All Things Medieval

The biggest source of financial power the Muslim Empire had always came from controlling large parts, if not all, of the Silk Road. This was literally a road in some places, with oases and cities along the way to support travelers’ needs for a fee. Goods from China and India were so different from what could be found and made in Europe that they had always commanded very high prices—-and those transportation fees were a big part of the price. If someone could find another route to China and India, the economic power of the Ottoman and Persian Empires would be reduced.

In 1498, Vasco de Gama landed a Portuguese ship at Calicut, the same harbor where Ibn Battuta had been so vexed over reaching China. Portuguese ships had been working on this goal for much of the 15th century, pushed in early stages by Prince Henry “the Navigator.” He did not actually sail, but he used his influence and money to get ships to sail incrementally farther down the coast of Africa. Each cape—beyond which land could not be seen until you actually rounded the cape in person—was a limit that captains believed they could not cross without grave danger. Prince Henry kept pushing them and commissioning new voyages until finally the first cape was rounded, then the second…and then they realized there was no real reason not to keep going.

The Portuguese were part of the Reconquista effort through all these years, and their greatest adversary was the Muslim fleet of corsairs in the Atlantic Ocean. The accounts of exploration that I remember from school left out this key motive: to reduce the power of the Silk Road and thus strip the Muslim kingdoms of some of their wealth—-which would reduce their power to buy and train slave armies, which would hamper their ability to keep taking over more of Europe. It was a far-seeing strategic push.

Vasco da Gama’s ships passed around the Cape of southern Africa at the close of 1497 (they named Natal Province to mark Christmas Day). As they worked their way north again, in the Indian Ocean, it wasn’t long till they were back in Muslim territory. Mozambique was a busy Arab port,and so was Mombasa. In this part of the Indian Ocean, Arab ships could proceed without fear of meeting hostile ships, so they generally went unarmed. Vasco da Gama’s men may have acted as pirates a few times, looting ships for supplies.

The Portuguese were making inquiries about hiring a pilot who could navigate them to India. They got no takers—-in fact a lot of hostility—until they found a town near Mombasa where an Indian pilot agreed to come on board. From there, they went straight to India.

At Calicut, da Gama had a political problem. He needed to give a royal gift to the local king, but either what he had left, or what the Portuguese had provided for him, made a pathetic offering for even a local king in a rich country. Had the Portuguese gotten used to trading with and impressing people at the mouth of the Congo River? Or, since Ibn Battuta reported that the King of Mali didn’t give rich gifts, perhaps they had mistaken impressions of what would be the embassy’s expectations in the East. Wikipedia says his gift was “four cloaks of scarlet cloth, six hats, four branches of corals, twelve almasares, a box with seven brass vessels, a chest of sugar, two barrels of oil and a cask of honey.” Sugar was incredibly expensive in the west, but not in the east, where sugar canes were native. However, if they didn’t impress the king, at least they were able to trade for spices to carry back.

What made any of these long voyages possible was the discovery of predictable cyclical wind patterns. The Portuguese first found Brazil by catching the South Atlantic gyre westward to South America, then eastward to Africa. They didn’t understand the winds of the Indian Ocean, which reverse course when the monsoon season changes. The summer monsoon winds had made their trip to India relatively short, but they did not wait long enough for the winter monsoon winds to turn. The return voyage back to Africa took five times longer, and when they arrived in Malindi, where they had hired their Indian pilot, they had scurvy and many sailors had died. Da Gama had to reduce his fleet to two ships, but those two were able to return, catching the South Atlantic gyre to turn north along Africa. One of his ships arrived at Lisbon in July, 1499, to tell the news.

While da Gama was gone, the King of Portugal had married a daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. As a condition of the match, he had ordered the forced conversion or expulsion of Portugal’s Jews. After her death, he married a younger sister. The dynastic marriages were empire-building steps, though in the end Portugal failed to put a descendant on the Aragonese throne.

