WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) (6 page)

Vlad The Impaler

1400s

History can show many examples of men and women who have committed appalling acts of cruelty against their fellow men, not a few of them in the name of religion. But there are few whose actions can match those of Vlad III, ruler of the central European state of Wallachia in the mid-15th century. Not that Vlad stayed quietly and untroubled in his castle, Tirgoviste, during the 20 years of his reign. As with other states in this seldom peaceful region of central Europe, where Islam and Christianity had fought bloody battles for control for centuries, Wallachia was pulled to and fro between rival factions. Vlad, turned out of his castle and his country in the 1460s, spent almost as many years off his throne as on it.

Vlad was born about 1431 in the Danube principality of Transylvania, where his father, Vlad Dracul, was the military governor put in charge of the region by Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, at a time when Turkish control was strengthening. In 1387, the young Sigismund had founded an order of knights, called the Order of the Dragon (‘Dracul’ in Romanian), which, like the much older Knights Templars and Knights Hospitallers, was a Christian order, devoted to turning back the Islamic tide: the Ottoman Turks had been expanding their influence into eastern Europe for much of the past century. Vlad was a knight of the Order of the Dragon, hence his name, Vlad Dracul.

In 1436, Vlad Dracul was promoted to the throne of the neighbouring state of Wallachia, taking the title Vlad II and installing his family, including Vlad and his younger brothers Mircea and Radu, in the castle of Tirgoviste. Within two years, Vlad II Dracul, probably with an eye to securing his position as a ruler in his own right rather than as a nominee of the Holy Roman emperor, had changed sides. He formed an alliance with the Turks and sent two of his sons, Vlad and Radu, to the court of the Sultan Murad II as insurance for his own good behaviour and future loyalty.

Vlad II’s alliance with the Ottoman Turks was disliked by many of the leading men (‘boyars’) of Wallachia, including the statesman and warrior Janos Hunyadi, who had expelled the Turks from Transylvania in 1442. In 1447, Hunyadi led a revolt of the boyars against Vlad II. Vlad was assassinated and his son Mirea was buried alive after his eyes were gouged out. Sultan Murad granted Vlad II’s other two sons their freedom, and Vlad returned at once to his homeland. Radu chose to stay in Turkey.

The young Vlad, called Vlad Dracula (‘son of Dracul’), was not turning his back on the Turks. With the help of the Turkish cavalry, he wrested his father’s throne from the boyars and proclaimed himself Vlad III of Wallachia. This first period of occupation of the throne was short-lived, for Janos Hunyadi soon ousted him and put his own man in Vlad’s place.

THE CRUEL RULER

Whether it was that dreadful killing of his father and his brother, plus the ensuing homeless years of conspiring and building up connections and relationships in the tangled, dangerous politics of the Christian-versus-Ottoman Turk world that turned Vlad Dracula into a ruthless killer, apparently enjoying the spilling of blood for its own sake, or whether he was born with a mind attuned to bloodlust, history does not tell us. What we do know is that when he eventually got his throne back in 1456, Vlad Dracula treated the boyars who had opposed him and his father with quite extraordinary cruelty.

He started off by handing out to the boyars a punishment meted many times throughout history: inviting one’s enemies to dinner, then murdering them all. Vlad’s version, carried out after a feast celebrating Easter Sunday, involved long-term torture rather than simple death for most of those at the feast. The healthy among them were put to work on building him a new castle, Poenari, on the river Arges. They were treated like animals: beaten and tortured for the slightest reason, ill-fed and ill-clothed. Many worked naked in the harshest weather as their clothes wore into shreds. And, of course, many died.

What happened to the old, weak and infirm among the boyars invited to that Easter Sunday feast was an even greater pointer to the way in which Vlad was to operate in the coming years. He impaled them on stakes, setting them up in a public place so that his subjects could watch them die, slowly and in hideous pain. This was the start of a career that would have future generations calling him Vlad the Impaler.

Over the years, Vlad’s methods became more and more twisted and psychopathic. A near-contemporary etching shows Vlad’s victims impaled on stakes pushed through their bodies, from front to back and through the neck. Other accounts of his impalements describe how the stakes were pushed up through the body, through the anus in the case of men, or the vagina in the case of women. He impaled large numbers at a time, often setting the stakes in circles and other patterns in the ground. He is said to have impaled 30,000 merchants outside the Tirgoviste city walls because they transgressed trade laws.

