How Vlad Țepeș became Europe's first print villain

Chapter

16 – 17 June 1462

Vlad's horsemen

7,000 – 10,000

The Ottoman host

150,000 – 300,000

The night's dead

5,000 + 15,000 (Balbi)

Mehmed II demanded that Vlad come and pay homage in person; Vlad answered by ambushing Hamza Pasha's 1,000 cavalry near Giurgiu, taking the fortress in Turkish disguise, and raiding across the frozen Danube – 'some 800 kilometers in two weeks'. To Matthias Corvinus he reported 23,884 dead on 11 February 1462, counted place by place from Giurgiu to Rahova. The sultan abandoned his siege at Corinth and marched on Wallachia himself, with 15 tümens by his own letter – some 150,000 men – and 120 cannon.

The janissaries forced the Danube at Turnu Severin on 4 June, losing 300 men to Wallachian fire, then advanced through scorched earth and poisoned wells. On the night of 16–17 June Vlad rode into their camp south of Târgoviște with 7,000–10,000 horsemen, from three hours after sunset until four in the morning – and struck the viziers' tents instead of the sultan's. The Wallachian second column under the boyar Galeș never attacked.

A Wallachian veteran later told Modrussa at Buda that the sultan fled his camp that night and was dragged back by his friends. The Venetian bailo Balbi counted 5,000 Wallachian and 15,000 Ottoman dead; the capital was found deserted, its road lined with some 20,000 impaled and Hamza Pasha rotting on the highest stake. Mehmed dug a trench, left on 22 June, burned Brăila on 29 June, and reached Adrianople on 11 July – but the throne was already slipping to Radu, and by late 1462 Vlad was Corvinus's prisoner.

We killed 23,884 Turks without counting those whom we burned in homes or the Turks whose heads were cut by our soldiers… Thus, your highness, you must know that I have broken the peace with him (Sultan Mehmet II).

Vlad III to Matthias Corvinus, 11 February 1462

Meanwhile: While Vlad burned the Danube ports, Skanderbeg kept Ottoman armies tied down in Albania.

Chapter

1463 – 1521

Beheim's poem

Winter 1463, Wiener Neustadt

Pamphlets 1488–1568

13, eight incunabula

First dated print

14 October 1488, Nürnberg

The villain reached print before the voivode reached prison. In the winter of 1463 the Meistersinger Michael Beheim sang Von ainem wutrich der heis Trakle waida von der Walachei at Frederick III's court in Wiener Neustadt – two impaled monks and their braying donkey among the marvels – from a runaway monk's account. Modrussa had already written to Pius II in 1462, the pope put the stories in his Commentaries in 1464, and Corvinus's courtiers spread fresh horrors after the 1462 arrest. The manuscripts behind all this were Saxon, precise about churches and raid dates, and already calling Vlad worse than Nero.

Then came the presses. Marx Ayrer finished his Nürnberg quarto on St Calixtus' day, 14 October 1488 (GW 12525; the single surviving copy sits in Weimar as Inc. 609a); Peter Wagner's Nürnberg edition, undated, followed so closely that scholars still argue the order – copies survive in Philadelphia, Munich and Stuttgart. The trail runs on: Lübeck, in Low German, after 1488 (Ghotan, GW 12531); Bamberg 1491 (Sporer); Nürnberg 1499 (Huber), with the dining-among-the-stakes woodcut; Strasbourg 1500 (Hupfuff, GW 12530); Nürnberg again in 1520 and 1521 (Stuchs, Gutknecht, VD16 D 2636f). Thirteen pamphlets down to 1559/1568, eight of them incunabula, 46 stories, no complete edition – one of Europe's first bestsellers.

Readers laughed and shuddered: Trithemius, finding the booklet in circulation, wrote that its horrors move readers to risus et horror, and Hartmann Schedel shelved a copy beside his chapbooks. The prints even gave the villain an ending the manuscripts lacked – conversion, baptism at Ofen, the 1475/76 restoration. One claimed stop is missing from the map on purpose: the 1463 Vienna broadsheet some scholars posit has, as Paulus shows, not a shred of evidence.

Cuius horribilia facta circumferuntur in quodam libello dudum impressa, que et risum et horrorem legentibus movent.

