Also media, let's fucking podcast.
This is a behind the Bastards listeners, It's a podcast about the worst people in all of history. And I got 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 three am.
I just feel we have to cut that because some people.
Yeah, we'll believe it out, we'll bleep it out. So okay, we'll bleieve it out.
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 thirties and you stay up slightly later than normal. That's that's where I am right now. I'm pounding coffee. I'm trying to do better.
Uh.
And here to just distracked from my my decrepit elderlyness, 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.
Why are you like seven mountain dues.
Or what's zero mountain dues 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 what.
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 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 know, like, could you could use some crowdsourced research put into that, right, But that's right.
I was born on the Bayou and they don't they don't take notes about when.
You were born there.
That's actually I'm actually who that credence song was true.
Yeah, 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, happy Halloween, everybody, Happy Halloween.
Happy Halloween. It's Tuesday Halloween. I do apologize. I feel like we all are getting a little screwed there, right yeah, yeah, yeah, Halloween.
We need to make it be like Thanksgiving, where it's always on like a Friday.
Yes, but you bet a couple of days off before and after.
Yeah exactly, But 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, motherfucking I mean, the title of the episode is just motherfucking Dracula comma bitches. But they probably won't let us use the episode exclamation point, thank you. 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.
I just count Shocula, which is I mean, honestly, Jack, a little racist, all of the all of the dah the same, right, Yeah, I.
Am not that from it. 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 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 like I heard they go into people's rooms and try and bite their neck and suck on their wad. Yeah. So I don't know what 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 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 sense is based on a real guy of Vlad Tepesh, better known as Vlad the Impaler, and we have gotten over the years.
Yeah, yeah, Lad, 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 go. Yeah, going back into 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 pale 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 out of stuff.
I don't generally cook it, but I will eat off of a kabab, so that gives me rights to that. But yeah, I think I think he just got to it first. Otherwise I would be known, you would have been introducing me as Jack.
There's all there's a lot of unfair things like that, like the the Wachowski's 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 yeah, it's unfair, it's unfair. And also my version of the matrix all Danny DeVito we get, we get those we get those talentless hacks out of there, and we go pure divito.
It's predvito. It's multiplicity matrix, matrixplicity, it's multiplicity the matrix. And that's how you can kind of tell things are off a little bit. Yeah, this is a world of alldvitos.
Because you're like, I'm used to some Danny DeVito's, but not quite as many as we're getting.
So like, sure, we've heard of like you go into work and it's mostly de Vito's but not pure Divito, and that's how things are a little bit, yeah, a little bit twisted at the robots have taken so Dracula, So Dracula. Sorry, this becomes a dragon who could be ably played by Danny DeVito is based on a real guy. Shock he should be Vlad the Impaler, And a weird number of fans over the years have been like, you should do with Lad 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 Lad 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 Lad the Impaler episode, every other sentence would be me being like reading a paragraph where somebody from like the sixteen hundreds 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 it's 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 flying around, Yeah, 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, very smart sounding thing that anyone's ever said. Now they're like, well, you know what Einstein said, the definition of 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 ball, 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 dark shit. Yeah.
History, Yeah, that is probably a lot of what happened.
It's one of those like he was a ruler in the fourteen hundreds, which was a pretty brutal time, especially in Eastern ye 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, because it's but because like 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 the things that he was trying to do not only like extended the Civil War and 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, whereas in Vladi Impaler, I'm not sure
if that really qualifies. He's a ruler in Wallachia during which is you know, 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 for 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 of like a part of a political dispute basically that has echoed down And like anybody who is a ruler in Europe in this period's 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 Tepees 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 v 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 fourteen thirty one. Maybe he may have been born as early as fourteen twenty eight. We're not gonna know, because nobody, really nobody was like putting down birth certificates. I'm gonna guess people didn't always know what year it was. Like, if you traveled like seven miles by foot, you probably would go to a place like, no, it's not fourteen twenty eight, it's fourteen twenty nine.
Whatever.
I like to keep it mysterious, like you do with you exactly exactly. Lad also is trying to avoid getting doxed 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 Romany, I mean, Romani 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 fourteen hundreds, 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 in the relationship between people and rulers that's starting to happen in the West and 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 big power, Yeah, I've heard of Hungary, not Wallachia. Well, so everybody gets an idea of how dumb I am. Yeah on this whole thing.
I had a friend in high school, as a Romanian national, who would always insist that he was Wallachia, not just not Romania. Like Wilaki is like the center of what becomes the state of Romania. And so the other big power in the 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 they're working on it, right, They're in the process of making Constantinople into Istanbul. You can refer to that. They might be Giant Song if you want a little bit more information on that. It's pretty pretailed history exactly too many. 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 the Second, who's going to wind up ruling Volakia, he spends most of his life allied to the Ottomans, right 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 Morad the second, 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 automan 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. 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 Dracule. Dracuel is not like a last name. It is a title that they are given. And obviously that's the root of the word Dracula. If 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. Doesn't go well for the people on the boat. The crate that he's loaded under 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 the Second, Glad 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 nightly order called like the Order of the Dragon, and Vlad the Second is one of the guys he brings into this. Most kind of layman's histories of Vlad the Second and of Lad 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 M. J. Trow,
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 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, get this impressive 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 name.
