Bram Stoker's Dracula emerges from Vlad the Impaler's brutal 1400s reign in Wallachia, where mass executions and the "Dracul" title fueled vampire myths. Historical panic over mid-1700s rabies epidemics and the 1832 Irish cholera outbreak transformed these legends into cultural metaphors for capitalism and slavery. Ultimately, Stoker synthesized these elements—political treatises, folklore, and personal trauma—to create a wealthy aristocrat vampire, shifting the monster from peasant to real estate baron in his 1890 novel. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Unfair Title Given00:14:51
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Let's fucking podcast.
This is Behind the Bastards, listeners.
It's a podcast about the worst people in all of history.
And I got very hyped there.
So you might think this is going to be a high-energy podcast episode.
But I am years old or something like that.
And last night I went to bed at 3 a.m.
Don't tell people how old are you?
We have to cut that because then people are going to be able to do it.
Yeah, we'll bleep it out.
We'll bleep it out.
So we'll bleep it out.
The safety.
Yeah, I don't even fully remember.
I just, I'm telling you right now, people, I'm the kind of hungover that you get, not because you've gotten, you were drinking or doing drugs, but because you are in your mid-30s and you stay up slightly later than normal.
That's where I am right now.
I'm pounding coffee.
I'm trying to do better.
And here to distract from my decrepit elderliness is Jack O'Brien.
The most decrepit old person you've ever seen.
The Crypt Keeper.
What's up, guys?
How are you doing, Jack?
I'm doing all right.
Are you like seven Mountain Dews or what's going on?
I'm zero Mountain Dews in.
But it's still early.
What is it?
Is it a security risk to tell people how old you are?
Or just like I don't know why.
We like to filter out disinformation.
Like there's a lot of listeners who think my real name is.
And, you know, I don't tell that for a specific reason, but the more lies there are out there, right?
Like the better it is for me.
Okay.
Yeah.
People don't like us, Jack.
But you also don't know how old you are.
So I feel like you could use some crowdsourced research put into that.
That's right.
That's right.
I was born on the bayou and they don't take notes about when you were born there.
That's actually, I'm actually who that credence song was written.
That's true.
Yeah.
That's really cool.
Well, it's great to be here.
It's great to see both of your faces.
Thank you for thank you for having me back.
Good to see you, Jack attack.
Jack, it's the spookiest month of the year.
I think we can all accept that.
And on the day this drops, happy Halloween.
Yeah, happy Halloween, everybody.
Happy Tuesday, Halloween.
Happy Halloween.
It's Tuesday, Halloween.
I do apologize.
I feel like we all are getting a little screwed there, right?
Yeah, by Tuesday, Halloween.
Yeah.
Halloween.
We need to make it be like Thanksgiving, where it's always on like a Friday.
Yes.
You get a couple days off before and after.
Yeah, exactly.
But that's not the case.
So it's a Tuesday.
I wish you all the best.
But because we wanted to try to help make Halloween extra good, we have an episode about the man who put the spook in Spooktober, which is what I call October.
Dracula.
Yeah.
That's right.
That's right.
Mother fucking, I mean, the title of the episode is just Mother Fucking Dracula, Bitches.
But they probably won't let us use that in the episode.
Exclamation point.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
I don't think we can put that on Spotify.
They'll get angry.
Jack, what do you know about Dracula?
I am a big fan of his cereal.
Let's count Shocula, which is, I mean, honestly, Jack, a little racist.
All of the dash novels aren't the same.
Right.
Yeah.
I am not that familiar.
Like, I know there are historical roots to the character, but like in terms of who it's based on or what they did to have such a horrible story told about them, which is what it is.
I mean, it feels like it could just be like from a middle school burn book, right?
Like, just like, I heard they go into people's rooms and try and bite their neck and suck on their blonde.
Yeah.
So I don't know.
I'm curious to learn more.
Yeah.
Well, you're going to learn way too much today.
So good.
That's what I come here for.
If you're, you know, most people, I think, are, are broadly aware that Dracula, the vampire from the Bram Stoker book, and then from, I don't know, like a million other books and pieces of media since, is based on a real guy, Vlad Tepej, better known as Vlad the Impaler.
And we have gotten over the years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Vlad the Impaler.
That's right.
I've always resented this guy a little bit because he took a nickname that I always wanted.
Yeah, Jack the Impaler.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You remember like how hard I tried to get that going back in the cracked days.
For the record, Jack, you're always the first impaler in my heart, or at least in the top like three, certainly before Dracula.
A lot of people say like, I don't impale that many things.
And I would point out like, wait, have you not seen me eat with a fork?
Yeah, or, I mean, you've cooked kebab a couple of times and that was you were impaling the shit out of some stuff.
I don't generally cook it, but I will eat off of a kebab.
So that gives me rights to that.
But yeah, I think he just got to it first.
Otherwise, I would be known.
You would have been introducing me as Jack the Impaler.
There's a lot of unfair things like that.
Like the Wachowskis get credit for creating The Matrix, even though just seven or eight years later, I had an idea that was very similar to The Matrix.
So like, who gets the credit, you know?
But it's unfair.
It's unfair.
And also my version of The Matrix, all Danny DeVito.
We get those talentless hacks out of there and we go pure DeVito.
Pure DeVito.
It's like a multiplicity matrix.
A matrix placed.
It's multiplicity plus the Matrix.
And that's how you can kind of tell things are off a little bit.
Yeah.
This is a world of all DeVitos.
Because you're like, I'm used to some Danny DeVitos, but not quite as many as we're getting.
Sure, we've heard of like, you go into work and it's mostly DeVitos, but not pure DeVito.
And that's how you tell things are a little bit twisted.
A little bit of robots have taken in this universe.
So Dracula.
So Dracula, sorry.
So before this becomes a Devil.
Who could be ably played by Danny DeVito?
Is based on a real guy.
Shocking.
He should be.
Vlad the Impaler.
And a weird number of fans over the years have been like, you should do a Vlad the Impaler episode.
And there are a lot of lurid stories about what he did.
But the reason why we haven't covered him before, and we're not really going to do an episode focused entirely on Vlad the Impaler, is that he's the kind of historical bastard where like you don't actually know if any of that's true or if most of that is true.
Like every, if I was just doing a Vlad the Impaler episode, every other sentence would be me being like reading a paragraph where somebody from like the 1600s is writing about an atrocity he was supposed to have committed a couple of hundred years earlier.
And then me going, but also maybe that's not true because it's more based on these like other myths or whatever that came about in a previous age.
Or, you know, here's all these reasons why that might not be the, that's the case.
You get these ass flying around for some reason.
So there's reasons to.
Yeah, I always got the sense.
And I think this is why I like didn't dig into it that much.
Is I always got, you know how Einstein gets credit for every smart thing or smart sounding thing that anyone's ever said now?
They're like, well, you know what Einstein said, the definition of either Einstein or Tom Samuel.
The insurance is doing the same thing over and over.
And it's like, first of all, that's not insanity and that's not a smart thing.
But second of all, Einstein like never said any of that.
But it's like, I always got the sense of Vlad the Impaler and slash Dracula just like got his brand was really strong.
Like we needed somebody to be spooky.
And so we just gave him all the all the dark shit from history.
Yeah, that is probably a lot of what happened.
It's one of those, like he was a ruler in the 1400s, which was a pretty brutal time, especially in Eastern Europe.
Eastern Europe doesn't have a lot of periods of time where things weren't fairly brutal like it is.
And he's, but I don't know on his own.
I don't know that I would qualify him as a bastard because like for this show, just kind of to make things narratively make sense, I have adopted sort of a definition where it doesn't just being a bastard doesn't just mean you're a bad person.
It means you actively like made the world worse and stood out in your time as a shitty person.
Like I wouldn't do a behind the bastards on a random plantation owner in the South, right?
Not because that's not a bad thing to do, but because like, well, what is there to say, right?
Like he was one of a bunch of people who were part of this really awful system.
I would do an episode on Robert E. Lee, right?
Because his, the things that he was trying to do not only like extended the civil war, made this conflict bloodier, but he was actively attempting to set this system up in a way that would allow it to like persevere longer into the future.
So he was somebody who was actively not just part of a bad system, but like making things worse in his existence, right?
Okay.
Whereas in Vlad the Impaler, I'm not sure if that really qualifies.
He's a ruler in Wallachia, which is part of Romania now during this really brutal period.
He definitely, like all rulers in that, does some horrible shit.
But most of the stuff about his like real horrible crimes against humanity, some of it may be true, but a lot of it is the result of propaganda from a bunch of Catholic monks who were like really pissed at him because he had killed a bunch of the Germans in his country.
And I don't know, you know, mixed bag as to whether or not like it's fair or just kind of like a part of a political dispute, basically, that is echoed down.
And like anybody who is a ruler in Europe in this period is going to do some massacres.
But if like you're doing the same kind of horrible shit as everybody else in the area, I don't know that I'm going to like want to cover you in behind the bastards.
So what makes Tepej interesting is the degree to which is how he becomes Dracula, right?
And that is a story that involves a lot of other people's bastardry.
It involves a really fascinating look into human folklore and the kind of stories that we tell about our monsters.
And I think ultimately it has a lot to say about like why we are the way we are.
So that's kind of the story we're going to be talking about today, how Vlad became Dracula.
But that is going to start with a little bit of a bio on Vlad the Impaler.
So are you ready to learn about V the MP?
V the MP.
I am.
A little VMP action.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
So Vlad was born in 1431.
Maybe.
He may have been born as early as 1428.
We're not going to know because nobody really, nobody was like putting down birth certificates.
I'm going to guess people didn't always know what year it was.
Like if you travel like seven miles by foot, you probably would go to a place like, no, it's not 1428.
It's 1429.
Whatever.
They like to keep it mysterious like you do with your birth year.
Exactly.
Vlad also is trying to avoid getting doxxed.
So he was probably born in Transylvania.
That part of the books is likely accurate.
The town he was born in is, I'm going to do my best here, Sigiswara, which was then part of the Kingdom of Hungary.
Hungary and Romania, I mean, Romania is not a thing at this moment as like an independent nation, but they're going to wind up spending quite a bit of time having a little kerfuffle over this specific area that he's born in.
Eastern Europe in his time was a place of chaos and violence, one in which the medieval traditions of serfdom and feudalism, they were starting to fade in the West, right?
In Western Europe in the 1400s, serfdom and kind of a lot of these feudal attitudes are giving way to what's going to result in like a more modern concept of like states and the relationship between people and rulers.
That's starting to happen in the West.
But in the East, all of that shit is really kind of coming into its height, right?
Because it's, you know, just a different part of the world.
The chief powers in Vlad's time in the area where he grows up are Hungary.
That's like the big Christian kingdom, which was a closely related foreign kingdom to Wallachia, where his dad is going to be ruling in the not too distant future.
And then the other of Hungary, not Wallachia.
So everybody gets an idea of how dumb I am on this whole thing.
I had a friend in high school who's a Romanian national who would always insist that he was Wallachian, not just not Romania.
Like Wallachia is like the center of what becomes the state of Romania.
And so the other big power in the region, you've got Hungary on one side and like the Holy Roman Empire, which is like, you know, kind of governing the major Christian states in that region.
And then the other big power is the Ottoman Empire.
