Speaker 1: Also media, let's fucking podcast.
Speaker 2: This is a behind the Bastards listeners, It's a podcast
Speaker 2: about the worst people in all of history. And I
Speaker 2: got I got very hyped there, so you might think
Speaker 2: this is going to be a high energy podcast episode.
Speaker 2: But I am years old or something like that, and
Speaker 2: last night I went to bed at three am.
Speaker 1: I just feel we have to cut that because some people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll believe it out, we'll bleep it out. So okay,
Speaker 3: we'll bleieve it out.
Speaker 1: Safety.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't even fully remember. I just I'm telling
Speaker 2: you right now people, I'm the kind of hungover that
Speaker 2: you get, not because you've gotten you were drinking or
Speaker 2: doing drugs, but because you are in your mid thirties
Speaker 2: and you stay up slightly later than normal. That's that's
Speaker 2: where I am right now. I'm pounding coffee. I'm trying
Speaker 2: to do better.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: And here to just distracked from my my decrepit elderlyness,
Speaker 2: is Jack O'Brien the.
Speaker 3: Most decrepit old person you've ever seen, the crypt keeper.
Speaker 3: What's up, guys? How are you doing? Jack? I'm doing
Speaker 3: all right.
Speaker 1: Why are you like seven mountain dues.
Speaker 3: Or what's zero mountain dues in but it's still early.
Speaker 3: What is it? Is it a security risk to tell
Speaker 3: people how old you are or just like I don't
Speaker 3: know what.
Speaker 2: We like to filter out disinformation, Like there's a lot
Speaker 2: of listeners who think my real name is and you know,
Speaker 2: I don't tell that for a specific reason. But the
Speaker 2: more lies there are out there, right, like, the the
Speaker 2: better it is for me.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, people don't like us, Jack, but you.
Speaker 3: Also don't know how old you are, so I know, like,
Speaker 3: could you could use some crowdsourced research put into that, right,
Speaker 3: But that's right.
Speaker 2: I was born on the Bayou and they don't they
Speaker 2: don't take notes about when.
Speaker 3: You were born there.
Speaker 2: That's actually I'm actually who that credence song was true.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it's great to be here. It's great to
Speaker 3: see both of your faces. Thank you for thank you
Speaker 3: for having me back.
Speaker 2: Good to see you, Jack, attack Jack. It's the spookiest
Speaker 2: month of the year. I think we can all accept that.
Speaker 1: And on the day this drops, Happy Halloween.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Happy, happy Halloween, everybody, Happy Halloween.
Speaker 3: Happy Halloween. It's Tuesday Halloween. I do apologize. I feel
Speaker 3: like we all are getting a little screwed there, right yeah, yeah, yeah, Halloween.
Speaker 2: We need to make it be like Thanksgiving, where it's
Speaker 2: always on like a Friday.
Speaker 3: Yes, but you bet a couple of days off before
Speaker 3: and after.
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly, But but that's not the case. So it's
Speaker 2: a Tuesday. I wish you all the best. But because
Speaker 2: we wanted to try to help make Halloween extra good,
Speaker 2: we have an episode about the man who put the
Speaker 2: spook in Spooktober, which is what I call October Dracula. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's right, that's right, motherfucking I mean, the title of
Speaker 2: the episode is just motherfucking Dracula comma bitches. But they
Speaker 2: probably won't let us use the episode exclamation point, thank you.
Speaker 2: I don't think we can put that on Spotify.
Speaker 3: They'll get angry. Jack, What do you know about Dracula.
Speaker 3: I am a big fan of his cereal.
Speaker 2: I just count Shocula, which is I mean, honestly, Jack,
Speaker 2: a little racist, all of the all of the dah
Speaker 2: the same, right, Yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Am not that from it. Like, I know there are
Speaker 3: historical roots to the character, but like in terms of
Speaker 3: who it's based on or what they did to have
Speaker 3: such a horrible story told about them, which which is
Speaker 3: what it is I mean, it feels like it could
Speaker 3: just be like from a middle school burn book, right,
Speaker 3: like just like like I heard they go into people's
Speaker 3: rooms and try and bite their neck and suck on
Speaker 3: their wad. Yeah. So I don't know what I'm curious
Speaker 3: to learn more. Yeah, well you're going to learn way
Speaker 3: too much today. So good, that's what I come here for.
Speaker 2: If you're you know, most people I think are broadly
Speaker 2: aware that Dracula the Vampire from the Bram Stoker book
Speaker 2: and then from I don't know, like a million other
Speaker 2: books and pieces of media sense is based on a
Speaker 2: real guy of Vlad Tepesh, better known as Vlad the Impaler,
Speaker 2: and we have gotten over the years.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, Lad, that's right. I've always resented this guy
Speaker 3: a little bit because he took a nickname that I
Speaker 3: always wanted. Yeah, Jack the Impaler. Yeah, yeah, you remember
Speaker 3: like how hard I tried to go. Yeah, going back
Speaker 3: into cracked days.
Speaker 2: For the record, Jack, You're always the first Impaler in
Speaker 2: my heart, or at least in the top like three,
Speaker 2: certainly before Dracula.
Speaker 3: A lot of people say like, I don't pale that
Speaker 3: many things, and I would point out, like, wait, have
Speaker 3: you not seen me eat with a fork.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Or I mean you've cooked kebab a couple of
Speaker 2: times out of stuff.
Speaker 3: I don't generally cook it, but I will eat off
Speaker 3: of a kabab, so that gives me rights to that.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I think I think he just got to
Speaker 3: it first. Otherwise I would be known, you would have
Speaker 3: been introducing me as Jack.
Speaker 2: There's all there's a lot of unfair things like that,
Speaker 2: like the the Wachowski's get credit for creating the matrix,
Speaker 2: even though just seven or eight years later, I had.
Speaker 3: An idea that was very similar to the matrix.
Speaker 2: So like who gets the credit, you know, But yeah,
Speaker 2: it's unfair, it's unfair. And also my version of the
Speaker 2: matrix all Danny DeVito we get, we get those we
Speaker 2: get those talentless hacks out of there, and we go
Speaker 2: pure divito.
Speaker 3: It's predvito. It's multiplicity matrix, matrixplicity, it's multiplicity the matrix.
Speaker 3: And that's how you can kind of tell things are
Speaker 3: off a little bit. Yeah, this is a world of alldvitos.
Speaker 2: Because you're like, I'm used to some Danny DeVito's, but
Speaker 2: not quite as many as we're getting.
Speaker 3: So like, sure, we've heard of like you go into
Speaker 3: work and it's mostly de Vito's but not pure Divito,
Speaker 3: and that's how things are a little bit, yeah, a
Speaker 3: little bit twisted at the robots have taken so Dracula,
Speaker 3: So Dracula. Sorry, this becomes a dragon who could be
Speaker 3: ably played by Danny DeVito is based on a real guy.
Speaker 3: Shock he should be Vlad the Impaler, And a weird
Speaker 3: number of fans over the years have been like, you
Speaker 3: should do with Lad the Impaler episode and there are
Speaker 3: a lot of lurid stories about what he did. But
Speaker 3: the reason why we haven't covered him before and we're
Speaker 3: not really going to do an episode focused entirely on
Speaker 3: Lad the Impaler is that he's the kind of historical
Speaker 3: bastard where like you don't actually know if any of
Speaker 3: that's true or if most of that is true. Like
Speaker 3: every if I was just doing a Lad the Impaler episode,
Speaker 3: every other sentence would be me being like reading a
Speaker 3: paragraph where somebody from like the sixteen hundreds is writing
Speaker 3: about an atrocity he was supposed to have committed a
Speaker 3: couple of hundred years earlier, and then me going, but
Speaker 3: also maybe that's not true, because it's it's it's more
Speaker 3: based on these like other myths or whatever that came
Speaker 3: about in a previous age or you know, here's all
Speaker 3: these reasons why that might not be the that's the
Speaker 3: case flying around, Yeah, for some reason. So there's reasons
Speaker 3: to Yeah, I always got the sense, and I think
Speaker 3: this is why I like didn't dig into it that much.
Speaker 3: Is I always got you know how Einstein gets credit
Speaker 3: for every smart thing, very smart sounding thing that anyone's
Speaker 3: ever said. Now they're like, well, you know what Einstein said,
Speaker 3: the definition of is doing the same thing over and over.
Speaker 3: And it's like, first of all, that's not insanity and
Speaker 3: that's not a smart thing. But second ball, Einstein like
Speaker 3: never said any of that. But it's like I always
Speaker 3: got the sense of Vlad the Impaler and slash Dracula
Speaker 3: just like got his brand was really strong, Like we
Speaker 3: needed somebody to be spooky, and so we just gave
Speaker 3: him all the dark shit. Yeah.
Speaker 2: History, Yeah, that is probably a lot of what happened.
Speaker 2: It's one of those like he was a ruler in
Speaker 2: the fourteen hundreds, which was a pretty brutal time, especially
Speaker 2: in Eastern ye Eastern Europe doesn't have a lot of
Speaker 2: periods of time where things weren't fairly brutal like it is,
Speaker 2: and he's but I don't know on his own, I
Speaker 2: don't know that I would qualify him as a bastard because, like,
Speaker 2: for this show, just kind of to make things narratively
Speaker 2: make sense, I have adopted sort of a definition where
Speaker 2: it doesn't just being a bastard doesn't just mean you're
Speaker 2: a bad person. It means you actively like made the
Speaker 2: world worse and stood out in your time as a
Speaker 2: shitty person. Like I wouldn't do a Behind the Bastards
Speaker 2: on a random plantation owner in the South, right, not
Speaker 2: because that's not a bad thing to do, because it's
Speaker 2: but because like what is there to say, right, Like
Speaker 2: he was one of a bunch of people who were
Speaker 2: part of this really awful system. I would do an
Speaker 2: episode on Robert E. Lee, right, because the things that
Speaker 2: he was trying to do not only like extended the
Speaker 2: Civil War and made this conflict bloodier, but he was
Speaker 2: actively attempting to set this system up in a way
Speaker 2: that would allow it to like persevere longer into the future.
Speaker 2: So he was somebody who was actively not just part
Speaker 2: of a bad system, but like making things worse in
Speaker 2: his existence right, whereas in Vladi Impaler, I'm not sure
Speaker 2: if that really qualifies. He's a ruler in Wallachia during
Speaker 2: which is you know, part of Romania now during this
Speaker 2: really brutal period. He definitely, like all rulers in that,
Speaker 2: does some horrible shit. But most of the stuff about
Speaker 2: his like real horrible crimes against humanity. Some of it
Speaker 2: may be true, but a lot of it is the
Speaker 2: result of propaganda for a bunch of Catholic monks who
Speaker 2: were like really pissed at him because he had killed
Speaker 2: a bunch of the Germans in his country. And I
Speaker 2: don't know, you know, mixed bag as to whether or
Speaker 2: not like it's fair or just kind of of like
Speaker 2: a part of a political dispute basically that has echoed
Speaker 2: down And like anybody who is a ruler in Europe
Speaker 2: in this period's going to do some massacres. But if
Speaker 2: like you're doing the same kind of horrible shit as
Speaker 2: everybody else in the area, I don't know that I'm
Speaker 2: going to like want to cover you in behind the bastards.
Speaker 2: So what makes Tepees interesting is the degree to which
Speaker 2: is how he becomes Dracula, right, And that is a
Speaker 2: story that involves a lot of other people's bastardry. It
Speaker 2: involves a really fascinating look into human folklore and the
Speaker 2: kind of stories that we tell about our monsters, and
Speaker 2: I think ultimately it has a lot to say about
Speaker 2: like why we are the way we are. So that's
Speaker 2: kind of the story we're going to be talking about today,
Speaker 2: how Vlad became Dracula. But that is going to start
Speaker 2: with a little bit of a bio on Vlad v Impaler.
Speaker 2: So are you ready to learn about v the MP V.
Speaker 3: The MP I am a little VMP action.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, that's right. So Vlad was born in
Speaker 2: fourteen thirty one. Maybe he may have been born as
Speaker 2: early as fourteen twenty eight. We're not gonna know, because nobody,
Speaker 2: really nobody was like putting down birth certificates. I'm gonna
Speaker 2: guess people didn't always know what year it was. Like,
Speaker 2: if you traveled like seven miles by foot, you probably
Speaker 2: would go to a place like, no, it's not fourteen
Speaker 2: twenty eight, it's fourteen twenty nine.
Speaker 3: Whatever.
Speaker 2: I like to keep it mysterious, like you do with
Speaker 2: you exactly exactly. Lad also is trying to avoid getting
Speaker 2: doxed so he was probably born in Transylvania. That part
Speaker 2: of the books is likely accurate. The town he was
Speaker 2: born in is I'm going to do my best here, Sigiswara,
Speaker 2: which was then part of the Kingdom of Hungary. Hungary
Speaker 2: and Romany, I mean, Romani is not a thing at
Speaker 2: this moment as like an independent nation. But they're going
Speaker 2: to wind up spending quite a bit of time having
Speaker 2: a little kerfuffle over this specific area that he's born in.
Speaker 2: Eastern Europe in his time was a place of chaos
Speaker 2: and violence, one in which the medieval traditions of serfdom
Speaker 2: and feudalism they were starting to fade in the west.