Johannes Trithemius, Annales Hirsaugienses, ad annum 1454 (BSB Clm 704, fol. 193v)

Meanwhile: In 1488, the year of the first prints, some 7,000 crusade indulgences were handed out in Nürnberg alone.

Chapter

1482 – 1501

Kuritsyn's embassy

1482 – 1485, Hungary

Skazanie episodes

19, in 20+ manuscripts

Mihailović's memoirs

Written 1490 – 1501

At Ivan III's court the German horror stories were rewritten as statecraft. The Skazanie o Drakule voevode, 19 long episodes attributed to the courtier Fyodor Kuritsyn after his 1482–1485 embassy to Hungary, was written between 1481 and 1486; the oldest copy, made on 28 January 1490 by 'the sinner Efrosin', survives with 20+ later manuscripts. Half its episodes still drip blood, yet their moral is order: the golden cup nobody dares steal from the fountain, the 'evil-wise' (zlomudry) prince whose terror kept the peace. Only his conversion to Catholicism is condemned – it is blamed for his death.

The Ottoman side wrote too. Tursun Beg, a divan official born in the mid-1420s at Edirne who had stood before Constantinople in 1453, called Vlad Kazıklı Voyvoda – the Impaler Lord – around 1500 in his Tarih-i Ebülfeth, and put the 1462 host at 300,000. Konstantin Mihailović of Ostrovica, taken as a janissary boy at Novo Brdo in 1455, confirms the impalements in memoirs written 1490–1501, adds the noses Vlad cut from Ottoman dead and sent to Hungary, and remembers staked camps, nights of terror, and the forest of the impaled glimpsed from the rear.

The Romanian voice is the thinnest and the closest to the ground: village legends recorded by Rădulescu-Codin share the burning of the poor and the too-short shirt with the German and Slavic books – the stories really did travel by mouth – and the peasants' verdict matches the Russian one: only such cruel acts could secure public order. Vlad's own chancery letters, the 1551 letter that first calls him Țepeș in Romanian, and the historians of the 1800s complete a portrait no woodcut ever drew.

Not very tall, but very stocky and strong, with a cold and terrible appearance… the very long eyelashes framed large wide-open green eyes.

Niccolò Modrussa, papal legate, who met Vlad at Buda (modern translation, excerpt)

Meanwhile: While Efrosin copied the Russian tale in 1490, Antonio Bonfini was writing Vlad into Latin history at Buda (around 1495).

Chapter

1476 – 1897

Reigns

1448 · 1456 – 1462 · 1476

Prison years

1462 – 1475, no documents

Dracula

May 1897, London

Released in the summer of 1475 at Stephen III's request, Vlad fought in Bosnia in 1476 and retook Wallachia that November with Hungarian and Moldavian help. Weeks later Basarab returned with Ottoman backing, and Vlad died fighting near Snagov before 10 January 1477: an army of about 2,000 destroyed by some 4,000 men. His head went to Mehmed II and ended on a high stake in Constantinople; how he fell – mistaken for a Turk by his own men, says Kuritsyn; murdered by a disguised assassin, says Unrest – is disputed.

Four centuries later Bram Stoker, who had taken notes since 8 March 1890, researched at Whitby and the London Library, moved his count from Styria to Transylvania, and borrowed the name from Wilkinson's 1820 history – Dracula was published in May 1897 by Archibald Constable and Company, probably on 26 May, price 6 shillings. Stoker never visited Eastern Europe, never names Vlad in his working papers, and still had 'Count Wampyr' in his drafts. The novel was the first book ever to join Dracula to vampirism, and it has never been out of print.

What the record will not support stays out: no proven birth house at Sighișoara, no body in the Snagov grave opened in 1931, no Bran title deed – only one overnight stay in one source. The name Țepeș itself enters the record around 1500, with Tursun Beg's Kazıklı Voyvoda, and in Romanian only in 1551. The villain of the woodcuts outlived the voivode by centuries: Europe's first print villain.

Dracula means devil. Wallachians were accustomed to give it as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous by courage, cruel actions or cunning.

William Wilkinson, Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820) – the footnote Stoker copied

Meanwhile: In 1979 the Ceaușescu regime commissioned its own Vlad: Doru Năstase's film <em>Vlad Țepeș</em>.