The purpose of Portugal’s voyages to India, too, was empire-building. They wanted to do individual trade with Calicut, but they wanted more, too. At best, they wanted tribute, while at least, they wanted serious influence. Subsequent Portuguese fleets colonized Mozambique, where Muslim rulers had been unwelcoming before. It made a good layover place to get more supplies or repair ships after the stormy southern passage. The South Indian Ocean along Africa was no longer a Muslim lake.

Vasco da Gama commanded the fourth India Armada voyage in 1502. By then, Portuguese traders had gotten into a dispute with Arab traders in Calicut, and many of them were killed in a riot. Portugal held the king responsible, so this fleet was larger—20 ships—and armed. Its mission was conquest: to blockade Calicut’s harbor and force the king into a position of tribute.

Along the way, da Gama opened trade in East Africa’s city of Sofala while resting in Mozambique, whose Muslims were now eager to make up for past slights. He left simple consulates at both places—or as they are called, factories. The factor was the person who acted (Lat. facere) for another party, so where he lived was the factory. But at his next stop, Kilwa, he did more. The Sultan of Kilwa was brought on board ship (effectively a captive) to sign a treaty that included a huge gold tribute to Portugal, and when he did not want to sign, da Gama threatened to level the city with his guns.

On the Indian side, da Gama had an even more aggressive approach. On an island off the south coast of India, he picked up a guide and translator, a Jew from south India—-where there had been Jewish settlements for centuries. They started sailing south to Calicut, following the coast. After they battled an Indian pirate, their translator said the pirate’s home city was a hornet’s nest of piracy, so da Gama attacked it with guns, fire, and an armed landing party. It’s not that da Gama objected to piracy, he just wanted to be the perpetrator, not the victim.

Given the example of his burnt town, the Raja of the Vijayanagara kingdom chose to sign a treaty with the Portuguese. What else could he do? He had no idea how big this threat was; da Gama was not acting like the small party that he really was. So the Raja’s port city, Bhatkal/Batecala, would pay an annual tribute in rice, expel Muslims, and refrain from trading with Calicut. The joke’s on da Gama, in a way; the kingdom was a wealthy horse-trading center, but he perceived the port as a little fishing and farm trading town and didn’t ask much tribute. It’s interesting that the Raja of Vijavanagara didn’t mind expelling Muslims, because we know from Ibn Battuta that India was a Hindu-Muslim battleground much of the time. The Hindu Raja may have seen distant Portugal as a valuable ally against the Sultan of Delhi.

Then Vasco da Gama did something really appalling. Muslims in India had chartered a ship to carry them to Mecca. The Miri was owned by a Muslim in Calicut, so da Gama decided the war against Calicut was starting now. He boarded the ship, and looted it. Then he had the passengers locked in their cabins and set the ship on fire. It sickened the men with him because it was so gruesome and merciless. It took the ship several days to sink, and anyone who jumped into the water was speared like a whale by da Gama’s soldiers. But da Gama saved 20 children, pious man that he was, so that they could be baptized and raised as monks in Portugal.

When they arrived at Calicut, the ruler started to negotiate as to their losses in the riots a few years before. Da Gama made it a precondition of talks that all Muslims would first be expelled, and then he seized some fishermen as hostages. Calicut’s reply was that da Gama had already avenged his dead many times over (when he sank the pilgrim ship) and had already looted more value than they had lost, in his piracy, and Calicut was not going to expel anyone. After hanging the fishermen from the masts, da Gama began to bombard the city with his ships’ guns. His ships had brought along a lot of powder and shot; they bombarded the city for two days.

Da Gama let Calicut rest for a few days; he sailed to the next city, Kochi, to make a treaty. There, the Indian Christians we talked about previously, who may have first heard the Gospel from St. Thomas, contacted him and asked to become subjects of the King of Portugal. To da Gama, this must have felt like a first embassy from the legendary King Prester John!

