“Once upon a time there was a bloodthirsty prince Dracula. He impaled people, roasted them on coals, boiled their heads in a cauldron, ripped off their skin alive, chopped them into pieces and drank blood from them … "- said Abraham Van Helsing, leafing through a book about the life-threatening crimes of a formidable vampire. Many people remember this episode from F. Coppola's film based on Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula", and perhaps it was from this film that they learned that Dracula was not a fictional character.
The famous vampire has a prototype - the prince of Wallachia Vlad Dracula Tepes (Tepes - from the Romanian tepea - stake, literally - a piercer, a planter on a stake), who ruled this Romanian principality in the middle of the 15th century. Indeed, this man is called to this day “the great monster”, who eclipsed Herod and Nero with his atrocities.
You probably already know all the details of this historical and fantastic figure inside and out? Let's just summarize what is known.
Let's leave on Stoker's conscience that he “turned” a real historical figure into a mythical monster, and let's try to figure out how justified the accusations of cruelty are and whether Dracula committed all those atrocities, compared to which the vampire addiction to the blood of young girls seems innocent fun. The deeds of the prince, widely disseminated by the literary works of the 15th century, are indeed chilling. A terrible impression is produced by stories about how Dracula loved to feast, watching the torment of the impaled victims, how he burned the tramps whom he himself invited to the feast, how he ordered to hammer nails into the heads of foreign ambassadors who did not take off their hats, and so on, so on … the imagination of the reader, who first learned about the atrocities of this medieval ruler, arises the image of a ferocious ruthless man with a piercing gaze of unkind eyes,reflecting the black essence of the villain. Such an image is quite consistent with German book engravings that capture the features of a tyrant, but the engravings appeared after Vlad's death.
But those who happen to see a lifetime portrait of Dracula, practically unknown in Russia, will be disappointed - the person depicted on the canvas clearly does not "pull" the bloodthirsty sadist and maniac. A small experiment showed: people who did not know who exactly is depicted on the canvas often called the "unknown" beautiful, unhappy … Let's try to forget about the reputation of the "great monster" for a minute, look at the portrait of Dracula with an open mind. First of all, Vlad's large, suffering eyes attract attention. And the unnatural thinness of his haggard, yellowish face is also striking. Considering the portrait, it can be assumed that this man suffered severe trials and hardships, that he is more of a martyr than an executioner …
Vlad led Wallachia at the age of twenty-five, in 1456, in very difficult times for the principality, when the Ottoman Empire expanded its possessions in the Balkans, conquering one country after another. Serbia and Bulgaria have already come under Turkish oppression, Constantinople fell, and a direct threat hung over the Romanian principalities.
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The prince of little Wallachia successfully resisted the aggressor and even attacked the Turks himself, making a campaign in the territory of occupied Bulgaria in 1458. One of the goals of the campaign was to free and resettle the Bulgarian peasants who professed Orthodoxy on the lands of Wallachia. Europe enthusiastically welcomed Dracula's victory. Nevertheless, a big war with Turkey was inevitable. Wallachia hindered the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, and Sultan Mehmed II decided to overthrow the unwanted prince by military means.
The younger brother of Dracula Radu the Handsome, who converted to Islam and became the favorite of the Sultan, claimed the throne of Wallachia. Realizing that he could not alone resist the largest Turkish army since the conquest of Constantinople, Dracula turned to the allies for help. Among them were Pope Pius II, who promised to give money for the crusade, and the young Hungarian king Matthias Corvin, who called Vlad “his beloved and faithful friend,” and leaders of other Christian countries. All of them verbally supported the Wallachian prince, however, when trouble struck in the summer of 1462, Dracula was left alone with a formidable enemy.
The situation was desperate, and Vlad did his best to withstand this unequal battle. He conscripted the entire male population of the principality from the age of twelve into the army, used the scorched earth tactics, leaving the enemy with burnt-out villages where it was impossible to replenish food supplies, and waged a partisan war. Another weapon of the prince was the panic that he instilled in the invaders. Defending his land, Dracula ruthlessly exterminated enemies, in particular, he impaled prisoners, using execution against the Turks, which was very “popular” in the Ottoman Empire itself.