If I get to call myself the fucking Dragon, yeah, I'm gonna be. I'm gonna be like if Kentucky were to award me the rank of colonel. You know, if I could be at Kentucky colonel, I would I would be much more pro Kentucky than I currently yea.
And you would have. Yeah, the branding is just incredible and great that 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, yeah, then you gotta be cool with Sigis Mandy. 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, because 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 if kind of our only goal, yeah, like if you were to introduce yourself as the Dragon, people would be like you give yourself that nickname? Yeah right, yeah.
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 Lad would have
experienced our lad, not Lad the second his dad. There are some things we can infer his family was extremely wealthy. These guys are nobility, right, They're they're bowyers, which is like what you call nobles in in in this region. They have numerous servants and body guards. And for most of Ladd'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 what not. That would make him like a bastard, right, like in a literal.
Sense federal master.
That's not the case in this part of the world, right, Wallachian in 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 biological mother is. So Vlad is his dad's actually
is an illegitimate son, So it's not. One of the things about this is that there's this 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 the Second 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 Glad the Impaler is his dad's like legit son, and he's the second son of the family under his
elder brother Mercea. His youngest brother, Radu is also known as the handsome and m J. Trout 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 grace is expected of men that 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 bobbles and like just various fancy news. 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.
His mustache. What do you think of the mustache mustache?
I always assume that's just from another era. Yeah, And it also looks like he might have taken one of his locks and just like put it across his upper lip.
So 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 Brea Hercule Perro movies like the second the second one opens with like the the gritty backstory of a mustache. It's amazing anyway, That's what I imagine. So in his book, M. J. Trow cites two historians, Fluorescue and McNally, who write this about
Flats upbringing. There were the usual distinctions that followed the feast days, puppets, 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. In the winter, they hunted eagles with sling shots the Sigasuarrez slopes on primitive double runner sleds trapped hairs. That is pretty cool. Eagles with sling shots.
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 bull saying an eagle with your so funny shooting eagles out of the fucking clear blue sky. Yeah, sling fucking.
Rock and a piece of elastic. Yeah, amazing.
And they didn't have elastic, so it was just like a slid like you had to swing it around and like it David's style, right, Yeah, probably.
I think maybe they had more modern slingshots than I don't know. I'm not a slingshot expert. In fourteen thirty six, the ruler of Wallachia, Vlad the Second's brother, died of natural causes. Now he had spent. Vlad's brother, had Laed. The second'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 them. 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 them a bunch of your family members, right, your family, some other nobles, and you send him 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 here, everyone, Robert here, I fucked this up. I misspoke. Obviously, the Ottomans had not captured is Stanbul at this point, which we talk about later when they do. Believe the capital of the Ottoman Empire at this phase was Adirney edr Ine. 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 in court. They generally attend like 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 yeah, stay with Sophie while we recorded this. That is that is the case you said, case go sideways? Yeah, okay, yeah, in case you to support another group of advertisers.
That's right.
So Vlad the second 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 Lad the Second'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.
Holy Roman Empire?
Yes, yes, he's the holy and the king of Hungary. Right, got 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 or or the Dragon. They're the ones who came up with that idea. To let them call them those dragons. Okay, yeah, yeah.
So the family, the Dragon family moves to the capital of Wallachia, tiergo Viste, and into a big fancy castle. Now Glad, being paler age six or seven, starts his night training at this point, which is like every little boys dream. I think we all wish we could have trained this a night when we were six or seven. Oh ak, yeah, okay, yeah, so cool.
But I thought like they were like, okay, you're now ready to do battle at night like a ninja, Like that is what he's going to wind up doing under cover of darkness. This is this is when we do our nighttime seals training.
It is you have to start early, not just for a kid. But oftentimes I'm not one hundred percent sure if this is the way, but I think it is the way that they do in Willachia. But like even going back to the 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 ten fifteen 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, yeah, and dressage. Yeah, and yeah hates when I just try and ride it into a fist fight.
No, you have tried to invade Persia several times and your horse just won't see it.
It's not going well. It's not going well. Yeah, very bad at it.
This period in his life where he's kind of living in tigiv Ste, he's training on being a knight. It ends pretty quickly for little baby Blaid the Impaler, because in fourteen thirty seven, when he's some 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 do. It's not going anywhere, you know, it doesn't really mean much in the 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 fuck load of people. So,
you know, get rid of rats people. It just makes sense. Now, Glad the Second, Glad the Impaler's dad has no choice but to make the same decision that his brother had made and bin the knee to the sultan right now. Thankfully, Marad the Second 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 corona 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 Morad is just kind of like interested in that sort of stuff, so he he'll give them money, He'll like support them and be like, yeah, I just am kind of curious what you're gonna 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.