Speaker 2: Right in western Europe in the fourteen hundreds, serfdom and
Speaker 2: kind of a lot of these feudal attitudes are giving
Speaker 2: way to what's going to result in like a more
Speaker 2: modern concept of like states in the relationship between people
Speaker 2: and rulers that's starting to happen in the West and
Speaker 2: the East. All of that shit is really kind of
Speaker 2: coming into its height, right because it's, you know, just
Speaker 2: a different part of the world. The chief powers in
Speaker 2: Vlad's time in the area where he grows up are Hungary,
Speaker 2: that's like the big Christian Kingdom, which was a closely
Speaker 2: related foreign kingdom to Wallachia where his dad is going
Speaker 2: to be ruling in the not too distant future.
Speaker 3: And then the other big power, Yeah, I've heard of Hungary,
Speaker 3: not Wallachia. Well, so everybody gets an idea of how
Speaker 3: dumb I am. Yeah on this whole thing.
Speaker 2: I had a friend in high school, as a Romanian national,
Speaker 2: who would always insist that he was Wallachia, not just
Speaker 2: not Romania. Like Wilaki is like the center of what
Speaker 2: becomes the state of Romania. And so the other big
Speaker 2: power in the You've got Hungary on one side, and
Speaker 2: like the Holy Roman Empire, which is like, you know,
Speaker 2: kind of governing the major Christian states in that region.
Speaker 2: And then the other big power is the Ottoman Empire.
Speaker 2: And the Ottomans have not taken Constantinople yet, but they're
Speaker 2: they're working on it, right, They're in the process of
Speaker 2: making Constantinople into Istanbul. You can refer to that. They
Speaker 2: might be Giant Song if you want a little bit
Speaker 2: more information on that. It's pretty pretailed history exactly too many. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so Constantinople has not gotten the works yet, but the
Speaker 2: Turks are in the process, so they are making constant
Speaker 2: incursions into this chunk of Eastern Europe. They control some
Speaker 2: of the surrounding territories. And like when you read like
Speaker 2: weirdo right wing dudes with like Twitter accounts that are
Speaker 2: named I don't know, like cultural critic or whatever, they
Speaker 2: tend to like. They always like to frame this as
Speaker 2: this bone deep clash of religions and cultures that are
Speaker 2: just completely different and can never live together. That's not
Speaker 2: what anyone living through it sees it as.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: If you are actually living in the area at this point,
Speaker 2: your life is a lot more muddled. Vlad the Impaler's father,
Speaker 2: who is Vlad the Second, who's going to wind up
Speaker 2: ruling Volakia, he spends most of his life allied to
Speaker 2: the Ottomans, right like, he is an Ottoman vassal, and
Speaker 2: he is also he's fighting when he goes to war,
Speaker 2: he's often fighting on behalf of Sultan Morad the second,
Speaker 2: And a lot of people go back He's going to
Speaker 2: go back and forth. His son's going to go back
Speaker 2: and forth. A lot of people in this border area
Speaker 2: are like, well, right now, it looks like the Ottomans
Speaker 2: are a better bet, so I'm an automan vessel. And
Speaker 2: then like, oh, now the holy Roman Emperor seems like
Speaker 2: he's got you know, some shit on his he's got
Speaker 2: some weight behind him, so I'm going to go over there.
Speaker 2: That's just how people are right like it. It doesn't
Speaker 2: make any sense to be super rigorous about it, because
Speaker 2: that'll just get you killed.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 2: So it is from the Emperor Sigismund that the family
Speaker 2: gets their imposing title Dracule. Dracuel is not like a
Speaker 2: last name. It is a title that they are given.
Speaker 2: And obviously that's the root of the word Dracula. If
Speaker 2: you've seen that new movie The Last Voyage of the Demeter,
Speaker 2: which is about one chapter in the bram Stoker Dracula
Speaker 2: book where Dracula travels over to this little coastal English
Speaker 2: town on a boat. Doesn't go well for the people
Speaker 2: on the boat. The crate that he's loaded under the
Speaker 2: ship in has a dragon on it. That's because the
Speaker 2: word dracul means dragon, although in Romanian it can also
Speaker 2: mean devil. Both are It's kind of like it means
Speaker 2: both and yeah, the reason why he gets that title
Speaker 2: is that Sigismund is trying to get Vlad the Second,
Speaker 2: Glad the Impaler's dad, and a couple of these other
Speaker 2: kings and stuff who are sort of on the fence.
Speaker 2: A lot of them kind of go back and forth
Speaker 2: between him and the Ottomans. He wants to get them
Speaker 2: locked in on his side, right because he's trying to
Speaker 2: build up a solid He's trying to like make sure
Speaker 2: his power base stays solid. And so he creates this
Speaker 2: nightly order called like the Order of the Dragon, and
Speaker 2: Vlad the Second is one of the guys he brings
Speaker 2: into this. Most kind of layman's histories of Vlad the
Speaker 2: Second and of Lad the Impaler will describe the Order
Speaker 2: of the Dragon this way. And I'm going to quote
Speaker 2: from an article by the Warfare History Network quote a
Speaker 2: group of European leaders who were sworn to defend the
Speaker 2: Holy Roman Empire against infidels. Now again, that kind of
Speaker 2: leans into a lot of popular conceptions about how this
Speaker 2: period of time works. Some of the sources I've read
Speaker 2: kind of make it look again a lot more muddled.
Speaker 2: There's a pretty interesting book on Vlad the Impaler by M. J. Trow,
Speaker 2: who is a crime novelist. And we'll talk about our
Speaker 2: historian that we have as a source here in a second,
Speaker 2: but he describes the order and he has some pretty
Speaker 2: good sources to back this up in more mafioso terms,
Speaker 2: So not this alliance of Christians against the infidels, but
Speaker 2: more of like a system of mutual aid designed by
Speaker 2: Sigismund to tie regional rulers to him and to each
Speaker 2: other to reinforce his own power. More of like a
Speaker 2: secret society right where it's like, get this impressive and
Speaker 2: this title will kind of bind them to me and
Speaker 2: to each other and will promise to like help each
Speaker 2: other out. I'm trying to make this kind of like
Speaker 2: intimate cultural bond to set us all together, but more
Speaker 2: because I want them. I want them to feel like
Speaker 2: they have a sense of like owing me something.
Speaker 3: Right, and they do because that nickname is awesome name.
Speaker 2: If I get to call myself the fucking Dragon, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna be. I'm gonna be like if Kentucky were
Speaker 2: to award me the rank of colonel. You know, if
Speaker 2: I could be at Kentucky colonel, I would I would
Speaker 2: be much more pro Kentucky than I currently yea.
Speaker 3: And you would have. Yeah, the branding is just incredible
Speaker 3: and great that they had a sense of it at
Speaker 3: the time. I love that. It was just like, well,
Speaker 3: if you want to like have this cool nickname, yeah,
Speaker 3: then you gotta be cool with Sigis Mandy. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's like a you know, a five year old creating
Speaker 3: a club that's like the super Cool Ninjas. Yeah that
Speaker 3: like you get to call yourself a super cool Ninja
Speaker 3: if you join up, Like hell yeah, that's worked from
Speaker 3: the beginning of time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because like I think every man, I think I
Speaker 2: speak for literally the entire male population when I'm like,
Speaker 2: we all want to be nicknamed the Dragon.
Speaker 3: The Dragon. But if kind of our only goal, yeah,
Speaker 3: like if you were to introduce yourself as the Dragon,
Speaker 3: people would be like you give yourself that nickname? Yeah right, yeah.
Speaker 2: But if you're like, no, man, somebody else said I'm
Speaker 2: the Dragon and like they're the Holy Roman Emperor, then
Speaker 2: you're in. Then you're in, you know, like in like Flynn,
Speaker 2: I guess that's that's really the goal here, and it's
Speaker 2: I don't know, it's debatably successful, but that's where they
Speaker 2: get the nickname from. Now we have basically no real
Speaker 2: information on the kind of childhood that Lad would have
Speaker 2: experienced our lad, not Lad the second his dad. There
Speaker 2: are some things we can infer his family was extremely wealthy.
Speaker 2: These guys are nobility, right, They're they're bowyers, which is
Speaker 2: like what you call nobles in in in this region.
Speaker 2: They have numerous servants and body guards. And for most
Speaker 2: of Ladd's early childhood he's effectively like his dad is
Speaker 2: the governor of Transylvania for Hungary, watching for a Turkish incursion.
Speaker 2: We don't know who his mother was. It's possible she
Speaker 2: was like basically a prostitute. This is not like normal
Speaker 2: in like Western Europe and what not. That would make
Speaker 2: him like a bastard, right, like in a literal.
Speaker 3: Sense federal master.
Speaker 2: That's not the case in this part of the world, right,
Speaker 2: Wallachian in Transylvanian culture, certainly in this period is not
Speaker 2: very pro woman and so and to the extent that,
Speaker 2: it doesn't really matter who your mother is.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: What determines whether or not you are a legitimate and
Speaker 2: that's in the parlance of the time, a legitimate son,
Speaker 2: right in order to like inherit and stuff, is just
Speaker 2: who your dad is. Right, It doesn't actually matter who
Speaker 2: your biological mother is. So Vlad is his dad's actually
Speaker 2: is an illegitimate son, So it's not. One of the
Speaker 2: things about this is that there's this quasi aristocratic democracy thing,
Speaker 2: where like winding up in charge is the result of
Speaker 2: a bunch of these other boyers supporting you having a job.
Speaker 2: So the fact that Vlad the Second is like an
Speaker 2: illegitimate son probably doesn't really hurt him because he's able
Speaker 2: to get a lot of support to put him in power.
Speaker 2: But Glad the Impaler is his dad's like legit son,
Speaker 2: and he's the second son of the family under his
Speaker 2: elder brother Mercea. His youngest brother, Radu is also known
Speaker 2: as the handsome and m J. Trout writes, quote, yeah,
Speaker 2: he's hot as hell.
Speaker 3: MJ.
Speaker 2: Trow writes about his about all of their upbringing. Actually,
Speaker 2: he would have had a steward to organize the servants,
Speaker 2: order the food and the wine, and regulate the day.
Speaker 2: Numerous skivvies would be employed to cook, clean and sew.
Speaker 2: The male children would have learned to give orders and
Speaker 2: adopt the airs and grace is expected of men that
Speaker 2: one day rule an entire country, however small by modern standards.
Speaker 3: Yes, the one picture of Vlad the impaler that I've
Speaker 3: always seen. The main thing that I take away from
Speaker 3: it is that he looks like a rich guy from
Speaker 3: another era. Yeah, he's for sure bobbles and like just
Speaker 3: various fancy news. His hair is like looks like it
Speaker 3: has been combed by someone who is not him for
Speaker 3: like hours a day. Oh yeah, the thing he's wearing
Speaker 3: makes him look like a Christmas tree ornament. Yeah, that's
Speaker 3: kind of his overall.
Speaker 1: His mustache. What do you think of the mustache mustache?
Speaker 3: I always assume that's just from another era. Yeah, And
Speaker 3: it also looks like he might have taken one of
Speaker 3: his locks and just like put it across his upper lip.
Speaker 1: So there's a serious curl going on on.
Speaker 2: His I'm imagining there's like a backstory to that mustache.
Speaker 2: Like if you guys have watched Brea Hercule Perro movies
Speaker 2: like the second the second one opens with like the
Speaker 2: the gritty backstory of a mustache. It's amazing anyway, That's
Speaker 2: what I imagine. So in his book, M. J. Trow
Speaker 2: cites two historians, Fluorescue and McNally, who write this about
Speaker 2: Flats upbringing. There were the usual distinctions that followed the
Speaker 2: feast days, puppets, ambulant artists, acrobats, mini singers, and in
Speaker 2: summer there were ball games, running and jumping contests, and
Speaker 2: games on quadrilateral swings made of red cloth and fashioned
Speaker 2: in the form of a pyramid. In the winter, they
Speaker 2: hunted eagles with sling shots the Sigasuarrez slopes on primitive
Speaker 2: double runner sleds trapped hairs. That is pretty cool. Eagles
Speaker 2: with sling shots.
Speaker 3: Eagles with slingshots is red.
Speaker 2: The degree of deadly skills you had to have even
Speaker 2: to be like a pampered rich kid in this era
Speaker 2: is amazing.
Speaker 3: Like you're just fucking bull saying an eagle with your
Speaker 3: so funny shooting eagles out of the fucking clear blue sky. Yeah,
Speaker 3: sling fucking.
Speaker 2: Rock and a piece of elastic. Yeah, amazing.
Speaker 3: And they didn't have elastic, so it was just like
Speaker 3: a slid like you had to swing it around and
Speaker 3: like it David's style, right, Yeah, probably.
Speaker 2: I think maybe they had more modern slingshots than I
Speaker 2: don't know. I'm not a slingshot expert. In fourteen thirty six,
Speaker 2: the ruler of Wallachia, Vlad the Second's brother, died of
Speaker 2: natural causes. Now he had spent. Vlad's brother, had Laed.
Speaker 2: The second's brother had been the kind of guy whose
Speaker 2: primary focus was not pissing anyone off too much. So
Speaker 2: he had tried to be friendly with the Hungarians because
Speaker 2: they're right next door. But he'd also paid tribute to
Speaker 2: the Sultan and been in a military alliance with them.