Vlad delighted in all forms of torture. His victims had their eyes gouged out, were eviscerated, decapitated, dismembered, boiled in oil and burnt. He once had a mistress disembowelled in public for having – perhaps mistakenly, perhaps dishonestly – told him that she was pregnant. Rumour had it that Vlad ate the bodies and drank the blood of his victims. The etching that showed men and women impaled on stakes, also depicted men hacking up and boiling body parts while Vlad, hands outstretched, sat waiting at a table covered with a white cloth for the cooked flesh to be set in front of him.

In his own kingdom, Vlad imposed his dreadful catalogue of punishments on the sick, the poor, the dishonest, the lazy and the work-shy. His aim, he said, was to make Wallachia a well-ordered, crime-free society where only the healthy, happy and prosperous had a place.

A FAILED ATTACK

When Vlad took his methods beyond his own borders into the valley of the river Danube in 1461, he came unstuck, partly because he had not taken into account the full measure of Mehemmed II, who had succeeded his father as sultan of Turkey in 1451. When Vlad attacked but failed to subdue the Turks along the Danube, largely because the sultan’s army there was too strong, he made an abortive attempt at murdering the sultan in his tent. He succeeded only in enraging Mehemmed, a man whose actions, including the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, were to earn him the title of Conqueror. Mehemmed ordered the invasion of Wallachia.

Vlad retreated into the heart of his kingdom, razing villages and poisoning wells as he went so that the Turks could find no forage. Those Turkish soldiers he captured were impaled. Sultan Mehemmed is said to have found at one place in Wallachia a veritable forest of stakes, each with its dead, decomposing and stinking Turkish soldier impaled on it. Sultan Mehemmed chose to make a tactical withdrawal from Wallachia. Soon, he had sent in another force, this one led by Vlad’s brother, Radu. As this force neared Vlad’s castle of Poenari, his wife chose suicide over capture by the Turks and leaped to her death from the castle battlements. Vlad escaped into the mountains and made his way into Transylvania, leaving his throne for Radu to mount.

Years of exile now followed for Vlad Dracula. In Transylvania, he fell into the hands of King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, who had been remarkably successful in driving the Turks out of his land. Matthias Corvinus took Vlad to Hungary and imprisoned him. After a time, ‘imprisonment’ turned into guest status, with the occasional reporting back to the king. Vlad Dracula even married the king’s cousin. And in exile he continued his habit of impaling living creatures on stakes, though now he was reduced to small animals and large insects.

In the end, fortune once again favoured Vlad Dracula. His brother Radu in Wallachia had been making too many concessions to the Ottoman Turks and had turned the Order of the Dragon out of Wallachia. In 1467, King Matthias Corvinus gathered together a Christian force, led by him and Prince Stefan Bathory of Transylvania. With Vlad Dracula in its train, they drove the Turks out of Wallachia (now ruled by a prince called Basarab the Old, Radu having died of syphilis) and Moldavia. As was only to be expected, Vlad Dracula’s path back to his throne was marked by burnt and subdued villages and thousands of stakes on which were impaled the bodies of Turkish soldiers. Because he was a Christian destroying the infidel, Vlad’s favourite method of execution was this time officially approved by the pope in Rome.

Vlad Dracula died fighting the Ottoman Turks. Sultan Mehemmed, never likely to acquiesce in the Christian takeover of Wallachia, soon sent a huge force against him. Vlad could not count on the support of Wallachia’s boyars, and when his final battle came in 1476 he was greatly outnumbered. No one knows the manner of Vlad Dracula’s death, only that he died fighting fiercely for his throne.

Vlad Dracula was resurrected in spectacular style in the 19th century. It was a time when interest in the Gothic merged with Romanticism to create a feverish interest in the occult, in bloodsucking vampires, in devil-worship and much else. When Bram Stoker wrote
Dracula
, his classic vampire horror story, it is not surprising that one of his main inspirations was Vlad Dracula. Vlad was not a vampire, and he had not worshipped the devil. But his name – another meaning of ‘dracul’ in Romanian was ‘devil’ – and his habit of impaling people on stakes, then eating their bodies and drinking their blood, certainly made him a prime candidate for the lead in a story about vampires, which could only be destroyed by driving a stake through their body.

