The evil that men do
Disclaimer: I don't own Hellsing; it belongs to Kohta Hirano and/or whoever who might have rights to it. No one can own history, tough.
Vlad Ţepeş was born in the city, or a military fortress, of Sighişoara inTransylvania, during the winter of 1431. He didn't remember, of course, but he was told later it was so cold and hard that birds fell from the trees dead and desperate wolves attacked huts of the poor, preying humans. He was born as the second son to his father Vlad Dracul and his mother Princess Cneajna of Moldavia. He had an older brother named Mircea and a younger brother named Radu the Handsome that he later came to hate. His native country was Wallachia, but the family lived in exile in Transylvania as his father had been ousted by Ottoman sympathizing boyars. The same year Vlad III was born, his father, Vlad II Dracul, was in Nuremberg, where he was vested into the Order of the Dragon, founded by Emperor Sigismund to the defense of the cross from its enemies, particularly the Ottomans. What was left of him later thought that the rest had just been inevitable.
He had been initiated to the Order at the age of five. He was called Drǎculea, little dragon or the son of a dragon. Count Hrovje Vukcic once described The Order of the Dragon as a "pagan rite", which was pretty accurate description, but when he was so young he had still believed in all the right things. His father was probably under considerable political pressure from the Ottoman sultan. Threatened with invasion, he gave a promise to be the vassal of the Sultan and gave up his two younger sons as hostages so that he would keep his promise. Never mind his reasons, with all the intolerance of the youth Drǎculeahad never forgiven him for betraying his oath and those years were influential in shaping him like water shaped stone. He developed a well-known hatred for Radu, for Ottomans in general and for Mehmed, who would later become the sultan, in particular. The nights nauseated him, only thee pain kept him from throwing up. Figures his useless brother would actually enjoy it. But he never asked God for anything. God helped those who helped themselves.
Pain could be washed away with the pain of others. Later he had collected enough distance that he could even joke, while his laugh might have made everyone except two tremble. The only good thing in the Ottoman Empire, as he later told to Dimitra, was the sun. It was warmer there and his fortress had been built to last, not to be luxurious or even comfortable and so it was drafty, made of stones that never warmed no matter how much coal or firewood one used. It was a good fortress but during winter it was literally cold comfort.
"Lord husband, do you mean that there people don't feel cold even during winter?" she had asked, confused. A princess she might be, but even she was never really warm as long as winter lasted, except under the blankets with her husband. That was the way the world was.
"That exactly," had been his answer and he had proceeded to warm her.
"They don't deserve it," she had declared solemnly before returning the caresses. How could he but love a woman who had priorities?
Vlad's father was assassinated in the marshes near Bălteni in December of 1447 by rebellious boyars. They had scalped him, torn off the skin of his face while he was still alive and conscious. Hiss older brother Mircea was also dead, blinded with hot iron stakes and buried alive by his political enemies at Târgovişte. To protect their political power in the region, the Ottomans invaded Wallachia and the Sultan put Vlad III on the throne as his puppet ruler. A colossally stupid move, even if his rule at this time was too brief to take advantage of the situation; Wallachia was conquered and he was ousted the same year. Vlad fled to Moldavia and was put under the protection of his uncle, Bogdan. Who was later assassinated, of course. The bad old times.
He never had time to grieve when the wounds were raw. He never gave up either. After a lot of being pardoned, plotting and shedding blood Vlad became a true prince of his native land. He led the life of all the other princes of Wallachia, drafting laws, meeting foreign envoys and presiding over important judicial trials. He also married then princess Dimitra of Kiev. It was a political marriage, but what few knew was that he had fallen in love with her as well. He never asked Dimitra what she thought of him, but she told him anyway, often a different thing every day. Luckily she decided she loved him more often than not.
"Fool!" she called him. "Dearheart. Monster. Love. My lord husband. My Most Respected Manly Lord Prince. Idiot! Sweetling." Unlike many she had a soul. He loved it all. He also eliminated all possible threats to his power, mainly the rival nobility groups, boyars. Revenge was cold and sweet but wasn't the only reason. Some of the old gentry had outlived seven ruling princes. It was only the sensible thing to do. He enslaved the boyars, their wives and children. They were forced to labour for months rebuilding the old Poienari castle with materials from another nearby ruin. They labored until the clothes fell off their bodies and then they worked naked. Very few of the old gentry survived building Vlad's castle. He loved that too.
He was not a womanizer back then. He believed in the rules of the church and one of the most important after killing Ottomans was chastity. Maidens who lost their virginity, adulterous wives, and unchaste widows, so much filth in the world. He had their sexual organs cut out or their breasts cut off. Or he had them impaled through the vagina on red-hot stakes that were forced through the body until they emerged from the mouth, since they so coveted stakes down there. Many whispered in dark corners, maids and manservants and soldiers so the castle was filled with susurration, wondering how princess Dimitra dared to sleep with him. At times he wondered the same.