Speaker 2: And this is the kind of thing where like nobody
Speaker 2: trusts each other. So when you're in a military alliance
Speaker 2: with a guy like the Sultan, you send them a
Speaker 2: bunch of your family members, right, your family, some other nobles,
Speaker 2: and you send him to Istanbul. And that's like your
Speaker 2: guarantee of good behavior. If you don't keep up with
Speaker 2: the treaty, they'll kill your family, you know, Like that's
Speaker 2: the way it goes here, everyone, Robert here, I fucked
Speaker 2: this up. I misspoke. Obviously, the Ottomans had not captured
Speaker 2: is Stanbul at this point, which we talk about later
Speaker 2: when they do. Believe the capital of the Ottoman Empire
Speaker 2: at this phase was Adirney edr Ine. That's how it's anglicized.
Speaker 2: But if you keep up with the treaty, the family
Speaker 2: is a pretty good life, right, Like they're not locked
Speaker 2: in a cell or whatever in court. They generally attend
Speaker 2: like schools and whatnot in the area. Like it can
Speaker 2: be a pretty decent experience depending on where you are.
Speaker 3: This puts it in a whole new perspective that you
Speaker 3: guys made me send my kids to yeah, stay with
Speaker 3: Sophie while we recorded this. That is that is the
Speaker 3: case you said, case go sideways? Yeah, okay, yeah, in
Speaker 3: case you to support another group of advertisers.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: So Vlad the second his brother dies and he becomes
Speaker 2: the ruler of Wallachia next, and he does this with
Speaker 2: the backing of Sigismund. Right, Sigismund was not happy with
Speaker 2: Lad the Second's brother. He's like, this guy is in
Speaker 2: an alliance with the Sultan. I'm not a big fan
Speaker 2: of the Sultan. I want to put a guy on
Speaker 2: the Wallachian throne who's like my dude, right, and who I.
Speaker 3: Holy Roman Empire?
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, he's the holy and the king of Hungary. Right,
Speaker 2: got you know you can. He's a triple threat, at
Speaker 2: least a double threat, probably triple. I assume there's another
Speaker 2: threat to him.
Speaker 3: Holy Roman Empire or or the Dragon. They're the ones
Speaker 3: who came up with that idea. To let them call
Speaker 3: them those dragons. Okay, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: So the family, the Dragon family moves to the capital
Speaker 2: of Wallachia, tiergo Viste, and into a big fancy castle.
Speaker 2: Now Glad, being paler age six or seven, starts his
Speaker 2: night training at this point, which is like every little
Speaker 2: boys dream. I think we all wish we could have
Speaker 2: trained this a night when we were six or seven.
Speaker 2: Oh ak, yeah, okay, yeah, so cool.
Speaker 3: But I thought like they were like, okay, you're now
Speaker 3: ready to do battle at night like a ninja, Like
Speaker 3: that is what he's going to wind up doing under
Speaker 3: cover of darkness. This is this is when we do
Speaker 3: our nighttime seals training.
Speaker 2: It is you have to start early, not just for
Speaker 2: a kid. But oftentimes I'm not one hundred percent sure
Speaker 2: if this is the way, but I think it is
Speaker 2: the way that they do in Willachia. But like even
Speaker 2: going back to the ancient Greece, if you're the kind
Speaker 2: of dude who, because of your position in society, you're
Speaker 2: going to be expected to fight on horseback. You are
Speaker 2: often raised like with your horse, because it takes sometimes
Speaker 2: ten fifteen years to like really train a military horse
Speaker 2: to be able to because like horses don't want to
Speaker 2: fight right like, they don't. They don't want to charge
Speaker 2: a bunch of angry armed men. That's scary for a horse,
Speaker 2: so you have to it. Often, like these societies, like
Speaker 2: this is the case with the Macedonians back in the
Speaker 2: time of Alexander, they spend a lot of their childhoods,
Speaker 2: like both kind of growing up and training with their
Speaker 2: horses so that they can fight together, because it takes
Speaker 2: that long to make a good war horse.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's been a constant struggle with me and my horse.
Speaker 3: My horse is more into the arts, yeah, and dressage. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and yeah hates when I just try and ride it
Speaker 3: into a fist fight.
Speaker 2: No, you have tried to invade Persia several times and
Speaker 2: your horse just won't see it.
Speaker 3: It's not going well. It's not going well. Yeah, very
Speaker 3: bad at it.
Speaker 2: This period in his life where he's kind of living
Speaker 2: in tigiv Ste, he's training on being a knight. It
Speaker 2: ends pretty quickly for little baby Blaid the Impaler, because
Speaker 2: in fourteen thirty seven, when he's some between seven and
Speaker 2: nine years old, probably the Emperor Sigismund dies and his
Speaker 2: plans to create this grand anti Ottoman alliance kind of
Speaker 2: crumble the whole order of the Dragon thing. They keep
Speaker 2: the title, They're always going to use that title. That's
Speaker 2: fucking do. It's not going anywhere, you know, it doesn't
Speaker 2: really mean much in the now that Sigismund's died, and
Speaker 2: there's this like kind of right as he dies, there's
Speaker 2: a peasant uprising in Wallachia that's pretty brutal to put down,
Speaker 2: weakens them militarily, and then there's a wave of plagues,
Speaker 2: probably spread by rats, that hits right at the same
Speaker 2: time and kills just a fuck load of people. So,
Speaker 2: you know, get rid of rats people. It just makes sense. Now,
Speaker 2: Glad the Second, Glad the Impaler's dad has no choice
Speaker 2: but to make the same decision that his brother had
Speaker 2: made and bin the knee to the sultan right now. Thankfully,
Speaker 2: Marad the Second is a pretty cool dude as sultans go.
Speaker 2: He's famous for being tolerant, particularly of like heretical religious
Speaker 2: sects in his own country. Right there's all these like
Speaker 2: little weird religious groups that have some take on you know,
Speaker 2: the corona or whatever. That's like kind of very much
Speaker 2: not in the mainstream, and like a lot of other
Speaker 2: sultans probably would have punished them, but Morad is just
Speaker 2: kind of like interested in that sort of stuff, so
Speaker 2: he he'll give them money, He'll like support them and
Speaker 2: be like, yeah, I just am kind of curious what
Speaker 2: you're gonna I just want to let you cook, you know,
Speaker 2: like tell me some shit. You know, there's not TV
Speaker 2: back then, so maybe like encouraging heretical religious sects is
Speaker 2: kind of like funding Netflix.
Speaker 3: Y what these crazy fuckers. He's also known as being
Speaker 3: super nice to his slaves, which is again kind of
Speaker 3: the like are you a good person? It doesn't mean
Speaker 3: like not having slaves. It means are nice to them, right,
Speaker 3: nice to it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But that said, as that probably suggests, good dude
Speaker 2: is a relative term when we are talking about medieval rulers,
Speaker 2: and as relatively chill as Marat is, he's still the
Speaker 2: kind of dude who punishes his enemies by impaling them
Speaker 2: in mass because that's just kind of how the Ottomans be, right,
Speaker 2: everybody's got their own ways of like killing your enemies.
Speaker 2: The Ottomans, one of the things they like to do
Speaker 2: is impale. That's not They're not the only people doing impaling, right,
Speaker 2: Impaling's popular. Everybody We always like a good impaling. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: but yeah, lots of different ugly none of the ways
Speaker 2: people kill each other in the Middle Ages are nice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they like to really make a show of it,
Speaker 3: make a meal. Yeah. Yeah. Of the thing, So when
Speaker 3: you say impale, is that just like run through with
Speaker 3: a sword or.
Speaker 2: And sharp stick going going through you in a way
Speaker 2: that's unpleasant.
Speaker 3: And then gravity doing some work? Is that?
Speaker 2: I think gravity often I mean the same way that
Speaker 2: like that's what kills you to an extent when you
Speaker 2: get like crucified, right, yes, yeah, that whole process.
Speaker 3: So do they impale you and then just like let
Speaker 3: you slide down a like do they put it upright?
Speaker 3: Is that what when they're when we're saying someone's an
Speaker 3: impaler because I am again still trying to get the
Speaker 3: nickname to go, and I'm trying to see like what
Speaker 3: type of impaling I could do to like get this
Speaker 3: ship to finally catch on, Like is it a big
Speaker 3: wooden stick? Sharp wood stick? And then you put it
Speaker 3: upright and they're just kind of like hanging there in
Speaker 3: the air. Yeah, Like yeah, Jason X, the.
Speaker 2: You're kind of are letting them slide down it. It's
Speaker 2: often a punishment for like crimes against the state, right
Speaker 2: it is. It is a particularly nasty one, so people
Speaker 2: who like it threatens sort of the stability of the
Speaker 2: government often do it. There's a few different ways. It's
Speaker 2: one of those things where sometimes people are dead when
Speaker 2: they do this and you're just kind of doing it
Speaker 2: as a show of force. Sometimes it's a very quick death,
Speaker 2: right like you're And there's a couple of different ways.
Speaker 2: There's like through the abdomen or whatnot, like directly to
Speaker 2: the heart. There's like the reverse way. There's like putting
Speaker 2: it basically going in through the outdoor, so to speak.
Speaker 2: I'm sure you can kind of guess what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: There through the butt hole for the butt yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: And there's a but you know, it can it can
Speaker 3: be the kind of thing where like you die pretty quickly,
Speaker 3: or it can be the kind of thing where.
Speaker 2: It's like slow and it takes days. That sort of
Speaker 2: depends on the region and what you did.
Speaker 3: Okay, so that will that sort of thing will get
Speaker 3: people's attention. Yeah, I can understand where somebody who does
Speaker 3: that a lot would get a nickname.
Speaker 2: It'll get your attention. But back to what we were
Speaker 2: saying about like where this lands within the morality of
Speaker 2: the time. Pretty common. A lot of states do impaling, right. Basically,
Speaker 2: any ruler has the potential to impale a dude if
Speaker 2: they commit the right crime in this, especially in Eastern
Speaker 2: Europe and in kind of like Middle East North Africa,
Speaker 2: a lot of this, a lot of impaling going on, right,
Speaker 2: and that they're not the only ones. Western Europe has
Speaker 2: it's impaling traditions too, don't get me wrong, And this
Speaker 2: has gone on. I think the Assyrians are some of
Speaker 2: the first people we know we're doing in paling. So
Speaker 2: this has always been a popular way to get rid
Speaker 2: of people you don't like. So Marad the Second, pretty
Speaker 2: nice guy, also an impaler. Vlad the Second signs a
Speaker 2: treaty with because he's like, well, Sigismund's down now he's
Speaker 2: still going by Vlad Dracul. Don't get me wrong here, Okay,
Speaker 2: smart man understands branding. Yeah, he gets branding. So in
Speaker 2: fourteen thirty eight, the year after Sigismund dies, the Sultan
Speaker 2: goes to war with Transylvania with the Hungarians right, and
Speaker 2: Vlad the Second has to join on his side and
Speaker 2: winds up fighting against the people he had just been governing.
Speaker 2: Now he's willing to do this because he doesn't really
Speaker 2: have any other option, but his heart is not in it.
Speaker 2: And within a couple of years he's like publicly, you know,
Speaker 2: a vassal of the Ottomans, but he's also covertly supporting
Speaker 2: an anti Ottoman alliance led by John Hunyati, who's the
Speaker 2: Transylvanian governor for the Hungarians. There's this series of battles.
Speaker 2: Hanyati does pretty well against the Ottomans, they win a
Speaker 2: few of them, and this causes problems for the Dracule
Speaker 2: family because like now they've picked the wrong side of
Speaker 2: this conflict, right, they bet on the Ottomans. The Ottomans
Speaker 2: aren't doing great so far. And I'm going to quote
Speaker 2: now from a biography of life Lad Tepees by Kurt Trepto,
Speaker 2: who is an American historian from Miami Beach, Florida.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: After Hanyati defeated Ottoman forces in Transylvania in March fourteen
Speaker 2: forty two, vlad Dracule was called to Adrianople to demonstrate
Speaker 2: his loyalty to his suzerain, leaving his eldest son Mercea
Speaker 2: as governor in Wallachia. As a result of what he
Speaker 2: considered to be Dracul's treachery, the Sultan imprisoned the prince
Speaker 2: at Gallipoli and ordered an attack on Wilakia. This new
Speaker 2: Ottoman assault was again repulsed by Henyati, who used the
Speaker 2: occasion to install his protege Besab the Second on the throne.
Speaker 2: Realizing the danger posed to the Empire if Hanyati controlled Volakia,
Speaker 2: the Sultan decided to release Vlat Dracul at the end
Speaker 2: of fourteen forty two, but required him to leave his
Speaker 2: two youngest sons as hostages. So there's this kind of
Speaker 2: you see how messy this is, right, Yeah, Sultan gets
Speaker 2: angry that he's been supporting the Hungarians, so he arrests
Speaker 2: Vlad the second. Vlad the second son is in charge
Speaker 2: in Wallachia for a while, but then the Hungarians push
Speaker 2: him out of power and stick a new guy on
Speaker 2: the throne. And the Sultan's like, well, I guess this
Speaker 2: family there's still my best bet, right, So I'm just
Speaker 2: going to take his kids as hostages and hope that
Speaker 2: that works to keep him loyal, right.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, I think that inspires a lot of loyalty
Speaker 3: and people generally like it when you do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a big, big big fans. So vladd and
Speaker 2: his sexy brother Radu are going to be the hostages here.
