Sunday, September 9, 2012

Will The Real Dracula Please Stand Up? Part Ii

Vlad's Early Life

There is a debate, though never will be quite sure, as to when Vlad was unquestionably born. Most scholars put the event at either November or December of 1431 in the Transylvanian town of Sighisoara. The very town house in which he was born still stands and is a beloved traveler spot. His father, Vlad Dracul, was in exile at this time. The area that the house stands in was, at that time, in a very selective neighbourhood, surrounded by Saxon and Magyar merchants and nobility. Had they known their hereafter and the suffering this new born babe was to put them through in later life, I feel extremely doubtful that he would have seen his first birthday.

We know extremely puny of Vlad's early childhood. We do know that he had an elder brother, Mircea and younger one, Radu the Handsome. It was his mother, a noblewoman of Transylvania who saw to his early education, reading, writing, music and the arts and court etiquette. But his real education, that of knighthood, began in 1436, after his father had deposed and killed the Danesti prince and took the throne. His tutor, the man who taught him the art of warfare and peace, was an old and seasoned soldier and Boyar who had fought against the Turks at the Battle of Nicolopolis. Often he would regale the young prince with his forces tales and adventures as he forged his fee into a Christian Knight.

At the age of 13, he and his brother, Radu, were sent as hostages of the Sultan to Adrianople and, while Vlad was released to take the Wallachian throne in 1448, Radu made the decision to stay with the Turks with whom he's grown up with. On taking the Wallachian throne for the second time in 1456, Vlad made his capital at Tirgovista, sanctioning the move with the construction of a castle in the colse to mountains near the Arges River. It was here that the reign of terror for which he will all the time be remembered started for the builders of his castle were the Boyars and the merchants, the very citizen who had buried his older brother, Mircea alive. Half starved and brutalised, many of them did not survive the venture.

Vlad the Impaler

A true hero to the Romanians, for his defence of their religion and culture against the Turks, the rest of the world will all the time revile Vlad Dracula Tepes, for his fetes of barbarism and inhuman brutality to both his enemies and kinsmen alike. As with the tale of Erzsebet Bathory, care should be taken in what to and what not, to believe. Vlad had many enemies and, just as in politics today, the peoples of 15th Century Europe, were not above carrying out smear campaigns. However, there can be very puny doubt of the atrocities carried out by this man and which made him the most feared ruler of all time. As his nickname "Tepes" would suggest, Vlad's adored recipe of punishment and justice, was Impalement.

Man's ingenuity in creating ever increasing, shameful and agonising deaths for his fellow men is startling but few can exceed the act of impalement for its sheer agony, shame and the untold of horror it brought with it. The act itself was simple enough when settled in the hands of a skilled executioner and it was perhaps, this simplicity, that made it so terrifying. Notion to have been first used in the old lands of the Babylonians, Vlad excelled at it and introduced it proper, to the rest of the world.

Brought to the place of execution, the victim would be stripped naked while ropes were attached to their ankles. They would then be made to lie flat on their backs while the ends of the rope were attached to a horse and rider on either side. The stake, a twenty foot length of wood, smoothed and oiled and sharpened to a blunt point would then be introduce the anus, if a male, or the vagina or anus, if female. It was prominent that the point was not too sharp in case the major organs were ruptured and death came swiftly, just as it was prominent that the stake slowly widened the from the point down. In the capable hands of their riders and guides, the horses would be urged slowly forward, drawing the victim onto the stake while the executioner guided its progress. The stake would trip through the body and emerge either through the mouth, (if death was to be early) or just below the collar bone or in the middle of the shoulder blades. Once the victim was properly skewered, the whole appliance was then determined lifted and settled into a ready made sink hole, secured in place by smaller stakes and rocks. It could take days for the victim to die from this horrific practice. Death would finally come as the internal organs were slow crushed in the middle of the stake and the rib cage as the victim inexorably slid down the wedge shaped structure. The stench from these inhuman forests, for Vlad staked thousands at a time, must have been horrendous, especially when one considers that the sphincter was almost all the time ruptured at some point. Some records state that some were impaled straight through the abdomen, an uncommon mercy from Vlad, while yet others were impaled upside down. There is also evidence that babies were often impaled with their mothers on the part of the spike that protruded from the mother's upper chest.