Henry V At Agincourt

25 October 1415

Henry V’s destruction of the military strength French nobility at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 was the high point of English success in the Hundred Years War. Edward III, Henry’s great-grandfather, had begun the campaign 80 years earlier to wrest back from France territories that the English king laid claim to through his French ancestry.

When Henry V succeeded to the throne in 1413 he was already planning to consolidate the work begun by his ancestor. He wanted to win back lands lost and to gain possession of other lands that the French had never handed over. He planned to first take possession of Normandy, which he claimed to have been a domain of the English crown since the time of William the Conquer. From this power base, he would be in a strong position to make the French acknowledge and honour his claim to the French crown.

Henry V’s invasion of Normandy was no quick raid across the Channel. On 11 August, 1415, a pleasant Sunday afternoon on Southampton Water, the king gave the signal that sent on its way to France an armada of 1,500 ships – 12 times the number of ships that Spain sent against England in 1588 – carrying an army of 12,000 men and the huge tonnage of arms and equipment needed to support them in the months ahead. Three days later the little ships, most of which were merchant ships and coastal traders, were unloading their cargoes near Harfleur, on the south bank of the mouth of the river Seine in Normandy.

Henry had originally intended to cross the Seine from Harfleur and push north to the English possession of Calais, gathering in the lands of Normandy as he went and relying on speed to get him to Calais before the French could muster a response. Unfortunately, the town of Harfleur was well garrisoned and Henry had to besiege it. It was a month before Harfleur capitulated, and Henry eventually set off north early in October. By this time, his army had been depleted in both men and resources, with much having to be left behind to garrison and defend Harfleur.

At the same time, the French were organizing their forces into an increasingly formidable, well-organized army. The English found themselves constantly harried, short on rations, and again and again having to turn away from their chosen line of march because bridges and fords were now held by the French. Much of the way was through wooded country or marshy land on either side of rivers, and when the weather broke, heavy rain turned the country into a muddy quagmire. Much of this land, the valley of the Somme, was to be fought over again by French and British forces during World War I, now on the same side, in equally dreadful conditions in 1916.

On 20 October, the French sent heralds to the English camp, with a formal challenge for Henry V from the dukes of Orléans and Bourbon. Henry rejected it, sending back a message to the French that he intended to continue his march to Calais and would fight them if they opposed him. For the next four days the English and French armies marched virtually in parallel north towards Calais. Late in the day on

24 October, the two armies came together in a gorge between Agincourt and Tramecourt, with the French army blocking Henry’s way to Calais. Both armies made camp within sight and sound of each other. Clearly, there would be a battle between the two the next day, the Feast of Saints Crispin and Crispinian.

Of the two armies, the English was undoubtedly in the worse condition and the less prepared for a major encounter. It was much smaller than the French force. Henry is generally thought to have had about 900 lightly armed men-at-arms and 5,000 archers, all armed with the English longbow, at his disposal. Many of these men were suffering from dysentery, they had all been underfed for weeks and they were all tired: one military historian has calculated that they had marched about 420 km (260 miles) in 17 days. Nearly 200 years later the playwright William Shakespeare turned this ragged army into an heroically romantic ‘happy few, a band of brothers’ whose actions on ‘Crispin Crispian day’ would be remembered from that day onwards.

French numbers have been less easy to calculate. A generally accepted number is somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000, with the probable total being nearer the former number than the latter. Half the French army was made up of dismounted men-at-arms and the other half consisted of roughly two-thirds mounted knights (cavalry) and one-third crossbowmen and archers.

During the night heavy rain fell on both armies and the ground on which they would be fighting the next day. The English army made its preparations quietly; the French, full of confidence, could be heard eating and drinking, dicing and gambling, the knights resting on bales of straw to keep them above the mud, and their servants bustling to and fro and shouting cheerfully at each other. A rumour went about among the English that there was a brightly painted wagon at the back of the French camp and that in a few days’ time the English king was going to be paraded through Paris in it.