Few remembered it later but Vlad was hailed as a Christian hero for slaughtering the Turks and other non-believers by visitors from all over Europea then. He also made donations to various churches and monasteries, one such place being the monastery at Lake Snagov where he made the only friend he could trust, even if it was because the egumen of a backwater monastery wouldn't know corruption even if it came and bit him. Vlad often talked about Heaven and mercy with the egumen. Every time he visited the monastery he asked the egumen if he the sinners really could go to Heaven if they honestly regretted. The egumen said yes of course, but privately he thought that his king would do wisely to always have somebody at hand to do the last rites and pray for him. He was always relieved when his friend changed the topic of conversation.
Then the war came again and following his father, even if he had been weak, and because of his old hatred Vlad sided with the Hungarians against the Ottomans. This angered the Turks who attempted to remove him. They failed miserably, however; he crossed south of the Danube and devastated the area between Serbia and the Black Sea, leaving over twenty thousands people dead, impaled or hacked down like firewood. In response to this, his intimately hated nemesis Sultan Mehmed II raised an army of around sixty thousands troops and thirty thousands irregulars and in the spring of 1462 headed towards Wallachia. There Vlad had the pleasure to see Mehmed, squeamish and effeminate weasel that he was, returned to Istanbul after being sickened by the sight of impaled corpses outside Vlad's capital of Târgovişte, many of them were Turkish prisoners of war. The warrior sultan turned command of the campaign against Vlad over to subordinates even though his army had initially outnumbered Vlad's three to one.
In the end even Drǎculea was unable to stop the Turks from entering Wallachia and occupying Târgovişte, but he lived of death alone, death and pain and sweet blood like wine, he breathed it like he never had to breath again and even Dimitra called him monster more often now. He didn't care. He preached his Lord's truth with bloody grace. Appalled, He turned His back to him that year. The Turkish army surrounded his Poienari Castle built on foundation of bones, led by his half-brother Radu the Handsome. An archer shot an arrow through a window into Dimitra's main quarters, informing her of the tragical and painful death of her crazed husband and her due fate. Upon reading the message, she climbed into the highest tower of the castle.
"I'll rather have my body rot and let my tits be nibbled by the fish than let those unclean bastards of demons and lame camels of Turks touch them!" she exclaimed at the top of her lungs, more of a soldier's woman than a princess then. And she flung herself off the tower into a tributary of the river flowing below the castle. Ever after the tributary was called Râul Doamnei, the Lady's River. Laughing and little drunk, Vlad Ţepeş returned from a victorious battle to a dear deserted body, a sickening smell of water and a priest who refused to bury her to holy ground.
"The suicide is a sin no one can forgive," the old man stood his ground, afraid and determined. "She will burn in Hell," the last part was added almost apologetically.
"So this is the gratitude of the church for my crusade?" Vlad asked silkily, icily. He told his men to crucify him and every other churchman in town. He burned the bodies so they couldn't be resurrected in Heaven, a home-made anathema. Dimitra was given last rites and buried properly. He held the sword, he made he rules and if the Turks and his brother dearest had thought him crazy before, now they learned to rue making an enemy of the crazy. The Turks eventually had to leave the country, but not before installing Vlad's brother Radu as the new prince of Wallachia. And he was betrayed by the same monarch he had allied himself with. Drǎculea Vlad Ţepeş was imprisoned with his son Mihnea by king Matthias Corvinus.
Fight for your God. God will not save those who beg for mercy. Fighting itself is a prayer. This is what his father taught him before turning his coat and begging mercy from the bloody Ottomans of all things. One dead man on a stake, one hundred, one thousand, that had been the Jerusalem at the end of his prayers, his promise of his God descending. So where was his Kingdom Come now? Enemies, allies, men and women, aged and children dead through his hand and now Dimitra too. He only rued he hadn't killed his brother first.
His imprisonment was none too onerous. For Corvinus it was nothing personal, just a course of action he saw profitable at the moment. Vlad was able to gradually win his way back into the graces of the Hungarian monarch; so much so that he was able to marry again and have two sons. The woman was unimportant but sons are father's strength. In the end he didn't need it; they were about ten years old when he reconquered Wallachia in 1476. In the end his brother, open Turk sympathizer was the most important factor in Vlad's rehabilitation. It took that idiot of a king some time to realize, but eventually he was able to imagine himself as the Sultan's vassal.
During his captivity, Vlad also adopted Catholicism, if only to piss off his brother, he had converted to Islam when captured in Istanbul. Even small revenges are revenges and must be made do with until the wind changes. He knew it would change; the dance wasn't over yet. And even in captivity he could not give up what had become his favorite pastime; he often captured birds and mice which he proceeded to torture and mutilate — some were beheaded or tarred-and-feathered and then released, most were impaled on tiny spears. It was amusing how seasoned soldiers shuddered and turned their gaze away from small, innocent suffering animals or probably in front of his supposed madness. Another petty revenge while waiting for an opportunity to see Raul and Corvinius writhing under his hand.
