Dracula's nephew. Who is Count Dracula: a real historical figure or a mythical image

Vlad III Basarab, also known as Vlad Tepes(Rom. Vlad Țepeș - Vlad Kolovnik, Vlad the Impaler, Vlad the Impaler) and Vlad Dracula(rum. Vlad Drăculea (November or December - December) - the ruler of Wallachia in, - and. The nickname "Tepesh" ("The Impaler", from the Rum. ţeapă [tsyape] - "stake") received for cruelty in reprisals against enemies and subjects Veteran of wars against Turkey Vlad III's residence was located in Targovishte... Vlad received the nickname Dracula (Son of the Dragon or the Younger Dragon) in honor of his father, who was (since 1431) in the elite knightly Order of the Dragon, created by Emperor Sigismund in 1408 year... Members of the order had the right to wear a medallion with the image of a dragon around their neck.Vlad III's father not only wore the sign of the order, but also minted it on his coins, depicted it on the walls of churches under construction, for which he received the nickname Dracul - the Dragon (or the Devil).

Biography

As a result of the "Night attack" on June 17, 1462, he forced the retreat of the 100-120 thousandth Ottoman army that invaded the principality, led by Sultan Mehmed II.

In the same year, due to the betrayal of the Hungarian monarch Matthias Korvin, he was forced to flee to Hungary, where he was taken into custody on false charges of collaborating with the Turks and spent 12 years in prison.

Anonymous German document from 1463

The basis of all future legends about the unprecedented bloodthirstiness of the ruler was a document compiled by an unknown author (presumably on the orders of King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary) and published in 1463 in Germany. It is there that for the first time there are descriptions of the executions and tortures of Dracula, as well as all the stories of his atrocities.

From a historical point of view, the reason to doubt the accuracy of the information presented in this document is extremely high. In addition to the obvious interest of the Hungarian throne in replicating this document (the desire to hide the fact of the theft by the King of Hungary Matthias Corvinus of a large amount allocated by the papal throne for the crusade), not a single earlier mention of these “pseudo-folklore” stories was found.

Once came to him from the Turkish poklisarium<послы>, and when you go up to him and bow down according to your custom, and cap<шапок, фесок>I didn’t take off my 3 chapters. He asks them: “What for the sake of tacos do you do a great favor to the sovereign and such a shame do you do to me?” They answered: “This is our custom, sovereign, and our land has.” He said to them: “And I want to confirm your law, but stand strong,” and commanded them to nail caps to their heads with a small iron nail and let them go, rivers to them: “When you go, tell your sovereign, he has learned to endure that shame from you, we but not with skill, let him not send his custom to other sovereigns who do not want to have it, but let him keep it with him.

This text was written by the Russian ambassador to Hungary Fyodor Kuritsyn in 1484. It is known that in his "Tale of Dracula Voivode" Kuritsyn uses information from that anonymous source, written 21 years earlier.

Below are some of the stories written by an unknown German author:

• There is a known case when Tepes summoned about 500 boyars and asked them how many rulers each of them remembers. It turned out that even the youngest of them remembers at least 7 reigns. Tepes' answer was an attempt to put an end to such an order - all the boyars were impaled and dug around the chambers of Tepes in his capital Targovishte.

• The following story is also given: a foreign merchant who came to Wallachia was robbed. He files a complaint with Tepes. While they are catching and impaling the thief, on the orders of Tepes, the merchant is thrown a purse, in which there is one coin more than it was. The merchant, having discovered a surplus, immediately informs Tepes. He laughs and says: “Well done, I wouldn’t say - you should sit on a stake next to the thief.”

• Tepes discovers that there are many beggars in the country. He convenes them, feeds them to their heart's content and addresses the question: “Do they not want to get rid of earthly suffering forever?” On a positive answer, Tepes closes the doors and windows and burns all those gathered alive.

• There is a story about a mistress who tries to deceive Tepes by talking about her pregnancy. Tepes warns her that she does not tolerate lies, but she continues to insist on her own, then Tepes rips open her stomach and shouts: “I told you that I don’t like lies!”

• A case is also described when Dracula asked two wandering monks what the people say about his reign. One of the monks replied that the population of Wallachia scolded him as a cruel villain, and the other said that everyone praised him as a liberator from the threat of the Turks and a wise politician. In fact, both one and the other testimonies were fair in their own way. And the legend, in turn, has two endings. In the German "version", Dracula executed the former for not liking his speech. In the Russian version of the legend, the ruler left the first monk alive, and executed the second for lying.

• One of the creepiest and least credible pieces of evidence in this document is that Dracula liked to have breakfast at the site of an execution or the site of a recent battle. He ordered to bring him a table and food, sat down and ate among the dead and dying on the stakes of people. There is also an addition to this story, which says that the servant who served Vlad food could not stand the smell of decay and, clutching his throat with his hands, dropped the tray right in front of him. Vlad asked why he did it. "There is no strength to endure, a terrible stench," the unfortunate man replied. And Vlad immediately ordered to put him on a stake, which was several meters longer than the others, after which he shouted to the still living servant: "You see! Now you are above everyone else, and the stench does not reach you."

• Dracula asked the ambassadors of the Ottoman Empire who came to him demanding recognition of vassalage: "Why didn't they take off their hats to him, the ruler." Hearing the answer that they would bare their heads only in front of the Sultan, Vlad ordered the caps to be nailed to their heads.

Literary and screen image of Dracula

The reign of Dracula had a great influence on his contemporaries, who formed his image in the folklore tradition of the Romanians and their neighboring peoples. An important source in this case is the poem by M. Behaim, who in the 1460s lived at the court of the Hungarian king Matthew Corvinus, German pamphlets are known, distributed under the title "On a Great Monster". Various Romanian legends tell about Tepes, both directly recorded among the people and processed by the famous storyteller P. Ispirescu.

Vlad III became a literary hero shortly after his death: it was written about him in Church Slavonic (which at that time was used in Romania as a literary language), after the Russian embassy of Ivan III, very popular in Russia, visited Wallachia.

The emergence of a connection between the image of Vlad Tepes and Count Dracula is usually explained by the fact that Bram Stoker heard the legend that Tepes became a vampire after death. It is not known whether he heard a similar legend; but there were reasons for its existence, since the killer Tepes was cursed by the dying more than once, and, in addition, changed his faith (although this fact is questioned). According to the beliefs of the Carpathian peoples, this is quite enough for a posthumous transformation into a vampire. However, there is another version: after the death of Vlad Tepes, his body was not found in the grave...

At his direction, the victims were impaled on a thick stake, the top of which was rounded and oiled. The stake was inserted into the vagina (the victim died almost within a few minutes from profuse blood loss) or the anus (death came from a rupture of the rectum and developed peritonitis, the person died for several days in terrible agony) to a depth of several tens of centimeters, then the stake was installed vertically. The victim, under the influence of the gravity of his body, slowly slid down the stake, and sometimes death occurred only after a few days, since the rounded stake did not pierce the vital organs, but only went deeper into the body. In some cases, a horizontal bar was installed on the stake, which prevented the body from sliding too low and ensured that the stake did not reach the heart and other critical organs. In this case, death from blood loss occurred very slowly. The usual version of the execution was also very painful, and the victims writhed on a stake for several hours.

Tepes sought to measure the height of the stakes with the social rank of the executed - the boyars turned out to be higher impaled than commoners, so the social status of the executed could be judged from the forests of those impaled.

imitators

The doubtfulness of the scale of Dracula's atrocities did not prevent later rulers from "adopting" such methods of conducting domestic and foreign policy. For example, when John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, probably having heard a lot about effective "draculia" methods during the diplomatic service at the papal court, began impaling Lincolnshire rebels in 1470, he himself was executed for actions - as the sentence ran - "contrary to the laws of this country".

see also

The legend of the "King of Vampires", Prince Dracula. In Romania, not far from the Tihut Pass, the dilapidated walls of the Poenari fortress still exist. Local residents claim that even today the spirit of Vlad III still roams the earth. Neither heaven nor hell accepted him. And so he is forced to wander around the world, tormented by the thirst for human blood.

During the day, Dracula hides in the ruins of the fortress. At night, he goes out and searches for his victims by the light of the moon. Legend has it that the one bitten by the prince immediately turns into a vampire, with protruding fangs and small wounds on his neck. But who really was this formidable prince? ..

Quiet corners of paradise now seem to be the surroundings of the former castle of the famous prince Vlad III better known as Dracula. And then, in the XV century, local residents bypassed this place, just not to fall into the hands of a cruel ruler.

As soon as a man looked at Prince Vlad, fear gradually took possession of all his thoughts. Indeed, according to historians, he had a terrifying appearance: a narrow face, a long nose, a protruding lower lip, large glassy eyes that hid the feelings of the prince.

It was with bulging eyes that people connected Dracula's ability to induce fear and horror in the prisoner with the help of hypnotic influence. It seemed that Dracula's gaze penetrated the very soul, and its owner could easily find out everything that a person thinks about. However, many modern scientists believe that such a shape of the eyes can be nothing more than a consequence and one of the signs of Graves' disease, which is often found in residents of mountain villages.

People say: "The face is the mirror of the soul." Indeed, being the ugliest of the three brothers, Vlad also had a cruel and independent disposition. The intent, almost unblinking look of cold fish eyes, contemptuously compressed mouth, narrow protruding chin - everything suggests that Prince Dracula was a vain proud man who hated and despised people.

Not taller than average, Vlad III possessed great physical strength. So, he could swim across the river without much difficulty. In the Middle Ages, there were many large rivers and small streams, but bridges were clearly lacking. A warrior who did not know how to swim well was doomed to death.

Dracula was also known in the 15th century as an excellent gunner. This talent of the prince is all the more worthy of special attention if we recall the fact that in those days - when small and large wars were fought in almost every country - boys were taught horse riding and shooting from different types of weapons from childhood. Each young man masterfully wielded weapons. And therefore, to earn the glory of a magnificent warrior and rider was then not at all an easy thing.

The life and death of Vlad Tepes (Tepes), Dracula, are shrouded in a dense veil of mystery. Local residents claim that the grave of the bloody prince is located in the Snagovsky monastery. But more recently, historians have stated that that grave is a cenotaph, that is, a grave without burial.

The time and place of birth of Vlad III is shrouded in mystery. According to some sources, he was born between 1428 and 1431. More accurate information could not be found. This is due to the fact that at that time the monastery walls could not save manuscripts from fire. And since there were an innumerable number of fires at that time, people, written monuments, including documents, often died from them.

The birthplace of Dracula is determined by a relatively small house located on Blacksmith Street located in one of the districts of Sighisoara. It still attracts many tourists traveling around Romania.