Speaker 3: Now. Is this how last names happened back then? Because
Speaker 3: it feels like we're going from their old last name
Speaker 3: to like the Dracule family. Was it just a thing
Speaker 3: where people were like, actually, this is cooler. Somebody called
Speaker 3: me this.
Speaker 2: I don't think that they would have been called the
Speaker 2: Dracule family. It's more that because the dad has this title,
Speaker 2: when he dies, the one who inherits it is going
Speaker 2: to be Dracula, which is like son of the dragon. Okay,
Speaker 2: basically right, that's that's the way I was just it's
Speaker 2: fun to use this name a lot because it's pretty
Speaker 2: fucking cool. So I just said Vladin his sexy brother
Speaker 2: Radu would be those hostages. I probably shouldn't have said
Speaker 2: that about Radhu because I have to know something uncomfortable
Speaker 2: here about our historian source Kurt Trepto. So again, we've
Speaker 2: got the two books I read. One is by this
Speaker 2: guy who is you know, it's a pretty good pop
Speaker 2: history book, but it's not perfect. And the other is
Speaker 2: this book by Kurt, who is definitely a historian. He
Speaker 2: is a fulbright scholar and an expert on Romanian history.
Speaker 2: He is somebody who certainly has the academic credentials to
Speaker 2: back up his book. Unfortunately, a scholar is not the
Speaker 2: only thing that he is, because as I was writing
Speaker 2: this episode, I came upon a two thousand and seven
Speaker 2: article by the History News Network that notes about Kurt
Speaker 2: Trepto quote he was sentenced to the maximum of seven
Speaker 2: years in December two thousand and two for offenses involving
Speaker 2: two girls aged ten and thirteen, who we invited to
Speaker 2: his home in Lasi. A Romanian woman convicted of being
Speaker 2: his accomplice is still in prison. Trepto, who looked visibly
Speaker 2: emaciated as he left the prison, declined to comment. The
Speaker 2: historian was released early because he wrote a book entitled
Speaker 2: The Life and Times of Vlad Dracul while he was
Speaker 2: in prison. His lawyer, Livu Broun said the book September
Speaker 2: two thousand and three until October two thousand and six
Speaker 2: was counted as community service, Bron told reporters. Bron told
Speaker 2: the court during his trial that his client had sex
Speaker 2: only with the thirteen year old girl and that he
Speaker 2: did not know she was a minor.
Speaker 3: So there's a lot there. Oh my god, that is
Speaker 3: uh uh something else. Yeah, I didn't primary source here. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's he is a historian. He's a fulbright scholar. He
Speaker 3: also wrote his Dracula book as fucking community service for
Speaker 3: being a pedophile. I'll se a pedophile. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: I don't know what else to say about that. I
Speaker 3: figured I should live much to say.
Speaker 2: You know, Trepto's book is okay. Treu is a better writer, right,
Speaker 2: but he's not a historian. And I did find a
Speaker 2: couple of minor errors in there, so I wanted to
Speaker 2: like read both of them. And then as I was
Speaker 2: writing the script, I learned that unfat pleasant reality. The
Speaker 2: lesson here should be obvious. Never check your word right.
Speaker 2: There you go, there you go.
Speaker 3: Then you won't learn stuff like this. Yeah, absolutely so.
Speaker 2: In the time when Vlad the second had been out
Speaker 2: in Automan captivity, he had lost control of Wallachia to
Speaker 2: one of his many noble rivals. He took it back
Speaker 2: in fourteen forty three, and our friend the pedophile historian
Speaker 2: notes that this is probably because he was a pretty
Speaker 2: popular ruler. From what we can tell captivity was not
Speaker 2: like bad for the dracul brothers, right, the Draculas, the Draculai,
Speaker 2: the Dracules La. Anyway, they learned how to fight in
Speaker 2: the Ottoman style. Now, Solad future of Lad the Impaler
Speaker 2: has now learned how to fight as a European night
Speaker 2: and how to fight as an Ottoman. Right, so he
Speaker 2: gets a whole new set of weapons. He's having fun
Speaker 2: different kind of like classes on that sort of stuff.
Speaker 2: There's some evidence that they converted to Islam for a
Speaker 2: period of time. This is unclear. Vlad the Impaler is
Speaker 2: gonna like mix and match faiths a bunch. He's a
Speaker 2: little bit like that one character from The Mummy who's
Speaker 2: just got like all the religion symbols. Right, He's going
Speaker 2: to be Orthodox, he's going to be Catholic for a while,
Speaker 2: he's going to be probably may have been Muslim for
Speaker 2: a while.
Speaker 3: So you know, bumper sticker, you know. Yeah, he's a
Speaker 3: very coexist kind of guy, Lad the Impaler. Yeah, so
Speaker 3: things go less well. He's you know, while Lad the
Speaker 3: Impaler and and Radu are are hanging out with a sultan,
Speaker 3: things are not going great for his father, Lad the
Speaker 3: Second Hunyati, the Hungarian leader is not a forgiving kind
Speaker 3: of dude. And once it becomes clear that yet again,
Speaker 3: the mister Dracule has backed the Ottomans, Transylvania goes to
Speaker 3: war with Wolakia of Lad the Second loses this war,
Speaker 3: he gets captured and is executed alongside his eldest son,
Speaker 3: who had ruled in his stead while he was out fighting. No, no,
Speaker 3: that's Marseilla. I don't think he's particularly handsome. He gets
Speaker 3: so while his dad is losing this ward to Transylvania,
Speaker 3: like a bunch of these boyers in in Tigovitay, like
Speaker 3: see where the wind is blowing. And so they capture
Speaker 3: his son Mercea and they they kill him by burying
Speaker 3: him alive, and they are there's some suggestion among scholars
Speaker 3: that maybe this is part of how that myth about
Speaker 3: like Dracula being being buried alive. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Maybe
Speaker 3: that's part of it, right. I feel like, if you're
Speaker 3: executing the eldest son and the next eldest is Vlad
Speaker 3: the Impaler, I guess he probably doesn't have that nickname.
Speaker 3: He doesn't have that. Yeah, he's not impaling yet if
Speaker 3: he's given off even like the slightest of impaling vibes.
Speaker 3: I don't know if he's like trained as both like
Speaker 3: in Eastern and Western fighting, and is like fighting as
Speaker 3: a knight with one hand. He is like Jean Clade
Speaker 3: van Dam in an early nineties movie, right, exact, just
Speaker 3: like kind of but I don't know.
Speaker 2: I say this a lot, listeners. If you are executing
Speaker 2: a family for their loyalties to the Sultan.
Speaker 3: Says all the time, Yeah, keep an eye out. Does
Speaker 3: one of them look like they might be an empale?
Speaker 3: Maybe don't do that execution, you know, keep him second
Speaker 3: in line, is all I'm saying. So, uh, it's unclear
Speaker 3: if Laude and Radu are free or still with the Sultan.
Speaker 3: They probably are still with the Sultan when their dad
Speaker 3: and brother get killed. But whatever the case, Vlad winds
Speaker 3: up going back to Murad and is like, Hey, they
Speaker 3: killed my family. I need to go.
Speaker 2: Do you know a pretty dope vengeance quest thing? I
Speaker 2: feel like I'm a good guy to have a vengeance quest.
Speaker 2: You know, all of this, all this martial arts training
Speaker 2: and shit I got Can I have some dudes, you know,
Speaker 2: some like some like fighting dudes, right, and Marad is like, Yeah,
Speaker 2: they'll probably work out pretty well for me. Have some dudes.
Speaker 3: So you know.
Speaker 2: Part of why this is noteworthy is that not long
Speaker 2: after his death he's going to become a symbol first
Speaker 2: of sort of resistance to the Ottomans and eventually of
Speaker 2: like Romanian independence. He's going to get this reputation is
Speaker 2: like the shield of the West from the marauding Ottomans,
Speaker 2: and his memory is used. You can find a lot
Speaker 2: of weird right wing culture warriors with Vlad the Impaler
Speaker 2: shit to this day. It's worth noting he only gets
Speaker 2: to power because he's cool with the Sultan right on
Speaker 2: both sides. Yeah, yeah, he's a both set, which is
Speaker 2: very much in line with other rulers and with how
Speaker 2: his dad had played things, you know, Yeah, and his
Speaker 2: uncles had played things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you do whatever is going to allow you to
Speaker 3: survive to the next day. Yeah, it's a rough time
Speaker 3: out there, yeah, exactly. So this works.
Speaker 2: He winds up being coming the ruler of Wallachia for
Speaker 2: what will be the first of three times. He is
Speaker 2: in and out of there several times. The first piece
Speaker 2: of documented evidence we have from Vlad the Impaler is
Speaker 2: this letter he writes right after he comes to power.
Speaker 2: It's the first documented like piece of writing that was
Speaker 2: done by his hands. And this is not like a
Speaker 2: big deal, but it's interesting that this first Lad the
Speaker 2: Impaler letter is written on All Saints Day or Halloween
Speaker 2: of fourteen forty eight.
Speaker 3: That's kind of cool. Yeah, a man knows his brand.
Speaker 2: That's incredible branding, right, that's the visionary site. Yeah, oh
Speaker 2: my god. So he is seventeen when this happens and
Speaker 2: all probably and he is already a hardened combat veteran,
Speaker 2: but he is not going to be ruler for very long.
Speaker 2: Within two months of taking power, one of his regional
Speaker 2: rivals invades Wallachia and forces young Vlad the Not Yet
Speaker 2: an Impaler to flee the scene. So by Christmas of
Speaker 2: fourteen forty eight, he is out of power.
Speaker 3: But with that nickname, they should have known he was
Speaker 3: going to be an impaler. Yeah, and his name is
Speaker 3: Lad than not Yet an Impaler. You got to keep
Speaker 3: checking his Wikipedia page to see if it's it's safe
Speaker 3: to fuck with him. Yeah, still not, but I've got
Speaker 3: bad things are coming for us. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the that's the moment in the movie, like
Speaker 2: they're checking their smartphones as they wait for the battle
Speaker 2: to start, and they're like, oh shit, it just got updated,
Speaker 2: and like the mods aren't reverting it, guys, we might
Speaker 2: be fucked.
Speaker 3: Bad news.
Speaker 2: So Ladsman the next couple of years bouncing around kingdoms
Speaker 2: ruled by his relatives in Moldova, cementing alliances, building a
Speaker 2: base of power. By fourteen fifty two, he's reconciled with
Speaker 2: him Hanyati and he's promised to serve the Hungarians as
Speaker 2: defender of Wallachia. So he betrays the Sultan. Now this
Speaker 2: is a bad time to betray the Sultan because right
Speaker 2: after he's like, nah, I'm totally team Hungary, Constantinople falls
Speaker 2: to the Turks, which is not a great position to
Speaker 2: be in. Right this whole place, like this is where
Speaker 2: you know, if you're fighting with the Turks and things
Speaker 2: go badly, you can retreat in the direction of Constantinople.
Speaker 2: That's going to stop being an option for these guys
Speaker 2: very soon. So by July of fourteen fifty three, lad
Speaker 2: has retaken power in Wallachia by personally hacking to death
Speaker 2: the guy who had usurped the throne from him, probably
Speaker 2: single combat, which is pretty cool. Right, Yeah, that is
Speaker 2: how I.
Speaker 3: Became the host of this podcast, right, Yeah, it was combat.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, so just hacking to pieces, that's right, hacked
Speaker 3: two pieces. So in fourteenth makes a statement, Yeah yeah,
Speaker 3: that's the best way to hack someone to pieces. O guy, Yeah,
Speaker 3: to that other guy, to the taptain of this podcast.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, you guys will take my kids.
Speaker 2: So that's right, that's right, that's why we do it.
Speaker 2: So fourteen fifty seven is the year when which Vlad
Speaker 2: will commit the first massacre that kind of starts his
Speaker 2: reputation off with a bang. As this history should drive home,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of turnover and willocke in politics, right.
Speaker 2: His family is in and out of power constantly, and
Speaker 2: a lot of this has to do with the boyers, right,
Speaker 2: these local nobles who are the rulers support system and
Speaker 2: his primary threat, right, because you can't rule without the
Speaker 2: support of the boyers. But also they're always, you know,
Speaker 2: angling to get someone in who's better, right, better for them,
Speaker 2: So I Vlad eventually gets kind of tired of this
Speaker 2: whole game, and in Easter of fourteen fifty seven, he
Speaker 2: invites all of his boyers for a big feast and
Speaker 2: while they're eating, he kills the yeah, don't Yeah, somebody's
Speaker 2: like in the bathroom, like you know, just kind of
Speaker 2: freshening up and checks his phone. It's like, oh shit,
Speaker 2: they changed his Wikipedia guys, we got to bounce.
Speaker 3: Oh man. I'm going to quote from it called the Feast, Yeah, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 3: real red wedding vibes.
Speaker 2: I'm going to quote from a contemporary account here. While
Speaker 2: all the citizens were feasting and the younger ones were dancing,
Speaker 2: he Dracula surrounded them the boyars led them together with
Speaker 2: their wives and children, just as they were dressed up
Speaker 2: for Easter, to Ponari, where they were put to work
Speaker 2: until their clothes were torn and they were left naked.