And the Ottomans have not taken Constantinople yet, but they're working on it, right?
They're in the process of making Constantinople into Istanbul.
You can refer to the They Might Be Giants song if you want a little bit more information on that.
It's pretty detailed.
Yeah, so Constantinople has not gotten the works yet, but the Turks are in the process.
So they are making constant incursions into this chunk of Eastern Europe.
They control some of the surrounding territories.
And like when you read like weirdo right-wing dudes with like Twitter accounts that are named, I don't know, like cultural critic or whatever, they tend to like, they always like to frame this as this bone-deep clash of religions and cultures that are just completely different and can never live together.
That's not what anyone living through it sees it as, right?
If you are actually living in the area at this point, your life is a lot more muddled.
Vlad the Impaler's father, who is Vlad II, who's going to wind up ruling Wallachia, he spends most of his life allied to the Ottomans, right?
Back and Forth Mustache00:07:55
Like he is an Ottoman vassal, and he is also, he's fighting when he goes to war.
He's often fighting on behalf of Sultan Murad II.
And a lot of people go back.
He's going to go back and forth.
His son's going to go back and forth.
A lot of people in this border area are like, well, right now it looks like the Ottomans are a better bet.
So I'm an Ottoman vessel.
And then like, oh, now the Holy Roman Emperor seems like he's got, you know, some shit on his, he's got some weight behind him.
So I'm going to go over there.
That's just how people are, right?
Like it doesn't make any sense to be super rigorous about it because that'll just get you killed.
Sure.
So it is from the Emperor Sigismund that the family gets their imposing title, Dracul.
Dracula, not like a last name.
It is a title that they are given.
And obviously that's the root of the word Dracula.
You've seen that new movie, The Last Voyage of the Demeter, which is about one chapter in the Bram Stoker Dracula book where Dracula travels over to this little coastal English town on a boat.
It doesn't go well for the people on the boat.
The crate that he's loaded onto the ship in has a dragon on it.
That's because the word Dracul means dragon.
Although in Romanian, it can also mean devil.
Both are, it's kind of like it means both.
And yeah, the reason why he gets that title is that Sigismund is trying to get Vlad II, Vlad the Impaler's dad, and a couple of these other kings and stuff who are sort of on the fence.
A lot of them kind of go back and forth between him and the Ottomans.
He wants to get them locked in on his side, right?
Because he's trying to build up a solid, he's trying to like make sure his power base stays solid.
And so he creates this knightly order called like the Order of the Dragon.
And Vlad II is one of the guys he brings into this.
And most kind of laymen's histories of Vlad II and of Vlad the Impaler will describe the Order of the Dragon this way.
And I'm going to quote from an article by the Warfare History Network.
Quote, a group of European leaders who were sworn to defend the Holy Roman Empire against infidels.
Now, again, that kind of leans into a lot of popular conceptions about how this period of time works.
Some of the sources I've read kind of make it look, again, a lot more muddled.
There's a pretty interesting book on Vlad the Impaler by MJ Trowe, who is a crime novelist.
And we'll talk about our historian that we have as a source here in a second.
But he describes the order, and he has some pretty good sources to back this up, in more mafioso terms.
So not this like alliance of Christians against the infidels, but more of like a system of mutual aid designed by Sigismund to tie regional rulers to him and to each other to reinforce his own power.
More of like a secret society, right?
Where it's like, we'll get this impressive title and this title will kind of bind them to me and to each other and will promise to like help each other out.
I'm trying to make this kind of like intimate cultural bond to set us all together, but more because I want them, I want them to feel like they have a sense of like owing me something, right?
And they do because that nickname is awesome.
It's a dope nickname, right?
If I get to call myself the fucking dragon, yeah, I'm going to be, I'm going to be like, if Kentucky were to award me the rank of colonel, you know, if I could be a Kentucky colonel, I would, I would be much more pro-Kentucky than I currently am.
Yeah.
And you would have, yeah, the branding is just incredible.
It's great.
They had a sense of it at the time.
I love that it was just like, well, if you want to like have this cool nickname, then you've got to be cool with Sigismund.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like a, you know, a five-year-old creating a club that's like the super cool ninjas.
Yeah.
That like you get to call yourself a super cool ninja if you join up.
Like, hell yeah.
That's worked from the beginning of time.
Yeah.
Cause like I think every man, I think I speak for literally the entire male population when I'm like, we all want to be nicknamed the dragon.
The dragon.
But it's kind of our only goal in life.
Like if you were to introduce yourself as the dragon, people would be like, give yourself that nickname.
But if you're like, no, man, somebody else said I'm the dragon.
And like, they're the Holy Roman Emperor, then you're in, then you're in, you know, like, in like Flynn, I guess.
That's, that's really the goal here.
And it's, I don't know, it's debatably successful, but that's where they get the nickname from.
Now, we have basically no real information on the kind of childhood that Vlad would have experienced, R. Vlad, not Vlad II, his dad.
There are some things we can infer.
His family was extremely wealthy.
These guys are nobility, right?
They're boyers, which is like what you call nobles in this region.
They have numerous servants and bodyguards.
And for most of Vlad's early childhood, he's effectively like his dad is the governor of Transylvania for Hungary, watching for a Turkish incursion.
We don't know who his mother was.
It's possible she was like basically a prostitute.
This is not like normal in like Western Europe and whatnot.
That would make him like a bastard, right?
Like in a literal sense.
Oh, that's a master dude.
That's not the case in this part of the world, right?
Wallachian and Transylvanian culture, certainly in this period, is not very pro-woman.
And so, and to the extent that it doesn't really matter who your mother is, right?
What determines whether or not you are a legitimate, and that's in the parlance of the time, a legitimate son, right?
In order to like inherit and stuff is just who your dad is, right?
It doesn't actually matter who your who your biological mother is.
So Vlad is, his dad actually is an illegitimate son.
So it's not one of the things about this is that there's this like quasi-aristocratic democracy thing where like winding up in charge is the result of a bunch of these other boyers supporting you having a job.
So the fact that Vlad II is like an illegitimate son probably doesn't really hurt him because he's able to get a lot of support to put him in power.
But Vlad the Impaler is his dad's like legit son.
And he's the second son of the family under his elder brother Mirseya.
His youngest brother, Radu, is also known as the handsome.
And MJ Trow writes, quote, yeah, he's hot as hell.
MJ Trow writes about his, about all of their upbringing, actually.
He would have had a steward to organize the servants, order the food and the wine, and regulate the day.
Numerous skivvies would be employed to cook, clean, and sew.
The male children would have learned to give orders and adopt the airs and graces expected of men that would one day rule an entire country, however small by modern standards.
Yes.
The one picture of Vlad the Impaler that I've always seen, the main thing that I take away from it is that he looks like a rich guy from another era.
Yeah, he's for sure.
Baubles and like just various fanciness.
His hair is like, looks like it has been combed by someone who is not him for like hours a day.
Oh, yeah.
The thing he's wearing makes him look like a Christmas tree ornament.
Yeah.
That's kind of his overall.
You like his mustache?
What do you think of the mustache?
The mustache, I always assume that's just from another era.
And it also looks like he might have taken one of his locks and just like put it across his upper lip.
There's a serious curl going on on his.
I'm imagining there's like a backstory to that mustache.
Like if you guys have watched Kenneth Brenag, Hercule Perot movies, like the second, the second one opens with like the gritty backstory of a mustache.
It's amazing.
Anyway, that's what I imagine.
So in his book, MJ Trow cites two historians, Florescue and McNally, who write this about Vlad's upbringing.
There were the usual distinctions that followed the feast days, puppet theaters, ambulant artists, acrobats, mini-singers.
And in summer, there were ball games, running and jumping contests, and games on quadrilateral swings made of red cloth and fashioned in the form of a pyramid.
Training War Horses00:06:20
In the winter, they hunted eagles with slingshots down the Sigasuar slopes on primitive double runner sleds, trapped hares.
That is pretty cool, hunting eagles with slingshots.
Eagles with slingshots is red.
The degree of deadly skills you had to have, even to be like a pampered rich kid in this era, is amazing.
Like, you're just fucking bullseying an eagle here.
That's so funny.
Shooting eagles out of the fucking clear blue sky with a fucking slingshot.
Fucking rock and a piece of elastic.
Yeah, amazing.
And they didn't have elastic, so it was just like a sling, like you had to swing it around and like do it David style, right?
Yeah, I don't know.
Probably.
I think maybe they had more modern slingshots than I don't know.
I'm not a slingshot expert.
Yeah.
In 1436, the ruler of Wallachia, Vlad II's brother, died of natural causes.
Now, he had spent Vlad's brother, Vlad II's brother, had been the kind of guy whose primary focus was not pissing anyone off too much.
So, he had tried to be friendly with the Hungarians because they're right next door, but he'd also paid tribute to the Sultan and been in a military alliance with him.
And this is the kind of thing where, like, nobody trusts each other.
So, when you're in a military alliance with a guy like the Sultan, you send him a bunch of your family members, right?
Your family, some other nobles, and you send them to Istanbul, and that's like your guarantee of good behavior.
If you don't keep up with the treaty, they'll kill your family, you know, like that's the way it goes.
Hey, everyone, Robert here.
I fucked this up.
I misspoke.
Obviously, the Ottomans had not captured Istanbul at this point, which we talk about later when they do.
I believe the capital of the Ottoman Empire at this phase was Adirne, E-D-I-R-N-E.
That's how it's anglicized.
But if you keep up with the treaty, the family is a pretty good life, right?
Like, they're not locked in a cell or whatever.
Like, they're in court.
They generally attend schools and whatnot in the area.
Like, it can be a pretty decent experience, depending on where you are.
This puts it in a whole new perspective that you guys made me send my kids to stay with Sophie while we recorded this.
That is, that is the case.
You said in case things go sideways.
I was like, okay.
Yeah, in case you just support another group of advertisers.
That's right.
So, Vlad II, his brother dies, and he becomes the ruler of Wallachia next.
And he does this with the backing of Sigismund, right?
Sigismund was not happy with Vlad II's brother.
He's like, this guy is in an alliance with the Sultan.
I'm not a big fan of the Sultan.
I want to put a guy on the Wallachian throne who's like my dude, right?
And who I can do.
Sigismund is Holy Roman Empire.
Yes.
Yes.
He's the Holy Roman Empire.
And the King of Hungary, right?
Gotcha.
You know, you can, he's a triple threat, at least a double threat.
Probably triple.
I assume there's another threat to him.
Holy Roman Empire ordered the dragon.
They're the ones who came up with that idea to let them call themselves dragons.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the family, the dragon family, moves to the capital of Wallachia, Tirgoviste, and into a big fancy castle.
Now, Vlad the Impaler, age six or seven, starts his night training at this point, which is like every little boy's dream.
I think we all wished we could have trained as a knight when we were six or seven.
Oh, at K-N-I-G-H-D.
Yeah.
Okay.
Also cool.
But I thought they were like, okay, you're now ready to do battle at night like a ninja.
That is what he's going to wind up doing.
Under cover of darkness.
This is when we do our nighttime seals training.
It is, you have to start early, not just for the kid, but oftentimes, I'm not 100% sure if this is the way, but I think it is the way that they do in Wallachia.