Historians are not entirely sure that Vlad III was born in that place. However, the surviving documents testify that in the 15th century the house belonged to Vlad Tepesh's father, Vlad II Dracul. Dracul in translation into Russian means "the Dragon". This means that the old prince was a member of the Romanian Order of the Dragon. Members of this organization were once engaged in the forced conversion of "infidels" to Christianity. By the end of the first quarter of the 15th century, Prince Vlad II already had three sons. But only one of them, Vlad, could become famous for centuries.

Poenari Fortress

It must be said that in his youth, Prince Vlad III managed to win over the common people and earn their love and respect. Indeed, according to handwritten sources, at that time he was a real knight of the Middle Ages, a man of honor and duty. He was especially distinguished by his ability to lead the course of the battle. The warriors who fought under the command of the talented commander Vlad Tepesh always won the battles.

Historians of those years remember Dracula as a fairly democratic statesman. He always opposed the capture of Romania by foreigners, as well as the division of his native lands. In addition, he directed the activities of the principality primarily to the development of national crafts and trade. Vlad III paid special attention to the fight against criminals: thieves, murderers and swindlers. At the same time, the most sophisticated and cruel methods of punishing the guilty were chosen.

Popular love for Prince Dracula and his extraordinary popularity among the inhabitants of medieval Wallachia are fully justified. Contemporaries remember him as a people's protector, always at war with the boyars, who always oppressed the common people. In addition, the military victories won by Vlad III more than redeemed his rigidity. Patriotic Romanians were proud of their commander, who knew how to win even in that battle, which was clearly doomed to lose.

However, the most important quality of Tepesh's character, which determined the goodwill of the people, was almost fanatical religiosity. At that time, the church had a strong influence on the life of society. The sovereign, having enlisted the support of the holy fathers, could confidently count on the obedience of the people subject to him. “But what about the incredible cruelty inherent in Dracula?” - you ask.

The answer is simple: then it was considered an ordinary thing - to severely punish, and then go to church to atone for sins and thank God for the blessings of life. And the people, meanwhile, mourned the executed, not daring to grumble and resist their master - after all, his power was "sacred". C'est la vie, the French say in such cases.

For its part, the church was also interested in friendship with the princes. In this case, the benevolent ruler could endow the monasteries with land and villages. And in return, he received a blessing from the clergyman for various deeds and deeds (including cruel and bloody ones). Vlad III usually distributed such gifts to the clergy after another military victory or in a fit of religious feeling (so that God forgives sins).

Chronicles testify; wishing to reduce the level of crime in his small state, Prince Vlad Tepesh did not spare the guilty and used the most severe methods of punishment. His reprisal was not long in coming. The offender, as they say, was burned at the stake without trial or investigation or executed on the chopping block. The ruler of Wallachia and the gypsies did not spare. They were also waiting for a fire or a sword: according to Tepesh, they were all potential thieves, horse thieves and, moreover, vagabonds.

Until now, the content of many gypsy stories is reduced to the coverage of those terrible events when Prince Dracula carried out mass executions of gypsies. To some extent, the great ruler of Wallachia achieved the desired result. The chroniclers said that since then crime in the prince's possessions has come to naught. As a confirmation of the words of a medieval historian, one can give the following example. If someone found a gold coin on the street, then in no case did he pick it up. This would mean stealing someone else's property, for which one could pay with one's life.

And how many conflicting rumors go around the construction of the Poenari fortress. It turns out that having planned the construction, Vlad Tepesh ordered all the wanderers who came to Tirgovista to celebrate Easter to be brought to him by force. After that, he declared that the pilgrims would be able to return to their homes only after the construction of the fortress was completed. People who knew the harsh temper of the Romanian prince did not argue and enthusiastically set to work, because everyone wanted to return to their native places as soon as possible.

Soon a new castle was built. However, the fortress, built with the help of lies and coercion, did not bring good luck to its owner and could not protect him during the siege of the Turks. When the Turks captured Poenari in 1462, Prince Dracula was forced to flee from foreigners. The princess who remained in the fortress did not want to become a prisoner of the victors, as well as her husband, who became famous for his incredible cruelty. She threw herself down from the high fortress wall and crashed. Only the white stones of the ruined fortress and the second name of Arges, “river of the princess”, remained in her memory.

The Romanian prince Vlad III earned his nickname Tepes (Tepes) because of his own cruelty. Translated into Russian, "tepesh" means "to impale." A similar method of execution, borrowed by Europeans from the Turks, was used by medieval sovereigns quite often. At the same time, the stake was either driven into the body of the offender with strong hammer blows, or the sentenced person was literally put on a stake fixed in the ground. The executioners have mastered this type of execution so much that it cost them nothing to drive a stake into the body of the victim so that she writhes in death throes for at least a week.

It was the method of punishing criminals described above that became Dracula's favorite. With his help, he successfully resolved issues not only of domestic, but also of foreign policy. The number of people who became victims of such a massacre by the prince alone is measured in several tens of thousands.

It seemed that Dracula's cruelty knew no bounds. Not only gypsies and captured Turks could be executed, but also any citizen of Wallachia who committed a crime. It is in the fear and unwillingness to be on the chopping block or the stake that the secret of the honesty of the medieval Romanian, mysterious for a modern European, lies. After the news of a new sophisticated execution spread further and further throughout the principality, there were no people who wanted to try their luck. All citizens preferred to lead the life of the sinless righteous.

It must be admitted that, despite the cruelty, Dracula was a fair judge. For the slightest fault, not only ordinary citizens were punished, but also quite wealthy. The same historical chronicles testify that seven merchants were impaled on charges of concluding trade agreements with the Turks. Thus, in Shesburg, the acquaintance of Wallachian merchants with the enemies of the Christian faith, the "dirty Turks", ended tragically.

The chronicle or chronicle, to which the German sources about Dracula go back, were written by Tepesh's obviously ill-wishers and depict the ruler and his life in the most negative colors. With Russian sources it is more difficult. They do not refuse to depict Vlad's cruelty, but they try to give it more noble explanations than the German ones, and emphasize it in such a way that the same actions look in the circumstances both more logical and not so gloomy.

Here are some stories from various sources. It is not possible to verify their authenticity:

A foreign merchant who came to Wallachia was robbed. The merchant files a complaint with the master. While they are catching and impaling a thief, with fate, in general, “in fairness”, everything is clear, the merchant, on the orders of Dracula, was thrown a purse in which there was one more coin than was stolen. The merchant, having discovered something superfluous, immediately informs Tepes about it. He just laughs at this: “Well done, I wouldn’t say - you should sit on a stake next to the thief.”

Another example. Vlad Dracula merrily feasts, as the old Russian author wrote, among the “corpse”. The servant who brings the dishes grimaces. To the question of the ruler "Why?" it turns out that the servant cannot bear the stench. "Resolution" of Tepes: "So put the servant higher, so that the stench does not reach him." And the poor fellow writhes on a stake of unprecedented height.

Dracula's "diplomacy" is also remarkable. I propose to read the translation from the Old Russian language: “Dracula had such a tradition: when an inexperienced messenger from the king or from the king arrived to him and could not give an answer to Dracula’s insidious questions, he put the messenger on a stake, while saying: “It’s not my fault in your death, but either your sovereign, or you yourself. But you do not lay the blame on me. But if your sovereign, knowing that you are inexperienced and unwise, and sent you as an ambassador to me, a wise ruler, then your sovereign killed you; but if you personally decided to go, ignorant, then you killed yourself.

An excellent example is the massacre of Turkish envoys, who, according to the tradition of their country, bowed to Dracula without taking off their hats. Dracula praised this custom, and in order to strengthen them even more in this custom, he ordered the hats to be nailed to the heads of the messengers.

The chroniclers claim that such a cruel disposition of Dracula was brought up in the palace of the Turkish Sultan. Every year, the prince of Wallachia had to ship a certain amount of silver and timber to Turkey. In order for the prince not to forget about his duty, the sultan ordered the son of Vlad II to be escorted to his palace. So, twelve-year-old Vlad III ended up in Turkey. It was there that he got acquainted with various methods of punishing the guilty and rebellious citizens of the state.

A rare day in Turkey passed without an execution. Two stories will help readers to imagine the whole picture of gloomy life in medieval Istanbul.

Once there was a trial of two sons of one of the Romanian princes, who did not pay tribute on time. For some reason, at the last moment before the execution, the Sultan "mercied" and ordered not to put the boys on a stake, but to blind them. At the same time, blinding was perceived then as the greatest mercy.

The second story tells of the theft of cucumbers, a vegetable considered an exotic delicacy in Turkey. Once, the vizier of the Sultan missed two cucumbers in the garden. Then it was decided to cut open the stomachs of all the gardeners who worked at the palace. The fifth of them contained a cucumber. The Sultan ordered the execution of the guilty on the chopping block. The rest "could go home to their homes."

Having learned about the stay of Vlad III in the captivity of the Turkish Sultan, where day after day he became an eyewitness to the bullying of people, it is not difficult to guess the reasons for his cruel temper out of hatred for the Turks. What kind of person could grow out of a twelve-year-old boy who lived in that hell, when every day he saw only one thing: human suffering, the death throes of thousands of executed people and the martyrdom of people.

Dependence on the Turkish sultan was, of course, not to the liking of the freedom-loving Slavs. Father and son - the rulers of Wallachia - firmly believed that someday their principality would be freed from the yoke of Turkey.

Upon returning from captivity, Vlad III decided to free the Vlachs from the power of the Turks at all costs forever. And now, four years after inheriting the princely throne, Tepesh announced to the Turks that he did not intend to continue to pay tribute. Thus, a challenge was made to the Ottoman Empire. Then Sultan Murad sent a small detachment to Wallachia, consisting of a thousand horsemen.

However, luck turned away from the Turkish warriors. They were taken prisoner and impaled within one day. And for the Turkish Agha, who commanded the punitive detachment, Dracula even ordered to prepare a special stake - with a gold tip.

After Murad learned that his envoys had suffered a shameful defeat, he decided to send an entire army to Wallachia. This was already the beginning of an open war between the Ottoman Empire and Wallachia. The final battle between the Turks and the Wallachians took place in 1461. Thanks to the dedication of the Slavs, the Turks were defeated. After that, Prince Vlad 111 went to war with Transylvania, located next to Wallachia. The Transylvanian nobility (for the most part, the wealthiest merchants) had long been concerned about the violent temper of the owner of the nearby principality.

They decided to get rid of the unpredictable, cruel and wayward neighbor. However, Prince Dracula was ahead of them. Like a terrible hurricane, he swept through with his army, sweeping away everything in its path. Romanians still remember the five hundred compatriots executed on Shesburg Square at that terrible time.