Y what these crazy fuckers. 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 nice to them, right, nice to it.
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 Marat is, he's still the kind of dude who punishes his enemies by impaling them in mass 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's popular. Everybody 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.
Yeah, they like to really make a show of it, make a meal. Yeah. Yeah. Of the thing, So when you say impale, is that just like run through with a sword or.
And 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 like do they put it upright? Is that what when they're when 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 ship to finally catch on, Like is it a big wooden stick? Sharp wood stick? And then you put it upright and they're just kind of like hanging there in the air. Yeah, Like yeah, Jason X, the.
You're kind of are letting them slide down it. It's often a punishment for like crimes against the state, right it is. It is a particularly nasty one, so people who like it threatens 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 butt hole for the butt yeah, yeah, yeah, And there's a but 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 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 that they're not the only ones. Western Europe has it's impaling traditions too, don't get me wrong, And this has gone on. I think the Assyrians are some of the first people we know we're doing in paling. So this has always been a popular way to get rid of people you don't like. So Marad the Second, pretty nice guy, also an impaler. Vlad the Second signs a treaty with 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 fourteen thirty eight, the year after Sigismund dies, the Sultan goes to war with Transylvania with the Hungarians right, and Vlad the Second 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 Hunyati, who's the Transylvanian governor for the Hungarians. There's this series of battles. Hanyati does pretty well against the Ottomans, they win a few of them, and this causes problems for the Dracule 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 life Lad Tepees by Kurt Trepto, who is an American historian from Miami Beach, Florida.
Quote.
After Hanyati defeated Ottoman forces in Transylvania in March fourteen forty two, vlad Dracule was called to Adrianople to demonstrate his loyalty to his suzerain, leaving his eldest son Mercea 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 Wilakia. This new Ottoman assault was again repulsed by Henyati, who used the occasion to install his protege Besab the Second on the throne.
Realizing the danger posed to the Empire if Hanyati controlled Volakia, the Sultan decided to release Vlat Dracul at the end of fourteen forty two, 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 the second. Vlad the second 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 there's 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 vladd 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 Dracule 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 Dracule 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 that's the way I was just it's fun to use this name a lot because it's pretty fucking cool. So I just said Vladin his sexy brother Radu would be those hostages. I probably shouldn't have said that about Radhu because I have to know 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 two thousand and seven article by the History News Network that notes about Kurt Trepto quote he was sentenced to the maximum of seven years in December two thousand and two for offenses involving two girls aged ten and thirteen, who we invited to his home in Lasi. 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, Livu Broun said the book September two thousand and three until October two thousand and six was counted as community service, Bron told reporters. Bron told the court during his trial that his client had sex only with the thirteen year old girl and that he did not know she was a minor.
So there's a lot there. Oh my god, that is uh uh something else. Yeah, I didn't primary source here. Yeah, it's he is a historian. He's a fulbright scholar. He also wrote his Dracula book as fucking community service for being a pedophile. I'll se a pedophile. Yeah, you know, I don't know what else to say about that. I figured I should live much to say.
You know, Trepto's book is okay. Treu is a better writer, right, but he's not a historian. And I did find a couple of minor errors in there, so I wanted to like read both of them. And then as I was writing the script, I learned that unfat pleasant reality. The lesson here should be obvious. Never check your word right. There you go, there you go.
Then you won't learn stuff like this. Yeah, absolutely so.
In the time when Vlad the second had been out in Automan captivity, he had lost control of Wallachia to one of his many noble rivals. He took it back in fourteen forty three, 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 Draculai, the Dracules La. Anyway, they learned how to fight in
the Ottoman style. Now, Solad future of Lad the Impaler has now learned how to fight as a European night and how to fight as an Ottoman. Right, so he gets a whole new set of weapons. He's having fun different kind 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 gonna 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 religion symbols. Right, He's going to be Orthodox, he's going to be Catholic for a while, he's going to be probably may have been Muslim for a while.
So you know, bumper sticker, you know. Yeah, he's a very coexist kind of guy, Lad the Impaler. Yeah, so things go less well. He's you know, while Lad the Impaler and and Radu are are hanging out with a sultan, things are not going great for his father, Lad the Second Hunyati, the Hungarian leader is not a forgiving kind
of dude. And once it becomes clear that yet again, the mister Dracule has backed the Ottomans, Transylvania goes to war with Wolakia of Lad the Second loses this war, he gets captured and is executed alongside his eldest son, who had ruled in his stead while he was out fighting. No, no, that's Marseilla. I don't think he's particularly handsome. He gets so while his dad is losing this ward to Transylvania, like a bunch of these boyers in in Tigovitay, like
see where the wind is blowing. And so they capture his son Mercea and they they kill him by burying him alive, and they are there's some suggestion among scholars that maybe this is part of how that myth about like Dracula being being buried alive. 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 if he's given 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 Clade van Dam in an early nineties movie, right, exact, just like kind of but I don't know.
