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Brilliant, complex and unmatched for sheer cruelly, Vlad III Dracula drove the Turks out of his native Wallachia in 1462, only to be deposed from his throne.
Five and a half centuries after his death, the Turks still equate the name Dracula with evil, and they are not referring to Bram Stoker's fictional vampire. In 1462, when the real Dracula retreated from an attack on the Turks in the Danube River valley, he left what history records as "a forest of the impaled"-20,000 Turkish prisoners rotting on large stakes outside the city of Tirgoviste. So cruel was this Dracula that he enjoyed dining while watching mass executions, usually by the slow death of impalement, although he was not averse to watching people skinned or boiled alive. By the time he was deposed, he had killed between 40,000 and 100,000 people. Ironically, he prided himself on his sense of fairness.
Vlad III Dracula came of age during external and internal turmoil that ravaged the Wallachain Danube and Transylvania's Carpathian Mountains. Fifteenth-century Wallachia (now part of Romania) was not strong enough to fend off either the Ottoman Empire or the Kingdom of Hungary. Consequently, Turks forced the principality to pledge a policy of neutrality. More often than not, however, Dracula's father, the Wallachian prince Vlad II Dracul, betrayed treaties for personal or religious reasons.
Vlad Dracula was barely 12 when he became a pawn of his father's political maneuvering. Vlad Dracul gave the young Vlad and his 7-year-old brother Radu to the Ottoman Sultan Murad II in 1442 as human peace offerings, hostages to allay the sultan's fear of further Wallachian attacks.
But Vlad Dracul knew he could not maintain his promise of neutrality. Ten years earlier he had taken an oath to an order-the Order of the Dragon-to protect the Holy Roman Empire. In fact, his very name, Dracul, which meant dragon, was bestowed on him by that order-Dracula means "son of the dragon." Just a year after swearing neutrality to the Turks, Dracul took part in a Bulgarian crusade called for by the pope, though he was still a subject of Murad. The Bulgarian campaign ended with a disastrous defeat of the Christians at Varna in 1444.
Once home from Bulgaria, Dracul and the...