Then the victorious prince returned home. However, it was then that danger lay in wait for him. Outraged by the atrocities of the Wallachians, the trading elite of Transylvania, on behalf of the author, who wished to remain anonymous, published a pamphlet. Its content was reduced to a retelling of recent events, the capture of Transylvania by Vlad III, about his atrocities and cruelty. The anonymous poet also added that the Wallachian prince was allegedly going to attack and conquer the Hungarian principality in the near future. King Dan III of Hungary was furious when he learned about the malice and arrogance of the prince of Wallachia, as well as his intention to seize the state.

After the fortress of Dracula was taken by the Turks, its owner decided to flee to Hungary. Arriving there, he found himself a prisoner of King Dan III. For 12 long years, the Grand Duke of Wallachia languished in prison. It was then that he was able to conquer Dan with his humility and humility. Tepesh even converted to Catholicism in order to win over the monarch of the Slavic state.

At last the heart of the good King of Hungary softened, and he freed the prisoner. Already at large, the prince married the niece of the monarch, and later even gathered a large army of Hungarian mercenaries to go to war against Wallachia and win back the throne.

In the autumn of 1476, the army of Vlad Tepesh approached Wallachia. But, as it turned out later, luck left the commander famous for his military victories forever. In the first battle, the Hungarian army was defeated, and Vlad III himself was taken prisoner by the Wallachian boyars.

Considering the shameful death at the hands of former subjects, Tepesh escaped from captivity and was killed by boyar soldiers. However, other sources claim that death suddenly overtook Vlad III when he was already on horseback and intended to escape from Wallachia.

Be that as it may, the body of Prince Vlad III Tepesh, Dracula, was subsequently cut by the boyars into many pieces, which were scattered across the field. However, the monks of the Snagov Monastery, who more than once received generous gifts from the hands of the sovereign, sincerely loved and pitied the prince, who was martyred. They collected the remains of Dracula and buried them near the monastery.

After the death of a cruel but just prince, contemporaries argued more than once about where his soul ended up: in heaven or in the underworld. It was from these unceasing disputes that the now well-known legend was born, which says that the spirit of the Romanian does not accept either hell or heaven. They say that until now the rebellious soul of Prince Dracula is looking for peace and, finding it nowhere, wanders the earth in search of more and more new victims.

Vlad Tepes was born approximately in 1429 or 1431 (the exact date of birth, as well as death, is unknown to historians). He came from the Basarab family. His father, Vlad II Dracul, was a Wallachian ruler and ruled over an area in present-day Romania. The mother of the child was the Moldavian princess Vasilika.

Family and famous nickname

Vlad III Tepes spent the first seven years of his life in the Transylvanian city of Sighisoara. There was a mint in his family's house. It minted gold coins, which depicted a dragon. For this, Vlad's father (and later himself) received the nickname "Dracul". In addition, he was enrolled as a knight in the Order of the Dragon, created by the Hungarian king Sigismund I. In his youth, his son was also called "Dracula", but later this form changed to the more well-known - "Dracula". The word itself belongs to the Romanian language. It can also be translated as "devil".

In 1436, Vlad's father became the ruler of Wallachia and moved the family to the then capital of the principality, Targovishte. Soon the boy had a younger brother - Radu Handsome. Then the mother died, and the father married a second time. In this marriage, another brother of Dracula, Vlad Monk, was born.

Childhood

In 1442, Vlad III Tepes was on the run. His father quarreled with the Hungarian ruler Janos Hunyadi. The influential monarch decided to place his protege Basarab II on the Wallachian throne. Realizing the limitations of his own forces, Dracula's parent went to Turkey, where he was going to ask for help from the powerful Sultan Murat II. It was then that his family fled the capital so as not to fall into the hands of Hungarian supporters.

Several months have passed. The spring of 1443 came. Vlad II agreed with the Turkish Sultan and returned to his homeland with a powerful Ottoman army. This army displaced Basarab. The Hungarian ruler did not even resist this coup. He was preparing for the upcoming Crusade against the Turks and rightly believed that it was necessary to deal with Wallachia only after defeating his main opponent.

The Hunyadi War ended with the Battle of Varna. The Hungarians suffered a crushing defeat in it, King Vladislav was killed, and Janos himself fled ingloriously from the battlefield. Peace negotiations followed. The Turks, as winners, could impose their demands. The political situation has changed dramatically, and Dracula's father decided to go over to the Sultan. Murat agreed to become the patron of the Wallachian ruler, however, in order to make sure of his loyalty, he demanded that valuable hostages be sent to Turkey. They were chosen as 14-year-old Vlad Dracula and 6-year-old Radu.

Ottoman life

Dracula spent four years in Turkey (1444-1448). It is traditionally believed that it was during this period that his character underwent irreversible changes. Returning to his homeland, Vlad Dracula became a completely different person. But what could have caused these changes? The opinions of the biographers of the Wallachian ruler were divided on this score.

Some historians claim that Dracula was forced to convert to Islam in Turkey. Torture could indeed have a negative impact on the psyche, but there is not a single piece of evidence about them in credible sources. It is also assumed that Tepes experienced severe stress due to the harassment of the heir to the Ottoman throne, Mehmed, towards his brother Radu. The historian of Greek origin Laonicus Chalkokondil wrote about this connection. However, according to the source, these events took place in the early 1450s, when Dracula had already returned home.

Even if the first two hypotheses are true, Vlad III Tepes really changed after he found out about the murder of his own father. The ruler of Wallachia died in the struggle against the Hungarian king. By sending his sons to Turkey, he hoped that peace would finally come to his country. But in fact, the flywheel of the war between Christians and Muslims was only spinning. In 1444, the Hungarians again went on a crusade against the Turks and were again defeated. Then Janos Hunyadi attacked Wallachia. Dracula's father was executed (he was cut off his head), and in his place the ruler of Hungary planted another of his henchmen - Vladislav II. Vlad's older brother was dealt with even more cruelly (he was buried alive).

Soon the news of what had happened reached Turkey. The Sultan gathered a formidable army and defeated the Hungarians in the Battle of Kosovo. The Ottomans contributed to the fact that in 1448 Vlad III Tepes returned to his homeland and became a Wallachian prince. As a token of mercy, the Sultan gave Dracula horses, money, magnificent clothes and other gifts. Radu stayed at the Turkish court.

Brief reign and exile

Dracula's first Wallachian reign lasted only two months. During this time, he only managed to begin an investigation into the circumstances of the murder of his relatives. The Romanian prince learned that his father was betrayed by his own boyars, who at the decisive moment went over to the Hungarians, for which the new government showered them with various favors.

In December 1448, Dracula had to leave the capital of Wallachia, Targovishte. Recovering from defeat, Hunyadi announced a campaign against Tepes. The ruler's army was too weak to successfully resist the Hungarians. Having soberly assessed the situation, Dracula fled to Moldova.

This small country, like Wallachia, was ruled by its princes. The rulers of Moldavia, who did not have significant forces, were forced to agree to Polish or Hungarian influence. Two neighboring states fought each other for the right to be overlords of a small principality. When Dracula settled in Moldova, the Polish party was in power there, which guaranteed his safety. The overthrown ruler of Wallachia remained in the neighboring principality, until in 1455 a supporter of the Hungarians and Janos Hunyadi Peter Aron established himself on the throne.

Return to power

Fearing to be betrayed by his sworn enemy, Dracula left for Transylvania. There he began to gather the people's militia in order to retake the Wallachian throne (on which the protege of the Hungarians Vladislav was again at that time).

In 1453, the Turks captured the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. The fall of Tsargrad again aggravated the conflict between the Christians and the Ottomans. Catholic monks appeared in Transylvania, who began to recruit volunteers for a new crusade against the infidels. Everyone except the Orthodox was taken to the holy war (they, in turn, went to the army to Tepes).

Dracula in Transylvania hoped that the Wallachian prince Vladislav would also go to liberate Constantinople, which would make his task easier. However, this did not happen. Vladislav was afraid of the appearance of the Transylvanian militia on his borders and remained in Targovishte. Then Dracula sent spies to the Wallachian boyars. Some of them agreed to support the applicant and help him with the coup d'état. In August 1456, Vladislav was killed, and Tepes was proclaimed ruler of Wallachia for the second time.

Shortly before that, the Turks again declared war on Hungary and laid siege to Belgrade, which belonged to it. The fortress was saved. The crusade, which was supposed to end with the liberation of Constantinople, turned towards Belgrade. And although the Turks were stopped, a plague broke out in the Christian army. Nine days before Dracula came to power in Wallachia, his opponent Janos Hunyadi, who was in Belgrade, died of this terrible disease.

prince and nobility

The new reign of Vlad in Wallachia began with the execution of the boyars responsible for the death of his brother and father. The aristocrats were invited to a feast timed to coincide with the Easter holiday. There they were sentenced to death.

According to legend, right during the solemn feast, Dracula asked the boyars sitting at the same table with him how many Wallachian rulers they caught alive. None of the guests could name less than seven names. The question was ominous and symbolic. The incredible turnover of rulers in Wallachia spoke of only one thing: the nobility here is ready to betray their prince at any moment. Dracula couldn't let that happen. He took the throne quite recently, his position was still precarious. To gain a foothold at the helm of power and demonstrate his determination, he carried out demonstrative executions.

Although the ruler was unpleasant to know, he could not get rid of her completely. Under Tepes, there was a council of 12 people. Every year the ruler tried to update the composition of this body as much as possible in order to include enough people loyal to himself.

Dracula's domain

The primary task of Vlad on the throne was to deal with the taxation system. Wallachia paid tribute to Turkey and the authorities needed a stable income. The problem was that after Dracula's accession to the throne, the chief treasurer of the principality fled from Wallachia to Transylvania. He took with him a register - a collection where all data on taxes, taxes, villages and cities of the state were entered. Because of this loss, the principality experienced financial problems at first. The next treasurer was found only in 1458. The new cadastre needed to restore the tax system took three years to prepare.

On the territory belonging to Dracula there were 2100 villages and 17 more cities. There was no census at that time. Nevertheless, historians, with the help of secondary data, managed to restore the approximate number of subjects of the prince. The population of Wallachia was about 300 thousand people. The figure is modest, but in medieval Europe there was practically no demographic growth. Regular epidemics interfered, and the century of Dracula was especially rich in bloody events.

The largest cities of Tepes were Targovishte, Campulung and Curtea de Arges. They were the actual capitals - the princely courts were located there. The Wallachian ruler also owned the profitable Danube ports that controlled the trade of Europe and the Black Sea (Kilia, Braila).