I say this a lot, listeners. If you are executing a family for their loyalties to the Sultan.
Says all the time, Yeah, keep an eye out. Does one of them look like they might be an empale? Maybe don't do that execution, you know, keep him second in line, is all I'm saying. So, uh, it's unclear if Laude 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 you know a pretty dope vengeance quest thing? I feel like I'm a good guy to have a vengeance quest. You know, 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 Marad is like, Yeah, they'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 is 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 on
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, Yeah, and his uncles had played things.
Yeah, 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 being coming 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 Lad the Impaler letter is written on All Saints Day or Halloween of fourteen forty eight.
That's kind of cool. Yeah, a man knows his brand.
That's incredible branding, right, that's the visionary site. Yeah, oh my god. So he is seventeen 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 fourteen forty eight, he is out of power.
But with that nickname, they should have known he was going to be an impaler. Yeah, and his name is Lad than not Yet an Impaler. You got to keep checking his Wikipedia page to see if it's it's safe to fuck with him. Yeah, still not, but I've got bad things are coming for us. Yeah.
Yeah, that's the 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.
So Ladsman the next couple of years bouncing around kingdoms ruled by his relatives in Moldova, cementing alliances, building a base of power. By fourteen fifty two, he's reconciled with him Hanyati and he's promised to serve the Hungarians as defender of Wallachia. So he betrays the Sultan. Now this is a bad time to betray the Sultan because right after he's like, nah, I'm totally team Hungary, 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. So by July of fourteen fifty three, lad has retaken power 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 combat. Yeah yeah, so just hacking to pieces, that's right, hacked two pieces. So in fourteenth makes a statement, Yeah yeah, that's the best way to hack someone to pieces. O guy, Yeah, to that other guy, to the taptain of this podcast. Yeah yeah, you guys will take my kids.
So that's right, that's right, that's why we do it. So fourteen fifty seven is the year when which Vlad will commit the first massacre that kind of starts his reputation off with a bang. As this history should drive home, there's a lot of turnover and willocke in 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 rulers 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, So I Vlad eventually gets kind of tired of this whole game, and in Easter of fourteen fifty seven, he invites all of his boyers for a big feast and while they're eating, he kills the yeah, don't Yeah, somebody's like in the bathroom, like you know, just kind of freshening up and checks his phone. It's like, oh shit, they changed his Wikipedia guys, we got to bounce.
Oh man. I'm going to quote from it called the Feast, Yeah, yeah, exactly, real red wedding vibes.
I'm going to quote from a contemporary account here. While all the citizens were feasting and the younger ones were dancing, he Dracula surrounded them the boyars 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 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 shit 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 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 in his army retreat rather
than advance further into Wallachia. It's impossible to know how precisely true that all is, but again 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 levees 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 an 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 I've lad the Impaler kills, but it's a shitload. Fifty thousand is probably a pretty good low estimate. Some higher estimates are up to like one hundred thousand 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 indigence. He gathers a huge number of these guys up and he burns them all to death, and like a barn. Basically truly a right wing hero, this guy is. He is very much a right wing era.
He is again a law and order guy. His royal propaganda Burea will spread all these stories about like, oh, you know, this merchant came to a town that 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 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 is there, you know that he's in power because nobody would dare steal anything when 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.
Myth like the yeah, the good branding got him, a myth about him being good at branding. Yeah, exactly, that's a but that that's a cool story, 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 Troe, who is our source, that is not a priminal quote. The villages of satuln Hosman and Casults were burned to the ground by his cavalry and the supporters of Lad the Monk were butchered. Who is one of these uprising leaders? A lot of lads Bode was
totally destroyed. Talm's left blazing, and it's people hacked like cabbage in the town square. Merchants who are now expected to sell their wares at the specified towns of Tigovi State Tigsor and simplelun Cabbage like cabbage.
Yeah, hacked like cabbage.
Hacked like cabbage, Yeah, just to pieces shredded. Merchants who are now expected to sell their wares at below the market rate were rounded up for non compliance and according to these Saxon accounts, impaled by the road or boiled in cauldrons. The young men to whom it was claimed, had been sent to Alakia to learn the language, were likewise executed quite simply because they were clearly spies and the Sacks. And 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, and a lot of these towns, that's a good group of people to blame all your problems on. So Lad'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 these especially these monks who like flee from him. You know, he fairly brutal to them, rain 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 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, just because of these German germanic like monk accounts of his fatality.
The monks had burn books, but they also were some of the only people who knew how to write, ye is that right? Yeah? So like a lot of this stuff is just the guy who was meanest to monks becomes a 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, flat Again, as we noted above, he's not just impaling people. He'll boil alive.
He's got some more creative methods though. But impalement gets a lot of attention right in part because it's 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 Lad the impaling some people comes after a military victory he won against his his rival with a
very silly name, Dan the Third. He's like, he's got all these wild ass Hungarian Romanian names, and then there's just Dan hanging out there, like yeah, all these guys, you've got Vlad the Dracule and then like yeah, and then there's Dan the Third.