The Turkish-Wallachian war in the summer of 1462 went down in history with the famous night attack, during which up to fifteen thousand Ottomans were destroyed. The sultan was already standing at the capital of the principality of Targovishte, when Dracula, along with seven thousand of his soldiers, entered the enemy camp, intending to kill the Turkish leader and thereby stop the aggression. Vlad failed to carry out his daring plan to the end, but an unexpected night attack caused panic in the enemy camp and, as a result, very heavy losses. After a bloody night, Mehmed II left Wallachia, leaving part of the troops to Radu the Beautiful, who himself had to wrest power from the hands of his older brother. Dracula's brilliant victory over the Sultan's troops turned out to be useless: Vlad defeated the enemy, but was unable to resist the "friends". Betrayal of the Moldavian prince Stefan, cousin and friend of Dracula,unexpectedly sided with the Radu, turned out to be a turning point in the war. Dracula could not fight on two fronts and retreated to Transylvania, where the troops of another "friend" who came to the rescue, the Hungarian king Matthias Corvin, were waiting for him.
And then something strange happened. In the midst of negotiations, Corwin ordered the arrest of his "loyal and beloved friend", accusing him of secret correspondence with Turkey. In letters allegedly intercepted by the Hungarians, Dracula begged Mehmed II for forgiveness, offered his help in the capture of Hungary and the Hungarian king himself. Most modern historians consider the letters to be grossly fabricated forgery: they are written in a manner unusual for Dracula, the proposals put forward in them are absurd, but most importantly, the originals of the letters, these most important evidence that decided the fate of the prince, were "lost", and only their copies in Latin have survived given in the "Notes" of Pius II. Of course, Dracula's signature was not on them. Nevertheless, Vlad was arrested at the end of November 1462, chained and sent to the Hungarian capital Buda.where he was imprisoned for about twelve years without trial or investigation.
What made Matthias agree with the absurd accusations and cruelly deal with his ally, who at one time helped him to ascend the Hungarian throne? The reason turned out to be commonplace. According to the author of the Hungarian Chronicle, Antonio Bonfini, Matthias Corvin received forty thousand guilders from Pope Pius II for the crusade, but did not use this money for its intended purpose. In other words, the king, who was constantly in need of money, simply pocketed a significant amount and shifted the blame for the disrupted campaign to his vassal, who allegedly was playing a double game and intriguing with the Turks.
However, the accusations of high treason of a man known in Europe for his implacable struggle with the Ottoman Empire, the one who almost killed and actually put to flight the conqueror of Constantinople Mehmed II, sounded rather absurd. Wanting to understand what really happened, Pius II instructed his envoy in Buda, Nicholas Modrusse, to sort out what was happening on the spot.
King of Hungary Matthias Corvin. The youngest son Janos Hunyadi loved to be portrayed in the manner of a Roman emperor, with a laurel wreath on his head. He was considered the patron saint of science and art. During the reign of Matthias, the expenses of his court rose sharply, and the king looked for ways to replenish the treasury - from increasing taxes to using money donated by the Vatican for the crusades. The prince was accused of cruelty, which he allegedly showed towards the Saxon population of the Hungarian kingdom of Transylvania. Matthias Korvin personally told about the atrocities of his vassal, and then presented a certain anonymous document, in which the bloody adventures of the "great monster" were reported in detail, with German punctuality.
The denunciation spoke of tens of thousands of tortured civilians and for the first time mentioned anecdotes about beggars burned to death, about impaled monks, how Dracula ordered to nail caps to the heads of foreign ambassadors, and other similar stories. An unknown author compared the Wallachian prince with the tyrants of antiquity, claiming that during his reign Wallachia resembled "a forest of those planted on a stake", accused Vlad of unprecedented cruelty, but at the same time did not care about the credibility of his story. There are a lot of contradictions in the text of the denunciation, for example, the names of the settlements given in the document, where 20-30 thousand (!) People were allegedly destroyed, still cannot be identified by historians.
What was the documentary basis for this denunciation? We know that Dracula actually made several raids into Transylvania, destroying the conspirators hiding there, among whom were the applicants for the Wallachian throne. But, despite these local military operations, the prince did not break off commercial relations with the Transylvanian Saxon cities of Sibiu and Brasov, which is confirmed by Dracula's business correspondence of that period. It is very important to note that, in addition to the denunciation that appeared in 1462, there is not a single earlier evidence of the massacres of civilians on the territory of Transylvania in the 50s of the 15th century. It is impossible to imagine how the annihilation of tens of thousands of people, which took place regularly for several years,could have gone unnoticed in Europe and would not have been reflected in the chronicles and diplomatic correspondence of those years.
