Vlad Tepes, Cruelty, and the Janissaries

For five hundred years my people have fought the yoke of the Ottoman Empire, and their passage and battles have left an imprint in the national psyche and in the Romanian language.

The territory of what is now Romania, was a buffer zone between the advancement of the Ottoman Empire towards medieval Europe and their demands for treasure and heavy tribute.

One of our national heroes, Vlad Tepes, had fought the Ottomans to his eventual death. Vlad was a Prince of Wallachia; a province located between the Transylvanian Carpathian Mountains and the Danube River. The 15^th-century Wallachia was the state between the central European kingdom of Hungary and the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

When the Turkish Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople in 1453, the ruler of Wallachia was Vlad Dracul, or Vlad the Dragon. His personal coat of arms was a dragon, hence the name. When his son, also named Vlad, ascended to the throne, he received the title of “Son of the Dragon,” Vlad Dracula.

Vlad Tepes was born in 1430. He was exposed at an early age to medieval cruelty because, as a boy, was held hostage by the Turks in a fortress called Egrigoz, “Crooked Eyes.”

He also witnessed the murder of his own father and his elder brother being buried alive on orders of the Regent of Hungary. Medieval Europe was not lacking in utter cruelty, violence, and savagery among the princes and kings in power who devised the most disgusting ways to torture and kill their enemies.

Called Vlad Tepes, “the Impaler,” after his favorite method of killing Turkish prisoners and others, Vlad proceeded to rule with an iron fist. The impaling stakes were often blunted and greased to extend the agony, the impalement of a vital organ, and the eventual death of the victim.

Vlad continued campaigns against the invading Turks and helped save Christian Europe from Islamic conquest. He helped peasants fight the ruthless feudal lords of Eastern Europe called “boyars” and “restored order to a land torn apart by foreign invasion and civil strife.

Vlad did lock up a group of beggars and disabled people in a church and set them on fire, but the utter cruelty was explained away as stamping out disease when threatened by the plague.

He allegedly skinned women alive who were found guilty of committing adultery.

The myth of vampirism that Bram Stoker, a British author, assigned to Vlad Dracula is certainly not true. Stoker never traveled to Romania to investigate elements for his book; he just visited his local library and found the history of Vlad Tepes fascinating.

There is no doubt that he was a monster of cruelty as he strangled, boiled, roasted, and put to death a minimum of 50,000 people in his reign of ten years. He met a violent end in 1476, but nobody knows if the was killed by the Ottomans or his political rivals. His severed head was impaled on a spike for all to see. He was allegedly buried on an island in Romania, but, when they opened the tomb in modern times, it was empty.

His alleged residence, Bran Castle, was not his home even though the castle advertises some loose connection to one of his campaign stays. The Poenari castle ruins in Transylvania are more credibly the place where he lived. Its location is hard to access via 1480 concrete stairs. The citadel was destroyed partially by three different earthquakes and the masonry fell in the river below.

Poenari castle ruins are located on Mount Cetatea, a canyon formed by the Arges River. It was built in the first part of the 13^th century to be used by the Basarab rulers. Vlad repaired it in 1459 when he saw its potential for a hard to access fortress and became his residence until his death.

As a boy, held hostage by the Turks, Vlad witnessed what the Ottomans did to Christian boys they held captive. Turks used a system called “devsirme” (collect) to conscript physically and intellectually gifted Christian boys from the territories they conquered in places like Anatolia, Armenia, and the Balkans.

They used Christian boys because Turkish law forbade them to enslave Muslims and they could also keep powerful enemies under control, such as Vlad’s dad.

The Christian boys were circumcised, forcibly converted to Islam, and sent to the capital which is today Istanbul. Most of them were forced to join the forces of the Janissaries, “the shock troops” of the sultans. The Janissaries (yeniceri, Turkish) were founded in 1300s as the sultan’s body guards, later as the standing army of the Ottoman Empire. They wore a distinctive hat with feathers and spoons. Every Janissary regiment had a huge cooking pot called “kazan” (cazan, Romanian) and a huge ladle to distribute the food cooked. If said kazan was lost in battle, the punishment was expulsion; an overturned ladle meant mutiny.

Vlad was lucky to have escaped the conscription into Janissaries and all the military schools involved prior to being included in such a regiment. After centuries of thuggery and even murder of sultans, the Janissaries fell in disfavor and in 1826 in the Auspicious Incident, thousands of Janissaries were murdered in their barracks. Their influence disappeared and the Ottoman Empire disappeared a century later replaced by general Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the post-Ottoman Turkey.

Vlad Dracul, as an imprisoned boy in Egrigoz, dodged the bullet of Janissaries.