Speaker 2: So basically, he makes them build his castle. These like nobles,
Speaker 2: he forces, enslaves them, forces them to build his castle,
Speaker 2: and then he impales them to death, right them and
Speaker 2: their wives.
Speaker 3: All these dudes and their.
Speaker 2: Wives killed shit out of them, right, ugly stuff. Now,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of stories of impalement from his reign.
Speaker 2: This is kind of the first one, but you're going
Speaker 2: to get a lot more. The most commonly told one
Speaker 2: is that he wins this big victory against the Turks,
Speaker 2: and he has maybe tens of thousands of their soldiers
Speaker 2: impaled on the road leading to his capital, which is
Speaker 2: so frightening that the Sultan in his army retreat rather
Speaker 2: than advance further into Wallachia. It's impossible to know how
Speaker 2: precisely true that all is, but again to a lot
Speaker 2: of these weird right wing myths about the guy, it's
Speaker 2: worth noting if he did impale the Sultan's army, which
Speaker 2: is pretty likely, most of the guys, if not all
Speaker 2: of them that he impaled, would have been like Christian Europeans,
Speaker 2: because that's how the Ottoman army works, right, Like a
Speaker 2: lot of their soldiers are these kind of like local
Speaker 2: levees and stuff, often who are basically given to them
Speaker 2: as like this is part of if you're allied with
Speaker 2: the Ottomans, you send them an x number of kids
Speaker 2: every year, right, and they train a lot of these
Speaker 2: guys up as soldiers. Now, it's kind of unclear how
Speaker 2: many people I've lad the Impaler kills, but it's a shitload.
Speaker 2: Fifty thousand is probably a pretty good low estimate. Some
Speaker 2: higher estimates are up to like one hundred thousand people,
Speaker 2: and most of these are various forms of execution, including impalement.
Speaker 2: But despite again this reputation, he starts to get as
Speaker 2: the shield of the West. The majority of the people
Speaker 2: that he's going to kill are his own folks, right,
Speaker 2: you've got your boyers. Obviously, he kills a few hundred
Speaker 2: of them. He kills a lot of purported spies and criminals,
Speaker 2: and also just kind of anyone he thinks is a
Speaker 2: danger to his rule. Vlad the Impaler early on is
Speaker 2: going to be like, you know, what's going to keep
Speaker 2: me in power is becoming a law and order guy. Right,
Speaker 2: So he declares war on the homeless population, on beggars
Speaker 2: and stuff indigence. He gathers a huge number of these
Speaker 2: guys up and he burns them all to death, and
Speaker 2: like a barn. Basically truly a right wing hero, this
Speaker 2: guy is. He is very much a right wing era.
Speaker 2: He is again a law and order guy. His royal
Speaker 2: propaganda Burea will spread all these stories about like, oh,
Speaker 2: you know, this merchant came to a town that that
Speaker 2: Dracula was controlling one day and was like, somebody stole
Speaker 2: my gold, and Dracula, you know, would do something brutal
Speaker 2: to get it. Back right, like because there's you don't
Speaker 2: commit crime, right, there's one of this One of the
Speaker 2: common stories you hear is that like there's this watering
Speaker 2: post for people like traveling through a rural area and
Speaker 2: Dracula leaves this ornate golden cup there. And it's the
Speaker 2: point that he does this is that like, as long
Speaker 2: as the is there, you know that he's in power
Speaker 2: because nobody would dare steal anything when when Dracula's running
Speaker 2: the shit right almost certainly just like bullshit.
Speaker 3: But that's the story.
Speaker 2: One of the stories that gets told about this guy,
Speaker 2: the reality.
Speaker 3: Myth like the yeah, the good branding got him, a
Speaker 3: myth about him being good at branding. Yeah, exactly, that's
Speaker 3: a but that that's a cool story, a cool story.
Speaker 3: Golden cup.
Speaker 2: Again, probably not true because while he's in charge, there's
Speaker 2: a bunch of uprisings. People are in fact not too
Speaker 2: scared to piss off Dracula. Right, maybe they should have been,
Speaker 2: because these don't go well. But I'm going to quote
Speaker 2: again from Troe, who is our source, that is not
Speaker 2: a priminal quote. The villages of satuln Hosman and Casults
Speaker 2: were burned to the ground by his cavalry and the
Speaker 2: supporters of Lad the Monk were butchered. Who is one
Speaker 2: of these uprising leaders? A lot of lads Bode was
Speaker 2: totally destroyed. Talm's left blazing, and it's people hacked like
Speaker 2: cabbage in the town square. Merchants who are now expected
Speaker 2: to sell their wares at the specified towns of Tigovi
Speaker 2: State Tigsor and simplelun Cabbage like cabbage.
Speaker 3: Yeah, hacked like cabbage.
Speaker 2: Hacked like cabbage, Yeah, just to pieces shredded. Merchants who
Speaker 2: are now expected to sell their wares at below the
Speaker 2: market rate were rounded up for non compliance and according
Speaker 2: to these Saxon accounts, impaled by the road or boiled
Speaker 2: in cauldrons. The young men to whom it was claimed,
Speaker 2: had been sent to Alakia to learn the language, were
Speaker 2: likewise executed quite simply because they were clearly spies and
Speaker 2: the Sacks. And the reason he brings that up is
Speaker 2: that like a bunch of these German types have like
Speaker 2: moved into Romania over the preceding generation. So there's like
Speaker 2: German communities in a bunch of the cities in Wallachia.
Speaker 2: And as is always the case, these guys, a lot
Speaker 2: of them become like merchants, right, So these are kind
Speaker 2: of like your upper middle class merchant class, and a
Speaker 2: lot of these towns, that's a good group of people
Speaker 2: to blame all your problems on. So Lad's going to
Speaker 2: really do a lot of murdering of these German types.
Speaker 2: And so that's where a lot of the stories of
Speaker 2: him come from. Is these these especially these monks who
Speaker 2: like flee from him. You know, he fairly brutal to them,
Speaker 2: rain and they tell these they exaggerate these stories, right,
Speaker 2: he certainly did some fucked up shit, but they're also
Speaker 2: they're trying to like spread propaganda about this guy because
Speaker 2: he killed their friends.
Speaker 3: So they're also they're they're pumping it up a little bit, right, right,
Speaker 3: But does that help or does that just like make
Speaker 3: him more terrifying and people want to I.
Speaker 2: Mean, it's why he has this rep right, just because
Speaker 2: of these German germanic like monk accounts of his fatality.
Speaker 3: The monks had burn books, but they also were some
Speaker 3: of the only people who knew how to write, ye
Speaker 3: is that right? Yeah? So like a lot of this
Speaker 3: stuff is just the guy who was meanest to monks
Speaker 3: becomes a great historical monster. Just because monks knew how
Speaker 3: to write. Yeah, we say a lot. History is written
Speaker 3: by the victors, but it's also written by the people
Speaker 3: who know how to write, and so you've got a
Speaker 3: real advantage if you're the monks in that regard, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so yeah, flat Again, as we noted above, he's not
Speaker 3: just impaling people. He'll boil alive.
Speaker 2: He's got some more creative methods though. But impalement gets
Speaker 2: a lot of attention right in part because it's it's
Speaker 2: kind of identified with the East, even though they're not
Speaker 2: the only people who do it. And the most infamous
Speaker 2: story of Lad the impaling some people comes after a
Speaker 2: military victory he won against his his rival with a
Speaker 2: very silly name, Dan the Third. He's like, he's got
Speaker 2: all these wild ass Hungarian Romanian names, and then there's
Speaker 2: just Dan hanging out there, like yeah, all these guys,
Speaker 2: you've got Vlad the Dracule and then like yeah, and
Speaker 2: then there's Dan the Third.
Speaker 3: Dan. They don't like, who is going to win that one,
Speaker 3: DrAk or Dan the Third the Third Dan? Yeah? Third?
Speaker 3: So he beats this ship.
Speaker 2: And yeah, this Dan at a town called Brassov quote.
Speaker 2: It was here that the inhabitants were impaled in large
Speaker 2: numbers as the chapel of Saint Jacob burned to the ground.
Speaker 2: According to the poet Mikhel b him, the the impaler
Speaker 2: sat at a table in the open air and mopped
Speaker 2: up from his plate the blood of his writhing victims.
Speaker 2: The boyer, who complained of the foul stinch, was impaled
Speaker 2: higher than the rest. Now most yeah, pretty cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, mainly like watching everybody get impaled and killed and
Speaker 3: complained that it smelled bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and someone who was going to be Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's fun.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I gotta tell you, man, this place smells like shit. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So most of the Wallachians he massacred are again Germanic
Speaker 2: residents who have come to make up a significant chunk
Speaker 2: of the mercantile class during a series of migrations in
Speaker 2: previous centuries. And it's from a bunch of these guys
Speaker 2: that we get the stories of lad teppers that take
Speaker 2: him from he's just another guy in a pretty brutal
Speaker 2: area to like fucking Dracula. And I'm going to quote
Speaker 2: now from the Warfare History Network. Dracula's atrocities in Transylvania
Speaker 2: caused a tremendous backlash in the German community, which began
Speaker 2: to disseminate vicious propaganda against him. After extensive interviews with
Speaker 2: the survivors of the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, German poet
Speaker 2: Michael Beaham wrote the story of a bloodthirsty madman called
Speaker 2: Dracula of Lachia. In his poem, Biham describes the Vlad
Speaker 2: as dining amongst his impaled victims after the massacre. He
Speaker 2: even accuses Lad of dipping his bread in their blood.
Speaker 2: The genesis of the enduring association of Dracula with vampires.
Speaker 2: Vlad's horrific link to Transylvania as undoubtedly why Victorian novel
Speaker 2: Bram Stoker later chose to turn the real life Wallachian
Speaker 2: prince into a fictional Transylvanian count. So that's one argument
Speaker 2: is to like where the German this comes from. And
Speaker 2: some of the stories about Vlad are certainly true or
Speaker 2: at least had a germ of truth, right, But the
Speaker 2: whole legend of him is this bloodthirsty monster is the
Speaker 2: result of an effective propaganda campaign, not just by his enemies.
Speaker 2: They're one of them, right, These Germans want to turn
Speaker 2: him into a monster. The fact that he is so
Speaker 2: horrifying also helps to turn him into this like anti
Speaker 2: Turkish figure, like the Shield of the West. But the
Speaker 2: fact that he's so famous too. He's going to later
Speaker 2: primarily under Chouchescu, who is the We've done episodes on Chouchescu,
Speaker 2: the communist dictator in kind of the mid to late
Speaker 2: twentieth century. He's going to become this figure of Romanian nationalism,
Speaker 2: right because he's just like your first famous guy kind
Speaker 2: of that you can call the Romanian figure.
Speaker 3: So the blood sucking of Dracula originated with like dipping,
Speaker 3: like with kind of a like part time we're gonna
Speaker 3: get it.
Speaker 2: We're going to get into that. There's more to the
Speaker 2: blood sucking. But the first time you've got kind of
Speaker 2: Dracula directly like tied to drinking blood is this story
Speaker 2: of Laddy and Paler dipping his bread in blood, which
Speaker 2: again is almost certainly a lie because like, you kill people,
Speaker 2: but do you drink their blood?
Speaker 3: Really? I don't know, pretty gross. I wouldn't, so wouldn't,
Speaker 3: But I also love dipping my bread and stuff, and
Speaker 3: it's like such are to go about drinking blood? I mean,
Speaker 3: but also very much less badass. I dip some.
Speaker 2: Bread bread out of blood every now and then. I
Speaker 2: bet you could make a nice blood gravy that would
Speaker 2: be pretty rich, but probably a little salty.
Speaker 3: Of the most British, I've tried the hell out of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll do anything with blood, those weirdos. So, speaking
Speaker 2: of the British, our advertisers are not the British, so
Speaker 2: you can feel good about spending your money with them.
Speaker 3: We have been working on just getting the British to
Speaker 3: sponsor the show. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not going great. Yeah, but we'll keep We'll
Speaker 2: keep pressing the flesh. Don't worry.
Speaker 3: We're back.
Speaker 2: So Vlad is going to go to war with his
Speaker 2: former allies the Turks in fourteen fifty nine. The Pope
Speaker 2: calls a crusade, and Vlad is the only European head
Speaker 2: of state to be like, yeah, I'll do that. Everyone
Speaker 2: else is like, I feel like we tried a lot
Speaker 2: of crusades and most of them didn't go well.
Speaker 3: So just Robert from my frame of reference, up to
Speaker 3: this point, the wars are being waged, or you know,
Speaker 3: when he's going in and like takeing out a rival
Speaker 3: and killing his whole town. How many people, Like, is
Speaker 3: it like sometimes thousands? Yeah, thousands, Okay, yeah, sometimes, Like
Speaker 3: again we're talking thousand to one hundred thousand total. That's
Speaker 3: he's going to massacre. And remember reading something about like
Speaker 3: ancient Greek warfare where it was like the towns were
Speaker 3: like so it was more on in line with like
Speaker 3: a high school football rivalry, like a lot of the
Speaker 3: towns and like the warring and like it was like yeah,
Speaker 3: and then they like came to our town, and you know,
Speaker 3: it's just like these small communities going to war with
Speaker 3: one another, which I don't really have a frame of
Speaker 3: reference for because war in the modern context is so massive.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, this is definitely smaller than modern wars.