The ruler of Calicut was not finished defending his city against the invaders. Inviting da Gama back for a parley, he had a flotilla of small ships surrounded da Gama’s huge flagship. Calicut’s tech disadvantage was overcome by getting so close to the tall ship that it couldn’t operate its guns and had to defend with low-tech methods. A few weeks later, da Gama passed Calicut again, and the city now had hired Arab ships from the Red Sea. These ships were much closer in technology to the Portuguese, resulting in a full naval battle. The Portuguese narrowly won it.

Da Gama’s fleet set sail for home in 1503, leaving a patrol behind to assist the two cities that had made trade treaties, Batecala and Kochi. Da Gama reached Portugal with a large mass of spices, but his patrol was not enough to help defend Kochi, which the ships of Calicut burned down. Then some Italian passengers from da Gama’s ships slipped out of Kochi and went to Calicut, revealing themselves as military engineers and agents of rival Venice. The next batch of naval battles by Mediterranean powers would take place off the coast of India.

The Portuguese dominated the spice trade in the Indies for about a hundred years. At the same time, they were colonizing Brazil—but that’s not part of the story of medieval Islam.

The Inquisition in Spain ran through the 1500s, 1600s, and 1700s, ending only in the time of Napoleon, whose brother was appointed King of Spain. But its nature changed after the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. Its rate of executions slowed, and at the same time, it became an institution built into the society. The Pope began to have more control, too, and whatever deviations it had taken from canon law ended.

First and perhaps most importantly, Tomas de Torquemada became too old and visibly weak to carry out his duties as Grand Inquisitor. In 1494, the Pope appointed four assistants whose mandate included reining in the runaway Inquisition. Torquemada died in 1498. He had presided over the most hysterical stage of the program, when fear grew and grew, and they became more and more careless about due process.

His successor was Diego de Deza, Archbishop of Seville and tutor to Ferdinand and Isabella’s heir, who had just died. Deza had a record of getting Muslims and Jews to convert, probably using strong-arm harassment tactics, which to him would have seemed quite appropriate. He hated Conversos; all the more so, since it turned out he had Jewish heritage on his mother’s side. Let’s assume that the Pope succeeded in trimming back some of Torquemada’s excesses, still Diego de Deza seems to have been another “damn the torpedos full speed ahead” sort of guy. People lodged complaints against him, saying he enriched himself by confiscating property, and that his officials had “no regard for God or justice.”

One of Deza’s changes was to skip the thirty-day period in which people might confess. After 1500, the Edict of Grace was not proclaimed, but instead, they went straight to the Edict of Faith, which asked for denunciations. By Deza’s time, types of torture had been institutionalized, mostly ways of putting stress and pain on joints with weights or with the “rack.” They were not supposed to cause permanent harm or bleeding, and canon law when followed put time limits on periods of pain.

Those who were convicted ended the process in an auto-da-fe, which is actually an anachronism since the term is Portuguese for “act of faith,” and the Portuguese Inquisition didn’t start up until after 1530. It was a Mass, but during the ceremony, they had confessions and penances, including some death sentences. Perhaps more often as time went by, executions by burning were carried out immediately, so that “auto-da-fe” has come to mean “public burning.” However, later Gothic horror literature ramped up the auto-da-fe into something more appalling than it ever really was.

In 1499, Archbishop Cisneros came to Granada to speed up the conversion of the Muslims. As the prelate of Toledo, he had already been involved in reforming the Franciscans, who had become soft and corrupt. Many of them were living in luxury and some kept concubines. Cisneros required them to be celibate, to live in their parishes, and to actually preach and confess. Some monks fled to North Africa and converted to Islam rather than give up their women. Cisneros was austere by nature, so he had no sympathy for them.

When Cisneros arrived in Granada, he had no sympathy for the Muslims there, either. He announced there would be a mass conversion, and it began with burning books in Arabic—except for medical books. Thousands of manuscripts went into a bonfire in the public square. His action was a clear violation of the Alhambra Treaty, which had promised no such destruction of Muslim culture. The countryside rose in rebellion. That actually made things easier for the crown, since open war ended the treaty. As the rebels were killed, the survivors were given the choice of death, conversion, or expulsion.