Dan. They don't like, who is going to win that one, DrAk or Dan the Third the Third Dan? Yeah? Third? So he beats this ship.
And yeah, this Dan at a town called Brassov quote. It was here that the inhabitants were impaled in large numbers as the chapel of Saint Jacob burned to the ground. According to the poet Mikhel b him, the the impaler 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 stinch, was impaled higher than the rest. Now most yeah, pretty cool.
Yeah, mainly 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 gotta tell you, man, this place smells like shit. Yeah. Yeah.
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 lad teppers 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. 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 Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, German poet Michael Beaham wrote the story of a bloodthirsty madman called Dracula of Lachia. In his poem, Biham describes the Vlad
as dining amongst his impaled victims after the massacre. He even accuses Lad of dipping his bread in their blood. The genesis of the enduring association of Dracula with vampires. Vlad's horrific link to Transylvania as 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
is to like where the German 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 is 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 Chouchescu, who is the We've done episodes on Chouchescu, the communist dictator in kind of the mid to late twentieth 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 gonna get it.
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 Laddy and Paler dipping his bread in blood, which again is almost certainly a lie because like, you kill people, but do you drink their blood?
Really? I don't know, pretty gross. I wouldn't, so wouldn't, But I also love dipping my bread and stuff, and it's like such are to go about drinking blood? I mean, but also very much less badass. I dip 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 salty.
Of the most British, I've tried the hell out of that.
Yeah, I'll do anything with blood, those weirdos. So, speaking of the British, our advertisers are not the British, so you can feel good about spending your money with them.
We have been working on just getting the British to sponsor the show. Yeah.
Yeah, it's not going great. Yeah, but we'll keep We'll keep pressing the flesh. Don't worry.
We're back.
So Vlad is going to go to war with his former allies the Turks in fourteen fifty nine. 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 from my frame of reference, up to this point, the wars are being waged, or you know, when he's going in and like takeing 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 thousand to one hundred thousand total. That's
he's going to massacre. And remember reading something about like ancient Greek warfare where it was like the towns were like so it was more on 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, 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 of these towns. 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 not purely like this little shit either.
Yeah. Yeah, so it almost makes it like area, you know, it's pretty Yeah, everyone gets Whitely 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 your power potentially, so he breaks his treaty with the Sultan fourteen fifty nine. And part of this treaty is that every you know, so often Wailakia 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, Vladim pales 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. Lad, It's not going to go great. Vladd 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 their hats to their heads, I wouldn't be thrilled time.
If it's cool, it's cool, don't get me wrong. That's a cool thing to do if you're a bad guy. You know, if you're a bad guy and you're really leaning into it. Yeah, Also, like maybe don't send the second wave of I feel like the first sends a message what we do. We think that he just didn't like the recruiters specifically, and was like, these silver tongued foxes will come and uh cool him down.
I'm not gonna maybe this isn't the case. I'm not a not an expert here, but if I'm in charge, right and this happens, first thought I'm gonna have is like, oh, I could promote some guys I don't like to diplomats and.
Get rid of the fuckers.
I could.
I could drop a few of these dudes, you know, just you my top diplomatic. Yeah, you're the you're the head of foreign policy. I got a gig for you now. So you breed like an elite fighting group made of your enemy's children.
Yeah, that's the janissaries, right, not necessarily like like you're 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 Janisaries.
Your spare kids, your kids, Yeah, soldiers maybe if you if you fuck around. Yeah, weird time, weird situation myself as one of any of these people. And it seems like, uh, and I'm not gonna lie a fucking waking nightmare.
Yea to live at this time. Yeah, the past is not just a foreign country, but almost like a different planet. It's wild of the ship.
Yeah.
Anyway, they go to Wark Vlad with the Turks, and the thing about Lad 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 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 capitol 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. So let's get rid of this guy, because we don't want to keep doing this shit, right, We want to do this stuff that's fun, not slowly, slowly lose a war of grinding attrition. So they overthrow Vlad. They put his sexy brother Radu in charge, and winds up having to like flee the scene after this battle and ends up in the 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 you and your family are the least reliable people on the planet. Why would I do that? Right, Like, why would I do that? You can't be trusted, None of you can. So if Lad SPAN's twelve years as the King of Hungary's prisoner, writer Mark Mark Longo notes quote that he wiled 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.
I done it. I'm not a big rat guy. Not a big rat guy. He did a it's like done an article at Cracked. I think where just about how like wondrous rats are, Like, they're so smart and sourceful, and they're also a pretty big danger though. Yeah, even in a pet post ratituoy world, though, I would like, at an instinctual level, rather they all die right now.
Yeah, that's that's gonna be popular with certain quarters, unpopular with some.
Yeah. I mean, like intellectually I wouldn't do it because balance in 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, I think.
Yeah, So he catches a lucky break Vlad because his brother loses power in fourteen seventy three and vlad Or Rodhu 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 fourteen seventy six, and he takes power for the third time, which lasts about two months, after which he is found decapitated in a field.