Speaker 2: But he is killing a lot of people of these towns.
Speaker 2: You're probably talking dozens or hundreds of executions, but like
Speaker 2: he is, he is going to execute tens of thousands,
Speaker 2: So like it's not not purely like this little shit either.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, so it almost makes it like area, you know,
Speaker 3: it's pretty Yeah, everyone gets Whitely murdered in a massacre.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's that is kind of how you have
Speaker 2: to do it. Anyone left alive, that's like a threat
Speaker 2: to your your power potentially, so he breaks his treaty
Speaker 2: with the Sultan fourteen fifty nine. And part of this
Speaker 2: treaty is that every you know, so often Wailakia has
Speaker 2: to send several thousand young boys to serve as janissaries, right,
Speaker 2: which is like this Turkish elite military unit made up
Speaker 2: of like the kids of their rivals basically. And the
Speaker 2: way vlad announces we're not friends anymore is when the
Speaker 2: Sultan sends recruiting officers, Vladim pales them. And then when
Speaker 2: the Sultan is like what the fuck and he sends
Speaker 2: some diplomats to be like, hey, bro, what's going on. Lad,
Speaker 2: It's not going to go great. Vladd nails their turbans
Speaker 2: to their heads, which is going to piss off the
Speaker 2: Sultan a lot. That would piss me off if I
Speaker 2: sent diplomats and somebody nailed their their hats to their heads,
Speaker 2: I wouldn't be thrilled time.
Speaker 3: If it's cool, it's cool, don't get me wrong. That's
Speaker 3: a cool thing to do if you're a bad guy.
Speaker 3: You know, if you're a bad guy and you're really
Speaker 3: leaning into it. Yeah, Also, like maybe don't send the
Speaker 3: second wave of I feel like the first sends a
Speaker 3: message what we do. We think that he just didn't
Speaker 3: like the recruiters specifically, and was like, these silver tongued
Speaker 3: foxes will come and uh cool him down.
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna maybe this isn't the case. I'm not
Speaker 2: a not an expert here, but if I'm in charge,
Speaker 2: right and this happens, first thought I'm gonna have is like, oh,
Speaker 2: I could promote some guys I don't like to diplomats and.
Speaker 3: Get rid of the fuckers.
Speaker 1: I could.
Speaker 3: I could drop a few of these dudes, you know,
Speaker 3: just you my top diplomatic. Yeah, you're the you're the
Speaker 3: head of foreign policy. I got a gig for you now.
Speaker 3: So you breed like an elite fighting group made of
Speaker 3: your enemy's children.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the janissaries, right, not necessarily like like you're
Speaker 2: the rulers, but like basically, if you're a vassal to
Speaker 2: the Ottomans, you send them some kids every year, and
Speaker 2: there's some rules like it's not going to be your
Speaker 2: only son. If you only have one kid, they're not
Speaker 2: going to take that kid generally, and it's not the
Speaker 2: oldest usually, I think is one of the other rules.
Speaker 2: Like they they try because they don't want to piss
Speaker 2: people off too much. But like they take these kids
Speaker 2: in and they raise them and train them to be
Speaker 2: like elite soldiers, the Janisaries.
Speaker 3: Your spare kids, your kids, Yeah, soldiers maybe if you
Speaker 3: if you fuck around. Yeah, weird time, weird situation myself
Speaker 3: as one of any of these people. And it seems like, uh,
Speaker 3: and I'm not gonna lie a fucking waking nightmare.
Speaker 2: Yea to live at this time. Yeah, the past is
Speaker 2: not just a foreign country, but almost like a different planet.
Speaker 2: It's wild of the ship.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Anyway, they go to Wark Vlad with the Turks, and
Speaker 2: the thing about Lad the Impaler that we definitely know is,
Speaker 2: by I think all accounts, he's a really good military leader.
Speaker 2: He's like really very good at running an army. He
Speaker 2: is outnumbered this whole time, often two to one, but
Speaker 2: he wins regular victories against the Sultan, and obviously when
Speaker 2: he captures Sultan's troops, he's got impale a shitload of
Speaker 2: these guys. But it's also the Sultan's army is very
Speaker 2: big and Vlad's is not, and so he suffers pretty
Speaker 2: high casualties over the course of this fighting, and eventually
Speaker 2: the elites back at the capitol are like, so, we're
Speaker 2: just burning all of this money fighting this war that
Speaker 2: we cannot, Like, the Ottoman Empire is much bigger than Wallachia.
Speaker 2: We've already burnt through a lot of our army. You
Speaker 2: are eventually going to lose this thing. So let's get
Speaker 2: rid of this guy, because we don't want to keep
Speaker 2: doing this shit, right, We want to do this stuff
Speaker 2: that's fun, not slowly, slowly lose a war of grinding attrition.
Speaker 2: So they overthrow Vlad. They put his sexy brother Radu
Speaker 2: in charge, and winds up having to like flee the
Speaker 2: scene after this battle and ends up in the care
Speaker 2: of the Hungarian king, and he's like, hey, could you
Speaker 2: give me an army to like take back power? And
Speaker 2: the King of Hungary is like, dude, you you and
Speaker 2: your family are the least reliable people on the planet.
Speaker 2: Why would I do that? Right, Like, why would I
Speaker 2: do that? You can't be trusted, None of you can.
Speaker 2: So if Lad SPAN's twelve years as the King of
Speaker 2: Hungary's prisoner, writer Mark Mark Longo notes quote that he
Speaker 2: wiled away his time torturing and impaling rodents he caught
Speaker 2: in his quarters. Maybe true, maybe not fun story either
Speaker 2: way and on brand, you know, good. Good for him,
Speaker 2: he's at least preventing the next plague by getting rid
Speaker 2: of those rats.
Speaker 3: I done it. I'm not a big rat guy. Not
Speaker 3: a big rat guy. He did a it's like done
Speaker 3: an article at Cracked. I think where just about how
Speaker 3: like wondrous rats are, Like, they're so smart and sourceful,
Speaker 3: and they're also a pretty big danger though. Yeah, even
Speaker 3: in a pet post ratituoy world, though, I would like,
Speaker 3: at an instinctual level, rather they all die right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's gonna be popular with certain quarters, unpopular
Speaker 2: with some.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, like intellectually I wouldn't do it because
Speaker 3: balance in nature.
Speaker 2: But like my gut is just like ugh anti rat. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I read too many stories about the Black Plague to.
Speaker 3: Trust him too, I think.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So he catches a lucky break Vlad because his
Speaker 2: brother loses power in fourteen seventy three and vlad Or
Speaker 2: Rodhu gets replaced by a guy who wants to be
Speaker 2: friendly with the Ottomans. So with Hungarian backing, Vlad is
Speaker 2: able to retake the throne from this guy who's overthrown
Speaker 2: his brother in fourteen seventy six, and he takes power
Speaker 2: for the third time, which lasts about two months, after
Speaker 2: which he is found decapitated in a field.
Speaker 3: Is yeah. Wow. Yeah, it's like the ending of a
Speaker 3: no country for old men man, right, he just like
Speaker 3: having very killed at Jones, walks onto the sun said,
Speaker 3: then gives the monolog It'll do till the mess gets here. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 3: it's part but good yeah, good line, a lot of
Speaker 3: good lines. So he came back, did did power for
Speaker 3: a little bit longer, and then they they took him out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, then they took him out. Yeah, it's a it's like, uh,
Speaker 2: you know that banned the scorpions Jack, Yeah, of course,
Speaker 2: it's like when they It's like when after they broke
Speaker 2: up and then came back. It's just like that, don't
Speaker 2: look up the scorpions. I don't know if that's true.
Speaker 3: So and then we're found beheaded in a field somewhere.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Maybe, yeah, that that is what happened to the people
Speaker 2: who wrote Rock You Like a Hurricane. It is also
Speaker 2: worth noting that, like, you know, during this period of
Speaker 2: time where he's this military leader of lad his his
Speaker 2: big move is attack people at night. Also feeds into
Speaker 2: the vampire. Right, He's this blood drinking dude who comes
Speaker 2: after at the night, you know, at night his brother
Speaker 2: got buried alive. You can see some of the pieces
Speaker 2: of this, but there's a lot more to the story
Speaker 2: about how he goes from this dude, who is again
Speaker 2: pretty standard brutal Eastern European medieval leader to Dracula, the
Speaker 2: guy recently played by Nicholas Cage in a fairly fun movie,
Speaker 2: The Renfield Movie.
Speaker 3: I enjoyed it. Nicholas picture Nicholas Cage for this entire
Speaker 3: story well, and Nick Cage and Nick Holt need to
Speaker 3: be in more things together. Both both fascinating faces, both
Speaker 3: of those guys. So back to the story. So we're
Speaker 3: going to talk about how he goes from this European
Speaker 3: military leader to the Dracula guy. And to do that
Speaker 3: we have to, thankfully finally get to move from the
Speaker 3: shady environs of ill documented old history into a well
Speaker 3: trod field of solid folklorist research. And my main source
Speaker 3: here is the book The Vampire, a New History by
Speaker 3: English professor Nicholas Groom. Groom also writes articles about Nick
Speaker 3: Cave as a folklorus. This is another thing he's interested in,
Speaker 3: and I think that's pretty back. Yeah, definitely a vampire.
Speaker 3: I will say, I think higher odds that Nick Cave
Speaker 3: has drank the blood of his enemies than Vlad the Impaler,
Speaker 3: like almost certainly, Like I have trouble imagining Nick Cave
Speaker 3: drinking anything that's not the blood of his enemies. But
Speaker 3: of course, yeah, that's kind of his vibe, that is
Speaker 3: his vibe. Definitely mopped it up with a nice pa.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, he's a waste not kind of guy. That
Speaker 2: thing you know about Nick Cave. Murder Ballads, great album,
Speaker 2: everybody check it out. Got a good song about Staggerly anyway.
Speaker 2: Groom This Folklorus notes that the origins of the word
Speaker 2: vampire are somewhat controversial. It is often credited to coming
Speaker 2: from the French term avante paree, which means ancestor, but
Speaker 2: this is inaccurate. The terms most likely origins are in
Speaker 2: the Lithuanian word vompti, which means to drink, and the
Speaker 2: Serbo Croatian vampire or the Old Russian word upir, both
Speaker 2: of which are names right now. While the word vampire
Speaker 2: is quite modern, stories of blood sucking undead monsters that
Speaker 2: can change shape are about as old as civilization. It's
Speaker 2: often noted that the ancient Egyptian deity sec Met had
Speaker 2: some vampiric traits, but just drinking blood that doesn't make
Speaker 2: you a vampire, right. That trait is old in folklore,
Speaker 2: so it gets kind of put into vampires because we've
Speaker 2: always had blood drinking monsters and gods in our myths.
Speaker 2: But the most direct precursor to the actual like cryptid
Speaker 2: basically monster, the vampire comes from Serbia, where the term
Speaker 2: vukodlak refers to both a vampire and a werewolf. Right,
Speaker 2: And it's worth noting considering how often these two go
Speaker 2: together in like our modern horror stories. R Like you,
Speaker 2: they come from the same origin, right, Vampires and werewolves
Speaker 2: were originally the same thing.
Speaker 3: Make sense.
Speaker 2: They're both they both eat people, and they're both like
Speaker 2: chained shape in the monsters right into animals, right, both
Speaker 2: the vampires into bats, were wolves into wolves.
Speaker 3: So they started like like, so I have a five
Speaker 3: year old and when he's playing, he's like, and then
Speaker 3: I can do this, and then I can also do that,
Speaker 3: and like sometimes it turned into a wolf, and then
Speaker 3: I can turn then I have wings and I have
Speaker 3: a and then I'm a bat. Like originally it was
Speaker 3: all just like somebody doing that. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Look, the winter is long. You spend most of it
Speaker 2: sitting inside your shack, hoping the wolves don't get you,
Speaker 2: and eating I don't know whatever, like fucking shit you
Speaker 2: managed to save from harvest time. There's not much to do,
Speaker 2: and you're drinking, so you're going to wind up telling
Speaker 2: a lot of stories about bullshit. Yeah, yeah, just kind
Speaker 2: of like adding stuff to it over time. Now, while
Speaker 2: the word vampire again, vampire is very modern, this is
Speaker 2: not an old concept like what we consider a vampire.
Speaker 2: So both kind of the werewolf and vampire mists we
Speaker 2: have today started off as these kind of like the vukodlac,
Speaker 2: this Serbian mythical creature, and they split pretty recently as
Speaker 2: groom rites quote. There is, however, a significant distinction to
Speaker 2: be made in the English language. In English, the werewolf
Speaker 2: was established by medieval times as a human shape changer,
Speaker 2: with origins and Anglo Saxon and possibly Old Norse culture,
Speaker 2: as well as in classical accounts of the disease of licanthropy.