As mentioned above, Dracula's treasury was replenished mainly through taxes. Wallachia was rich in cattle, grain, salt, fish, wineries. In the dense forests that occupied half the territory of this country, a lot of game lived. From the east, spices rare for the rest of Europe (saffron, pepper), fabrics, cotton and silk were delivered here.

Foreign policy

In 1457, the Wallachian army went to war with the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. The initiator of the campaign was Vlad III Tepes. The history of the campaign is obscure. Dracula accused the inhabitants of the city of helping Hunyadi and quarreling him with his younger brother Vlad the Monk. Leaving the lands of Sibiu, the Wallachian ruler went to Moldavia. There he helped to ascend the throne to his longtime comrade Stefan, who supported Dracula during his exile.

All this time, the Hungarians did not stop their attempts to re-subjugate the Romanian provinces. They supported a challenger named Dan. This rival of Dracula settled in the Transylvanian city of Brasov. Soon Wallachian merchants were detained there, and their goods were confiscated. In Dan's letters, for the first time, there are references to the fact that Dracula liked to resort to the cruel torture of impalement. It was from her that he got his nickname Tepes. From Romanian, this word can be translated as "kolschik".

The conflict between Dan and Dracula escalated in 1460. In April, the armies of the two rulers met in a bloody battle. The Wallachian ruler won a landslide victory. As a warning to the enemies, he ordered to impale already dead enemy soldiers. In July, Dracula took control of the important city of Fagaras, which had previously been occupied by Dan's supporters.

In autumn, an embassy from Brasov arrived in Wallachia. He was received by Vlad III Tepes himself. The prince's castle became the place where a new peace treaty was signed. The document applied not only to the people of Brasov, but also to all the Saxons living in Transylvania. The prisoners on both sides were released. Dracula promised to join an alliance against the Turks, who threatened the possessions of Hungary.

War with the Ottomans

Since Romania was his homeland, Dracula was Orthodox. He actively supported the church, gave her money and defended her interests in every possible way. At the expense of the prince, a new monastery of Komana was built near Giurgiu, as well as a temple in Tyrgshor. Tepes also gave money to the Greek Church. He donated to Athos and other Orthodox monasteries in the country occupied by the Turks.

Vlad III Tepes, whose biography during the second reign was so closely connected with the church, could not help but fall under the influence of Christian hierarchs who urged the authorities in any European country to fight against the Turks. The first sign of a new anti-Ottoman course was an agreement with the Transylvanian cities. Gradually, Dracula was more and more inclined to the need for war with the infidels. The Wallachian Metropolitan Macarius diligently prompted him to this idea.

It was impossible to fight the Sultan with the forces of one professional army. Poor Romania simply did not have enough people to equip an army as colossal as it was considered by the Turks. That is why Tepes armed the townspeople and peasants, creating a whole people's militia. Dracula in Moldova managed to get acquainted with a similar system of defense of the country.

In 1461, the Wallachian ruler decided that he had enough resources to talk with the Sultan on an equal footing. He refused to pay tribute to the Ottomans and began to prepare for an invasion. The invasion really took place in 1462. An army of up to 120 thousand people, led by Mehmed II, entered Wallachia.

Dracula did not allow the Turks to carry out the war according to his scenario. He organized a partisan struggle. Wallachian detachments attacked the Ottoman army in small detachments - at night and suddenly. This strategy cost the Turks 15,000 lives. Moreover, Tepes fought according to the tactics of scorched earth. His partisans destroyed any infrastructure that could be useful to the interventionists in a foreign land. The executions so beloved by Dracula were not forgotten - impalement became nightmare Turk. As a result, the Sultan had to retire from Wallachia with nothing.

Doom

In 1462, shortly after the end of the war with the Ottoman Empire, Dracula was betrayed by the Hungarians, who deprived him of the throne and put his neighbor in prison for twelve whole years. Formally, Tepes ended up in prison on charges of collaborating with the Ottomans.

After his release, when it was already 1475, he, left without power, began to serve in the Hungarian army, where he held the post of royal captain. In this capacity, Vlad took part in the siege of the Turkish bastion Shabats.

In the summer of 1476, the war with the Ottomans moved to Moldavia. Stephen the Great continued to rule there, whose friend was Dracula. The year of birth of Tepes fell on a troubled time, when events of a huge scale took place at the junction of Europe and Asia. Therefore, even if he wanted to return to a peaceful life, he would not have succeeded in doing this.

When Moldova was saved from the Turks, Stefan of Moldavia helped Dracula to reassert himself on the Wallachian throne. In Targovishte and Bucharest, the pro-Ottoman Layot Basarab ruled at that time. In November 1476, Moldavian troops captured the key cities of Wallachia. Dracula was proclaimed the prince of this unfortunate country for the third time.

Soon Stephen's troops left Wallachia. Tepes had a small army left. He died in December 1476, just a month after the assertion of his power. The circumstances of death, like the grave of Dracula, are not known for certain. According to one version, a servant bribed by the Turks killed him, according to another, the prince died in battle against the same Turks.

Bad reputation

Today, Vlad Dracula is much better known not for the historical facts of his life, but for the mythical image that developed around his personality after the death of the prince. We are talking, of course, about the famous Transylvanian vampire, who took the name of the Wallachian ruler.

But how did this character come about? The most incredible rumors circulated about the real Dracula during his lifetime. In Vienna, in 1463, a pamphlet was written and published about him, in which Tepes was described as a bloodthirsty maniac (the facts about executions by impalement and other evidence of numerous Romanian wars were used). The same collection included the poem "About the Villain", written by Michael Behaim. The work insisted that Tepes was a tyrant. The executions of girls and children were mentioned. Vlad III Tepes himself, married to Ilona Siladya, had three sons: Mikhail, Vlad and Mikhnya.

In 1480 The Tale of Dracula the Governor appeared. It was written in Russian by the clerk Fyodor Kuritsyn, who worked in the embassy office under Ivan III. He visited Hungary, where he was on an official visit to King Matthias Corvinus to conclude an alliance against Poland and Lithuania. In Transylvania, Kuritsyn collected several stories about Dracula, which he later used as the basis of his novel. The work of the Russian clerk differed from the Austrian pamphlet, although there are scenes of cruelty in it. However, the image of Dracula received real worldwide fame much later - at the end of the 19th century.

Stoker's image

Today, only Romania itself seems to know about this: Dracula was not a vampire or a count, but the ruler of Wallachia in the 15th century. For most of the inhabitants around the globe, his name is associated only with the undead. The idea that Vlad III the Impaler drank blood was popularized by the Irish writer Bram Stoker (1847 - 1912). With his novel Dracula, he transformed the historical character into the category of a mythical creature and a popular hero of popular culture.

The image of a vampire, one way or another, is in every pagan culture and religion. In general, it can be called a "living corpse" - a dead creature that maintains its life by drinking the blood of its victims. For example, among the ancient Slavs, a ghoul was considered a similar creature. Stoker was fond of mysticism and decided to use the notoriety of the real Dracula for his vampire novel. The writer also called him Nosferatu. In 1922, this word was placed in the title of Friedrich Murnau's landmark horror film.

The image of Dracula has become a classic for the entire world cinema and the horror genre. Throughout the 20th century, the industry returned again and again to Stoker's plot of the Transylvanian count (according to the Guinness Book of Records, 155 feature films were made). At the same time, there are only a dozen tapes dedicated to Tepes, who lived in the 15th century.

There was a governor in the Muntian land, a Christian of the Greek faith, his name in Wallachian is Dracula, and in our opinion - the Devil. He was so cruel and wise that whatever his name was, such was his life...

Fedor Kuritsyn, "The Tale of Dracula Governor"

He drank the blood of his enemies and loved to dine among his thousands of impaled victims. He cut out women's breasts, skinned people alive, pierced their bellies, and nailed hats to their heads. The most important and bloody monster is the Prince of Darkness. The one whose name means "son of the Devil" in Romanian. The one who loves cinema so much and who today has thousands of fans. The mysterious tyrant of the Middle Ages - Vlad Tepes Dracula. This is what our contemporaries think.

He died five centuries ago and then he was buried with honors, called the most just ruler, honest and noble. People could not hold back their tears because they knew he gave his life to protect them. Vlad Dracula built churches and monasteries, founded the capital of Romania Bucharest and saved Europe from the Turkish invasion. He was a defender of the Orthodox faith, but died a Catholic. He was a brilliant commander, but went down in history under a terrible nickname - Tepes, i.e. "impaling". He is credited with tens of thousands of executions. Who was he really? Why did he acquire such fame? And when did the building of the reputation of a man who is still considered a national hero in Romania begin?

In the 15th century the prince Vlad III Dracula was the ruler or ruler of the small country of Wallachia, located in the center of Europe on the territory of modern Romania. Even during his reign, rumors spread around Europe about the extreme cruelty of Dracula. and then sudden death he was generally declared a servant of the Devil. Below is one of the medieval engravings, where Vlad quietly dine among thousands of impaled people.

Perhaps this excitement would have passed with time, but soon after the death of Dracula, an ambassador from the Russian Tsar Ivan III arrived in Romania Fedor Kuritsyn . He heard about the deeds of the prince and brought back from this journey his heartbreaking story - "The Tale of Dracula". In Russia, the book was immediately banned - Kuritsyn admired the actions of the prince too much. But one day the legend fell into the hands of a minor Ivan IV the Terrible . For the young king, this book became a guide to government. He carefully studied the methods of execution according to the method of Dracula and over time surpassed him. Began to combine flaying with burning; impaled and at the same time cut out pieces of meat from the unfortunate; boiled the victims in oil, set fire to them and tore them by the legs.

All tyrants are the same. Something makes everyone be cruel: the situation in the country, conspiracies, opposition, a difficult childhood, or innate insensitivity and cruelty. But why did Dracula stand out so much that he was proclaimed Prince of Darkness No. 1? Did he really drink blood? It's all the Irish writer's fault Bram Stoker . He lived in the 19th century and wrote horror novels, but none of them brought him success until he decided to write a novel about vampires. It was in the 19th century that everyone believed that ghouls exist. These are not just characters from folk tales. They live somewhere in the unknown and terrible forests of Eastern Europe, among the Serbs, Czechs and Russians. Stoker heard about Vlad the Impaler Dracula from his friend, a Hungarian scientist, who told about the forgotten tyrant and gave medieval books about the monster. In gratitude, Stoker made this scientist a vampire fighter and introduced him into the book under the name Van Helsing . In Stoker's novel, a vampire count lives in a Transylvanian castle who bites through the necks of his guests, drinks their blood, and turns them into zombie slaves. He sleeps in a coffin, he has red elongated fangs, a deformed spine and, most importantly, he is very afraid of sunlight. Naturally, Stoker changed and invented a lot. And Dracula was not a count, but a prince. And he did not live in Transylvania, but in Wallachia. and slept not in a coffin, but on an ordinary bed.