Is yeah. Wow. Yeah, it's like the ending of a no country for old men man, right, he just like having very killed at Jones, walks onto the sun said, then gives the monolog It'll do till the mess gets here. Yeah, exactly, it's part but good yeah, good line, a lot of good lines. So he came back, did did power for a little bit longer, and then they they took him out.
Yeah, then they took him out. Yeah, it's a it's like, uh, you know that banned the scorpions Jack, Yeah, of course, it's like when they 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.
So and then we're found beheaded in a field somewhere.
Yeah.
Maybe, yeah, that that is what happened to the people who wrote Rock You Like a Hurricane. It is also worth noting that, like, you know, during this period of time where he's this military leader of lad his his big move is attack people at night. Also feeds into the vampire. Right, He's this blood drinking dude who comes after 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 Renfield Movie.
I enjoyed it. Nicholas picture Nicholas Cage for this entire story well, and Nick Cage and Nick Holt need to be in more things together. Both both fascinating faces, both of those guys. So 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 folklorus. This is another thing he's interested in, and I think that's pretty back. 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, Like I have trouble imagining Nick Cave
drinking anything that's not the blood of his enemies. But of course, yeah, that's kind of his vibe, that is his vibe. Definitely mopped it up with a nice pa.
Oh yeah, he's a waste not kind of guy. That thing you know about Nick Cave. Murder Ballads, great album, everybody check it out. Got a good song about Staggerly anyway. Groom This Folklorus notes that the origins of the word vampire are somewhat controversial. It is often credited to coming from the French term avante paree, which means ancestor, but
this is inaccurate. The terms most likely origins are in the Lithuanian word vompti, which means to drink, and the Serbo Croatian vampire 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 sec Met 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, And it's worth noting considering how often these two go
together in like our modern horror stories. R Like you, they come from the same origin, right, Vampires and werewolves were originally the same thing.
Make sense.
They're both they both eat people, and they're both like chained shape in the monsters right into animals, right, both the vampires into bats, were wolves into wolves.
So they started like like, 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 it turned 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.
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 managed 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, just kind of like adding stuff to it over time. 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 mists we have today started off as these kind of like the vukodlac, this Serbian mythical creature, and they split pretty recently as groom rites 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 and Anglo Saxon and possibly Old Norse culture, as well as in classical accounts of the disease of licanthropy.
The word vampire, however, was adopted in the seventeen thirties 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 just with people telling stories in the woods.
Right.
The concept of a vampire inherently brings comes out of this sudden explosion in scientific understanding and knowledge that occurs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which come with both not just an understanding of like German disease theory, which is part of the vampire higher myth, right, this disease that gets spread through biting blood. But 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 seventeen hundreds is when we start to use blood to convict people of murders.
Right.
Obviously you're not doing DNA tests then, right, But in seventeen forty one, 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, is.
It because like, prior to that, just everything was covered with blood. All this there's a lot of blood. Yeah, right, I just slipped in some blood, Yeah, stepping out of my house. Well I don't know where 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 is a concept is inherently linked to true crime because starting in the seventeen hundreds, in particular, we get all of these viral news stories about serial killers and murderers. And this really takes off in the eighteen hundreds 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 sixteen eighty five who describes the murder of a man named Spalding in a town of called dal Keith. And this he describes a murder committed by a man named Spalding in a town called Dalkeith, and Spalding gets caught and hung but reanimate several times. Right, they don't quite kill him successfully, so he keeps coming back.
And this is sort of one of the story 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 rasputant 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 spend these folklore stories about monsters.
Yeah, and it's like that there is I think an under rated like blurriness to the barrier between life and death, 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 there there. You know, it's like you don't know when a work of artist,
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, from doctors, about like not wanting to do a DNA or not wanting to be resuscitated. It's because there's like this weird blariness 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 folkloris there's a theory that a lot of monster myths in the vampire would be kind of chief among them have their origin and 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 you know, for
a while people just say, yeah, demons in them. But like vamporism in this age of science, is a transmissible in 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, Yeah, And because there's this growing understanding of like vamporism as an illness, there's a thing you can do as opposed to just being horrified at this, 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. Not The initial version is not that the steak kills the vampire, but you stake them to their coffin so they can't get it, they can't get out.
That's why. That's why I do it mainly, And but I did. I only rarely do the head cutting off thing. Yeah, well that's the way you got such a vampire problem, and that's why I'm my property is lousy with vampires.
You to watch 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, why don't you explain that reference just to the listeners?
Know, Mitt Robert and I obviously know 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?
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 the thing.
Yeah, yeah, all sorts of stuff. People do a lot of different shit, and they do it not just as interesting because it's understood as a communicable infection. You don't just do this to the murderer. You do this too his victims too, because they might have caught it and you don't want them to re animate.
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, Yeah, it's the sixteen hundred, seventeen hundreds, early eighteen hundreds. They're not good at that yet, right, like they do. This is not I'm just saying this is rigorous science, but it is. It is born out of an attempt to do to think scientifically, right. That is an key aspect to it. A lot of the modern like serial killer psychological profiling stuff is also equally just complete bullshit.