THE BATTLE BEGINS

Next day, 25 October, 1415, both the English and French were up at dawn, moving their armies into position about 914 m (1,000 yds) apart. The French had decided on a battle plan that involved sending their troops into the fight in three waves. To this end, they formed their army into three lines, or ‘battles’, each battle consisting of two ranks of dismounted men, five or six men deep, and a line of horsemen – about 6,000 men in all in each battle. Bodies of 600 cavalry were stationed on each flank. There were well-disposed crossbowmen and gunners among the lines.

Henry, with far fewer fighting men at his disposal, had a single line of men-at-arms, four men deep. The line was divided into three divisions, with wedges of bowmen between them and more archers on the wings, standing behind well-sharpened stakes set in the ground in front of them at an angle carefully calculated to make the enemy turn aside or risk being impaled.

To ensure that no one would forget that his invasion was being carried out in the name of God, Henry had his priests well to the fore before battle was joined, praying continually. He himself received the sacrament before donning his gold-plated helmet, surmounted by a gold, jewel-studded crown, and mounting his horse. Late in the morning, after addressing his troops and reminding them of the justice of his cause and of those back home in England awaiting their return, Henry ordered his army to advance. Once in the centre of the field, the line stopped. The archers hammered their stakes into the ground, and let fly a storm of arrows at the enemy.

The longbow, used by the English much more successfully than other European states, helped Henry V win the Battle of Agincourt so comprehensively. It has been said that, not until the American Civil War, would a weapon with the range and accuracy of the longbow appear on a battlefield. The first French battle into the attack was led by the flanking cavalry, advancing so tightly packed that the knights could not wield their weapons. Their charge broke apart under the hail of arrows, which a well-trained archer could loose off every ten seconds. Many of the horses and riders that did get as far as the English line were impaled on the stakes in front of the archers. The remnants of the cavalry, retreating, plunged back into the heavily-armed and armoured foot soldiers, slowly lumbering into action behind them. The same thing happened to the second French battle.

Within four hours, the whole thing seemed to be over. The field was covered with dead and dying French; the French are calculated to have lost more than 6,000 men at Agincourt, while the English dead numbered less than 250. Many slightly wounded or unhorsed knights became so bogged down by their armour in the deep mud that they had become completely ineffective as fighting men. As one commentator noted, ‘Great people of [the French] were slain without any stroke’. There was a perceptible lull in the fighting, and it looked as if the third French battle would not continue. The English began gathering up prisoners who could be ransomed and searching for booty among the dead.

Then came what looked like a serious attack on the English from the rear. A French knight and a troop of men-at-arms made a sally from Agincourt Castle and seized Henry’s baggage train and the 1,000 peasants that looked after it. Thinking that he would have to repel an attack from his rear as well as cope with renewed fighting on his front, and seeing that many of the French prisoners and wounded still had their weapons, Henry ordered the slaughter of all French prisoners in English hands. He also warned that any Englishman who disobeyed his order would be hanged.

Although many of the English nobles and senior officers, thinking of the fortunes in ransom money to be made from the prisoners, refused to follow the order, the common soldiers did, and many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of French prisoners were slaughtered before the order was rescinded.

Modern historians have condemned Henry V for his order, forgetting that he was acting within the codes of an age much harsher and more cruel than our own. Then, too, it is probable that the number actually butchered was considerably less than suggested in accounts of the battle in the years after 1415. It is a matter of record that nearly 2,000 prisoners, still alive, were in Henry’s train when he moved on to Calais. One of them, Charles, Duke of Orléans, was to spend 35 years in captivity in England while his ransom money was raised.

Like many war crimes, Henry V’s ‘crime’ was the result of a decision taken in the heat of battle in response to his realization that certain specific actions by the enemy could, if not checked, turn victory into defeat. His action was not condemned by his contemporaries, English or French: indeed, French commentators blamed the leaders of the French army for not withdrawing when they could see that the battle was lost. Despite his ‘crime’, Henry V remains England’s most heroic king and Shakespeare’s ‘star of England’, whose sword was made by Fortune [– and, Henry would have added, by God].