The Wallachian Weasels - Vlad the Impaler, Dracula aka the most terrifying Prince in Medieval History!

By Chris Livemore

The Wallachian Weasels have a major part in Book IV in The Good Knight Series, as serial cheats in The Tournament, they are the main rivals of Jack's castles and you will see why they have earned a special place in Sir Percy's 'A Complete and Entirely Authoritative Guide to Medieval Insults' (Nb. you can get your own FREE copy of the guide by signing up to Jack's Shield Wall - see end of the blog!).

The Wallachian Weasels also sound made up, but only half of that name is. You may not realise this for a children's picture book series but hours and hours and hours of research has gone into each book to try and bring in some really interesting historical elements into series. Now as it happens, this group of knights is rooted in one of the most extraordinary and alarming chapters in the entire history of the medieval period.

Because Wallachia was real.

And its most famous prince was considerably more frightening than any insult suggests - he was the most terrifying Prince in the whole of the medieval period.

Where exactly is Wallachia?

Wallachia is a historical and geographical region of Romania, situated north of the Lower Danube and south of the Southern Carpathians. In the fifteenth century it was an independent principality, not quite a kingdom, ruled by a military governor called a voivode, located at a crossroads between Christian Europe and the Muslim lands of the Ottoman Empire, frequently the scene of bloody battles as Ottoman forces pushed westward and Christian forces pushed back.

It was not, in other words, a relaxing place to be and should not have been on a wish list of holiday destinations during the Middle Ages.

By the early fifteenth century, Wallachia had become an Ottoman tributary state, paying tribute while attempting to preserve its independence between two powerful worlds, which meant paying tribute, maintaining an uneasy peace, and like many medieval powers, the Ottomans often required noble hostages to guarantee loyalty.

This last detail matters considerably for what comes next.

The Son of the Dragon

Vlad III was the second son of Vlad II Dracul. His sobriquet Dracula, meaning "son of Dracul", derived from the Latin draco, meaning dragon, after his father's induction into the Order of the Dragon, created by Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund for the defence of Christian Europe against the Ottoman Empire.

The name Dracula literally meant "son of Dracul" ("son of the Dragon"). Though in medieval Romanian, dracul had also come to mean devil, which, given subsequent events, felt increasingly appropriate.

When he was eleven years old, Vlad was sent to the court of the Ottoman sultan as a hostage. His father and elder brother were assassinated when he was sixteen. He spent the rest of his life fighting to reclaim his father's throne, which he did, across three separate reigns, with methods that made him simultaneously the most feared ruler in Eastern Europe and a folk hero to his own people.

What he actually did

Here is where I need to choose my words carefully, because this is a family blog and some of the details are not suitable for anyone who is currently eating, or within 15 feet of a small child. His penchant for impaling his enemies on stakes in the ground and leaving them to die earned him the name Vlad the Impaler. He inflicted this type of torture on foreign and domestic enemies alike.

As he retreated from a battle in 1462, he left a field filled with thousands of impaled victims as a deterrent to pursuing Ottoman forces. Sultan Mehmed II, who had recently conquered Constantinople, marched on Wallachia, but approaching Târgoviște, he came across the 'Forest of the Impaled'. Contemporary accounts described a "forest" of thousands of impaled victims, with some reports claiming as many as twenty thousand (but modern historical and archaeological re-evaluations suggest the actual figure was around 1,600 to 1,700 stakes).

The horror discouraged the Ottoman soldiers and contributed to their hesitation. Imagine that twenty thousand dead. Lining a road. As a tactical decision. Yikes, can you see why this guy was terrifying now?

It worked. The Ottomans hesitated. In the brutal calculus of fifteenth-century warfare, where Wallachia was significantly outmatched in resources and manpower, the psychological impact of Vlad's methods was, arguably, the only weapon that consistently worked.

This does not make it less horrifying. But it does explain why Romania still considers him, in some quarters, a national hero. He kept Wallachia from being swallowed entirely by the most powerful empire of the age. The methods were monstrous. The alternative may have been worse.

The Dracula Connection

Here is the genuinely surprising part. Bram Stoker never visited Romania. He researched his novel largely in the British Museum Reading Room. His working notes show he originally planned to set his vampire novel in Styria, in Austria, and name his villain Count Wampyr.

Count Wampyr. We are all very lucky that did not stick. The pivot to Transylvania and the name Dracula came after Stoker encountered William Wilkinson's 1820 book, which contained a footnote explaining that "Dracula" meant "devil" in the Wallachian language and referenced a Wallachian prince who had fought the Turks. Stoker seized on the name, the geography, and the devilish associations.

Stoker's notes contain surprisingly little information about Vlad III beyond the name Dracula itself.. According to scholar Elizabeth Miller, Stoker "apparently did not know much about Vlad the Impaler, certainly not enough for us to say that Vlad was the inspiration for Count Dracula."

In other words: the most famous vampire in literary history shares a name, and almost nothing else, with one of the most genuinely frightening men who ever lived. The connection between Vlad and vampires developed gradually through centuries of folklore, sensational pamphlets, and later fiction rather than from any historical evidence that Vlad himself inspired vampire legends, tales that strongly influenced an eruption of vampiric fiction throughout the West.

Vlad's enemies invented the myth. Bram Stoker found the name in a library footnote. And between them they created Count Dracula. Neither of them would have predicted the Halloween industry that followed.

The story of Vlad the Impaler is something remarkable. Not just the impaling. Not about the Ottomans or the Order of the Dragon. Not even the historical footnote that produced the world's most famous fictional vampire. It is a story of a man defending his people against overwhelming odds.

Join Jack's Shield Wall — the free Good Knight newsletter — at thegoodknightbook.com/shield-wall. New members this month receive a free Guide to Medieval Insults, including, naturally, the Wallachian Weasels. History has never been more useful. 🏰⚔️