By 1500, Cisneros stated proudly that there were no Muslims and no mosques left in the city. (A few years later, he led an expedition to attempt conquest of Oran, in North Africa. The separation between continents that we take for granted was not at all evident to people at the time.) In 1502, a decree from Queen Isabella made it official: Islam was outlawed.

However, now they had another huge population of questionable converts, the Moriscos. The Inquisition had to deal with them, as well as with the Jews who had just converted to avoid expulsion. And that didn’t even count a slowly rising number of Protestants, followers of Jan Hus, though Spain wasn’t a hotbed of Protestant Reformation.

Moriscos had to leave their doors open on Thursday night and Friday morning, to make sure they were not doing ritual bathing before prayers. Soldiers on routine patrols would look in, as they were probably also doing with Jewish Converso homes, checking for Shabbat candles. Now there was a death penalty for practicing either Judaism or Islam, so anyone caught with a Koran or Talmud, or carrying out Jewish or Muslim slaughter rules, or doing any other practices, was arrested. There may not have been much due process before execution.

Isabella died in 1504, Ferdinand in 1516. The Grand Inquisitor, Cisneros, became the Regent until Ferdinand’s grandson Charles in the Netherlands could come take over. Cisneros was a strict, efficient Regent. In one year, he set up permanent courts (with a center at Madrid, perhaps the first step toward Madrid’s becoming the national capital) and a standing army. He demolished castles in Navarre, in case anyone up north thought about rebellion. He died within days of young Charles’ arrival.

The Spanish Inquisition became more bureaucratic after that time. Its Castilian and Aragonese branches united, perhaps the first step in the young king’s new model of “Spain” as a unified country. The Inquisition’s rate of convictions and executions dropped from a high of 40% to single digits, particularly during the reign of the fifth Grand Inquisitor. While any number of deaths for “wrong beliefs” is too many, 3% is much less like mass hysteria than is 40%, and it is within a margin that people can learn to live with. The Inquisition became more lawful, as it had been in the past, and at times it was too merciful for the taste of secular governments.

Cultural Muslims (Moriscos) got better at hiding the marks of Islam, and probably each generation growing up even nominally Catholic found the burden lighter. The ruling elite found it much harder to hide, so covert Muslim faith was more likely to linger among the poor, especially in the countryside. By the time a 1609 royal decree expelled the Moriscos, it’s likely that some of their persecutors were their own descendants, now their fiercest enemies—-such is human nature. That’s how it had been among the Jews, too.

That’s pretty much the end of the story of Islam in Andalusia. Genetic descendants of Arabs and Berbers remained in Spain, and a large number of Spanish words were borrowed from Arabic. But Islam as practiced religion and cultural identity came to an end just a few years after Judaism did. The Catholic monarchs were at the same time idealistic and pragmatic: they wanted a no-minorities nation, but they also wanted everyone to believe from the heart with no errors. Later Inquisitors targeted Protestants as part of the Counter Reformation, but our story of Islam interacting with the West in Spain ends here, with the ascension of the Hapsburg dynasty in 1517.

Inquisitions were normally a program run by priests who answered to the local bishop, who answered to the Pope. They were the answer to a very active concern: what about false teachers who might lead the illiterate astray? Inquisitions had been run, periodically, for several centuries in many places. They were guided by canon law which was based on Roman law, answerable to local bishops and the Pope. Most of the time, they imposed penance and re-educated heretics. Their worst punishment was exclusion from the Church, so that the offender was outside the protections of canon law.

This background helps us understand why the Inquisition in Spain became so infamous, because it didn’t follow this model. It was not overseen by bishops and the Pope, nor was it run by canon law, nor did it stop at imposing penances. Instead, it was run by a priest directly appointed by King Ferdinand and answerable only to him. As it ran and grew year after year, the Popes tried to stop it at times. It is probably a good example of how mass hysteria can create a feedback loop, magnifying the problem.