But like even going back to ancient Greece, if you're the kind of dude who, because of your position in society, you're going to be expected to fight on horseback, you are often raised like with your horse because it takes sometimes 10, 15 years to like really train a military horse to be able to, because like horses don't want to fight, right?
Like they don't, they don't want to charge a bunch of angry armed men.
That's scary for a horse.
So you have to, it often like these societies, like this is the case with the Macedonians back in the time of Alexander, they spend a lot of their childhoods like both kind of growing up and training with their horses so that they can fight together because it takes that long to make a good war horse.
Yeah.
It's been a constant struggle with me and my horse.
My horse is more into the arts and dressage.
Yeah.
And yeah, hates when I just try and ride it into a fistfight.
No, you have tried to invade Persia several times and your horse just won't do it.
It's not going well.
It's not going well.
Very bad at it.
This period in his life where he's kind of living in Tirgoviste, he's training on being a knight.
It ends pretty quickly for little baby Vlad the Impaler because in 1437, when he's somewhere between seven and nine years old, probably, the Emperor Sigismund dies.
And his plans to create this grand anti-Ottoman alliance kind of crumble.
The whole Order of the Dragon thing.
They keep the title.
They're always going to use that title.
That's fucking dope.
It's not going anywhere.
You know, it doesn't really mean much now that Sigismund's died.
And there's this like kind of right as he dies, there's a peasant uprising in Wallachia that's pretty brutal to put down, weakens them militarily.
And then there's a wave of plagues, probably spread by rats, that hits right at the same time and kills just a fuckload of people.
So, you know, get rid of rats, people.
It just makes sense.
Now, Vlad II, Vlad the Impaler's dad, has no choice but to make the same decision that his brother had made and bend the knee to the sultan, right?
Now, thankfully, Murad II is a pretty cool dude as sultans go.
He's famous for being tolerant, particularly of like heretical religious sects in his own country, right?
There's all these like little weird religious groups that have some take on, you know, the Quran or whatever that's like kind of very much not in the mainstream.
And like a lot of other sultans probably would have punished them.
But Murad is just kind of like interested in that sort of stuff.
So he'll give them money.
He'll like support them and be like, yeah, I just am kind of curious what you're going to, I just want to let you cook, you know, like tell me some shit, you know?
There's not TV back then.
So maybe like encouraging heretical religious sects is kind of like funding Netflix.
Yeah.
See what these crazy fuckers come up with.
Different Ways to Die00:03:12
He's also known as being super nice to his slaves, which is, again, kind of the like, are you a good person?
It doesn't mean like not having slaves.
It means are you nice to them, right?
Are you nice to them?
Yeah.
But that said, as that probably suggests, good dude is a relative term when we are talking about medieval rulers.
And as relatively chill as Murad is, he's still the kind of dude who punishes his enemies by impaling them en masse because that's just kind of how the Ottomans be, right?
Everybody's got their own ways of like killing your enemies.
The Ottomans, one of the things they like to do is impale.
That's not, they're not the only people doing impaling, right?
Impaling is popular, but we always like a good impaling.
Oh, yeah.
But yeah, lots of different ugly, none of the ways people kill each other in the Middle Ages are nice.
They like to really make a show of it.
Make a meal of the thing.
So when you say impale, is that just like run through with a sword?
Or there's an extra big sharp stick going going through you in a way that's unpleasant.
And then gravity doing some work.
Is that I think gravity often, I mean, the same way that like, that's what kills you to an extent when you get like crucified, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
That whole process.
So do they impale you and then just like let you slide down a pole?
Like, do they put it upright?
Is that what we're saying someone's an impaler?
Because I am, again, still trying to get the nickname to go.
And I'm trying to see like what type of impaling I could do to like get this shit to finally catch on.
Like, is it a big wooden stick, sharpwood stick?
And then you put it upright and they're just kind of like hanging there in the air.
Yeah.
Like Jason X, the killing Jason X with the sword.
You kind of are letting them slide down it.
It's often a punishment for like crimes against the state, right?
It is a particularly nasty one.
So people who like threaten sort of the stability of the government often do it.
There's a few different ways.
It's one of those things where sometimes people are dead when they do this and you're just kind of doing it as a show of force.
Sometimes it's a very quick death, right?
Like you're, and there's a couple of different ways.
There's like through the abdomen or whatnot, like directly to the heart.
There's like the reverse way.
There's like putting it basically going in through the outdoor, so to speak.
I'm sure you can kind of guess what I'm saying there.
Through the butthole.
Through the butt.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And there's a, you know, it can, it can be the kind of thing where like you die pretty quickly, or it can be the kind of thing where it's like slow and it takes days.
That sort of depends on the region and what you did.
Okay.
So that will, that sort of thing will get people's attention.
Yeah.
I can understand where, where somebody who does that a lot would get a nickname.
It'll get your attention, but back to what we were saying about like where this lands within the morality of the time.
Pretty common.
A lot of states do impaling, right?
Basically, any ruler has the potential to impale a dude if they commit the right crime in this, especially in Eastern Europe and in kind of like Middle East, North Africa, a lot of this, a lot of impaling going on, right?
And they're not the only ones.
Western Europe has its impaling traditions too.
Hostages and Scholars00:05:17
Don't get me wrong.
And this has gone on, I think the Assyrians are some of the first people we know were doing impaling.
So this has always been a popular way to get rid of people you don't like.
So Murad II, pretty nice guy, also an impaler.
Vlad II signs a treaty with him because he's like, well, Sigismund's down.
Now he's still going by Vlad Dracul.
Don't get me wrong here.
Okay.
Smart man.
Understands branding.
Yeah, he gets branding.
So in 1438, the year after Sigismund dies, the Sultan goes to war with Transylvania, with the Hungarians, right?
And Vlad II has to join on his side and winds up fighting against the people he had just been governing.
Now, he's willing to do this because he doesn't really have any other option, but his heart is not in it.
And within a couple of years, he's like publicly, you know, a vassal of the Ottomans, but he's also covertly supporting an anti-Ottoman alliance led by John Hunyadi, who's the Transylvanian governor for the Hungarians.
There's this series of battles.
Hunyadi does pretty well against the Ottomans.
They win a few of them.
And this causes problems for the Dracul family because like now they've picked the wrong side of this conflict, right?
They bet on the Ottomans.
The Ottomans aren't doing great so far.
And I'm going to quote now from a biography of Vlad Tepes by Kurt Trepto, who is an American historian from Miami Beach, Florida.
Quote, After Hunyadi defeated Ottoman forces in Transylvania in March 1442, Vlad Dracul was called to Adrianople to demonstrate his loyalty to his suzerain, leaving his eldest son, Mircea, as governor in Wallachia.
As a result of what he considered to be Dracul's treachery, the Sultan imprisoned the prince at Gallipoli and ordered an attack on Wallachia.
This new Ottoman assault was again repulsed by Henyati, who used the occasion to install his protégé, Bessarab II on the throne.
Realizing the danger posed to the empire, if Hanyadi controlled Wallachia, the Sultan decided to release Vlad Dracula the end of 1442, but required him to leave his two youngest sons as hostages.
So there's this kind of, you see how messy this is, right?
Yeah.
Sultan gets angry that he's been supporting the Hungarians, so he arrests Vlad II.
Vlad II's son is in charge in Wallachia for a while, but then the Hungarians push him out of power and stick a new guy on the throne.
And the Sultan's like, well, I guess this family, they're still my best bet, right?
So I'm just going to take his kids as hostages and hope that that works to keep him loyal, right?
Right.
Yeah.
I think that inspires a lot of loyalty and people generally like it when you do that.
Yeah, that's a big, big, big fans.
So Vlad and his sexy brother Radu are going to be the hostages here.
Now, is this how last names happened back then?
Because it feels like we're going from their old last name to like the Dracul family.
Was it just a thing where people were like, actually, this is cooler?
Somebody called me this?
I don't think that they would have been called the Dracul family.
It's more that because the dad has this title, when he dies, the one who inherits it is going to be Dracula, which is like son of the dragon.
Okay.
Basically, right?
That's the way I was just, it's fun to use this name a lot because it's pretty fucking cool.
Yeah.
So I just said Vlad and his sexy brother Radu would be those hostages.
I probably shouldn't have said that about Radu because I have to note something uncomfortable here about our historian source, Kurt Trepto.
So again, we've got the two books I read.
One is by this guy who is, you know, it's a pretty good pop history book, but it's not perfect.
And the other is this book by Kurt, who is definitely a historian.
He is a Fulbright scholar and an expert on Romanian history.
He is somebody who certainly has the academic credentials to back up his book.
Unfortunately, a scholar is not the only thing that he is.
Because as I was writing this episode, I came upon a 2007 article by the History News Network that notes about Kurt Trepto: He was sentenced to the maximum of seven years in December 2002 for offenses involving two girls aged 10 and 13, who he invited to his home in Lhasi.
A Romanian woman convicted of being his accomplice is still in prison.
Trepto, who looked visibly emaciated as he left the prison, declined to comment.
The historian was released early because he wrote a book entitled The Life and Times of Vlad Dracul while he was in prison.
His lawyer, Livio Braun, said the book, pinned from September 2003 until October 2006, was counted as community service.
Braun told reporters.
Braun told the court during his trial that his client had sex only with the 13-year-old girl and that he did not know she was a minor.
So there's a lot there.
Oh my God.
That is something else.
Yeah.
I didn't.
Primary source here.
Yeah.
It's this.
He is a historian.
He's a Fulbright scholar.
He also wrote his Dracula book as fucking community service for being a pedophile.
Yeah.
You know.
Wow.
I don't know what else to say about that.
I figured I should literally say, you know, Trepto's book is okay.
Tro is a better writer, right?
But he's not a historian.
And I did find a couple minor errors in there.
So I wanted to like read both of them.
And then as I was writing the script, I learned that on fat, pleasant reality.
The lesson here should be obvious.
Never check your work, right?
Impalement Reputation00:15:47
Yes.
There you go.
There you go.
Then you won't learn stuff like this.
Absolutely.
So, in the time when Vlad II had been out in Ottoman captivity, he had lost control of Wallachia to one of his many noble rivals.
He took it back in 1443.
And our friend the pedophile historian notes that this is probably because he was a pretty popular ruler.
From what we can tell, captivity was not like bad for the Dracul brothers, right?
The Draculas, the Draculi.
The Draculesla?
Anyway, they learned how to fight in the Ottoman style now.
So Vlad, future Vlad the Impaler, has now learned how to fight as a European knight and how to fight as an Ottoman, right?
So he gets a whole new set of weapons.
He's having fun, different kinds of like classes on that sort of stuff.
There's some evidence that they converted to Islam for a period of time.
This is unclear.
Vlad the Impaler is going to like mix and match faiths a bunch.
He's a little bit like that one character from the mummy who's just got like all the religious symbols, right?
He's going to be Orthodox.
He's going to be Catholic for a while.
He's going to be probably, he may have been Muslim for a while.
So, you know, he's like the coexist bumper sticker, you know?
Yeah, he's a very coexist kind of guy, Vlad the Impaler.
Yeah.
So things go less well.
His, you know, while Vlad the Impaler and Radu are hanging out with the Sultan, things are not going great for his father, Vlad II.