And thus Vlad the Impaler was again ready to make another bid for power. Vlad and voivode Stefan Báthory of Transylvania invaded Wallachia with a mixed force of Transylvanians, very few dissatisfied Wallachian boyars, and a contingent of Moldavians sent by his cousin, Prince Stephen III of Moldavia. Again, in the midst of one more great victory Vlad had one more reason to hate his brother. His bloody, painful, much awaited revenge went forever unfulfilled. Radu the Coward had died a couple of years earlier, not by his hand and the replacement on the Wallachian throne was a nobody, just another Ottoman candidate named Basarab. After placing Vlad Ţepeş on the throne, Stephen Báthory and the bulk of his forces returned to their lands, leaving him in a very vulnerable position. He had little time to gather support before a large Ottoman army entered Wallachia again determined to return prince Basarab to the throne. Vlad had ages ago alienated the boyars who felt they had a better chance of surviving under Prince Basarab and the peasants, tired of his depredations, abandoned him to his fate. He was forced to march to meet the Turks with the small forces at his disposal, less than four thousand men. No one thought much of his chances. He laughed as he rode away.
Maybe war never really started or ended those days. It was like one long, bloody formal dance where they danced in rows, stepped in, did damage, stepped out to give way to other and waited their turn to step back in. It was his turn to dance again when he visited his fried one last time, risked crossing lands the Turks held in secrecy. The egumen was happy to see him as always. It felt surreal to be in a place where the very air wasn't filled with death and hate and fear. The egumen dared a lot with him, he had even needled Vlad into turning back to Eastern Orthodoxy. And so he gave him gold and gemstones, stolen from the Ottomans. Egumen saw it best to not ask about them. He was the only truly humane man Vlad knew then, merciful to men and wouldn't let even a dog go hungry or suffer but Ottmans didn't count. They were the enemies of their God.
"I have a request to you," Drǎculea said to a holy man. "I have decided my grave will be here and I ask you to perform full funeral service, no matter what… oddities the situation might have." The egumen looked relieved but also sad. Vlad came to the disturbing conclusion that the man might actually cry for him.
"It will be done, my dear son. I see that you have at last decided to give the afterlife a thought." Vlad laughed joyously like a child.
"You might say that I think it a lot these days," he answered. They climbed to a bell tower and Vlad looked over the lands like a man anticipating a hunt or other exiting game. The egumen wondered how a man who had killed more enemies than most ever made and still had more didn't look at all like a man who was concerned about his death and soul. Vlad Ţepeş looked like a man who had the whole world in front of him and forever to enjoy it.
Later there were several variants of Vlad III Ţepeş ' death. Some said he was killed in battle against the Ottoman near Bucharest. At least that wouldn't have been so embarrassing. Others told he was assassinated by disloyal Wallachian boyars just as he was about to sweep the Turks from the field or during a hunt. The truth is that at the moment of one more unlikely victory snatched from the jaws of defeat and despair he was struck down by one of his own men. His body was left on the field and decapitated by the Turks. His head was sent to Istanbul as consolation price and preserved in honey andthesultan had it displayed on a stake as proof that Kazıklı Bey, the Impaler Prince, was finally dead. He came later back for it. He was reportedly buried at Snagov monastery located near Bucharest, yet while the egumen kept his word and held funeral for him there was no body to put to the grave. It was a mildly bizarre experience to visit it.
Impalement was his favourite method of torture. He often had the stakes arranged in various geometric patterns though pleased his sense of humor more than his sense of aesthetics. He also used nails in heads, cutting off limbs, noses and ears, blinding, strangulation, burning, mutilation of sexual organs, scalping, skinning and boiling alive the screams and blood bending his mind to abstract shapes. The corpses decayed for months, reeking to high Heaven. He would never suffer anyone violating law; violence was his law and he established iron-fisted law and order in Wallachia. He insisted that his people should be honest and hard-working. Merchants who cheated their customers tended to find themselves mounted on a stake beside common thieves. Once he left a gold cup in the middle of the street and returned to pick it up the next day since no one had dared to touch it. People were just too afraid to commit crimes.
And when all was over he devoured his law and order along with everything on his path. Power had been his lust, now he was made of power. He had always been bloodthirsty, now he gleefully drank deep. Hatred was slowly eradicated, replaced be revenge and oh so warming amusement. Drǎculea truly was a monster, but if asked Alucard would say that the monster came before the vampire.
AN: This is a mix of real history, my own conjuring and Hellsing canon (admittedly little of the canon). Boyar is Romanic gentry, voivode means prince and egumen is a Romanic word for Eastern Orthodox abbot.