The original problem was that many Jews in Spain had converted but remained culturally tied to their Jewish relatives and communities. Since Jews had been closely associated with Muslim rulers, often serving as officials, they were viewed as a foreign “5th Column.” The converted Jews, Conversos, were additionally seen as traitors by their Jewish relatives. The Inquisition’s roots seem to lie here: the Conversos had many enemies on all sides. An Inquisition was needed to find the ones who were not fully converted and straighten them out.

Canon law had some basic protections for the accused built into it. For example, anonymous denunciations were not permitted. If torture were used to persuade someone to confess, the confession was thrown out if the person recanted it when the torture was over (as many Templars had done). There were some rudimentary standards of evidence. But in Spain’s Inquisition, canon law was not followed. Anonymous denunciations were permitted and encouraged, and torture was used freely. This Inquisition, instead of imposing education and penance, convicted heretics as traitors to the King, therefore to death. It also, not incidentally, confiscated their property and fired them from their jobs.

Like anything, it began small. In 1478, the Pope gave Ferdinand and Isabella authority to name inquisitors in Castile. In 1481, the first six heretics were burnt at the stake. The Pope opposed sending Inquisitors into Aragon, objecting in 1482 that already many people, especially powerless and poor ones, had been seized, tortured, convicted and executed without evidence and often falsely. The Pope was concerned that the Inquisition was sending souls straight to Hell, rather than saving them. But King Ferdinand threatened to take the Inquisition from the Pope altogether, so that’s when the infamous Torquemada, Isabella’s personal priest, was appointed, and it was clear that he answered only to the King. Two years later, the Pope announced an appeal process to Rome, but the King announced a death sentence for anyone who tried it. At that point, the Pope had no control.

Torquemada’s Inquisitors would come to your town, and its officials proclaimed a 30 day amnesty: confess and do penance, abjure your heresy, and you would be spared. Once enough Conversos had been convicted and burnt alive, thousands of others rushed to confess to something, just to stay on the safe side. As the numbers grew, so did the Inquisition, since the problem seemed to be bigger than they had supposed.

Abjuring your heresy was not as easy as it sounded. The penitent heretic first had to don a sackcloth robe with yellow crosses, then must turn informer on other Conversos. If he ever stopped cooperating, he’d be considered Relapso and executed. Meanwhile, as a penitent, he could not practice medicine or law, bear arms, keep a tavern, carve stone, travel by horse or cart, wear jewels, or grow a beard. The status of penitent heretic was inherited by the children and some grandchildren.

Meanwhile, anonymous denunciation were welcomed, and any evidence of Shabbat observance was accepted: did you see your neighbor stocking up on food the day before Shabbat? buying meat from a Jewish butcher? lighting candles? not having a smoke-trailing chimney on Shabbat itself? Denunciations within families were definitely encouraged, with records of husbands denouncing wives and vice versa, children their parents, and so on. It may have been a convenient way to end a bad marriage or remove a hated father with a large estate, sort of like Agatha Christie plot premises. And denouncing your work colleague? Way to get a promotion! Your neighbor? Sweet, that extra lot will come in handy when it’s at city auction. Many royal officials and private citizens got rich off the Inquisition.

How many Jewish-origin Catholics were convicted of heresy and burnt as traitors? One historian (Henry Kamen) estimates about 2000, total. Other estimates begin at 12,000 and start climbing to 30,000 and on. Some say millions. We can infer, I think correctly, that under Torquemada the Inquisition didn’t keep careful records. By contrast, the medieval Cathar Inquisition kept such good records that historians can use them to reconstruct societal conditions in those towns. The high numbers in this case are probably wrong, because we know that additionally, tens of thousands of Jews left or were baptized, and their total number was not that great. But even the lowball estimate is shocking in its implied rate of arrests, and it too is probably wrong (like Ibn Khaldun, modern historians have a bias toward rejecting big numbers).