Yeah, 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 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, you know.
Bring the scientists in, Yeah, now, make us feel better. Yeah.
Vamporism is not just people wanting to like make things seem comfortable. There are also good, at the time, pretty good scientific reasons to believe that vamporism 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 vamporism 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 effective rabies. Vamp and folklore can't cross running water.
Not true on the Vampire Diaries, Thank you so much.
I'm glad the Vampire Diaries disagrees.
So one fact check everything for us using the text of the Vampire Diaries. So you get. One thing 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 a it's not a Boggin's out in the woods. It's an illness, right, And so there's diagnostic criteria and a lot of beliefs about how vamporism 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 and stories drink blood, Dracula, I think is the first to suck it. 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 sixteen hundreds.
Way too early. Yeah, we are not good at it. You want to get sixteen hundred 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 are quacks? Oh, let me read you from This is from Groom's book The Wild Story of a Guy named Arthur Koga Quote Coga, a thirty two year old divinity graduate of Cambridge University, was looked upon as a very
freakish and extravagant man. On twenty third November sixteen sixty seven, 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. Coga 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. And science there solid medical thinking.
Yeah. The lamb's blood was transfused using quills and silver pipes, but Coga received a payment of twenty shillings, drank canary wine and smoked a pipe in celebration, and the operation was repeated on twelfth of December. Coga'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 woolen. This sheep racked vessel of his like that of Argos. He addresses himself to you and the golden fleece. He signed himself Angus Coga or Coga the sheep. Wow.
So this is probably a guy having like a mental health crisis and They're like, we've got to shoot 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. Yeah, I have a 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 the blood up like a reverse like snake fang. 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. They really makes sense. We we've always we've like talked about where we I think I got that from the Reese's peanut butter cup ed Yeah,
where that is of 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, as it's said, They don't. They don't say I want to like have my.
I want to suck your blood. I want to like drink your blood and have it go into my stomach. Yes, 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 bar Barrack cartoons in the seventies where he probably started saying that. But I do treat that as as vampiric fact for sure. Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
But I was just I basically that is one of the first questions I ask everybody. Sure, the horror subject of vampire.
Known for this, So by the seventeen hundreds, blood is a central topic of scientific discussion, and all of these factors are 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 seventeen twenty five to about the mid seventeen fifties, 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, yeah, yeah, you get all this kind of stuff, right, or you'll get yeah, you'll hear a story about like a serial killer in fucking Idaho, and then like people will start flipping out, like I don't know, suburban Georgia that like their 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 polagra. So you have a bunch of rabies outbreaks. Not hard to see why someone again not a rational 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 sure looks like vampires. Pale guy who has blood all over his mouth which is crossing water eating people. Sure, yeah, it seems like a vampire to me.
Pale guys.
Glad you had like nice tans? What was they just looked normal?
Yeah, they're just looked normal. Jack.
Wow. Wow, Wow you said that like I was being Yeah.
You're not you're not familiar with the sacred Text. The other disease out that contributes to vampire understanding is there's these these outbreaks of what's called polagra. Now, polagra 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 polagra 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 pelagra. 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 pollagra because we're not used to corn yet, right, And pollagra has a lot of symptoms that seem similar to vamporism. 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 anemias.
Some people with pelagra 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 on 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 rest of Europe led to the word vampire from the Serbian, first entering German as their vampire around seventeen twenty six and later into English vampire by seventeen thirty four 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 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 sickness 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. But they don't know that yet because they're stupid old time people, right, not a smart new time people who
understand diseasesn't always take precautions against them. They're dummies, stupid dummies. Anyway, the Great vampire epidemic of the mid seventeen hundreds is kind of like the last hurrah for believing in vampires on like a widespread cultural level is 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 vamporism 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 sixteen hundreds early seventeen hundreds, 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 eighteen hundreds, if you are an Irish child, in the eighteen hundreds. You're gonna see some shit.
Things are good, right, have a good time famously chill time in Ireland eighteen hundreds.
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 eighteen hundreds. One of his first early memories is the great cholera outbreak in Ireland that occurs in this kind of in the early mid eighteen hundred 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 eighteen thirty two. Bram's mother Charlotte later recalled one evening we heard a missus Feene, 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 choler he mentions that she's fat.
I don't.
He's not like trying to fat shame or he's because that means healthy, right if that means that, like you're nourished, And it kills her like that because people you can get color and be dead in twelve hours, right like it is, And so it has this It is almost like a monster, like a vampire, is just sweeping through town in massacring families.
That is the speed with which this thing kills. So Bram's earliest memories and the stories that adults tell them 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
over they're put into morgues. They're found to later be alive. Some of them even survive through this because there's like very drunk during a cholera alcore roll into a mass grave.