Hunyadi, the Hungarian leader, is not a forgiving kind of dude.
And once it becomes clear that yet again, the Mr. Dracul has backed the Ottomans, Transylvania goes to war with Wallachia.
Vlad II loses this war.
He gets captured and is executed alongside his eldest son, who had ruled in his stead while he was out fighting.
Is that the handsome?
Or is that?
No, no, that's Mirseya.
I don't think he's particularly handsome.
He gets, so while his dad is losing this war to Transylvania, like a bunch of these boyers in Tirgoviste, like see where the wind is blowing.
And so they capture his son, Mirsey, and they kill him by burying him alive.
And there's some suggestion among scholars that maybe this is part of how that myth about like Dracula being buried alive coming out of the yeah, yeah, exactly.
Maybe that's part of it, right?
I feel like if you're executing the eldest son and the next eldest is Vlad the Impaler, I guess he probably doesn't have that nickname.
He doesn't have that.
Yeah, he's not impaling yet.
But if he's giving off even like the slightest of impaling vibes, I don't know.
If he's like trained as both like in Eastern and Western fighting and is like fighting as a knight with one hand.
He is like Jean-Claude Van Damme in an early 90s movie, right?
Exactly.
Might have just like kind of finished his job, but I don't know.
I say this a lot, listeners.
If you are executing a family for their loyalties to the sultan, you say this all the time.
Yeah.
Keep an eye out.
Does one of them look like they might be an impaler?
Maybe don't do that execution, you know?
Keep him second in line is all I'm saying.
So it's unclear if Lod and Radu are free or still with the Sultan.
They probably are still with the Sultan when their dad and brother get killed.
But whatever the case, Vlad winds up going back to Murad and is like, hey, they killed my family.
I need to go do a pretty dope vengeance quest thing.
I feel like I'm a good guy to have a vengeance quest.
All of this, all this martial arts training and shit I got.
Can I have some dudes?
You know, some like, some like fighting dudes, right?
And Murad is like, yeah, that'll probably work out pretty well for me.
Have some dudes.
So, you know, part of why this is noteworthy is that not long after his death, he's going to become a symbol first of sort of resistance to the Ottomans and eventually of like Romanian independence.
He's going to get this reputation as like the shield of the West from the marauding Ottomans.
And his memory is used.
You can find a lot of weird right-wing culture warriors with Vlad the Impaler shit to this day.
It's worth noting he only gets to power because he's cool with the Sultan.
Right.
Both sides.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's a both set.
Which is very much in line with other rulers and with how his dad had played things, you know?
And his uncles had played things.
You do whatever is going to allow you to survive to the next day.
Yeah, it's a rough time out there.
Yeah, exactly.
So this works.
He winds up becoming the ruler of Wallachia for what will be the first of three times.
He is in and out of there several times.
The first piece of documented evidence we have from Vlad the Impaler is this letter he writes right after he comes to power.
It's the first documented like piece of writing that was done by his hands.
And this is not like a big deal, but it's interesting that this first Vlad the Impaler letter is written on All Saints Day or Halloween of 1448.
Wow.
That's kind of cool.
The man knows his brand.
That's incredible branding, right?
That's amazing.
Visionary.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
So he is 17 when this happens and all probably.
And he is already a hardened combat veteran.
But he is not going to be ruler for very long.
Within two months of taking power, one of his regional rivals invades Wallachia and forces young Vlad the not yet an impaler to flee the scene.
So by Christmas of 1448, he is out of power.
But with that nickname, they should have known he was going to be an impaler.
His nickname is Vlad the Not Yet an Impaler.
You got to keep checking his Wikipedia page to see if it's safe to fuck with him.
Still not, but I've been bad things are coming for us.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the moment in the movie.
Like they're checking their smartphones as they wait for the battle to start and they're like, oh, shit, it just got updated and like the mods aren't reverting it.
Guys, we might be fucked.
Bad news.
Yeah, so Vlad spends the next couple of years bouncing around kingdoms ruled by his relatives in Moldova, cementing alliances, building a base of power.
By 1452, he's reconciled with Hunyadi and he's promised to serve the Hungarians as defender of Wallachia.
So he betrays the sultan.
Now um, this is a bad time to betray the sultan, because right after he's like, nah, i'm totally team Hungry.
Constantinople falls to the Turks, which is not a great position to be in.
Right, this whole place like this is where you know, if you're fighting with the Turks and things go badly, you can retreat in the direction of Constantinople.
That's going to stop being an option for these guys very soon.
Um, so by july of 1453, Vlad has retaken power uh, in Wallachia by personally hacking to death the guy who had usurped the throne from him, probably single combat, which is pretty cool right yeah, that is how I became the host of this podcast right yeah, it was uh, it was trial by combat.
Yeah yeah, so just hacking to pieces, that's right.
Hacked to pieces.
So, in 1450, makes a statement, yeah yeah, that's the best way to hack someone to pieces or rest in power.
To that other guy yeah, to that other guy, to the captain in this podcast.
Yeah yeah, you guys will take my kids.
So that's right, that's right, that's why we do it.
So 1457 is the year in which Vlad will commit the first massacre.
That kind of starts his reputation off with a bang.
Uh, as this history should drive home, there's a lot of turnover and Wallachian politics.
Right, his family is in and out of power constantly, and a lot of this has to do with the boyers.
Right, these local nobles who are the ruler's support system and his primary threat.
Right, because you can't rule without the support of the boyers.
But also, they're always, you know, angling to get someone in who's better right, better for them.
Um, so Vlad eventually gets kind of tired of this whole game and in easter of 1457, he invites all of his boyers for a big feast and while they're eating, he kills the sons of people.
Yeah, don't go do that, don't go do this.
Yes yeah, somebody's like in the bathroom, like you know, just kind of freshening up, and checks his phone, is like, oh, they changed his Wikipedia.
Guys, we gotta bounce.
Oh man, i'm gonna quote from like, the Red Feast.
Yeah exactly, real red wedding vibes.
Yeah, i'm gonna quote from a contemporary account, here, while all the citizens were feasting and the younger ones were dancing.
He Dracula surrounded them, the Boyers led them, together with their wives and children, just as they were dressed up for easter, to Ponari, where they were put to work until their clothes were torn and they were left naked.
So basically, he makes them build his castle.
These like nobles.
He, like forces, enslaves them, forces them to build his castle, and then he impales them to death.
Right them and their wives, all these dudes and their wives, killed out of them, right ugly stuff.
Now there's a lot of stories of impalement from his reign.
This is kind of the first one, but you're going to get a lot more.
The most commonly told one is that, like he wins this big victory against the Turks and he has maybe tens of thousands of their soldiers impaled on the road leading to his capital, which is so frightening that the sultan and his army retreat rather than advance further into Wallachia.
It's impossible to know how precisely true that all is, but again, And counter to a lot of these weird right-wing myths about the guy, it's worth noting if he did impale the Sultan's army, which is pretty likely, most of the guys, if not all of them, that he impaled would have been like Christian Europeans because that's how the Ottoman army works, right?
Like a lot of their soldiers are these kind of like local levies and stuff, often who are basically given to them as like, this is part of if you're allied with the Ottomans, you send them X number of kids every year, right?
And they train a lot of these guys up as soldiers.
Now, it's kind of unclear how many people Vlad the Impaler kills, but it's a shitload.
50,000 is probably a pretty good low estimate.
Some higher estimates are up to like 100,000 people.
And most of these are various forms of execution, including impalement.
But despite, again, this reputation he starts to get as the shield of the West, the majority of the people that he's going to kill are his own folks, right?
You've got your boyers, obviously.
He kills a few hundred of them.
He kills a lot of purported spies and criminals, and also just kind of anyone he thinks is a danger to his rule.
Vlad the Impaler early on is going to be like, you know, what's going to keep me in power is becoming a law and order guy, right?
So he declares war on the homeless population, on beggars and stuff, indigents.
He gathers a huge number of these guys up and he burns them all to death in like a barn, basically.
Truly a right-wing hero, this guy.
He is very much a right-wing hero.
Wow.
He is, again, a law and order guy.
His Royal Propaganda Bureau will spread all these stories about like, oh, you know, this merchant came to a town that Dracula was controlling one day and was like, somebody stole my gold and Dracula, you know, would do something brutal to get it back, right?
Like, because there's, you don't commit crime, right?
There's one of this, one of the common stories you'd hear is that like there's this watering post for people like traveling through a rural area and Dracula leaves this ornate golden cup there.
And it's the point that he does this is that like, as long as the cup is there, you know that he's in power because nobody would dare steal anything when Dracula's running the shit, right?
Almost certainly just like bullshit.
But that's the story, one of the stories that gets told about this guy.
The reality is myth, like the good branding got him a myth about him being good at branding.
Yeah, exactly.
But that's a cool story.
The water is a cool story.
Golden cup.
Again, probably not true because while he's in charge, there's a bunch of uprisings.
People are, in fact, not too scared to piss off Dracula, right?
Maybe they should have been because these don't go well.
But I'm going to quote again from Tro, who is our source that is not a criminal.
Quote: The villages of Satulnau, Hozman, and Kasoltz were burned to the ground by his cavalry, and the supporters of Vlad the Monk were butchered, who is one of these uprising leaders.
A lot of Vlads.
Bod was totally destroyed.
Talmes left blazing and its people hacked like cabbage in the town square.
Merchants who are now expected to sell their wares at the specified towns of Tirgoviste, Tirgsor, and Simpulung.
Say cabbage?
Like cabbage.
Yeah.
Hacked like cabbage.
Hacked like cabbage.
Yeah, just to pieces, shredded.
Merchants who were now expected to sell their wares at below the market rate were rounded up for non-compliance.
And according to the Saxon accounts, impaled by the road or boiled in cauldrons.
The young men whom it was claimed had been sent to Wallachia to learn the language were likewise executed, quite simply because they were clearly spies.
And the Saxon, the reason he brings that up is that like a bunch of these German types have like moved into Romania over the preceding generation.
So there's like German communities in a bunch of the cities in Wallachia.
And as is always the case, these guys, a lot of them become like merchants, right?
So these are kind of like your upper middle class merchant class in a lot of these towns.
That's a good group of people to blame all your problems on.
So Vlad's going to really do a lot of murdering of these German types.
And so that's where a lot of the stories of him come from is these, especially these monks who like flee from his fairly brutal to them reign.
And they tell these, they exaggerate these stories, right?
He certainly did some fucked up shit, but they're also, they're trying to like spread propaganda about this guy because he killed their friends.
So they're also, they're pumping it up a little bit, right?
Right.
But does that help or does that just like make him more terrifying and people want to.
I mean, it's why he has this rep, right?
It's because of these German, Germanic, like monk accounts of his brutality.
The monks had the bitchiest burn books, but they also were some of the only people who knew how to write.
Is that right?
Yeah, so like a lot of the stuff is just the guy who was meanest to monks becomes our great historical monster just because monks knew how to write.
Yeah, we say a lot history is written by the victors, but it's also written by the people who know how to write.
And so you've got a real advantage if you're the monks in that regard, you know?
Yeah.
So yeah, Vlad, again, as we noted above, he's not just impaling people.
He'll boil them alive.
He's got some more creative methods, though, but impalement gets a lot of attention, right?