Consequently, Dracula's raids into Wallachian enclaves, located on the territory of Transylvania, at the time of their implementation were considered in European countries as an internal affair of Wallachia and did not cause any public outcry. Based on these facts, it can be argued that the anonymous document, which first reported on the atrocities of the "great monster", was untrue and turned out to be another fake, fabricated by order of King Matthias following the "letter to the Sultan" in order to justify the illegal arrest of Vlad Dracula. For Pope Pius II - and he was a close friend of the German emperor Frederick III and, therefore, sympathized with the Saxon population of Transylvania - such explanations were enough. He did not interfere in the fate of a high-ranking prisoner, leaving the decision of the Hungarian king in force. But Matthias Korvin himself, feeling the precariousness of the charges brought forward by him, continued to discredit Dracula, languishing in prison, resorting, in modern terms, to the services of the "mass media". Poem by Michael Beheim, created on the basis of denunciation, engravings depicting a cruel tyrant, "sent around the world for everyone to see", and, finally, many printings of early printed brochures (of which thirteen have come down to us) under the general title "About one great monster" - all this was supposed to form a negative attitude towards Dracula, turning him from a hero to a villain. Apparently, Matthias Korvin was not going to free his captive, dooming him to a slow death in prison. But fate gave Dracula the opportunity to survive another takeoff.continued to discredit Dracula languishing in dungeon, resorting, in modern terms, to the services of the "media". Poem by Michael Beheim, created on the basis of denunciation, engravings depicting a cruel tyrant, "sent around the world for everyone to see," and, finally, many printings of early printed brochures (of which thirteen have come down to us) under the general title "About one great monster" - all this was supposed to form a negative attitude towards Dracula, turning him from a hero to a villain. Apparently, Matthias Korvin was not going to free his captive, condemning him to a slow death in prison. But fate gave Dracula the opportunity to survive another takeoff.continued to discredit Dracula languishing in dungeon, resorting, in modern terms, to the services of the "media". Poem by Michael Beheim, created on the basis of denunciation, engravings depicting a cruel tyrant, "sent around the world for everyone to see," and, finally, many printings of early printed brochures (of which thirteen have come down to us) under the general title "About one great monster" - all this was supposed to form a negative attitude towards Dracula, turning him from a hero to a villain. Apparently, Matthias Korvin was not going to free his captive, condemning him to a slow death in prison. But fate gave Dracula the opportunity to survive another takeoff.depicting a cruel tyrant, "sent out all over the world for everyone to see," and, finally, many copies of early printed brochures (of which thirteen have come down to us) under the general title "About one great monster" - all this should have formed a negative attitude towards Dracula, turning him from a hero to a villain. Apparently, Matthias Korvin was not going to free his captive, dooming him to a slow death in prison. But fate gave Dracula the opportunity to survive another takeoff.depicting a cruel tyrant, "sent around the world for everyone to see," and, finally, many copies of early printed brochures (of which thirteen have come down to us) under the general title "About one great fiend" - all this should have formed a negative attitude towards Dracula, turning him from a hero to a villain. Apparently, Matthias Korvin was not going to free his captive, dooming him to a slow death in prison. But fate gave Dracula the opportunity to survive another takeoff. Matthias Korvin was not going to free his captive, condemning him to a slow death in prison. But fate gave Dracula the opportunity to survive another takeoff. Matthias Korvin was not going to free his captive, condemning him to a slow death in prison. But fate gave Dracula the opportunity to survive another takeoff.
During the reign of Radu the Beautiful Wallachia completely submitted to Turkey, which could not but disturb the new Pope Sixtus IV. Probably, it was the intervention of the pontiff that changed the fate of Dracula. The Prince of Wallachia actually showed that he could withstand the Turkish threat, and therefore it was Vlad who was to lead the Christian army into battle in a new crusade. The conditions for the release of the prince from prison were his transition from the Orthodox faith to the Catholic one and his marriage to his cousin Matthias Corvin. Paradoxically, the “great fiend” could gain freedom only by intermarrying with the Hungarian king, who until recently represented Dracula as a bloodthirsty monster …
Two years after his liberation, in the summer of 1476, Vlad, as one of the commanders of the Hungarian army, set out on a campaign; his goal was the liberation of Wallachia occupied by the Turks. Troops marched through the territory of Transylvania, and documents have been preserved that say that the townspeople of Saxon Brasov joyfully welcomed the return of the "great monster" who, according to the denunciation, committed unheard-of atrocities here a few years ago. Having entered Wallachia with battles, Dracula drove out the Turkish troops and on November 26, 1476, again ascended the throne of the principality. His reign turned out to be very short - the prince was surrounded by obvious and hidden enemies, and therefore a fatal outcome was inevitable.