Being a lover of the arts, Vlad Tepes often had the stakes arranged in geometric patterns, his favourite being concentric circles. He even had stakes of different lengths made ready, the height of the stake denoting the rank and importance of the victim. As with hanged prisoners settled in gibbets throughout the rest of Europe, Vlad too left the corpses to rot and fall to pieces as warning to other. Tales were told of an invading Turkish army advent upon a forest of thirty thousand Turkish, impaled soldiers along the Danube. They turned and fled with fear. Even Mohammed Ii, a man not known for being squeamish, returned to Constantinople in 1461, sickened by the sight of a further twenty thousand Turkish soldiers, impaled colse to the city of Tirgovista. History has recorded this as, "The Forest of the Impaled".

In 1459 on St Bartholomew's Day, in the city of Brasov, he had thirty thousand Boyars and Saxon merchants impaled. A paramount woodcut made just a merge of years after the event, depicts Vlad Dracula feasting among this terrible forest while in the background, and executioner cuts up the body of a man. Vlad was never one to do things by half. When he decided upon an impalement, he would go through thousands at a time. In 1460 in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu, he had ten thousand staked.

Although impalement was the recipe that Vlad was chiefly remembered for, it was by no means his only means of ridding himself and his lands of undesirables. His methods read like an catalogue of Hell's own tortures. These included:

Hanging, drawing and quartering. Burning at the stake. Skinned alive. Mutilation of ears, noses, tongues and sexual organs, (especially in the case of women) Scalping. Exposure to the elements and wild animals.

There have been, and still are, many attempts to elucidate Vlad's acts. They state defence of the realm and a infer to stamp his authority against foreign elements. What cannot be denied however, is the fact that many of his victims were his own country men. The Saxon merchants were targeted because they were seen by Vlad as being parasites, feeding upon his country and people. The Boyars too, often wielded there unfair and capricious wills over the reigning Wallachian princes. They even site, as justification, that Vlad was a stock of his times and, up to a distinct point, that is true. Any way hard and brutal life may have been in 15th Century Eastern Europe though, his barbarism was of such brutality that it sent waves of revulsion and horror across the known world. And few, who have studied his life and times doubt that he derived a great deal of sadistic pleasure from his atrocities.

Almost from the very moment Vlad gained the throne in 1456, he began his reign of terror. One of his first acts was to hold a huge feast for the Boyars in Tirgovista. Vlad knew that many of those gift were personally responsible for the conspiracy that led to the assassination of his father and the burying alive of his brother Mircea. He asked those gift at the feast how many Wallachian princes they remembered upon the throne and not one present, remembered less than seven. In an act of what could only have been revenge and a deep seated hatred of their infidelity, he had them all immediately arrested. The older ones were impaled on the spot. The other healthier and younger, including children, were taken to the mountains, to his ruined castle above the Arges River were they were made to rebuild it, conferrence materials from an additional one ruin. It is recorded that they were brutalised and starved and made to labour until the very clothes fell from their backs, after which, they were made to work naked. Few survived this horrific ordeal. It would seem that the whole focus of Vlad's reign was to eliminate the Boyar class, replacing them with men from the free peasantry and nobility, knowing that these would be loyal to their prince.

Vlad also displayed a great hatred towards unchaste women. Maidens who lost their virginity before marriage, the promiscuous widow and adulterous wives. All these would find themselves receiving special attention from their ruling prince. Very often they would have the sexual organs mutilated, including having their breasts hacked off. They would then be spiked upon special, iron stakes that were heated red hot beforehand and inserted through the vagina. One article describes Vlad's medicine of an unfaithful wife. He had her taken to one of the main squares in Tirgovista and once there stripped naked. He then had her breasts hacked off and her skin removed with red hot pliers. After this she was impaled through her vagina while her skin was displayed on a table nearby. Vlad insisted that his citizen be honest and hard working. Anyone caught in the act of cheating were likely find themselves on the end of a stake.

look what I found Will The Real Dracula Please Stand Up? Part Ii look what I found


No comments:

Post a Comment