Speaker 2: The word vampire, however, was adopted in the seventeen thirties
Speaker 2: to describe a contemporary wonder. And this is really interesting
Speaker 2: to me because the concept we have of a vampire
Speaker 2: is inherently modern. You don't get a vampire with just
Speaker 2: just with people telling stories in the woods.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: The concept of a vampire inherently brings comes out of
Speaker 2: this sudden explosion in scientific understanding and knowledge that occurs
Speaker 2: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which come with both
Speaker 2: not just an understanding of like German disease theory, which
Speaker 2: is part of the vampire higher myth, right, this disease
Speaker 2: that gets spread through biting blood. But yeah, yeah, it
Speaker 2: comes with an increased appreciation of understanding of like the
Speaker 2: importance of blood in a medical and a forensic sense.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: The seventeen hundreds is when we start to use blood
Speaker 2: to convict people of murders.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Obviously you're not doing DNA tests then, right, But in
Speaker 2: seventeen forty one, this English murderer James Hall gets convicted
Speaker 2: because he kills a guy and he can't clean up
Speaker 2: all of the blood, right, So there's like blood from
Speaker 2: the murder, and it's also on some of his stuff.
Speaker 2: And this is like, I think the first time, or
Speaker 2: at least one of the first times that like blood
Speaker 2: as forensic evidence was used to convict a dude, is.
Speaker 3: It because like, prior to that, just everything was covered
Speaker 3: with blood. All this there's a lot of blood. Yeah, right,
Speaker 3: I just slipped in some blood, Yeah, stepping out of
Speaker 3: my house. Well I don't know where blood came from. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm sure there were other times where that connection was made,
Speaker 3: but this is like a famous case, and it's famous.
Speaker 3: It's also like really noteworthy in the history of forensics,
Speaker 3: and that's part of what's going to build to us
Speaker 3: understanding vampires. Right.
Speaker 2: Another key aspect, key ingredient to creating the vampire is
Speaker 2: the birth of print journalism, right, which plays a major
Speaker 2: role in disseminating these true crime stories. The vampire is
Speaker 2: a concept is inherently linked to true crime because starting
Speaker 2: in the seventeen hundreds, in particular, we get all of
Speaker 2: these viral news stories about serial killers and murderers. And
Speaker 2: this really takes off in the eighteen hundreds because true
Speaker 2: crime has always been a reliable moneymaker and that's a
Speaker 2: big part of this myth. Bloom cites a book published
Speaker 2: by demonologist George Sinclair in sixteen eighty five who describes
Speaker 2: the murder of a man named Spalding in a town
Speaker 2: of called dal Keith. And this he describes a murder
Speaker 2: committed by a man named Spalding in a town called Dalkeith,
Speaker 2: and Spalding gets caught and hung but reanimate several times. Right,
Speaker 2: they don't quite kill him successfully, so he keeps coming back.
Speaker 2: And this is sort of one of the story that
Speaker 2: contributes to the birth of the vampire myth, right, because
Speaker 2: it's really noteworthy. This guy is this, commits this brutal
Speaker 2: murder and then you can't kill him, right. It's kind
Speaker 2: of like the rasputant stories. It gets spread a lot, right,
Speaker 2: and so people start like talking about it, and it's
Speaker 2: in their mind consciously or subconsciously as they're continuing to
Speaker 2: spend these folklore stories about monsters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's like that there is I think an
Speaker 3: under rated like blurriness to the barrier between life and death,
Speaker 3: like you see even today. And you know, it's just
Speaker 3: like at a certain point it's like I guess they're
Speaker 3: like pretty dead, right, Yeah, like there there. You know,
Speaker 3: it's like you don't know when a work of artist,
Speaker 3: the artist is just like done when they're done. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it's like yeah, so yeah, it makes sense to
Speaker 3: me that that would be a contributing factor because it's
Speaker 3: still kind of confounding, and I think something that people
Speaker 3: don't like to think about, yeah, from doctors, about like
Speaker 3: not wanting to do a DNA or not wanting to
Speaker 3: be resuscitated. It's because there's like this weird blariness where
Speaker 3: you can be like kept alive even though you're mostly dead.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's also you know, it's it's not uncommon
Speaker 2: for people to be buried alive back then, and it's
Speaker 2: also not uncommon for people to commit murder. And some
Speaker 2: folkloris there's a theory that a lot of monster myths
Speaker 2: in the vampire would be kind of chief among them
Speaker 2: have their origin and unreal crimes by like what we
Speaker 2: now call serial killers, right, and people somebody in your
Speaker 2: community who you've known surprises everyone by committing this brutal
Speaker 2: series of murders. It's really maybe you don't want to
Speaker 2: acknowledge that this. You could have just gotten this person wrong, right,
Speaker 2: somebody had something dark inside them that you didn't see,
Speaker 2: and they committed this terrible crime. So the more comforting
Speaker 2: thing to believe is that they've caught some sort of
Speaker 2: demonic infection, right, sure, you know, and you know, for
Speaker 2: a while people just say, yeah, demons in them. But
Speaker 2: like vamporism in this age of science, is a transmissible
Speaker 2: in and that can explain how somebody can do something
Speaker 2: seemingly out of character for them. Oh, this guy that
Speaker 2: we all knew killed his wife and kids in this
Speaker 2: horrible way. He's a vampire. He caught the vampire infection, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: And because there's this growing understanding of like vamporism as
Speaker 2: an illness, there's a thing you can do as opposed
Speaker 2: to just being horrified at this, at this terrible crime.
Speaker 2: You execute the murderer, but you also have to ensure
Speaker 2: that he's not going to reanimate, right, which gives you
Speaker 2: some action that you can take that maybe makes you
Speaker 2: feel like you're protecting yourself.
Speaker 3: Right, So you just hang some garlic around their neck.
Speaker 2: Well, that is one of the things that you do. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's a couple of things that you do that play
Speaker 2: into the later myths. Right when somebody, when you think
Speaker 2: somebody is a vampire, you cut their head off often
Speaker 2: after you kill them, and you stake them. Not The
Speaker 2: initial version is not that the steak kills the vampire,
Speaker 2: but you stake them to their coffin so they can't
Speaker 2: get it, they can't get out.
Speaker 3: That's why. That's why I do it mainly, And but
Speaker 3: I did. I only rarely do the head cutting off thing. Yeah,
Speaker 3: well that's the way you got such a vampire problem,
Speaker 3: and that's why I'm my property is lousy with vampires.
Speaker 1: You to watch the Vampire Diary series, do I have
Speaker 1: you not?
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm a young person who is pop culturally engaged,
Speaker 3: so of course I've watched it and know exactly the
Speaker 3: reference you're talking about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, why don't you explain that reference just to the listeners?
Speaker 1: Know, Mitt Robert and I obviously know is one of
Speaker 1: the best television shows of all time. But the staking, yes,
Speaker 1: the head cutting off, yes, But the garlic myth?
Speaker 3: Yeah, myth?
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, I mean you would often stuff garlic in
Speaker 2: the mouth of the corpse too.
Speaker 1: You could also rip their heart out, that's the thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, all sorts of stuff. People do a lot
Speaker 2: of different shit, and they do it not just as
Speaker 2: interesting because it's understood as a communicable infection. You don't
Speaker 2: just do this to the murderer. You do this too
Speaker 2: his victims too, because they might have caught it and
Speaker 2: you don't want them to re animate.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So again it's important to note this is all very
Speaker 2: tied to old folklore and superstitious beliefs about monsters, but
Speaker 2: it's also tied to medical science. You can look at
Speaker 2: all these things that become part of the lore of
Speaker 2: how you defeat a vampire as people trying to create
Speaker 2: diagnostic and treatment criteria for a disease.
Speaker 3: Now evil, Yeah, it's the sixteen hundred, seventeen hundreds, early
Speaker 3: eighteen hundreds. They're not good at that yet, right, like
Speaker 3: they do. This is not I'm just saying this is
Speaker 3: rigorous science, but it is. It is born out of
Speaker 3: an attempt to do to think scientifically, right. That is
Speaker 3: an key aspect to it. A lot of the modern
Speaker 3: like serial killer psychological profiling stuff is also equally just
Speaker 3: complete bullshit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, lots of total bullshit, and it does I think
Speaker 2: a lot of our beliefs about like forensic science working
Speaker 2: a lot better than it does a lot of our
Speaker 2: desire to believe in like these competent hyper detectives does
Speaker 2: come out of like the same thing as the concept
Speaker 2: of a vampire, which is that, like, it's scary that
Speaker 2: people can commit murders and get away with them sometimes,
Speaker 2: and so it's comforting if you can find an explanation,
Speaker 2: even if that explanation a lot of it's nonsense, right,
Speaker 2: You know, forensic profiling is a flawed scientific field, but
Speaker 2: at least it provides an answer, you know.
Speaker 3: Bring the scientists in, Yeah, now, make us feel better. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Vamporism is not just people wanting to like make things
Speaker 2: seem comfortable. There are also good, at the time, pretty
Speaker 2: good scientific reasons to believe that vamporism might be a
Speaker 2: real illness. A lot of it comes from the fact
Speaker 2: that rabies explodes in large parts of Europe during the
Speaker 2: time in which vampires are born as a mythical creature. Right,
Speaker 2: there's these huge outbreaks. Animals will bite several people, and
Speaker 2: then those people rabies can cause you to get violently aggressive.
Speaker 2: They'll bite people and they'll transfer the disease to those people, right,
Speaker 2: And people who have rabies, there are certain things that
Speaker 2: seem kind of like vamporism in them. One of them, obviously,
Speaker 2: is this sudden, unexplained, violent aggression. They also have a
Speaker 2: fear of water, right, that's noted as like a side
Speaker 2: effective rabies. Vamp and folklore can't cross running water.
Speaker 1: Not true on the Vampire Diaries, Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: I'm glad the Vampire Diaries disagrees.
Speaker 3: So one fact check everything for us using the text
Speaker 3: of the Vampire Diaries. So you get. One thing that.
Speaker 2: Differentiates the vampire from other beasts of legend is that
Speaker 2: there isn't it. It is a scientific phenomenon. That is
Speaker 2: how it's seen.
Speaker 3: It is a disease.
Speaker 2: You diagnose people with a it's not a Boggin's out
Speaker 2: in the woods. It's an illness, right, And so there's
Speaker 2: diagnostic criteria and a lot of beliefs about how vamporism
Speaker 2: worked come from early attempts to grapple with germ theory
Speaker 2: and the like. It's the result of an attempt at
Speaker 2: scientific thinking that fails. And while a lot of monsters
Speaker 2: and stories drink blood, Dracula, I think is the first
Speaker 2: to suck it. So he's not just drinking it to
Speaker 2: get nourishment. He is sucking it and like that is
Speaker 2: providing him with like vital life force, right, And that
Speaker 2: is tied to an early understanding of blood transfusion. Right,
Speaker 2: that's we start transfusing blood into people in the late
Speaker 2: sixteen hundreds.
Speaker 3: Way too early. Yeah, we are not good at it.
Speaker 3: You want to get sixteen hundred blood because it's.
Speaker 2: As soon as people develop the hypodermic needle and realize
Speaker 2: that we can inject blood into our veins, it becomes
Speaker 2: just the quackest quack here. You think these like rich
Speaker 2: people today shooting their young kids blood into them are
Speaker 2: are quacks? Oh, let me read you from This is
Speaker 2: from Groom's book The Wild Story of a Guy named
Speaker 2: Arthur Koga Quote Coga, a thirty two year old divinity
Speaker 2: graduate of Cambridge University, was looked upon as a very
Speaker 2: freakish and extravagant man. On twenty third November sixteen sixty seven,
Speaker 2: he was treated to become more docile by receiving a
Speaker 2: blood transfusion from a Lamb Peppies who's like one of
Speaker 2: the doctors observed that the medical fraternity differ in the
Speaker 2: opinion they have of the effects of it. Some think
Speaker 2: it may have a good effect upon him as a
Speaker 2: frantic man by cooling his blood. Others that it will
Speaker 2: not have any effect at all. Coga saw the lamb
Speaker 2: as emblematic of meekness and humility, declaring in Latin, the
Speaker 2: blood of the sheep has symbolic power like the blood
Speaker 2: of Christ, for Christ is the lamb of God. And
Speaker 2: science there solid medical thinking.
Speaker 3: Yeah. The lamb's blood was transfused using quills and silver pipes,
Speaker 3: but Coga received a payment of twenty shillings, drank canary
Speaker 3: wine and smoked a pipe in celebration, and the operation
Speaker 3: was repeated on twelfth of December. Coga's mood was not
Speaker 3: noticeably softened by the treatment. However, some change has apparently
Speaker 3: taken place. He wrote a begging letter to the Royal
Speaker 3: Society complaining that he had been transformed into another species
Speaker 3: and was reduced to pawning his clothes, or, as he
Speaker 3: bombastically put it, he dearly purchases your sheep's blood with
Speaker 3: the loss of his own woolen. This sheep racked vessel
Speaker 3: of his like that of Argos. He addresses himself to
Speaker 3: you and the golden fleece. He signed himself Angus Coga
Speaker 3: or Coga the sheep. Wow.
Speaker 2: So this is probably a guy having like a mental
Speaker 2: health crisis and They're like, we've got to shoot full
Speaker 2: of sheep blood.
Speaker 3: You know what would help this? Yeah, he doesn't feel
Speaker 3: good after this and convinces himself it's because he's been
Speaker 3: turned into a sheep man. Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I have a I have a quick question for you. Sure, sure, Jack.