In part because it's kind of identified with the East, even though they're not the only people who do it.
And the most infamous story of Vlad the impaling some people comes after a military victory he won against his rival with a very silly name, Dan III.
He's like, you've got all these wild ass Hungarian, Romanian names, and then there's just Dan hanging out there.
Yeah.
All these guys.
You've got Vlad the Dracul and then like, yeah, and then there's Dan.
He's a third Dan.
They don't last long.
I gambled on who was going to win that one.
Vlad the Dracul, aka. Dad the impaler or Dan the third.
The third Dan.
The third Dan.
So he beats this shit at a Dan at a town called Brasov.
Quote, it was here that the inhabitants were impaled in large numbers as the chapel of St. Jacob burned to the ground.
According to the poet Michael Behem, the impalers sat at a table in the open air and mopped up from his plate the blood of his writhing victims.
The boyer who complained of the foul stench was impaled higher than the rest.
Now, most, yeah, pretty cool guy.
Someone like watching everybody get impaled and killed and complained that it smelled bad.
Yeah.
Well, and someone who was going to be, yeah, it's fun.
Yeah.
I got to tell you, man, this place smells like shit.
Yeah.
All right.
So most of the Wallachians he massacred are, again, Germanic residents who have come to make up a significant chunk of the mercantile class during a series of migrations in previous centuries.
And it's from a bunch of these guys that we get the stories of Vlad Tepes that take him from he's just another guy in a pretty brutal area to like fucking Dracula.
And I'm going to quote now from the Warfare History Network.
Overthrowing the Sultan00:13:30
Dracula's atrocities in Transylvania caused a tremendous backlash in the German community, which began to disseminate vicious propaganda against him.
After extensive interviews with the survivors of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, German poet Michael Behem wrote the story of a bloodthirsty madman called Dracula of Wallachia.
In his poem, Behem describes the Vlad as dining amongst his impaled victims after the massacre.
He even accuses Vlad of dipping his bread in their blood, the genesis of the enduring association of Dracula with vampires.
Vlad's horrific link to Transylvania is undoubtedly why Victorian novel Bram Stoker later chose to turn the real-life Wallachian prince into a fictional Transylvanian count.
So that's one argument as to like where the germ of this comes from.
And some of the stories about Vlad are certainly true, or at least had a germ of truth, right?
But the whole legend of him as this bloodthirsty monster is the result of an effective propaganda campaign, not just by his enemies.
They're one of them, right?
These Germans want to turn him into a monster.
The fact that he is so horrifying also helps to turn him into this like anti-Turkish figure, like the shield of the West.
But the fact that he's so famous too, he's going to later, primarily under Ceausescu, who is the, we've done episodes on Ceaușescu, the communist dictator in kind of the mid to late 20th century.
He's going to become this figure of Romanian nationalism, right?
Because he's just like your first famous guy kind of that you can call the Romanian figure.
So the blood sucking of Dracula originated with like dipping, like with kind of a like part-time.
We're going to get into that.
There's more to the blood sucking, but the first time you've got kind of Dracula directly like tied to drinking blood is this story of Vlad the Impaler dipping his bread in blood, which again is almost certainly a lie.
Yeah.
Because like you kill people, but do you drink their blood really?
I don't know.
Pretty gross.
I wouldn't.
I wouldn't.
But I also love dipping my bread and stuff.
And it's like several more to go about drinking blood.
I mean, but also much less badass.
Good to be able to do that.
You guys know that about you, Jack.
I love dipping some bread.
Bread out of blood every now and then.
I bet you could make a nice blood gravy that would be pretty rich, but probably a little saltier than most of them.
The British have tried the hell out of that.
Yeah, sure.
They'll do anything with blood, those weirdos.
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So Vlad is going to go to war with his former allies, the Turks, in 1459.
The Pope calls a crusade, and Vlad is the only European head of state to be like, yeah, I'll do that.
Everyone else is like, I feel like we tried a lot of crusades and most of them didn't go well.
So just, Robert, for my like frame of reference, up to this point, the wars are being waged.
Or, you know, when he's going in and like taking out a rival and killing his whole town, how many people, like, is it like...
Sometimes thousands.
Yeah.
Thousands?
Okay.
Yeah.
Sometimes.
Like, again, we're talking small.
50,000 to 100,000 total that he's going to massacre in very.
I remember reading something about like ancient Greek warfare where it was like the towns were like.
So it was more in line with like a high school football rivalry, like a lot of the towns and like the warring.
And like it was like, yeah, and then they like came to our town and, you know, it's just like these small communities going to war with one another.
Yeah.
Which I don't really have a frame of reference for because war in the modern context is so massive.
Yeah.
I mean, this is definitely smaller than modern wars, but he is killing a lot of people.
You're probably talking dozens or hundreds of executions, but like he is, he is going to execute tens of thousands.
So like it's not purely like this little shit either.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it almost makes it like scarier.
You know, it's pretty easy.
I mean, that's almost like everyone gets utterly murdered in a massacre.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's that is kind of how you have to do it.
Anyone left alive, that's like a threat to your power potentially.
So he breaks his treaty with the sultan 1459.
And part of this treaty is that every, you know, so often Wallachia has to send several thousand young boys to serve as Janissaries, right?
Which is like this Turkish elite military unit made up of like the kids of their rivals, basically.
And the way Vlad announces we're not friends anymore is when the Sultan sends recruiting officers, Vlad impales them.
And then when the Sultan is like, what the fuck?
And he sends some diplomats to be like, hey, bro, what's going on?
I have a feeling about what's going to happen with these guys.
It's not going to go great.
Vlad nails their turbans to their heads, which is going to piss off the Sultan a lot.
That would piss me off if I sent diplomats and somebody nailed their hats to their heads.
I wouldn't be thrilled.
Same time.
It's cool.
It's cool.
Don't get me wrong.
That's a cool thing to do if you're a bad guy.
If you're a bad guy and you're really leaning into it.
Also, like, maybe don't send the second wave.
I feel like the first message.
I feel like the first wave he sent a message.
What did we think?
Did we think that he just didn't like the recruiters specifically and was like, these silver-tongued foxes will come and cool him down?
I'm not going to, maybe this isn't the case.
I'm not an expert here, but if I'm in charge, right, and this happens, first thought I'm going to have is like, oh, I could promote some guys I don't like to diplomats and get rid of these fuckers, right?
Like I could drop a few of these dudes, you know?
Just made you my top diplomat.
Yeah.
You're the head of foreign policy.
I got a gig for you now.
So you briest has like an elite fighting group made of your enemy's children.
Yeah, that's the Janissaries, right?
Not necessarily like the rulers, but like basically if you're a vassal to the Ottomans, you send them some kids every year.
And there's some rules.
Like it's not going to be your only son.
If you only have one kid, they're not going to take that kid generally.
And it's not the oldest usually, I think, is one of the other rules.
Like they, they try, because they don't want to piss people off too much, but like they take these kids in and they raise them and train them to be like elite soldiers, the Janissaries.
Your spare kids.
Your spare kids.
Yeah.
Train them to be elite soldiers.
The Ottomans do a bunch of shit like that.
They'll kill you, maybe.
Maybe.
If you fuck around.
Yeah.
It's a weird, weird time.
Weird situation.
It's cool.
Janissary man.
I didn't see myself as one of any of these people.
And it seems like, and I'm not going to lie, a fucking waking nightmare to live at this time.
Yeah, the past is not just a foreign country, but almost like a different planet.
It's wild as shit.
Yeah.
Anyway, they go to war.
Vlad with the Turks.
And the thing about Vlad the Impaler that we definitely know is by I think all accounts, he's a really good military leader.
He's like really very good at running an army.
He is outnumbered this whole time, often two to one, but he wins regular victories against the Sultan.
And obviously when he captures Sultan's troops, he's got to impale a shitload of these guys.
But it's also the Sultan's army is very big and Vlad's is not.
And so he suffers pretty high casualties over the course of this fighting.
And eventually the elites back at the capital are like, so we're just burning all of this money fighting this war that we cannot like the Ottoman Empire is much bigger than Wallachia.
We've already burnt through a lot of our army.
You are eventually going to lose this thing.
let's get rid of this guy because we don't want to keep doing this shit right we want to we want to do the stuff that's fun not not slowly slowly lose a war of grinding attrition so they overthrow Vlad they put his sexy brother Radu in charge and Vlad winds up having to like flee the scene after this like battle and ends up in the like care of the Hungarian king and he's like hey could you give me an army to like take back power and the king of hungary is like Dude,
you and your family are the least reliable people on the planet.
Why would I do that?
Like, why would I do that?
You can't be trusted.
None of you can.
So Vlad spends 12 years as the king of Hungary's prisoner.
Writer Mark Longo notes, quote, that he wild away his time torturing and impaling rodents he caught in his quarters.
Maybe true, maybe not.
Fun story either way.
And on brand, you know, good, good for him.
He's at least preventing the next plague by getting rid of those rats.
Yeah.
I get it.
Like, I'm not a big rat guy.
Not a big rat guy.
We did a like done an article at Cracked, I think, where just about how wondrous rats are.
Like, they're so smart and resourceful.
And they're also a pretty big danger, though.
Yeah.
Even in a post-ratatouille world, though, I would like at an instinctual level rather they all die right now.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's going to be popular with certain quarters.
Unpopular with some.
Yeah.
I mean, like, intellectually, I wouldn't do it because balance and nature, but like my gut is just like, ugh.
Anti-rat.
Yeah.
I read too many stories about the black plague to trust him too.
Yeah.
So he catches a lucky break, Vlad, because his brother loses power in 1473.
And Vlad or Radu gets replaced by a guy who wants to be friendly with the Ottomans.
So with Hungarian backing, Vlad is able to retake the throne from this guy who's overthrown his brother in 1476.
And he takes power for the third time, which lasts about two months, after which he is found decapitated in a field.
Vlad is?
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's like the ending of no country for old men, man.
Right?
Just like heaven, very.
Killed off screen.
Tommy Lee Jones walks onto the set and then gives a monologue.
That's kind of a mess it'll do till the mess gets here.
Yeah, exactly.
That's a different part, but good line.
Good line.
A lot of good lines.
So he came back, did power for a little bit longer, and then they took him out.
Yeah, then they took him out.
Yeah.
It's like, you know that band The Scorpions, Jack?
Yeah, of course.
It's like when after they broke up and then came back.
It's just like that.
Don't look up the scorpions.
I don't know if that's true.
Pretend I'm right.
And then we're all found beheaded in a field somewhere.
Yeah, maybe.
Yeah, that is what happened to the people who wrote Rock You Like a Hurricane.
It is also worth noting that during this period of time where he's this military leader, Vlad, his big move is attack people at night.
Also feeds into the vampire myths, right?
He's this blood drinking dude who comes after you at the night, you know, at night.
His brother got buried alive.
You can see some of the pieces of this, but there's a lot more to the story about how he goes from this dude, who is, again, pretty standard, brutal Eastern European medieval leader, to Dracula, the guy recently played by Nicholas Cage in a fairly fun movie.
The Rinfield movie.
I enjoyed it.
I've been picturing Nicholas Cage for this entire story.
Well, and Nick Cage and Nick Holt need to be in more things together.
