Europe after the fall of Constantinople. My father had fought them bravely, holding the city of Belgrade, temporarily checking their advances. Shortly thereafter he perished from a raging fever, a true hero and athlete of Christ. His chief companion, the 71-year-old John of Capistrano, a monk and surprisingly effective soldier, echoed the language used after the fall of Constantinople, which in turn harked back to that of Saint Jerome when, over a thousand years earlier, in Bethlehem, he heard of the fall of Rome to Alaric’s Visigoths: The light of the world is extinguished. John himself died soon after issuing this paean, succumbing to the same fever that had taken his hero.

While at the very door of death my father, the White Knight, had perceptively stressed the need for unity: Do not quarrel with each other. If you should waste your energies in altercations, you will seal your own fate as well as dig the grave of our country. There are those who say these words were merely attributed to him, that they are apocryphal, but I have never doubted that he spoke them. Nor have I ever questioned the account relayed of the glowing tribute paid by his mortal enemy Mehmet II: Although he was my foe I feel grief over his death, because the world has never seen such a man. Indeed it has not. As other ‘great men’ motivated by gain and self-interest, bickered and schemed, my father alone pursued an ideal for its own sake, and perished in its pursuit.

Two months or so before his death there appeared in the sky a portent, a thing of dreadful beauty which trailed its luminous hair across the summer blue. It was a golden streak of cold celestial flame that, for a time, dominated the vault of heaven. Men were in awe. I wondered if it appeared above to warn us of the White Knight’s impending doom. Perhaps; or perhaps it heralded his successful defence of Belgrade. It really could have foretold either good or ill, and there were some who interpreted the sight one way, some another. I was never quite sure. There were those too who simply thought it some pointless, albeit spectacular, freak of the skies. But I knew the glorious object to be more than that. And I knew Vlad also was enormously impressed by the thing he saw, and fervently believed that its appearance was providential, marking his own imminent seizure of the Wallachian throne. He later minted a coin which while displaying his country’s emblem of the eagle on one side, had on the other this comet with its six floating rays. The symbol of my family was the raven, so I adopted the appellation Corvinus; thus Matthias Hunyadi became more commonly known as Matthias Corvinus, often referred to as the Crow. Vlad, however, was destined to be named neither the eagle nor the comet, but rather Tepes, the Impaler.

Jacob

Lately, I had been worried about the prospect of having to leave the monastery. I was, after all, very content living within its walls. But there were rumours that the local bishop Sigismund was extremely irritated at the monks’ adoption of Saint Bernard’s reforms for the Benedictine Order here, and was threatening to drive us all out. It seemed faintly ridiculous, and there were those among us who said that if the bishop did want to rid the building of its monks, then that had nothing to do with the reforms of Saint Bernard; he simply wanted the monastery for himself. It was hard to believe that a man of his position could covet in such a way, breaking the Tenth Commandment, but it was the likeliest explanation. The greedy and corrupt do sometimes rise to attain high authority, even in the Church.