The death of Vlad at the end of December of the same year is shrouded in mystery. There are several versions of what happened, but they all boil down to the fact that the prince fell a victim of treason, trusting the traitors who were in his entourage. It is known that the head of Dracula was donated to the Turkish Sultan, and he ordered to put it on one of the squares of Constantinople. And Romanian folklore sources report that the decapitated body of the prince was found by the monks of the Snagov monastery located not far from Bucharest and buried in the chapel built by Dracula himself near the altar.
So the short but bright life of Vlad Dracula ended. Why, contrary to the facts that the Wallachian prince was "framed" and slandered, the rumor continues to ascribe to him atrocities that he never committed? Opponents of Dracula argue: firstly, numerous works of different authors report about Vlad's cruelty, and, therefore, such a point of view cannot but be objective, and secondly, there are no chronicles in which he appears as a ruler doing pious deeds. It is not difficult to refute such arguments. An analysis of the works that speak of Dracula's atrocities proves that they all either go back to the handwritten denunciation of 1462, “justifying” the arrest of the Wallachian prince, or were written by people who were at the Hungarian court during the reign of Matthias Korvin. From here he also drew information for his story about Dracula, written about 1484, and the Russian ambassador to Hungary, clerk Fyodor Kuritsyn.
Penetrating into Wallachia, widely disseminated stories about the deeds of the "great fiend" were transformed into pseudo-folklore narratives, which actually have nothing to do with the folk legends recorded by folklorists in the regions of Romania directly connected with the life of Dracula. As for the Turkish chronicles, the original episodes that do not coincide with the German works deserve closer attention. In them, Turkish chroniclers, sparing no pains, describe the cruelty and courage of the "Kazykly" (which means "The Impaler") that terrified the enemies and even partially admit the fact that he put the Sultan himself to flight. We are well aware that the descriptions of the course of hostilities by the opposing sides cannot be impartial, but we also do not dispute thatthat Vlad Dracula really very cruelly dealt with the invaders who came to his land. After analyzing the sources of the 15th century, it can be confidently asserted that Dracula did not commit the monstrous crimes attributed to him.
He acted in accordance with the cruel laws of war, but the destruction of the aggressor on the battlefield under no circumstances can be equated with the genocide of the civilian population, of which Dracula was accused by the customer of the anonymous denunciation. The stories about the atrocities in Transylvania, for which Dracula received a reputation as a "great monster", turned out to be slander, pursuing specific selfish goals. History has developed in such a way that the descendants judge Dracula by the way his enemies described Vlad's actions, who sought to discredit the prince - where can we talk about objectivity in such a situation ?!
As for the lack of chronicles praising Dracula, this is due to the too short period of his reign. He simply did not have time, and perhaps did not consider it necessary, to acquire court chroniclers, whose duties included the praise of the ruler. It is another matter, famous for his enlightenment and humanism, King Matthias, "with whose death justice died," or the Moldovan prince Stefan, who ruled for nearly half a century, betrayed Dracula and impaled two thousand Romanians, but at the same time was called the Great and Holy …
It is difficult to discern the truth in the muddy stream of lies, but, fortunately, documentary evidence of how Vlad Dracula ruled the country has come down to us. The letters signed by him have survived, in which he gave land to the peasants, granted privileges to monasteries, an agreement with Turkey, which scrupulously and consistently defended the rights of citizens of Wallachia. We know that Dracula insisted on the observance of church burial rites for executed criminals, and this very important fact completely refutes the assertion that he impaled the inhabitants of the Romanian principalities who professed Christianity. It is known that he built churches and monasteries, founded Bucharest, fought with desperate bravery against the Turkish invaders, defending his people and his land. And there is also a legend about how Dracula met with God, trying to find out where his father's grave is,to build a temple on this site …
There are two images of Dracula. We know Dracula - the national hero of Romania, a wise and brave ruler, a martyr, betrayed by friends and spent about a third of his life in prisons, slandered, slandered, but not broken. However, we also know another Dracula - the hero of anecdotal stories of the 15th century, a maniac, a "great monster", and later a vampire cursed by God. By the way, about vampirism: no matter what atrocities the prince was accused by his contemporaries, there is not a single written source that says that he drank the blood of his victims. The idea to "turn" Dracula into a vampire appeared only in the 19th century.
A member of the Golden Dawn occult order (he practiced black magic), Bram Stoker became interested in this historical figure at the suggestion of Professor Arminius Vambery, who was known not only as a scientist, but also as a Hungarian nationalist. And so Count Dracula appeared - a literary character who gradually turned in the mass consciousness into the main vampire of all times and peoples.
E. ARTAMONOVA