Yeah, but also, like you can see how this is all filming a part of a fertile uh like background for Bram Stoker, right, He's going to have all this stuff going around in his young mind. Now, Hoolera 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 vampire is right, But it's also it's kind of worth noting for brand because he is when he is growing up, scientists don't believe in vamporism is 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 seventeen hundreds. By the time Bram is growing up, he's not hearing about vamporism 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 tax men. Right, because vampires suck blood. You can
call a fucking tax man a blood sucker, 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 their enemies generally, like these businessmen and whatnot.
And idea that the taxman I do call him a bloodsucker every year on my taxi terms. That's right, that's right.
But 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 eighteen fifty, the French National Assembly is described as a vampire living off the
blood of the June insurgents. Similarly, in the eighteenth Brumere of Louis Bonaparte eighteen fifty two, in a reversal of Edmund Burk'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 alchemists 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 pretty good metaphor, right, Like 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 now, This is how vampires become wealthy, cultured people, 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 now.
But they don't care about real estate because they can't afford it.
But they do seek out like foreclosured houses, and like they kind of pick out like the best house in the neighborhood and 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 vampires as a sort of like an insult really to describe these like rapacious early capitalists. 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 eighteen nineteen 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 some of the fact 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 published this thing in eighteen nineteen, and it's 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 Polodori. But that doesn't really matter all that much other than that, like Byron kind of a fame hound.
Yeah, with a cool name. People would rather cool vampire story be written by Polidori Byron rather than Hey, it's my boy, Johnny Pulidari, Yeah, j pol Yeah.
So one of the things that I didn't know until I started doing that I was familiar with, like Byron and him getting credit and being by this other guy. It's 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 Bramstoker'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 Saint Domingo by one Uriah Derek d' rc.
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 interesting because it is one of the first popular anti slavery narratives. Right,
This is written in the early eighteen hundreds. 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 fourteen 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, mister Person in what is now Haiti, repeatingly trying to kill a ten 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 mister Persone 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 returned 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 vampism 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 as well as 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. It seems relevant, it seems relevant all these different themes. Huh yeah. And was it not popular at the time at the time, or.
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 he reads, you know, Polidars 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 eighteen twenty by a British politician about the history of Wallachia and Moldavia. And because lad 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 lad 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 eighteen nine, right, and that is eighteen ninety 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. I gotta I gotta call him fucking and he's got This guy is so brutal. I want this to be a scary monster. Dude, this guy scary as shit. Like, yeah, let's go for it.
You know, is the is the impaling and the like staking the vampire? Like are those two suspected two have been yinked? 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 candy, So oh okay, yeah, yeah, yeah that makes sense though. Anyway, Jack, that is the story of the vampire. You gotta got a name. 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 number of people, sure, like I was not. I think I'm gonna stop trying to get people to call me Jack the Impaler because like, I don't think I can impale that many people. Jack,
I just the nickname that ended up sticking. Sleepy Jack the pumpkinheaded bitch is like terrible, It's not good, and I just wish people would stop calling me that.
But 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 were impaled. You're always going to be judged by the last person you impaled, right.
And and the people you impale will not remember how many, They will remember how you made them feel. Yeah, when you when you were impaling them. Yeah, Grandma was so wise. I have so many of her saying written down. He said that a lot of them, almost all of them had to do with him paling. Actually, it's really strange. Yeah, what a what a tale. There's a lot of political stuff happening in the middle in the middle there that I was not fully aware of or able to wrap
my head around. But yeah, it's Bromstoker. Also an awesome name. This story full of cool names and yeah, and then people were shitty names that nobody remembers, like Dan the Third, Dan the Third and John and whatever the fuck whoever.
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 John Damn. Yeah. Isn't there also a John something that wrote vampire vampire or vamp pull the door or whatever? Come on something like Brohm Stoker?
Yeah, or Lord Byron. I'm a Lord Byron Truther just because I would rather say that name than John Polidori.
What a dweb Anyway, it's funny there there are like conspiracy theories that like Lord Byron actually wrote Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and like would just like let her take the credit. This motherfucker like didn't even write the one that he supposedly write. Lord Byron just put his cool name on things. Yeah, I'm sure there's some Lord Byron heads who are gonna get mad at me for saying Byron. Yeah, the Byronians, What a bunch of drips.
Yeah me, I'm a Dan the Third Stand. I'm a Dan stand baby the third.
Yeah, oh, Dan the Third. All right, everybody? Well, Happy Halloween. Halloween everyone listening? You know, 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. 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 sport is an illegal gambling operations. So yeah, check that out too.
There you go. Well, thank you guys for having me on. And yeah, happy all hallows Eve, Happy Halloween. Everybody go out and cast some mischief, you know, mayhem.
Yeah, yeah, don't impale any one.
Do not impale. And I'm going to tell you that look impale if you if your heart tells you it's the right thing to do. Yeah, yeah, well maybe yeah, yeah, no I should say that thing. Sophie said, no, don't do that. Ye'll do that. But it's just there's so many people. He impaled, going to catch up.
We're ending it.
I believe it's over.
Bye. But Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. Or more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.