Disease or vampirism?

Regarding Dracula's appearance and photophobia, Stoker described the symptoms of a real illness, unknown at the time. Such people really have long fangs, they cannot be in the sun, because the skin becomes blistered, their skeleton is deformed and they become very scary. All of these are sick porphyria. It occurs very rarely when a person's metabolic process in the blood is disturbed. Doctors managed to determine porphyria not so long ago - in 1963. Patients with porphyria, of course, did not drink blood, but because of their ugly appearance they were feared and often called the living dead. Of course, such clinical features leave an imprint on the psyche. Thus, a person who is afraid of daylight and has anatomical defects begins to acquire a certain halo of mystery. Perhaps Stoker saw in his life a patient with porphyria. His appearance impressed the writer so much that he endowed her with his hero, the bloodsucker Dracula. And what did the real Prince of Wallachia look like?

Appearance of Vlad Dracula

A lifetime portrait of Dracula and its description have come down to us: "He was a short, densely built, broad-shouldered man. The features are rough. The skin is delicate. He had an aquiline nose, wide nostrils, very long eyelashes, wide eyebrows and a long mustache." Nothing to suggest porphyria. So the appearance of the literary Dracula has nothing to do with the appearance of the prototype. Moreover, there is no information in any historical source that Dracula drank blood. Other atrocities were attributed to him, but he was not seen in vampirism.

The tradition of drinking the blood of their enemies existed among the Kurds, Japanese samurai and the Papuans of New Guinea. It has nothing to do with pleasure, but with conviction. Drinking the blood of your enemy, you get his strength and youth. Eating the heart - you seize his courage. These traditions were unknown to medieval Romanians. But Stoker knew very well about them in the 19th century, who had been interested in the memoirs of famous European travelers all his life. So the writer's fantasy, in addition to a frightening appearance, endowed the Romanian prince with love for fresh blood. and behind these horrors one can no longer see the image of the real Dracula, the one whom the Romanians still consider a national hero. and they were so offended by Bram Stoker that they even banned the novel Dracula. Ceausescu declared that the novel dishonors the honorable name of the illustrious son of the Romanian people, Vlad Dracula. But why was one tyrant so protective of another? What was good about Vlad Tepes and his crimes? And why do Romanians love Dracula so much?

In the Middle Ages, Wallachia was a small principality adjacent to Transylvania, and today it is part of Romania. Mountains and dense fog hiding small towns. It seems that the Romanians there and now are afraid of vampires, but they do not know what it is. In their fairy tales, no one drinks blood. Such characters in folk representations never existed. Then it is not at all clear where the legend of the bloody Dracula came from.

Childhood and youth of Vlad Dracula

In 1431 in the city of Sighisoara in the family of the prince Vlad II Dracula and Moldavian princess Vasiliki a son was born. In general, the ruler of Wallachia had four sons: the eldest Mircea , average Vlad And Radu and the youngest - also Vlad (son of the second wife of Prince Vlad II - Koltsuny , subsequently Vlad IV Monk ). Fate will not be favorable to the first three of them. Mircea will be buried alive by the Wallachian boyars in Targovishte. Radu will become the favorite of the Turkish Sultan Mehmed II , and Vlad will bring his family the bad reputation of a cannibal. Vlad IV The monk will live his life more or less calmly. The family crest was a dragon. It was in the year of Vlad's birth that his father joined the Order of the Dragon, whose members swore on blood to protect Christians from the Muslim Turks. They wore long black cloaks. By the way, the bloody prince Dracula will wear the same.

Over time, details of his birth appear in the legends about Prince Dracula. Allegedly, when the baby was born, one of the icons in the room wept blood. It was the birth of the Antichrist. In addition, two comets appeared in the sky at once, which was also not a good omen. Such stories are often invented after the birth of many prominent people.

In the 15th century, the Turks took over the country. Sultan Murad II demands to pay tribute - to send boys and animals to Turkey. It is impossible to argue with the Turks, they have just captured Constantinople and have become a threat to the whole world. Gradually, the small countries of Eastern Europe came under their rule. From the Balkans, the Turks went to Romania and Wallachia had to become a Turkish province. The prince fought back as best he could, secretly joined the knightly order of the Dragon, and played a double game with the sultan. He taught his sons that the main thing is freedom.

But one day the sultan revealed his secret plan and summoned the prince and his sons to him and accused him of treason. And in order for the prince to serve him faithfully, he took his two sons as hostages: Vlad and Rada. If their father had rebelled against the Turks, the boys would have simply been killed. However, there were some advantages to this conclusion. Education in Turkey at that time was considered one of the best. Only there could Vlad learn martial arts and military strategy to face this empire. It had to be studied from the inside. That's what Vlad's father would have wanted. Several years passed and all this time the brothers were together. Vlad supported the younger Rada, took care of him. Together they dreamed that they would run away home and, together with their father and older brother, take revenge on the Turks.

But it happened differently. Wallachia had many enemies: Hungarian neighbors who wanted to take away her lands; the boyars, who wanted to put their protege on the throne, and the Turks, who established their own rules. Chaos reigned in the country. The Romanians gradually converted to Islam. And Dracula Sr. fought as best he could for the preservation of his rights and religion. But one day his captured sons found out - their father was killed. His older brother Mircea also died with him. The boyars elevated their candidate to the throne. Now it turned out that the fourteen-year-old Vlad Dracula became the heir to the throne. An heir who had nothing - no power, no freedom. He cherished in his soul hatred for the Turks and revenge for the death of his relatives. In his hatred, he did not notice how the irreparable happened - his younger brother liked the heir of Sultan Mehmed. Known for his perverse predilection for boys, he took the weak Radu into his harem and made him a favorite. Vlad choked with hatred. Through the prison bars, he saw the Turks executing Christians - how they sharpen smooth sticks with a diameter of about 25 cm and impale people on them. The unfortunate died for 12 hours, because the stake gradually passed through the whole body, pierced internal organs and passed through the mouth. Then Vlad decided to learn the language, techniques and customs of the Turks, and when the time comes, to kill them, in their own favorite way. so another six years passed in hatred and sadness.

Once, Vlad was brought to the Sultan and he said: "Come back home. Sit on the throne of your father and serve me more honestly than he served." Returning, Vlad saw his country in ruins. Boyar strife and the struggle for power gave rise to chaos. Theft, lynching and lawlessness flourished. Part of the population became turkish and converted to Islam. Neighboring Transylvania threatened war. It was then that Vlad Dracula made three oaths to himself: to avenge the death of his father and older brother, save his younger brother Rada from captivity and free the country from the Turks. He will not pay tribute, will not give boys to numerous Janissary barracks, because he is not a puppet, he is Vlad Dracula. The one whose name will become a nightmare for the Sultan. Personal life For four years, Vlad conscientiously paid tribute to the Turks, sent humble letters to the Sultan, assured of his loyalty. At the same time, he secretly formed his army.

Continuing the work of his father, he began to establish ties with his neighbors. He made friends with the king of Hungary and at his court found what he never had - a friend and love. The successor of the Hungarian king became a friend Matthias Korvin and love is beautiful Lydia , the daughter of a Romanian boyar - a quiet, submissive and beautiful girl. She was going to be the bride of the Lord, to spend her life in a convent. But a chance meeting with Vlad Dracula turned her life upside down. The prince, in love, begged on his knees to refuse to be tonsured, and Lydia agreed to become his wife. This decision will make her unhappy and make her die young. They were married in a small Hungarian church. Vlad was happy. For the first time in his life, he wanted not to fight, but to enjoy quiet family joys.

Domestic and foreign policy of Vlad Dracula

But Vlad understood that life under the rule of the Turks could not last forever. All this time he lived in captivity of his nightmares, and woke up from his own scream. In a dream he saw his dead father. He was lowered into the grave alive. I saw a little brother who was still at the mercy of the Turkish sultan. The dead called for revenge, while the living waited for his return. And Vlad finally made up his mind. The bloody revenge of Vlad Dracula. At this time, the Pope tried to organize a new crusade against the Turks, but only Wallachia and Hungary agreed to fight. Other countries feared the sultan's revenge. Vlad Dracula was so delighted with the opportunity to get rid of Turkish dependence that he refused to pay tribute to the Sultan. It was a challenge, but the sultan, busy with the war with Greece, decided to postpone the punishment of the impudent Dracula. Vlad understood that before the war it was necessary to strengthen his power. There was little time, so the prince did not choose the methods.

To begin with, he tried to stop the boyar strife that was tearing apart his small country. In his family castle Targovishte, Vlad avenged the death of his father and older brother. According to legend, he invited the boyars to a feast, and then ordered them all to be stabbed to death. It is believed that it is with this execution that the bloody procession of the great tyrant Vlad Dracula begins. So the legends tell, but the chronicles convince in a different way - at the feast, Dracula only scared the boyars, and only got rid of those whom he suspected of treason. During the first years of his reign, he executed 11 boyars who were preparing a coup against him. Having avoided a real threat, Dracula began to restore order in the country. He issued new laws. For theft, murder and violence, criminals were expected to be executed - they were supposed to be burned at the stake. When public executions began in the country, people realized that their ruler was not joking.

Vlad Tepes quickly became famous as a just ruler. In his time, money could be left right on the street and no one would dare to steal it, because everyone knew that the punishment would be terrible. There was not a single thief in the country. For Vlad, it didn’t matter if a nobleman, a boyar or an ordinary beggar committed a crime. The decision for all was one-execution. The legend claims that in this way he destroyed all the beggars and those who did not want to work. gradually he deliberately made people afraid of himself. He even selected scary stories about his cruelty. He believed that only in this way would he make himself respected and prepare the people for a difficult war with the Turks. In each city, Vlad left a golden goblet at the main well so that anyone could drink water. People were so afraid and respected their ruler that no one dared to steal this cup. Some of his reforms healed the economy of Wallachia in record time. Under Dracula, even hominy was boiled in milk, since milk was cheaper than water. He gave the green light to local merchants, and imposed a heavy duty on foreign merchants. And when the merchants of neighboring Transylvania tried to rebel, he staged a demonstrative execution. In front of the entire merchant community, he ordered to impale ten merchants who violated his law. But he was not forgiven for this. Vlad punished the Saxons near Brasov, after which they began to write about him scary stories. The Saxons portrayed Dracula as a terrible, bloody and cruel ruler. To them, he was a monster. Thus began the creation of the image of the Devil. The merchants decided to take revenge and spread gossip that Dracula is the Devil who destroys his people, that he burns entire cities, impales even babies, burns women's breasts, and then feasts among the corpses. Later, other terrible inventions were added to these fantasies.