The Inquisitors became convinced that Jews were seducing converts to slip back into Judaism. They told the King that there must be a final solution or it would keep getting worse. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella reluctantly agreed to expel all Jews. Not all Conversos, but all practicing Jews.

To put this into perspective, everyone had been expelling Jews for the last few decades. German cities expelled Jews in the 1420s, and cities in Italy were expelling them during the years of the Spanish Inquisition. The Medici family protected Jews in Florence, until their fall from power, and then Florence sent the Jews away. France and England had expelled them in previous centuries. So Jews were moving to Italian cities at first, then as these were closed, they were moving eastward to Austria and Poland. Poland and Bohemia didn’t really want Jews, but it needed them.

And, of course, Spanish Jews and Conversos had been fleeing all during the Inquisition and its precursors. The problem is that Spain had been a very good place to live, and many of these Jews had lived there since Roman times, like the Jews of the Rhine Valley. Emigrating might mean saving your life, but it could just as easily mean losing it to robbers, pirates, or starvation and exposure to weather. Arriving in a new place, it would take several generations to rebuild, and meanwhile your family was at the bottom, where survival was unlikely. If there was any way to placate the Inquisition and stay, it seemed safer.

Christopher Columbus may have been a Spanish Jew whose parents fled earlier, settling in Genoa, so that he could come from Genoa to seek funding from what would have been his king. Michel de Montaigne was a Jew; France had expelled its Jews in 1306, but apparently some refugees were able to settle there again. Montaigne’s family was not of original French Jewish (northern) extraction, but from Spain.

In parallel developments, Ferdinand and Isabella’s joint Aragonese-Castilian forces were just finishing off the last Muslim ruler, the Emir of Granada. So in 1492, a lot of people were about to sail the ocean blue.

When the King of Hungary created the Order of the Dragon in 1408, one of the knights to receive this honor was the illegitimate son of the Voivode of Wallachia (modern Romania). When the legitimate son died, Sir Vlad of the Order of the Dragon became the Voivode (Old Slavic for rank below the king but above the boyars). Vlad Drakul had three sons: Mircea, Vlad, and Radu (all of these names, strange to us, were quite traditional, like Louis in France). All of these sons could be called “Drakula,” essentially Son of the Dragon.

The Drakula sons were born at a time when Wallachia was a battlefield that sometimes acted as vassal to the Ottomans, and sometimes joined Christian kings in a Crusade effort. The strongest ruler in the area was John Hunyadi, the Voivode of Hungary and Transylvania, vassal to the King of Poland. Hunyadi was a determined enemy of the Ottomans; his career was made of battles, negotiations to find more allies and resources, and attempts to choose the Voivodes around him.

Vlad Drakul joined Hunyadi in a rebellion and was captured; his sons Vlad and Radu were taken from him as hostages. They grew up at Edirne, speaking Turkish, while their older brother had his turn to rule and be murdered. Hunyadi installed a Drakul cousin as Voivode, but Vlad, who was something like 20, decided to make a play for his inheritance. First he tried to oust his cousin with Ottoman support, but failed. He must have decided that power was going in the Hungarian direction, because next he left the Ottomans to live in Hungary for about six years. At the end of that time, he came back to Wallachia with their support, now the enemy of the Ottomans.

Radu, meanwhile, seems to have been pretty well assimilated to the Ottoman court. A Greek chronicler asserts that Mehmet II and Radu, who were about the same age, were very close friends—-and further that Mehmet tried many times to make Radu his paramour, while Radu resisted virtuously but stayed on good terms. Without further evidence, I’m not buying it. Resisting sexual advances (by cutting the prince with a dagger and hiding in a tree) is not consistent with staying on good terms, and Radu’s later nickname “the Handsome” may have suggested the idea. Was Mehmet (who had a large harem) interested in men too? He may have been, but it just doesn’t easily square that Radu was a target. And while Vlad was contesting for the Voivodeship of Wallachia, Radu became a Muslim and lived at the Topkapı Palace.

