Vlad

Chapter 11

In the year of Our Lord 1448, Vlad Tepes ascended to the throne of Wallachia (having been invested earlier by Sigismund of the House of Luxembourg, Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation), and he established his capital at Targoviste, not far from the Danube at the border of the Ottoman Empire, tasked with the Christian mission of fighting the Turk, into whose hands Vlad fell, quickly learning the lessons of Sultan Murad II: strength alone sustains power, and power requires the strength of cruelty. Having escaped the Turks, Vlad recovered the throne of Wallachia with a double ruse: the Turks as well as the Christians believed him to be their ally. But Vlad was only allied with Vlad and with the power of cruelty itself. He burned down castles and villages throughout Transylvania. He gathered all the students who had come to study the local language in one room, and then he burned them alive. He buried a man up to his navel and then had him beheaded. Others he roasted like pigs or slit their throats like lambs. He captured the seven fortresses of Transylvania and ordered their inhabitants shredded like lettuce. When the Gypsies were unwilling to submit one of their own to hanging, because the practice was opposed by Tigani custom, Vlad forced them to boil the Gyspy alive and then to feast on his flesh. One of Vlad’s lovers claimed, so he wouldn’t lose interest in her, that she was pregnant: just to make sure, he used his knife to slice open her womb. In 1462 he occupied the city of Nicopolis and ordered the prisoners nailed down by their hair until they died of starvation. He beheaded the lords of Fogaras, cooked their heads, and served them to the commoners. In the village of Amlas, he cut off the breasts of the women and forced their husbands to eat them. In the capital, he gathered all the poor, the sick, and the elderly of the region to his palace; he wined and dined them and asked them if they wished for anything else.

“No,” they said, “we are satisfied.”

So that they could die satisfied and never again feel the need for anything, he had them beheaded.

But he himself was not satisfied. He wanted his name and deeds to live forever in history. Then he discovered a tool that would be forever associated with him: the stake.

He captured the town of Beneşti and had all its women and children impaled. He impaled the boyars of Wallachia and the ambassadors of Saxony. He impaled a captain who could not bring himself to burn down the church of Saint Bartholomew in Brasov. He impaled all the merchants of Wuetzerland and appropriated their property. He decapitated the children of the village of Zeyding and then stuffed the heads up their mothers’ vaginas, and only then did he impale the women. He liked to see the impaled twitch and squirm on the stake “like frogs.” He had a donkey impaled on the head of a Franciscan monk.

Vlad liked to cut off noses, ears, genitals, arms, and legs. Burn, boil, roast, crucify, bury alive. . He sopped up the blood of his victims with his bread. When he became more refined, he rubbed salt on his prisoners’ flayed feet before setting animals loose to lick them.

But impaling people was his signature manner of slaughter, and he took pleasure in all the varieties of torture made possible by the stake. The stake could penetrate the rectum, the heart, or the navel. Thousands of men, women, and children died on the stake during the reign of Vlad the Impaler, though their deaths could never quench his thirst for power. His own death was the only one he saw fit to impede.

He listened to the legends of his land with great desire, obsessed.

Legends of the muroni, capable of instant metamorphosis, turning themselves into cats, mastiffs, insects, spiders. .

Of the nosferatu, hidden in the depths of forests, children of bastard parents, given over to wild orgies that exhaust them to death, although as soon as they are buried, the nosferatu awaken and abandon their graves, never again to return to them, and roam the night in the shape of black dogs, beetles, or butterflies. Poisoned by jealousy, they like to appear in nuptial chambers to render the newlyweds barren and impotent.

Of the lugosi, living corpses, given over to necrophilic orgies at gravesides, and who can be identified, and are often betrayed, by their chicken feet.

Of the strigoi of Braila who lie in their graves with their eyes perpetually open.

Of the varcolaci, with their pale faces and dry skin, who fall into a deep sleep and rise to the moon and devour it in their dreams: they were once children who died without being baptized.

This was the unyielding desire of Vlad the Impaler: to translate his cruel political power into cruel supernatural power; to rule not only over his time, but over eternity.

By 1457, Vlad the temporal monarch had provoked too many rivals to challenge his power: the local merchants and boyars, the warring dynasties and their respective supporters, the Habsburgs and their King Ladislaus the Posthumous, the Hungarian House of Hunyadi, and the Ottoman powers on the southern border of Wallachia. The latter declared themselves “enemies of Christ’s Cross.” The Christian kings associated Vlad with the religion of infidels. But the Ottomans, in turn, associated Vlad with the Holy Roman Empire and the Christian religion.

He was finally captured in battle by the faction run by the so-called Prince Basarab Laiota — a nimble ally, as is the Balkan practice, to all the powers at play, however hostile they were toward each other. Vlad the Impaler was condemned to be buried alive at an encampment next to the Tirnava River and was paraded along the route, heaped with scorn and derision, through crowds of the survivors of his infinite crimes, who — as Vlad was led past them in chains, standing on a cart, on his way to his burial ground — turned their backs on him. Nobody wanted to be on the receiving end of his final gaze.

Only one being was willing to face him. One person alone refused to turn her back on him. Vlad fixed his eyes on that creature who was but a little girl, a little girl who looked no older than ten. She stared at the Impaler with an impressive mixture of insolence and innocence, of tenderness and bitterness, of promise and despair.

Voivode, prince, Vlad the Impaler, Dracula — the name that all the inhabitants of Transylvania and Moldavia, Fogaras and Wallachia, the Carpathians and the Danube secretly knew him by — was headed toward death-in-life, dreaming of the living dead, the muroni, the nosferatu, the strigoi, the varcolaci, the vampires. .

He was going to his death and was taking with him only the blue gaze of a ten-year-old girl, dressed in pink, the only one who neither turned her back on him nor whispered, as the others did, the Cursed Name of Dracula. .

This, my dear Navarro, is a (partial) account of the secrets that can be conveyed to you by your loyal and reliable servant,

Eloy Zurinaga