Once Dracula arranged a dinner and invited the beggars to his place. When the guests had eaten, the prince asked if they always wanted to be so full and happy. The guests nodded happily. Then Vlad went out, and the servants locked and set fire to the house from all sides. Nobody survived. The same thing happened with the Turkish ambassadors. They came to the prince for negotiations, but refused to take off their turbans as a sign of respect. Then Dracula ordered to nail these turbans to the embassy's heads with nails. There is only part of the truth in these stories. The beggars in the country really disappeared, but no one burned them at a feast. They were punished, and those who refused to work were burned. And no one nailed turbans to the heads of ambassadors. Dracula knew Turkish customs too well. Since there was no chronicler at Dracula's court, there is too little information about him. The only "reliable" document was a pamphlet written by Saxon merchants. In it, he is naturally presented in the most negative light. But for the Romanian people, he is a hero and a just ruler who never killed innocent people.

Thus, in four years, Dracula completely changed the situation in his country. He founded the future capital - Bucharest, began the construction of new castles and fortresses and continued not to pay tribute to the Sultan, realizing that they would soon want to punish him. But when Vlad turned to his allies in Hungary and Moldova for support, they refused to help him. Friend and king of Hungary Matthias Corvinus has already spent the money allocated to him by the Pope for the crusade. Therefore, he was forced to support Dracula, but he did it in a very cunning way - he equipped the army and ordered him to stay on the border with Wallachia and wait. the angry sultan gathered 250 thousand soldiers and put them on Wallachia. Vlad was in despair, because he had only 30 thousand soldiers. Then he decided to retreat and wage a guerrilla war. His warriors only attacked at night, howling like wolves. The Turks were terrified, they thought they were fighting werewolves. This is exactly what Prince Dracula wanted. His army quickly appeared, killed and also quickly disappeared. The Turks found nothing in Wallachia, not even horse food. The water in the wells was poisoned. The Turks drank and died. In addition, ambushes awaited them in all mountain gorges and forests.

The tactics of "scorched earth" worked - the huge army of the Turks was melting before our eyes. Everyone volunteered to join Dracula's army. even 12-year-old boys and women were accepted into the army. And in 1462, one of the most famous and daring attacks of this war took place. Vlad dressed his soldiers in Turkish clothes and attacked the headquarters of the Sultan at night. The panic began. No one knew who was attacking them and from where. The frightened Turks cut each other down. The Sultan was not killed only by mistake - he was confused with the vizier. That night, Dracula's small army massacred 30,000 Turks. And the next day, the Sultan discovered a forest of impaled Turkish soldiers - 4,000 dead. So Vlad surpassed his teachers in cruelty. The conqueror of Constantinople, the great and invincible sultan, after what he saw said: "I will not conquer a country ruled by such a bloodthirsty and great warrior" and simply retreated. King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary credited this victory to himself. Allegedly, it was he who led Dracula in the war. O sent a letter to the Pope - reported that the money was not spent in vain.

Now all of Europe glorified Dracula and Corwin as heroes. Offended by Dracula, the Hungarian king said that he could not help him. I just didn't have time to raise an army. And Vlad believed a friend. He had only to finish off the retreating Turkish troops. Once, during a regular fight with the Turks, Dracula suddenly ran into the commander of the Turkish detachment in battle. A battle ensued, and when Vlad removed the helmet from the Turk with a blow, he saw his brother Radu. He realized that his brother had become a traitor and a loyal servant of the Sultan. Vlad wanted to kill him, but his brother shouted that Vlad owed him. It was he who begged the Sultan to grant him freedom and the throne. Having killed hundreds of enemies, Dracula could not kill a single one. This mistake will cost him his life.

Betrayal

Soon he learned that Rada was supported by the boyars and made a new pretender to the throne. A rebellion broke out against the prince. The boyars concluded a secret treaty with the Turks. and they launched a new offensive against the country. It was a trap - Vlad's small army could not fight on two fronts. He had to give up positions and retreat to the mountains, and keep the last defense high in the mountains - in his impregnable fortress Poenari . It was here that Dracula's hopes to free his country were buried. Here, his army held the Turkish siege for several months, and here he managed to transport his wife, saving the boyars from possible revenge. The Turks still surrounded the fortress. With the last of his strength, Vlad fled to the tower with a secret exit, where the unfortunate Lydia was waiting for him. But Vlad did not have time - the Turks had already made a hole in the wall of the tower. Lydia preferred death to Turkish bullying and jumped from the tower into the river. For a woman of that time, being captured by the Turks was worse than suicide. She died defending her honor. It is said that Dracula sold his soul to Satan after the death of Lydia. Dracula fled from the fortress, but his life stopped - his wife died, his brother renounced, his allies betrayed him. All he had left was revenge. The Turks, led by Radu, captured Wallachia. Meanwhile, the king of Hungary had to answer for the failure of the campaign before the Pope. And he found the culprit...

Vlad, hoping for his support, came to Buda, but he was seized. Corwin threw accusations of treason against him, allegedly he agreed with the Turkish Sultan to capture Hungary. Dracula was imprisoned and brutally tortured to force him to confess to "treason". He pleaded not guilty to nothing. so he spent ten whole years in a Hungarian prison. So the best friend of the Hungarian king Matthias Corvin shamelessly betrayed Dracula, slandered, forged letters to the Sultan, ordered to create documents about the cruel crimes of the prince. And the reason for betrayal is as old as the world - money. royal life demanded royal expenses and Matthias appropriated the money allocated by the Pope for the crusade, and decided to shift the blame for the disruption of the campaign to Vlad Dracula, part-time his best friend.

In order to convince the Pope that the prince is capable of treason, he called the offended merchants from Transylvania (the very ones Dracula once punished for lying). Now they could take revenge and created an anonymous pamphlet in 1463, which described the inhuman atrocities of Dracula and tens of thousands of tortured civilians. so in Europe they learned about the bloody monster Dracula. While he was in prison, terrible stories about his cruelty spread throughout the world.

Five centuries have passed, and after the success of Bram Stoker's book, cinema became interested in Dracula. The first silent horror story about Dracula "Nosferatu - a symphony of horror" saw the world. It was from her that the bloody procession of the movie vampire Dracula began. Over the past 80 years, more than 200 films have been made about the main vampire of the world. From the iconic film by Francis Ford Coppola to the ironic film starring Leslie Nielsen. All this time, the Romanians have not heard anything about Dracula the vampire. Films and books simply did not fall behind the Iron Curtain. Only in 1992 did they learn in Romania - their Vlad Dracula for the entire Western world is the Prince of Darkness and a symbol of evil.

Castle of Vlad Dracula

Thanks to Stoker's book, Romania became known to the whole world and tourism began to develop in the country. Today, thousands of tourists seek to see the castle of Count Dracula. However, there are many such castles throughout Romania, and Dracula simply did not see most of them - they were built after his death. For example, Bran Castle is considered the true residence of the prince, but he never visited there either. We can definitely say that Dracula visited only the fortress of Poenari and the ancient city of Sighisoara, where, in fact, he was born. But the Romanian guides naturally do not talk about this. By the way, the house where Dracula was born is now a restaurant with a vampire theme. Is it worth the slandered name of the national hero, only money will answer.

Last offspring of Dracula

A direct descendant of Vlad Dracula now lives in the center of Bucharest - Constantin Bolacianu-Stolnic . The uniqueness of the situation lies in the fact that he is already 90 years old, and he has no children. so he is the last of Dracula's lineage. Constantin Bolacianu-Stolnich is a neuropsychologist, anthropologist and geneticist. The old professor is descended from the older brother of Vlad Tepes - Mircea. He knows everything about his legendary ancestor Dracula. And he tells people what Vlad really was - a man who fought for the independence of his country, but, unfortunately, fell victim to political intrigues. He is a hero, a national hero. And not only in official history, but also in folk legends. It is not known what the history of Europe would have been if the Turks had conquered it. And the fact that they did not do this is the merit of Tepes. He was a strong personality. He was well educated, as he received the best education at that time - Turkish. He was a good warrior and one of the few who could resist Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople. The last descendant of Dracula has already come to terms with the fact that they made a gold mine out of his ancestor. But the secret of the last months of the prince's life is still trying to unravel.

The last years of the life and death of Vlad Dracula

Vlad spent 12 years of imprisonment in the prisons of Buda and Pest. In the meantime, the Pope of Rome has changed, the Turks have become more active again. Europe faced the threat of Turkish invasion. In his native Wallachia, the traitor brother Radu III the Handsome and, of course, the Turks ruled. There are suggestions that Radu converted to Islam. Therefore, the new Pope Pius II was afraid that the country might become completely Muslim. Then he remembered the captive Dracula. Who, no matter how he should fight for his country?

So after 12 years, his imprisonment ended. The Hungarian king Matthias Corvin released him so that he drove the Turks away and again ruled Wallachia. At the same time, he set two conditions for him: 1) he would marry his relative Ilona so that Corvin would not suspect him of treason; 2) accept Catholicism in order to prove his honesty to the Pope. Vlad will dutifully accept all the conditions - he married a second time and became an apostate. All in order to return and fulfill his third oath - to liberate the country. When he made his last campaign against the Turks he was 45 years old. His wife managed to give birth to two sons to him, and the king of Hungary finally fulfilled his promise - he gave him an army. With battles, Vlad ascended the throne for the third time. But at home, an unpleasant surprise awaited him - now everyone was scared to death of him, even his own servants. He renounced his faith. Behind him they whispered: a sorcerer, a devil, an apostate. In addition, Wallachia was again weakened by civil strife. Dracula again fought with the Turks and the victory was his. One day in 1462, in battle, he suddenly felt a terrible blow to his back. He was killed by his own boyars, treacherously, in battle...

Then, before burial, superstitious people plunged a stake into the chest of the prince and cut off his head. So then they did with the traitors of the faith. Vlad Dracula was buried by the monks Snagovsky Monastery. But a few years later, the grave was opened and only garbage and animal bones were found in it. The panic began. Gossip has gone that Vlad Dracula is alive. No one knew that his grave was securely hidden under a slab in front of the entrance to the same church. Someone reburied the body on purpose so that the parishioners would trample on the ashes of Dracula. According to ancient Orthodox custom, this meant that by such humiliation the deceased atones for his earthly guilt.

Many centuries have passed and now for Romania the prince has again become a hero. time put everything in its place. People realized too late the role that Dracula played in the liberation of the country. Today, the song is popular in Romania: "Where are you, Tepes, our god? Come back and send all the rulers of Romania to hell..."