Both fascinating faces, both of those guys.
So back to back to the story.
So, we're going to talk about how he goes from this European military leader to the Dracula guy.
And to do that, we have to, thankfully, finally get to move from the shady environs of ill-documented old history into a well-trod field of solid folklorist research.
And my main source here is the book, The Vampire, A New History by English professor Nicholas Groom.
Groom also writes articles about Nick Cave as a folklorist.
This is another thing he's interested in.
And I think that's pretty base.
Yeah, definitely a vampire.
I will say, I think higher odds that Nick Cave has drank the blood of his enemies than Vlad the Impaler.
Like, almost certainly.
Rabies as Vampirism00:12:28
Like, I have trouble imagining Nick Cave drinking anything that's not the blood of his enemies.
Of course.
Yeah.
That's kind of his vibe.
That is his vibe.
Definitely mopped it up with a nice pita.
Oh, yeah.
He's a waste knot kind of guy.
That thing you know about Nick Cave.
Yeah.
Murder Ballads, great album, everybody.
Check it out.
Got a good song about Staggerly.
Anyway, Groom, this folklorist, notes that the origins of the word vampire are somewhat controversial.
It is often credited to coming from the French term avant-paré, which means ancestor, but this is inaccurate.
The term's most likely origins are in the Lithuanian word vampti, which means to drink, and the Serbo-Croatian vampir, or the old Russian word upir, both of which are names, right?
Now, while the word vampire is quite modern, stories of blood-sucking undead monsters that can change shape are about as old as civilization.
It's often noted that the ancient Egyptian deity Sekhmet had some vampiric traits.
But just drinking blood, that doesn't make you a vampire, right?
That trait is old in folklore, so it gets kind of put into vampires because we've always had blood-drinking monsters and gods in our myths.
But the most direct precursor to the actual like cryptid basically monster, the vampire, comes from Serbia, where the term Vukodlak refers to both a vampire and a werewolf, right?
Like, and it's worth noting considering how often these two go together in like our modern horror stories, right?
They come from the same origin, right?
Vampires and werewolves were originally the same thing.
And it makes sense.
They're both, they both eat people and they're both like change shape into monsters, right?
Into animals, right?
Both vampires into bats, werewolves into wolves.
So they started off with the same thing.
So I have a five-year-old and when he's playing, he's like, and then I can do this, and then I can also do that.
And like, sometimes I turn into a wolf, and then I can turn, then I have wings and I have a, and then I'm a bat.
Like originally, it was all just like somebody doing that.
Yeah.
You look, the winter is long.
You spend most of it sitting inside your shack, hoping the wolves don't get you and eating, I don't know, whatever like fucking shit you manage to save from harvest time.
There's not much to do and you're drinking.
So you're going to wind up telling a lot of stories about bullshit.
Yeah, yeah.
And just kind of like adding stuff to it over time.
Yeah.
Now, while the word vampire, again, vampire is very modern.
This is not an old concept like what we consider a vampire.
So both kind of the werewolf and vampire myths we have today started off as these kind of like the Vukodlak, the Serbian mythical creature, and they split pretty recently, as Groom writes. Quote, there is, however, a significant distinction to be made in the English language.
In English, the werewolf was established by medieval times as a human shape changer with origins in Anglo-Saxon and possibly old Norse culture, as well as in classical accounts of the disease of lycanthropy.
The word vampire, however, was adopted in the 1730s to describe a contemporary wonder.
And this is really interesting to me because the concept we have of a vampire is inherently modern.
You don't get a vampire with just with people telling stories in the woods, right?
The concept of a vampire inherently brings like comes out of this sudden explosion in scientific understanding and knowledge that occurs in the 18th and 19th centuries, which come with both not just an understanding of like germ and disease theory, which is part of the vampire myth, right?
This disease that gets spread through biting.
Bloodborne, yeah.
Yeah, it comes with an increased appreciation of understanding of like the importance of blood in a medical and a forensic sense, right?
The 1700s is when we start to use blood to convict people of murders, right?
Obviously, you're not doing DNA tests then, right?
But in 1741, this English murderer, James Hall, gets convicted because he kills a guy and he can't clean up all of the blood, right?
So there's like blood from the murder and it's also on some of his stuff.
And this is like, I think the first time, or at least one of the first times that like blood as forensic evidence was used to convict a dude.
Was it because like prior to that, just everything was covered with blood?
There's a lot of blood.
Yeah, right.
I just slipped in some blood stepping out of my house.
And I don't know where the blood came from.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm sure there were other times where that connection was made, but this is like a famous case and it's famous.
It's also like really noteworthy in the history of forensics.
And that's part of what's going to build to us understanding vampires, right?
Another key aspect, key ingredient to creating the vampire is the birth of print journalism, right?
Which plays a major role in disseminating these true crime stories.
The vampire as a concept is inherently linked to true crime because starting in the 1700s in particular, we get all of these viral news stories about serial killers and murderers.
And this really takes off in the 1800s because true crime has always been a reliable moneymaker.
And that's a big part of this myth.
Bloom cites a book published by demonologist George Sinclair in 1685, who describes the murder of a man named Spalding in a town called Dalkiith.
And this, or he describes a murder committed by a man named Spalding in a town called Dahlkeith.
And Spalding gets caught and hung, but reanimates several times, right?
They don't quite kill him successfully.
So he keeps coming back.
And this is sort of one of the stories that contributes to the birth of the vampire myth, right?
Because it's really noteworthy.
This guy is this, commits this brutal murder and then you can't kill him, right?
It's kind of like the Raspbuten stories.
It gets spread a lot, right?
And so people start like talking about it and it's in their mind consciously or subconsciously as they're continuing to spin these folklore stories about monsters.
Yeah.
And it's like there is, I think, an underrated like blurriness to the barrier between life and death.
Yeah.
Like you see even today.
And you know, it's just like at a certain point, it's like, I guess they're like pretty dead, right?
Yeah.
Like they're, you know, it's like you don't know when a work of art, the artist is just like done when they're done.
Yeah.
And it's like, yeah.
So yeah, it makes sense to me that that would be a contributing factor because it's still kind of confounding.
And I think something that people don't like to think about.
Yeah.
We hear from doctors about like not wanting to do a DNR or not wanting to be resuscitated.
It's because there's like this weird blurriness where you can be like kept alive even though you're mostly dead.
Yeah.
And it's also, you know, it's, it's not uncommon for people to be buried alive back then.
And it's also not uncommon for people to commit murder.
And some folklorists, there's a theory that a lot of monster myths and the vampire would be kind of chief among them have their origin in unreal crimes by like what we now call serial killers, right?
And people, somebody in your community who you've known surprises everyone by committing this brutal series of murders, it's really maybe you don't want to acknowledge that this, you could have just gotten this person wrong, right?
Somebody had something dark inside them that you didn't see and they committed this terrible crime.
So the more comforting thing to believe is that they've caught some sort of demonic infection, right?
Sure.
You know, and for a while, people will just say, yeah, demons in them, but like vampirism in this age of science is a transmissible infection.
And that can explain how somebody can do something seemingly out of character for them.
Oh, this guy that we all knew killed his wife and kids in this horrible way.
He's a vampire.
He caught the vampire infection, right?
And because there's this growing understanding of like vampirism as an illness, there's a thing you can do as opposed to just being horrified at this terrible crime.
You execute the murderer, but you also have to ensure that he's not going to reanimate, right?
Which gives you some action that you can take that maybe makes you feel like you're protecting yourself.
Right.
So you just hang some garlic around their neck.
Well, that is one of the things that you do.
Yeah.
There's a couple of things that you do that play into the later myths, right?
When somebody, when you think somebody is a vampire, you cut their head off often after you kill them and you stake them.
The initial version is not that the stake kills the vampire, but you stake them to their coffin so they can't get out.
So they can't get out.
That's why I do it mainly.
But I only rarely do the head cutting off thing.
Yeah.
Well, that's part of why you got such a vampire problem.
Yeah.
And that's why my property is lousy with vampires.
Have you not watched the vampire diary series?
Do I?
Have you not?
I mean, I'm a young person who is pop culturally engaged.
So of course I've watched it and know exactly the reference you're talking about.
Yeah, but why don't you explain that reference just so the listeners know?
Yeah.
Robert and I obviously know.
The vampire diary is one of the best television shows of all time.
But the staking, yes, the head cutting off, yes.
But the garlic myth.
Yeah.
Myth.
Oh, okay.
Well, I mean, you would often stuff garlic in the mouth of the corpse too.
You could also rip their heart out.
That's a thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All sorts of stuff.
People do a lot of different shit.
And they do it not just, this is interesting.
Because it's understood as a communicable infection.
You don't just do this to the murderer.
You do this to his victims too, because they might have caught it and you don't want them to reanimate.
Right.
So again, it's important to note this is all very tied to old folklore and superstitious beliefs about monsters, but it's also tied to medical science.
You can look at all these things that become part of the lore of how you defeat a vampire as people trying to create diagnostic and treatment criteria for a disease.
Now evil.
It's the 1600s, 1700s, early 1800s.
They're not good at that yet, right?
Like they don't, this is not, I'm not saying this is rigorous science, but it is, it does, it is born out of an attempt to do to think scientifically, right?
That is a key aspect to it.
A lot of the modern like serial killer psychological profiling stuff is also equally just complete bullshit.
Lots of total bullshit.
And it does, I think, a lot of our beliefs about like forensic science working a lot better than it does.
A lot of our desire to believe in like these competent hyper detectives does come out of like the same thing as the concept of a vampire, which is that like it's just scary that people can commit murders and get away with them sometimes.
And so it's comforting if you can find an explanation, even if that explanation, a lot of it's nonsense, right?
You know, forensic profiling is a flawed scientific field, but at least it provides an answer.
Bring the scientists in.
Yeah.
Now make us feel better.
Yeah.
Vampirism, it's not just people wanting to like make things seem comfortable.
There are also good, at the time, pretty good scientific reasons to believe that vampirism might be a real illness.
A lot of it comes from the fact that rabies explodes in large parts of Europe during the time in which vampires are born as a mythical creature, right?
There's these huge outbreaks.
Animals will bite several people, and then those people rabies can cause you to get violently aggressive.
They'll bite people and they'll transfer the disease to those people, right?
And people who have rabies, there are certain things that seem kind of like vampirism in them.
One of them, obviously, is this sudden, unexplained, violent aggression.
They also have a fear of water, right?
That's noted as like a side effect of rabies.
Vampires and folklore can't cross running water.
Not true on the vampire diaries.
Thank you so much.
I'm glad the vampire diaries disagrees.
He's just here to fact check everything for us using the text of the vampire diaries.
One of the things of all time that differentiates the vampire from other beasts of legend is that there isn't it, it is a scientific phenomenon.
That is how it's seen.
It is a disease you diagnose people with.
It's not a boggins out in the woods.
It's an illness, right?
And so there's diagnostic criteria, and a lot of beliefs about how vampirism worked come from early attempts to grapple with germ theory and the like.
It's the result of an attempt at scientific thinking that fails.
And while a lot of monsters in stories drink blood, Dracula, I think, is the first to suck it.
Vampire Epidemic Panic00:15:36
So he's not just drinking it to get nourishment.
He is sucking it.