Vlad killed his cousin in battle, but there were more cousins who were apparently preferred by the locals. The German colony in Transylvania, which dated back to the early years of the Teutonic knights, didn’t support Vlad. He not only razed their towns, he also took captives back to Wallachia and used them for a public demonstration: he impaled them. That’s when his notoriety began. Even then, impaling people alive was shocking.

By 1460, Vlad was solidly in control. His old frenemy Mehmet II required him to come pay homage, but Vlad decided to stay on the Hungarian side. Not only that, he impaled the envoys and began to ravage Bulgaria, killing Slavs and Turks alike. Mehmet brought an army to remove him and install Radu, landing 150,000 soldiers and Janissaries at a Danube port.

Now Vlad cemented his reputation. First, he made a daring night attack on Mehmet’s camp, trying to assassinate Mehmet himself. The Wallachians, an army with some knights but mostly peasants (and probably no artillery), then retreated toward their capital Târgoviște with the Ottomans in pursuit. They destroyed everything in the Ottoman path: poisoned wells, burned crops, flooded land, and dug pit traps. Vlad’s army also sent anyone with an infectious disease to the Turks, so that the weary Ottomans not only went hungry but began to catch the plague.

When they arrived at Târgoviște, the Turks found that Vlad had rounded up about 20,000 ethnic Turks. His peasant army had been busy: the Turks were impaled on 20,000 stakes along the road for miles. The city was deserted, its gates wide. The Ottoman army was sickened and shocked by the impaling: it included men, women, and children; there were babies impaled with their mothers. If Vlad was aiming at shock value, he achieved it, and the Ottoman main army quickly withdrew. They burnt the town where their fleet waited.

Vlad won some more battles, but Radu and the Janissaries remained in the field. Vlad’s peasants could not win, and the nobles were also sickened by his brutality. So Vlad went to Hungary, where Hunyadi’s son Matthew Corvinus had been elected King. Instead of backing him, the king arrested Vlad.

Vlad stayed imprisoned in a small castle near Budapest for 14 years. The official cause was a charge that Vlad had actually gone back to the Ottomans, to betray Hungary; but from this time, legends about his cruelty were circulating in Germany and Hungary. Mehmet II had made Radu the Bey—-not Voivode, notice the war of language terms for “ruler”—-of Wallachia, with Janissary support. Radu may have crossed back over to Christian rituals, and he got along well enough with the nobles. He married an Albanian girl and had a daughter. However, Wallachia became an Ottoman stronghold, and its Christian neighbor Moldavia felt (rightly) threatened. Then even Radu died. Now what?

In 1475, at Moldavia’s request, Hungary released Vlad but refused to provide him with an army. Another cousin, Basarab, was now the ruler with Mehmet’s support. Vlad lived in Hungary as a free man for a year or so, but eventually Hungary gave him enough funds to join the Prince of Moldavia. Technically, this was Vlad’s third reign as Voivode, but it didn’t last long since he died in battle. The Ottomans cut him into pieces.

It wasn’t long before biographies of Vlad were being printed in German and Slavic. By now, he was widely known as a sadistic psychopath, which is probably true. But with early movable type, printers could invent new adventures and crimes for Vlad, who was soon on the Strasbourg Best Seller List. He became known as Dracula (his son also used this as the surname for the noble house they established). Probably most of the interest was generated by refugees from the German colony in Transylvania, so that his name became associated with this place. By 1500, about 25 years after his actual death, gruesome woodcuts showed him feasting with impaled bodies nearby, and other stories said he boiled people to death. It wasn’t much of a stretch for him to become an undead bogeyman.

Romania, on the other hand, recalled Vlad Țepeș (the Impaler) as a national hero. If he was harsh, it was to uphold public order and national strength. If he executed nobles, it was because they were disloyal. By the 19th century, Romanian literature celebrated his life. In the Communist years, he was lionized, and he is still best known in Romania as one of its strongest kings in history.