From the website:

Mention:

Fifth guard. 1 season. Episode 1 Prologue

Episode 24

Dracula. A real vampire from Transylvania Tuesday, January 14, 2020 04:06 PM ()

Dracula ... In the minds of millions of people, this name is associated with the image of the legendary vampire from the gloomy and mysterious country of Transylvania - during the day he pretends to be a lifeless body, and at night he goes on the trail of murders, terrifying entire generations of residents and ... spectators, as well as readers since 1897 of the year. It was in that year that he became the protagonist of Bram Stoker's wildly successful horror novel.
But far fewer people know that the name of the immortal Stoker character is borrowed from the real Dracula, who lived in the real Transylvania four centuries before. And although that Dracula was not at all a bloodsucker in the truest sense of the word, he acquired for himself no less terrible fame as a bloody tyrant, whose cruelty became the eternal and, perhaps, the most striking example of sadism.
The real Dracula was born in 1430 or 1431 in the ancient Transylvanian town of Sighisoara and was the second son of Vlad II, Prince of Wallachia. Having inherited the power of his father, he became Vlad III, although he was better known as Vlad the Impaler, that is, the Impaler. His father's name was Dracul - "the devil" - perhaps because he was a fearless fighter, or because - and this is most likely - that he was a member of the Catholic sect of the order of the dragon, and in those areas the dragon was synonymous with the devil. In any case, Vlad III called himself Dracul oh, the son of Dracul.
He was a brave warrior, but sometimes it was difficult to understand whose side he took in this or that battle between eastern and western religions, churches and cultures, mixed in the principality subject to him. Either he leaned towards the Turks, then towards the Hungarians, he switched from the Roman Catholic Church to the Orthodox, fought under the banner of Islam on the side of the Ottomans. In the political chaos of that era, he never stood firmly on his feet. Three times he lost and regained Wallachia - a part of Southern Romania, including the regions of Transylvania.
Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. Born from the imagination of the author in 1897, the vampire count still roams the world in films, novels and plays.
He first appeared on the Wallachian throne in 1443, on which the Turks put him, after his father and elder brother fell at the hands of Hungarian mercenaries. Frightened by the Turks, who at one time patronized him, he fled, but returned to the throne in 14S6, already with Hungarian support. The next six years of his reign were marked by atrocities. In those days, torture and murder of political opponents were commonplace - the XIV - XV centuries were imprinted in history as an era of unheard-of atrocities and crimes. But Vlad's antics, which later became an example for Ivan the Terrible, broke records even of those years. The number of his victims is incalculable. According to one legend, he ambushed a detachment of Turks, whom he was supposed to meet peacefully for negotiations, inviting them to the city of Tirgovishte, took off their clothes, put them on stakes and burned them alive.
His victims were not only enemies, but also his own subjects - to know and ordinary peasants, as well as random travelers. Suspecting everyone indiscriminately, he executed innocent people. So, his soldiers discovered and burned a group of merchants crossing his lands. They did not forget to kill even the drivers. Another time, for the same reasons, he gathered together 400 foreign students, mostly boys, who studied the language and customs in Wallachia, drove them into one room, locked and set fire to the house.
He usually impaled his victims on stakes. But this seemed not enough to him, and the sadist came up with all sorts of other ways of killing the victims - he pierced them with stakes in front, behind, on the side, through the chest, stomach, navel, groin. He strung them on stakes through his mouth, upside down; came up with ways to make a person suffer longer. invented different types deaths for people of different ages, sex and status. For this purpose, he prepared special stakes in the form of geometric figures, especially loved curved ones. For some unknown reason, he executed the population of the entire village, placing stakes of various lengths in a circle on a hillside, placing the headman and other representatives of local authorities from above so that they could take a last look at their former possessions with a blurred look.
He decorated the general picture of executions with torn nails, heads, ears and genitals. Those who lacked stakes were strangled, boiled in oil, or blinded. He took particular pleasure when the victims "danced and writhed on their stakes." Watching their torment, he would say: “Oh, what wonderful moments they experience!”
Thanks to the recent invention of the printing press, stories of Dracula's "arts" were spreading throughout Europe during his lifetime. He became a favorite character of pamphleteers, whose writings were popular in many countries. As forerunners of future illustrated magazines, these editions on the title pages placed appeals to readers who were frozen in horror such as: “The nightmare story of a monster and tormentor named Dracula, who distinguished himself by such acts hostile to Christianity as impaling people, chopping them to pieces, boiling women and children alive, as well as cannibalism.” The public bought and read such little books, thrilled with fear and curiosity at the same time, and at the same time forgetting that their native inquisition was much more terrible actions ...
So Dracula became the first international media character.
But, despite his crimes, in his homeland, in Romanian folklore, he remained a heroic figure who drove out the invaders. The Germans, in the books they published, emphasized the cruelty and sadism of Dracula, since among his Transylvanian victims there were many immigrants from Germany. But many chilling scenes were also drawn from other sources - Russian testimonies, the memoirs of Pope Pius II (his legate in Hungary met Dracula), Romanian ballads and legends that only confirmed and multiplied German examples.
One of the most memorable atrocities of Dracula took place on April 2, 1459 in Brasov and was the result of a long dispute between Vlad and local merchants. At the end of the day, the prince's detachments began to drive the people to the hill near the chapel on the outskirts of the city. In total, about 20 thousand people gathered, mainly representatives of the local nobility. They watched in horror as the soldiers burned their houses, and then the traditional stakes began.
Closer to the night, the hillside turned into a forest of stakes, through which streams of blood flowed and the heads of those who could not find a place on the points rolled. During the execution, one local boyar, as they say, shuddered from the terrible smell and sight of blood. And Dracula, who had a peculiar sense of humor, ordered to put the unfortunate man on the highest stake so that he would be less bothered by unpleasant odors. The prince himself was not embarrassed either by the sight itself or by the stench. According to legend, he calmly dined near the dead and dying in agony of fellow citizens.
Nor could he be accused of preferring one class or another. Once he gathered the boyars of the whole region and began to ask them who lived under whose rule. They did not suspect that Dracula set out to avenge the brutal murder of his brother and father and tried to find out which of the boyars could have been present at their death. As a result, more than 500 people were put on stakes and died a terrible death near his palace.
On another occasion, he invited poor residents to his palace, invited them to undress, and treated them to dinner. When they relaxed, all the doors suddenly slammed shut and the house blazed at once from different angles. “I did this in order to eradicate poverty in my state forever, so that no one else would suffer,” the prince declared with cynical humor.
Women were a special target for this monster. The story tells that one day Dracula met a poorly dressed peasant. “Your wife is clearly not worthy of you,” he said. And although the peasant tried to assure the prince that his wife was quite satisfied with him, he ordered her to be put on a stake, and the widower to pick up a new woman.
Unfaithful wives, girls who lost their virginity early, and widows who broke mourning were punished immediately. Their genitals were cut out, skinned alive and put on public display.
One of the legends has brought to our days the case of one of his mistresses, who also did not manage to escape death. Finding the master in a grumpy state, she tried to return him to a good mood, telling him that she was pregnant. Dracula accused her of lying. Wanting to prove that she was deceiving him, he drew his sword and cut open her stomach. The legend does not say whether he was right in his guess.
The insidious disposition of Dracula also manifested itself when the ambassadors of the Turkish Sultan arrived at him, but did not take off their turbans when they bowed. Dracula asked why they didn't show him respect. “This is the custom of our country,” they replied. To this, the count said that he supported this custom, and ordered their turbans to be nailed to their heads with nails.
No one knows how many people were executed or tortured in various ways by this tyrant. The papal legate, Bishop Erlau, who had no reason to exaggerate, reports that Dracula doomed 100,000 people to death, but other sources suggest that this number is too low.
"The Tale of Dracula the Governor" ... In the "History of the Russian State" N. M. Karamzin called this story "the first Russian historical novel." Her manuscript ends with the name of the scribe - this is the monk of the Kirillo-Belozersky monastery Euphrosyn. But who is the author? It is known that in 1482 Ivan III sent the diplomat Fyodor Kuritsyn to Buda. According to Academician A. Kh. Vostokov, “it is quite likely that the composition of this story can be attributed either to Kuritsyn himself, or to someone from his retinue who heard the descriptions of what happened by his eyewitness.”
Here summary"Tales" in the transfer of N. M. Karamzin.
There was a governor in the Muntian land, a Christian of the Greek faith, his name in Wallachian is Dracula, and in our opinion - the Devil. He was so cruel and wise that whatever his name was, such was his life.
One day, ambassadors from the Turkish king came to him and, entering, bowed according to their custom, but did not remove their caps from their heads. He asked them: “Why did they do this: they came to the great sovereign and inflicted such dishonor on me?” They answered: "This is the custom, sir, of ours and in our land." And he said to them: "And I want to confirm your law, so that they hold fast to it." And he ordered caps to be nailed to their heads with iron studs...
The king was very angry, and went to war with Dracula, and attacked him with great forces. The same, having gathered all his army, struck at the Turks at night and killed many of them. But he could not defeat the huge army with his small army and retreated. And he himself began to inspect everyone who returned with him from the battlefield: who was wounded in the chest, he paid honors to him and made him into a knight, and who in the back ordered him to be impaled ...
And the king sent an ambassador to Dracula, demanding tribute from him. Dracula gave the ambassador magnificent honors, and showed him his wealth, and said to him: “I am not only ready to pay tribute to the king, but with all my army and with all my wealth I want to go to his service, and as he commands me, so he I will serve ... ”And the king was glad, for at that time he was waging war in the east. And he immediately sent an announcement to all cities and all over the earth that when Dracula went, no one would do him any harm, but, on the contrary, they would meet him with honor. Dracula, having gathered all the army, set off on his way, and the royal bailiffs accompanied him, and gave him great honors. He, having gone deep into the Turkish land for five day's marches, suddenly turned back, and began to ruin cities and villages, and captivated and killed many people, planted some Turks on stakes, cut others in two and burned them, not sparing even infants. He left nothing in his path, he turned the whole land into a desert, and took away the Christians who were there and settled in his land. And he returned home, capturing untold riches, and dismissed the royal bailiffs with honors, admonishing: “Go and tell your king about everything that you saw: as much as you could, served him. And if my service is love to him, I am ready to serve him in the same way, how much my strength will become.
He lost his throne in 1462 and, overthrown by the boyars, spent 20 years in a Hungarian fortress. Then he was released to take part in the fight against the Ottomans, and after Dracula again took possession of the Wallachian throne. And there was the last battle with the Turkish army near Bucharest. Sources describe his death in different ways. Some argue that traitors-boyars killed him. Others say that he disguised himself as a Turk and disappeared, but the plan failed: his companions stabbed Dracula by mistake, and his head was flaunted in Istanbul for a long time, impaled on a stake. So ordered Sultan Mehmed II.
The remains of the Wallachian ruler rest in the Snagov Monastery, two dozen kilometers from Bucharest. This is one of the memorable historical places in Romania.
By the end of the 15th century, the monastery was known as one of the three largest monasteries in the country. Shortly after Dracula's death, the Church of the Annunciation collapsed. In the 17th century, the monastery experienced a new period of prosperity, becoming a recognized center of education in the southeast of Europe. One of the first printing presses in the country, Antim Ivireanu, the publisher of the Romanian translation of the Gospel, was installed in the monastery cells. Then the monastery was adapted for a prison, and by the middle of the 19th century it was empty, and the ancient buildings gradually fell into disrepair.
Here is what the Romanian writer Alexandru Odobescu wrote in 1862 in the short story A Few Hours in Snagov:
“The chipped slabs are located in different parts of the temple, but who can say over whose ashes they are erected? Only one, the largest, which lies opposite the royal doors at the altar, keeps a legend. They say that this is the tombstone of one cruel and masterful ruler Tepes, who in Snagov set up something like a torture chamber, from where the convict, who was tormented by fire and iron, was then thrown into the lake with the help of a throwing weapon. ... Metropolitan Filaret allegedly ordered that letters be cut from the stone on the grave of the despicable ruler who created such a terrible machine, and that this stone be put under eternal trampling or for the sake of saving an unfortunate soul under the feet of the priest when he comes out with holy gifts.
In the 30s of our century, the Romanian historians Dinu Rosetti and Gheorghe Florescu, who carried out archaeological excavations in Snagov, found confirmation that the remains of Vlad Tepes were in one of the burials. However, in the writings of later Romanian historians, this discovery is not only questioned, but somehow not considered indisputable.
... Fate did bring them together. Dracula rests in Snagov after completing earthly affairs in a grave behind the monastery wall, and Nicolae Ceausescu liked to be here, very close, in his palace, indulging in rest in between earthly affairs. In the evenings, a veil of twilight immediately covers Lake Snagov, the monastery standing on the island and the former country residence of the now executed and secretly buried dictator.
Previously, pleasure boats went on the lake, boat stations took tourists. But the “beloved leader”, a few years after coming to power, decided to protect himself as much as possible and banned any movement.
In winter, the icy lake freezes quickly. And on transparent ice, it seems that in one sitting, pushing off the shore, you can roll, slide to the island where Dracula sleeps. Or you might not get there - how lucky ... They say that the messengers who brought Dracula either good or bad news were also lucky in different ways: even the one who announced the victory was sometimes prepared with a spruce stake in case the ruler was not in the best mood. What to say about those who brought bad news ...
Only stones remained from the fortifications of the former monastery. The church is deserted and quiet. Although it is noticeable that someone is looking after the sad place. This is Elder Emilian Poenaru, giving thanks to the Lord every day, and has been praying here for ten years now.
Here is the door to the temple. The darkened painting on the walls is barely visible. There is a stone slab on the floor in front of the altar - no name, no dates, no words about exploits and accomplishments. As Filaret commanded, everyone who comes to the altar puts their foot on this slab...
Maybe Dracula was buried on the island so that he could not overcome the body of water at night and disturb people's memory? ..
The catastrophic earthquake of 1977 severely damaged the church and the bell tower, and destroyed the main dome. But the slab and the one under it were not awakened by the shudder of the earth. A few years ago the dome was recreated. Elder Poenaru wants to organize a museum of Vlad Tepes here, but he can’t find a companion for himself, no one stays on the island for a long time. It's like a curse hangs over him.
Romanians love hoaxes. No matter how tragic and bloody the grand spectacle played out on the streets of revolutionary Bucharest in the last days of December 1989, the victims and losses cannot obscure the culmination of that crazy action - the execution of the Ceausescu couple in one of the military garrisons in the city of Targovishte (the same one). Only many weeks later, footage of a secret burial ceremony at one of the unnamed cemeteries was shown on television. Naturally, however, for a good bribe, the Bucharest cemetery caretakers revealed the secret to journalists and began to conduct one excursion after another to two burials located 30 steps apart and marked, like all fresh graves, with iron crosses with tablets. Here are just fictitious names inscribed on the plates.
Time passed, the crosses were removed and no new ones were installed. And two graves remained nameless - and terrible: after all, it was not just that someone's hands lowered the coffins - on TV they showed only hands - into reinforced concrete pits. The same hands covered the graves with heavy slabs, and then piled them on top of the mound.
But the Bucharest old women were not afraid of these graves, they scouted everything and brought bouquets of flowers here. And soon, as the promises of the new rulers did not come true, people of younger age were also drawn here. Also with flowers. And with candles.
A person is weak and remembers the evil of yesterday with good today. Or perhaps ordinary Christian custom draws them here. And yet - a hidden, unspoken desire to atone for the sin of the imminent and therefore seeming today doubtful trial of the ruler, who for so many years was worshiped in blindness and servility.
Trembling in the wind, creaking trunks, cemetery aspens. There will be something to cut down the stake.