And like that is providing him with like vital life force, right?
And that is tied to an early understanding of blood transfusion, right?
That's we start transfusing blood into people in the late 1600s.
Way too early.
Yeah.
We are not good at it.
You do not want to get a late 1600s.
Oh boy, we're about to talk about blood.
Because it's as soon as people develop the hypodermic needle and realize that we can inject blood into our veins, it becomes just the quackest quack here.
You think these like rich people today shooting their young kids' blood into them are quacks?
Oh, let me read you from this is from Groom's book, The Wild Story of a Guy Named Arthur Koga.
Quote: Koga, a 32-year-old divinity graduate of Cambridge University, was looked upon as a very freakish and extravagant man.
On 23rd November, 1667, he was treated to become more docile by receiving a blood transfusion from a lamb.
Peppies, who's like one of the doctors, observed that the medical fraternity differ in the opinion they have of the effects of it.
Some think it may have a good effect upon him as a frantic man by cooling his blood, others that it will not have any effect at all.
Koga saw the lamb as emblematic of meekness and humility, declaring in Latin, the blood of the sheep has symbolic power, like the blood of Christ, for Christ is the lamb of God.
Good science there.
Solid medical thinking.
Yeah.
The lamb's blood was transfused using quills and silver pipes.
Koga received a payment of 20 shillings, drank canary wine, and smoked a pipe in celebration.
And the operation was repeated on 12th of December.
Koga's mood was not noticeably softened by the treatment.
However, some change has apparently taken place.
He wrote a begging letter to the Royal Society, complaining that he had been transformed into another species and was reduced to pawning his clothes.
Or, as he bombastically put it, he dearly purchases your sheep's blood with the loss of his own wool in this sheep-wracked vessel of his, like that of Argos.
He addresses himself to you and the golden fleece.
He signed himself Angus Koga or Koga the sheep.
Wow.
So this is probably a guy having like a mental health crisis, and they're like, We're going to shoot him full of sheep blood.
You know what would help this?
Yeah.
He doesn't feel good after this and convinces himself it's because he's been turned into a sheep man.
Yeah.
That'll do it.
I have a quick question for you.
Sure, sure, Jack.
So we've talked about this on my podcast, The Daily Zeitgeist with Miles Gray.
Yeah.
The model of vampire fangs.
When you picture a vampire sucking blood, do you picture the fangs having little hollow tubes inside them?
Yeah.
Yeah.
How else could they?
They suck the blood up like a reverse snake thing.
And I assume that that leads into their veins, right?
And then that they get that blood in their veins.
That's my assumption.
Well, on the vampire diary.
I feel like not on the vampire diaries.
They kind of just look like pointy little teeth.
But they do pop out.
Really makes sense.
We've like talked about where we, I think I got that from Reese's, the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ad.
Yeah.
That is, that is where most of my medical information.
Yeah.
Because it doesn't really.
Like we've, we've asked this of a bunch of our guests and like half of them are like, yeah, of course, that's exactly what happens in my brain.
And the other half are like, what are you talking about?
Why would that be it?
Like you just, they poke two little holes and then suck your blood.
Yeah.
As it said, they don't, they don't say, I want to like have my blood.
I want to like drink your blood and have it go into my stomach.
I think assuming that that line that I don't even know where that comes from, I think that's like, that's like Hanna-Barbera cartoons in the 70s, where he probably started saying that.
But I do treat that as vampiric fact for sure.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Good.
I was just, I basically, that is one of the first questions I ask everybody when they're on the subject of vampires.
So by the 1700s, blood is a central topic of scientific discussion.
And all of these factors, all these intellectual people are shooting blood into each other, right?
There's the birth of true crime as a genre.
You've got constant news stories that are just like lavish tales of bloody, gory murder.
You've got this early understanding of forensics, this early understanding of germ theory.
All of that is going to play a role in what's called the great vampire epidemic.
Were you aware that this was a thing, that we had a vampire epidemic?
I was not.
No, it's fucking dope.
It runs from about 1725 to about, you know, the mid-1750s.
And it's basically, there's a moral panic about vampires, kind of the same way we have it when like you get a terrorist attack and then suddenly people in like rural towns thousands of miles away are like, they're coming for us next.
Yeah.
You get all this kind of stuff, right?
Or you'll get, yeah, you'll, you'll hear a story about like a serial killer in fucking Idaho and then like people will start flipping out in like, I don't know, suburban Georgia that like they're next.
Human beings are not good at threat modeling.
That happens with vampires, right?
There's this suddenly this explosion in vampire tales all around Europe, primarily, Western and Eastern Europe.
One write-up on the great vampire epidemic that I found by researchers from the University of Virginia credits the epidemic to outbreaks of both rabies and pellagra.
So you have a bunch of rabies outbreaks.
Not hard to see why someone, again, not irrational, that if there's a rabies outbreak in your town and someone's like, it's vampires, you'd be like, yeah, it seems like it might be.
It certainly looks like it.
Sure as hell looks like vampires.
That pale guy who has blood all over his mouth with a broken head.
Will cross water.
He's eating people.
Sure.
Yeah, that seems like a vampire to me.
Pale guys, not a family of vampire diaries.
Glad they had like nice tans.
What was they just looked normal?
Yeah, they just looked normal, Jack.
Wow.
You said that like I was being.
Yeah.
You're not familiar with the sacred text.
The other disease outside that contributes to vampire understanding is there's these outbreaks of what's called pellagra.
Now, pellagra is an illness.
It's very new to Europeans, which is why it freaks them out, right?
Because it hadn't existed because it couldn't have because pellagra is something you get as a result of eating too much corn or improperly prepared corn, right?
There's ways you have to prepare corn that we know about now in order to avoid getting pellagra, but corn has just, it's this sexy new world crop that we import here and start putting in everything.
And so people are getting pellagra because we're not used to corn yet, right?
And pellagra has a lot of symptoms that seem similar to vampirism.
You get a sensitivity to sunlight, right?
You can't be out in the sun.
You get burnt really easily, right?
Obvious where that comes from.
You get severe anemia.
Some people with pellagra will crave blood.
Now, again, animal blood is often used in this period in various food sausages.
So it's not weird that somebody would have access to it.
But like people who can't be out in the sun and crave blood, not hard to see where that fits in, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I'm going to quote from the University of Virginia here.
Epidemics link rabies to a large number of deaths in Eastern Europe where vampire hysteria was particularly strong.
Several hundred cases of the disease were recorded, spread initially by rabid wolves, and then in at least some cases, people.
The wolf and the vampire have a well-known link as being a creature the vampire can change into.
But further, the disease is spread through biting.
Victims avoid sunlight and they can be repelled by strong odors, garlic being a possibility.
The hysteria that started to spread into the west of Europe led to the word vampir from the Serbian first entering German as der vampire around 1726 and later into English vampire by 1734 at the latest.
As this epidemic is spreading, people are convinced vampires are all over the place.
They start decapitating all these suspected vampires, staking them to their coffins.
They start executing people and then doing that to them because they believe that they're vampires.
And they start doing that to all their victims.
So there's this, God knows how many thousands of people get like dug up and decapitated and staked to their coffins because there's this belief that like they've caught the vampire sicknesses and this is the only way to stop it.
Now, the real culprit is their corn, right?
It's corn and wolves, as it always is in history.
Can't handle their corn.
Can't handle their corn.
But they don't know that yet because they're stupid old-time people, right?
Not us smart new time people who understand diseases and always take precautions against them.
They're dummies, stupid dummies.
Anyway, the great vampire epidemic of the mid-1700s is kind of like the last hurrah for believing in vampires on like a widespread cultural level as like an actual scientific illness because this kind of moral panic or hype or whatever around vampires, it leads scientific men, men of reasoning and understanding to finally reject vampirism wholly as a real disease as they gain an actual understanding about like what's causing their problems, right?
So this is in this kind of the late 1600s, early 1700s.
You can find a lot of quote-unquote educated men who will argue it's an actual illness.
That stops after the great vampire epidemic.
Now, the last crucial link in the chain from Vlad the Impaler to modern Dracula myths was the childhood of a guy named Bram Stoker.
Bram is an Irishman.
And if you know anything about the 1800s, if you are an Irish child in the 1800s, you're going to see some shit.
Things are good, right?
Things are good time.
Famously chill time in Ireland, the 1800s.
Yeah.
So one of his first, he's a sickly kid.
And also everyone around him is dying all the time, right?
That is Bram Stoker's childhood because he's an Irish kid in the 1800s.
One of his first early memories is the great cholera outbreak in Ireland that occurs in this kind of, in the early mid-1800 periods.
Cholera is an incredibly virulent illness that's spread initially by contaminated water.
As a result, once it hits a city, like an urban area, it explodes.
And this is cholera is one of these things.
When it hits an area where you live, we're talking an end of days virus.
This is like the shit we make movies about, right?
Cholera is a fucking nightmare.
And it hits the town of Sligo, where the Stokers live in 1832.
Bram's mother, Charlotte, later recalled: One evening, we heard a Mrs. Feeney, a very fat woman who was a music teacher, had died suddenly and, by the doctor's orders, had been buried an hour after.
With blanched faces, men looked at each other and whispered cholera.
But the whispers the next day deepened into a roar.
And in many houses lay one or two or three dead.
One house would be attacked and the next spared.
There was no telling who would go next.
And when one said goodbye to a friend, he said it as if forever.
Because one of the things about cholera, he mentions that she's fat.
I don't, he's not like trying to fat shame her.
He's because that means healthy, right?
If you're a fat person, that means that like you're nourished and it kills her like that.
Because people, you can get cholera and be dead in 12 hours, right?
Like it is, and so it has this, it is almost like a monster, like a vampire, is just sweeping through town and massacring families.
That is the speed with which this thing kills.
So Bram's earliest memories and the stories that adults tell him are about this implacable wave of death that is supernatural almost in its power and totality.
And because it is so contagious, the need to, there's this great need, you have to dispose of the corpses of the people that it's killing.
You have to do it quickly.
And because medical science still isn't great, a lot of living people get thrown into mass graves that they then dig out of or they're put into morgues.
They're found to later be alive.
Some of them even survive through this.
Some people just like very drunk during a cholera outbreak.
Yeah.
Everyone just like rolls them into a mass grave.
Yeah.
But also, like, you can see how this is all filming a part of a fertile background for Bram Stoker, right?
He's going to have all this stuff going around in his young mind.
Now, cholera is also a disease of capitalism, right?
And it's also a result of the new nature of life in these massive, crowded cities that are fueled by products from far away.
So vampirism is a bad thing.
Capitalism ever.
But it's also, it's kind of worth noting for Bram because he is, when he is growing up, scientists don't believe in vampirism as a literal thing anymore.
He wouldn't have been raised that this was a real literal thing.
But it has become a cultural touchstone and it becomes deeply associated with capitalism and wealth in the late 1700s.
By the time Bram is growing up, he's not hearing about vampirism as this real thing, right?
Because he's a cosmopolitan young man.
He is hearing about it in political treatises.
It's being used as a metaphor for the greed of bankers and rapacious taxmen, right?
Because vampires suck blood.
You can call a fucking tax man a bloodsucker, right?
That is his first, the first time Bram is going to encounter vampires.