They were sent to the court of the Turkish Sultan as hostages. Perhaps it was these four years spent in Istanbul that spoiled the psyche of the future ruler of Wallachia: he was an extremely unbalanced person with many strange habits.

Vlad was 17 years old when it became known about the murder of his father and older brother by the Wallachian boyars. In October 1448, the Sultan released the hostage and helped Vlad take the Wallachian throne, but two months later, the Hungarian governor Janos Hunyadi deposed Vlad III and returned the throne.

Vlad fled to Moldova to his uncle, but in 1451 he was killed by conspirators. Together with his cousin, son, Vlad fled to Hungary and settled in Transylvania, near the Wallachian border.

In 1456, Janos Hunyadi, dissatisfied with the policy of his protege, gave Vlad an army, with the help of which he overthrew. In the same year, Hunyadi died of the plague. Upon learning of this, Vlad convened a big feast, inviting pro-Hungarian boyars and bishops (that is, potential oppositionists) to it, after which he ordered them to be seized and executed. Vlad's favorite method of execution was impalement, thanks to which he received the nickname "The Impaler", that is, "The Impaler". Another common nickname for Vlad III is "Dracula", or, more precisely, "Dracula", which means "Son of the Dragon" (his father was nicknamed "Dracul" - "Dragon") or "Son of the Devil". However, there is an opinion that the nickname "Draculya" was given to Vlad by slanderers and is a distorted word "dragulya" - "dear".

Vlad III began to resolutely restore order in his state. At the beginning of his reign, trade routes were poorly guarded. With strict measures, Vlad III put an end to the robberies: the ruler ordered all the robbers caught on the high road to be impaled. It was said that under Dracula in Wallachia there was such an order that it was possible to drop a wallet with money on the city street, and the next day to find it in the same place: appropriation of someone else's was punished as cruelly as robbery.

In 1459, Vlad III set up obstacles for foreign merchants, limiting their trade to a few fairs in the border areas. He repeatedly crossed the Carpathians, betraying Vyrsu and Fagaras to fire and sword, since the Transylvanian Saxons living there gave refuge to Dracula's political opponents, hoping to subsequently receive trading privileges from them. Thanks to such effective measures, Vlad III managed to intensify domestic trade.

In the same 1459, Vlad III refused to pay tribute to the Turkish sultan. At first he tried to capture the obstinate vassal by cunning. In the winter of 1461/1462, the Greek Katavolinos and the bey of Nikopol, Hamza Pasha, invited Dracula to Giurgiu, ostensibly to resolve a border dispute. He agreed to come, but ordered his army to secretly follow. When it became clear that a trap had been prepared for Vlad, his troops emerged from the ambush and captured Katavolinos and Hamza Pasha. They were impaled on the outskirts of the city of Targovishte. Dracula captured Giurgiu and several Turkish fortresses in Bulgaria.

In November 1476, Vlad the Impaler, with the support of Bathory, invaded Wallachia. On November 8, he took Targovishte, and on November 16 - Bucharest. On November 26, the boyars recognized Vlad Tepes as the ruler of Wallachia. However, when Vlad's friends left Wallachia, it turned out that under his command there was only a small detachment of 4 thousand people, while there were many enemies around him.

Vlad Tepes dine at the place of execution
Fables published abroad about Vlad Tepes were illustrated with similar pictures.

Vlad III Tepes died in December 1476. The description of the circumstances of his death in various sources is transmitted in different ways. Someone said that the people of the former ruler attacked him. Others claimed that he was killed by a servant bribed by the Turks. The "Tale of Dracula Governor" says that during one of the skirmishes with the Ottomans, he was hacked to death by his own soldiers, mistakenly mistaking him for a Turk. Likewise, there is no reliable information about Dracula's burial place. "Tomb of Dracula" exists in two monasteries in Romania - Snagov and Comana. Both there and there, archaeologists discovered the burial places of a man, but it is not possible to identify the remains.

Vlad Tepes was endowed with outstanding human and political qualities, although he was not without flaws. In relation to the guilty, he was really cruel and merciless, for which he was feared and respected by both supporters and opponents. However, we must not forget that Vlad acted in accordance with the harsh laws of war, and it is unlikely that his cruelty stood out much in those not very humane times. The basis of all future legends about the unprecedented bloodthirstiness of Vlad Tepes was a document compiled by an unknown author and published in 1463 in Germany. It is there that for the first time there are descriptions of the executions and tortures of Dracula, as well as all the stories of his atrocities (the custom of having lunch surrounded by criminals dying on stakes; the extermination of the poor under the pretext of delivering them from earthly suffering; a hat nailed to the head of a foreign ambassador who did not take it off voluntarily, and similar fables). Apparently, this document was compiled by the ill-wishers of Vlad Tepes - either the Hungarians at court, or the Transylvanian Saxons, offended by Dracula for introducing restrictions on trade with Wallachia. The document quickly spread throughout Europe, being translated into other languages. So in Russia the "Legend of Dracula Governor", written by deacon Fyodor Kuritsyn in 1484 and containing all the same stories about Vlad Tepes, was popular. The same fables, having returned to Wallachia, were transformed into pseudo-folklore stories about the "great monster" Vlad Dracul, which overshadowed the real legends about him. According to one such legend, Dracula became a vampire after his death. The myth of the "vampire Dracula" found a second life at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries after the release of Bram Stoker's novels Children of the Night and Dracula. The image of "Count Dracula" is popular in popular culture to this day, although he has almost nothing to do with the real ruler of Wallachia, Vlad Dracula.