It's going to be people writing about them as like a fill-in for their enemies, generally like these businessmen and whatnot.
And I do call them that the taxman, I do call him a bloodsucker every year on my tax returns.
That's right.
That's right.
No.
It's worth noting: one of the major guys who spreads this kind of the use of the term vampire to describe, you know, bankers and the like is Karl Marx.
He's a major figure in this period of like the popular conception of the vampire.
Groom writes, quote, In the class struggles in France, 1850, the French National Assembly is described as a vampire living off the blood of the June insurgents.
Similarly, in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852, in a reversal of Edmund Burke's language condemning the French revolutionaries, the bourgeoisie order has become a vampire that sucks out the rural workers' blood and brains and throws them into the alchemist cauldron.
And Marx and a bunch of other guys who are proto-socialists and socialist thinkers in this period use vampires to describe capitalism because it's like it's a pretty good metaphor, right?
Like it's, it's not, and this is where, if you'll notice, when we're talking about the great vampire epidemic, vampires aren't rich people, they're not powerful people, it's just whoever, right?
It's a disease, right?
You know, this is how vampires become wealthy, cultured people, right?
Right.
Right.
Is in this period of time, they start being discussed in like the concept of a banker.
That's why ultimately, when Bram Stoker writes his Dracula book, he envisions Dracula as a count, right?
Not just a count, but like a real estate baron, right?
A big chunk of the Dracula book is Dracula doing like real estate transactions, you know?
He's like buying and selling properties and shit.
Yeah.
Sophie, vampire diaries?
Do we have confirmation?
They're definitely, it depends on how old they are.
Like new vamps, nah.
But like, they don't care about real estate because they can't afford it.
But they do, they do seek out like foreclosured houses and like they kind of pick out like the best house in the neighborhood and then they like take it over because they technically have to be invited in if it's a human-owned house.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that part holds up.
Okay.
That does hold up.
So a couple of things here.
One is that the stories that Bram Stoker grows up with the vampires, it's both this mix of like, he's a politically savvy, you know, guy who's plugged in.
He's reading a lot of articles that are using the vampire as a sort of like an insult really to describe these like rapacious early capitalists.
Modern Vampire Myths00:05:50
The other place he's going to encounter vampires is in kind of some of the first horror stories, right?
And these are like one of the guys who is responsible for this is Lord Byron, right?
Who in 1819 writes an article called The Vampire, a tale by Lord Byron.
And this is, this is going to spread, this is a very popular story.
These guys are kind of like the some of the, along with Poe, some of the foundational horror authors.
And The Vampire is a really popular story by Lord Byron.
And in fact, it spreads.
This is kind of a little bit of an aside, but it was too interesting not to mention.
Byron publishes this thing in 1819.
And it takes, you know, I'm actually just going to read a quote from this article in The Conversation: quote, The Vampire did away with the Eastern European peasant vampire of old.
It took this monster out of the forest, gave him an aristocratic lineage, and placed him into the drawing rooms of the Romantic era England.
It was the first sustained fictional treatment of the vampire and completely recast the folklore and mythology on which it drew.
Now, this story is initially credited to Byron.
It's later found out it was like a friend of his, this guy John Polidori, but that doesn't really matter all that much other than that, like Byron kind of a famehound.
Yeah.
With a cool name.
People would rather be written by Polidori.
Lord.
Byron rather than, hey, it's my boy Johnny Polidari.
Yeah, J. Poole.
So one of the things that I didn't know until I started doing this, I was familiar with like Byron and him getting credit and being by this other guy is like kind of the first vampire story in a modern sense.
But there's actually another vampire book that gets that's extremely influential that comes out before Bram Stoker's Dracula.
And it's an American response to the Polidari story, The Vampire, right?
And the title of this is The Black Vampire, A Legend of St. Domingo by one Uriah Derek DeRci.
Now, I think a lot of people are thinking about the movie Blackula, right?
Which is a black exploitation movie, but this is actually, this is not, we're not talking about like, I don't know, like this is actually a serious and influential work of literature, right?
And it's, it's interesting because it is one of the first popular anti-slavery narratives, right?
This is written in the early 1800s.
It is the first American vampire story is of a black vampire.
And it is also, it might be the first short story to argue in favor of emancipation, right?
This is published 14 years before Lydia Child is going to write a book called An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, which is kind of probably the first big anti-slavery book.
So it's one of the first popular pieces of literature arguing for emancipation, right?
It is not super well known, although you can find some, you can find copies of it online now.
I'm going to quote again from the conversation here.
Darcy's narrative begins with a slave owner, Mr. Person, in what is now Haiti, repeatedly trying to kill a 10-year-old slave.
Much as he tries, though, the corpse keeps reviving.
Person orders the child to be burned, but the boy moves with supernatural speed and miraculously causes the slave owner to be flung into the fire instead.
Before Mr. Person dies, his wife informs him that the cradle of their unbaptized son is empty, apart from his skin, bones, and nails.
Some years later, we return to Person's widow, Euphemia, who is in mourning for her third husband.
She is visited by two strangers, an extremely handsome black man dressed as a moorish prince, accompanied by a pale European boy.
He charms her with his elegance and beauty and rapidly wins her hand in marriage, which takes place that evening.
The same night, he reveals that he is a vampire and converts Euphemia to his bloodthirsty set.
Married to a monster and now a monster herself, Euphemia learns that the prince's pale young companion is her vanished son, now also a vampire.
And so part of what's going on here is like vampirism is kind of standing in as like this thing that people are judged for in the same way they're judged for like interracial marriages and stuff.
Like there's a lot going on in this story.
It's also very much like a sympathetic narrative about the Haitian Revolution.
I had no idea this book existed, but this is the first American vampire, right?
Is it this black vampire in this early pro-emancipation narrative?
America loves to forget about great shit.
Yeah, yeah.
That's pretty cool, I think.
That's pretty neat.
Seems relevant.
Seems relevant.
All these different themes.
Yeah.
And was it not popular at the time?
It is.
It is.
It's reasonably popular at the time.
It's not huge.
Obviously, it gets kind of like forgotten for the most part because it's not a touchstone, but it's not like an unsuccessful story, I don't think.
But it's not going to be nearly as successful as Bram Stoker's Dracula.
And, you know, Bram, one of the things, he's the manager of a theater, right?
That's how he makes a job, money in his early life.
So he's, he probably reads, you know, Polidari's The Vampire.
He also, when he's kind of, you know, doing this, this, this gig managing a theater, he comes across this book that had been written in 1820 by a British politician about the history of Wallachia and Moldavia.
And because Vlad the Impaler has become this sort of the shield of the West type figure and also this demonized figure by the Germans, this book has a lot of stories about the brutality of Vlad the Impaler.
So, you know, Bram Stoker is becomes, he's kind of obsessed with this area that becomes Romania.
He reads a lot about it.
He's also reading these stories about, you know, cultured vampires, getting these like rants about the vampires, the symbol of capitalism.
And all of this kind of fuses together to create the Dracula that he writes in his book, Dracula, in 1890, right?
And that is 1890, something like that.
That's how we get Dracula.
That's where he comes from, everybody.
And that's he's just kind of pulling a cool name from this history book that he's reading.
It's too cool.
Yeah, he reads this and he's like, well, that's too cool a name to not use.
Creating Dracula's Name00:04:15
I got to call him fucking.
And he's got this guy is so brutal.
I want this to be a scary monster, dude.
This guy's scary as shit.
Like, yeah, let's go for it.
You know, is the impaling and the like staking the vampire?
Like, are those two suspected to have been linked?
I think they, I mean, it certainly fits together, right?
Yeah.
And then the chocolate cereal with marshmallows, like, does it, where does that come up?
Uh, well, marshmallows, Jack, are the blood of uh uh candy.
So, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense then.
Anyway, Jack, that is the story of the vampire.
You got a got any, how you feeling?
I'm feeling good, man.
Like, I'm a little bummed out because the guy did impale a lot of, like, he earned the shit.
He impaled a pretty good number of people, sure.
Like, I was not.
I think I'm going to stop trying to get people to call me Jack the Impaler because I don't think I can impale that many people.
Jack, I just, the nickname that ended up sticking Sleepy Jack the pumpkin-headed bitch is like terrible.
It's not good.
And I just wish people would stop calling me that.
I'm going to tell you something, Jack, that my grandma told me, which is that you're never going to be judged by the number of people you're impaled.
You're always going to be judged by the last person you impaled.
Right.
And the people you impale will not remember how many, they will remember how you made them feel.
Yeah, when you were impaling.
When you were impaling them.
Yeah.
Your grandma was so wise.
I have so many of her sayings written down.
She says that a lot.
Yeah.
A lot of them, almost all of them had to do with impaling, actually.
It's really strange.
Yeah.
What a tale.
There's a lot of political stuff happening in the middle there that I was not fully aware of or able to wrap my head around.
But yeah, it's Brom Stoker, also an awesome name.
This is a cool name.
This is a story full of cool names.
Yes.
And then people with shitty names that nobody remembers.
Yeah, like Dan the Third.
What a name.
Dan III and John.
Whatever the fuck.
Whoever was.
Oh, yeah.
John Huniati.
I mean, Juniotti is not a bad last name, but he really, he really was fucking falling down on that first ass name.
Yeah.
John.
Just don't name your kids John.
Don't name your kids John.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wasn't there also a John something that wrote vampire or vampire?
Polidori or whatever.
John Polani.
Come on.
He named something fucking like Brom Stoker.
Yeah, or Lord Byron.
I'm a Lord Byron truther just because I would rather say that name than John Polidori.
What a dweeb.
Anyway.
It's funny.
There are like conspiracy theories that Lord Byron actually wrote Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and just let her take the credit.
This motherfucker didn't even write the one that he supposedly just put his cool name on things.
I'm sure there's some Lord Byron heads who are going to get mad at me for saying Byron stands.
Yeah.
They're the worst.
Byronians.
I hate them.
Yeah.
Byronians.
What a bunch of drips.
Yeah.
Me, I'm a Dan the Third Stan.
I'm a Dan Stan, baby.
Dan the third.
Yeah.
Dan the third.
Dan the third.
All right, everybody.
Well, happy Halloween.
Happy Halloween to everyone listening.
A plug jack attack.
Yeah, you can find me over five days a week at a podcast called The Daily Zeitgeist that I record Miles Gray.
And we also do an NBA podcast called Miles and Jack Got Mad Boosties.
It is an official partnership with the NBA that I have to think the NBA regrets.
Podcast Partnership Plug00:01:48
Yeah.
Just it's it's a very silly podcast.
Yeah.
You can also check out my partnership with the NBA, which is has nothing to do with the sports.
What is the standard is an illegal gambling operation.
So yeah, check that out too.
There you go.
Well, thank you guys for having me on.
And happy all Hallows Eve.
Happy Holidays.
Happy Halloween, everybody.
Go out and cause some mischief, you know?
Yeah, mayhem.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Don't impale anyone.
Do not impale.
I'm not going to tell you that.
Look, impale if your heart tells you it's the right thing to do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I should say the thing Sophie said, no, don't do that.
Don't do that.
It's just there's so many people he impaled.
You're never going to catch up.
We're ending it.
Come on.
I believe that.
It's over.
Bye.
Bye.
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