Speaker 3: So we've talked about this on my podcast, The Daily
Speaker 3: Zeitgeist with Miles Gray. Yeah, the model of vampire fangs.
Speaker 3: When you picture a vampire sucking blood, do you picture
Speaker 3: the fangs having little hollow tubes inside them? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 3: how the blood up like a reverse like snake fang.
Speaker 3: And I assume that that leads into their veins, right,
Speaker 3: and then that they get that blood in their veins.
Speaker 3: That's my assumption. Well, on the Vampire Diary, I feel
Speaker 3: like not on the Vampire Diaries, they kind of just
Speaker 3: look like pointy little teeth. They really makes sense. We
Speaker 3: we've always we've like talked about where we I think
Speaker 3: I got that from the Reese's peanut butter cup ed Yeah,
Speaker 3: where that is of most of my medical information? Yeah,
Speaker 3: because it doesn't really like we've we've asked this of
Speaker 3: a bunch of our guests, and like half of them
Speaker 3: are like, yeah, of course that's exactly what happens in
Speaker 3: my brain, and the other half are like, what are
Speaker 3: you talking about? Why would that be? It? Like you
Speaker 3: just they poke two little holes and then suck your blood,
Speaker 3: as it's said, They don't. They don't say I want
Speaker 3: to like have my.
Speaker 2: I want to suck your blood. I want to like
Speaker 2: drink your blood and have it go into my stomach. Yes,
Speaker 2: I think assuming that that line that I don't even
Speaker 2: know where that comes from. I think that's like, that's
Speaker 2: like Hanna bar Barrack cartoons in the seventies where he
Speaker 2: probably started saying that. But I do treat that as
Speaker 2: as vampiric fact for sure. Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
Speaker 3: But I was just I basically that is one of
Speaker 3: the first questions I ask everybody. Sure, the horror subject
Speaker 3: of vampire.
Speaker 2: Known for this, So by the seventeen hundreds, blood is
Speaker 2: a central topic of scientific discussion, and all of these
Speaker 2: factors are these intellectual people are shooting blood into each other. Right,
Speaker 2: there's the birth of true crime as a genre. You've
Speaker 2: got constant news stories that are just like lavish tales
Speaker 2: of bloody, gory murder. You've got this early understanding of forensics,
Speaker 2: this early understanding of germ theory, all of that is
Speaker 2: going to play a role in what's called the Great
Speaker 2: Vampire Epidemic.
Speaker 3: Were you aware that this was a thing, that we
Speaker 3: had a vampire epidemic? I was not.
Speaker 2: No, it's fucking dope. It runs from about seventeen twenty
Speaker 2: five to about the mid seventeen fifties, and it's basically
Speaker 2: there's a moral panic about vampires, kind of the same
Speaker 2: way we have it when like you get a terrorist
Speaker 2: attack and then suddenly people in like rural towns thousands
Speaker 2: of miles away are like they're coming for us next. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: you get all this kind of stuff, right, or you'll
Speaker 2: get yeah, you'll hear a story about like a serial
Speaker 2: killer in fucking Idaho, and then like people will start
Speaker 2: flipping out, like I don't know, suburban Georgia that like
Speaker 2: their next human beings are not good at threat modeling.
Speaker 2: That happens with vampires, right. There's this suddenly, this explosion
Speaker 2: in vampire tales all around Europe, primarily Western and Eastern Europe.
Speaker 2: One write up on the Great Vampire Epidemic that I
Speaker 2: found by researchers from the University of Virginia credits the
Speaker 2: epidemic to outbreaks of both rabies and polagra. So you
Speaker 2: have a bunch of rabies outbreaks. Not hard to see
Speaker 2: why someone again not a rational that if there's a
Speaker 2: rabies outbreak in your town and someone's like, it's vampires,
Speaker 2: you'd be.
Speaker 3: Like, yeah, it seems like it sure looks like vampires.
Speaker 3: Pale guy who has blood all over his mouth which
Speaker 3: is crossing water eating people. Sure, yeah, it seems like
Speaker 3: a vampire to me.
Speaker 1: Pale guys.
Speaker 3: Glad you had like nice tans? What was they just
Speaker 3: looked normal?
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're just looked normal. Jack.
Speaker 3: Wow. Wow, Wow you said that like I was being Yeah.
Speaker 2: You're not you're not familiar with the sacred Text. The
Speaker 2: other disease out that contributes to vampire understanding is there's
Speaker 2: these these outbreaks of what's called polagra. Now, polagra is
Speaker 2: an illness. It's very new to Europeans, which is why
Speaker 2: it freaks them out right, because it hadn't existed, because
Speaker 2: it couldn't have because polagra is something you get as
Speaker 2: a result of eating too much corn or improperly prepared corn. Right,
Speaker 2: there's ways you have to prepare corn that we know
Speaker 2: about now in order to avoid getting pelagra. But corn
Speaker 2: has just it's this sexy new world crop that we
Speaker 2: import here and start putting in everything. And so people
Speaker 2: are getting pollagra because we're not used to corn yet, right,
Speaker 2: And pollagra has a lot of symptoms that seem similar
Speaker 2: to vamporism. You get a sensitivity to sunlight, right, you
Speaker 2: can't be out in the sun. You get burnt really easily,
Speaker 2: right obvious where that comes from. You get severe anemias.
Speaker 2: Some people with pelagra will crave blood. Now again, animal
Speaker 2: blood is often used in this period in various food sausages,
Speaker 2: so it's not weird that somebody would have access to it.
Speaker 2: But like people who can't be out on the sun
Speaker 2: and crave blood, not hard to see where that fits in, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: And I'm going to quote from the University of Virginia here.
Speaker 2: Epidemics link rabies to a large number of deaths in
Speaker 2: Eastern Europe, where vampire hysteria was particularly strong. Several hundred
Speaker 2: cases of the disease were recorded, spread initially by rabid
Speaker 2: wolves and then in at least some cases people. The
Speaker 2: wolf and the vampire have a well known link as
Speaker 2: being a creature the vampire can change into but further
Speaker 2: the disease is spread through biting. Victims avoid sunlight, and
Speaker 2: they can be repelled by strong odors, garlic being a possibility.
Speaker 2: The hysteria that started to spread into the rest of
Speaker 2: Europe led to the word vampire from the Serbian, first
Speaker 2: entering German as their vampire around seventeen twenty six and
Speaker 2: later into English vampire by seventeen thirty four at the latest.
Speaker 2: As this epidemic is spreading, people are convinced vampires are
Speaker 2: all over the place. They start decapitating all these suspected vampires,
Speaker 2: staking them to their coffins. They start executing people and
Speaker 2: then doing that to them because they believe that they're vampires,
Speaker 2: and they start doing that to all their victims. So
Speaker 2: there's this this God knows how many thousands of people
Speaker 2: get like dug up and decapitated and staked to their
Speaker 2: coffins because there's this belief that like they've caught the
Speaker 2: vampire sickness and this is the only way to stop it. Now,
Speaker 2: the real culprit is their corn, right, it's corn, and wolves,
Speaker 2: as it always is in history, can't handle their corn.
Speaker 2: But they don't know that yet because they're stupid old
Speaker 2: time people, right, not a smart new time people who
Speaker 2: understand diseasesn't always take precautions against them. They're dummies, stupid dummies. Anyway,
Speaker 2: the Great vampire epidemic of the mid seventeen hundreds is
Speaker 2: kind of like the last hurrah for believing in vampires
Speaker 2: on like a widespread cultural level is like an actual
Speaker 2: scientific illness. Because this kind of moral panic or hype
Speaker 2: or whatever around vampires, it leads scientific men, men of
Speaker 2: reasoning and understanding to finally reject vamporism wholly as a
Speaker 2: real disease as they gain an actual understanding about like
Speaker 2: what's causing their problems. Right, So this is in this
Speaker 2: kind of the late sixteen hundreds early seventeen hundreds, you
Speaker 2: can find a lot of quote unquote educated men who
Speaker 2: will argue it's an actual illness that stops after the
Speaker 2: Great vampire Epidemic. Now, the last crucial link in the
Speaker 2: chain from Vlad the Impaler to modern Dracula myths was
Speaker 2: the childhood of a guy named Bram Stoker. Bram is
Speaker 2: an irishman, and if you know anything about the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: if you are an Irish child, in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2: You're gonna see some shit.
Speaker 3: Things are good, right, have a good time famously chill
Speaker 3: time in Ireland eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so one of his first he's a sickly kid
Speaker 2: and also everyone around him is dying all the time, right.
Speaker 2: That is Bram Stoker's childhood, because he's an Irish kid
Speaker 2: in the eighteen hundreds. One of his first early memories
Speaker 2: is the great cholera outbreak in Ireland that occurs in
Speaker 2: this kind of in the early mid eighteen hundred periods.
Speaker 2: Cholera is an incredibly virulent illness that's spread initially by
Speaker 2: contaminated water. As a result, once it hits a city,
Speaker 2: like an urban area, it explodes. And this is cholera
Speaker 2: is one of these things. When it hits an area
Speaker 2: where you live, we're talking an end of days virus.
Speaker 2: This is like the shit we make movies about, right.
Speaker 2: Cholera is a fucking nightmare. And it hits the town
Speaker 2: of Sligo where the Stokers live in eighteen thirty two.
Speaker 2: Bram's mother Charlotte later recalled one evening we heard a
Speaker 2: missus Feene, a very fat woman who was a music teacher,
Speaker 2: had died suddenly, and by the doctor's orders, had been
Speaker 2: buried an hour after with blanched faces. Men looked at
Speaker 2: each other and whispered cholera. But the whispers the next
Speaker 2: day deepened into a roar, and in many houses lay
Speaker 2: one or two or three dead. One house would be
Speaker 2: attacked and the next spared. There was no telling who
Speaker 2: would go next. And when one said goodbye to a friend,
Speaker 2: he said it as if forever. Because one of the
Speaker 2: things about choler he mentions that she's fat.
Speaker 1: I don't.
Speaker 2: He's not like trying to fat shame or he's because
Speaker 2: that means healthy, right if that means that, like you're nourished,
Speaker 2: And it kills her like that because people you can
Speaker 2: get color and be dead in twelve hours, right like
Speaker 2: it is, And so it has this It is almost
Speaker 2: like a monster, like a vampire, is just sweeping through
Speaker 2: town in massacring families.
Speaker 3: That is the speed with which this thing kills. So
Speaker 3: Bram's earliest memories and the stories that adults tell them
Speaker 3: are about this implacable wave of death that is supernatural
Speaker 3: almost in its power and totality, and because it is
Speaker 3: so contagious, the need to there's this great need. You
Speaker 3: have to dispose of the corpses of the people that
Speaker 3: it's killing. You have to do it quickly. And because
Speaker 3: medical science still isn't great, a lot of living people
Speaker 3: get thrown into mass graves that they then dig out
Speaker 3: over they're put into morgues. They're found to later be alive.
Speaker 3: Some of them even survive through this because there's like
Speaker 3: very drunk during a cholera alcore roll into a mass grave.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but also, like you can see how this is
Speaker 2: all filming a part of a fertile uh like background
Speaker 2: for Bram Stoker, right, He's going to have all this
Speaker 2: stuff going around in his young mind. Now, Hoolera is
Speaker 2: also a disease of capitalism, right, And it's also a
Speaker 2: result of the new nature of life in these massive,
Speaker 2: crowded cities that are fueled by products from far away.
Speaker 2: So vampire is right, But it's also it's kind of
Speaker 2: worth noting for brand because he is when he is
Speaker 2: growing up, scientists don't believe in vamporism is a literal
Speaker 2: thing anymore.
Speaker 3: He wouldn't have been raised that this was a real
Speaker 3: literal thing. But it has.
Speaker 2: Become a cultural touchstone and it becomes deeply associated with
Speaker 2: capitalism and wealth in the late seventeen hundreds. By the
Speaker 2: time Bram is growing up, he's not hearing about vamporism
Speaker 2: as this real thing, right because he's a cosmopolitan young man.
Speaker 2: He is hearing about it in political treatises. It's being
Speaker 2: used as a metaphor for the greed of bankers and
Speaker 2: rapacious tax men. Right, because vampires suck blood. You can
Speaker 2: call a fucking tax man a blood sucker, right. That
Speaker 2: is his first the first time Bram is going to
Speaker 2: encounter vampires, it's going to be people writing about them
Speaker 2: as like a fill in for their their enemies generally,
Speaker 2: like these businessmen and whatnot.
Speaker 3: And idea that the taxman I do call him a
Speaker 3: bloodsucker every year on my taxi terms. That's right, that's right.
Speaker 2: But no, it's worth noting one of the major guys
Speaker 2: who spreads this kind of the use of the term
Speaker 2: vampire to describe, you know, bankers and the like is
Speaker 2: Karl Marx. He's a major figure in this period of
Speaker 2: like the popular conception of the vampire. Groom writes quote
Speaker 2: in the Class Struggles in France eighteen fifty, the French
Speaker 2: National Assembly is described as a vampire living off the
Speaker 2: blood of the June insurgents. Similarly, in the eighteenth Brumere
Speaker 2: of Louis Bonaparte eighteen fifty two, in a reversal of
Speaker 2: Edmund Burk's language condemning the French Revolutionaries, the bourgeoisie order
Speaker 2: has become a vampire that sucks out the rural workers
Speaker 2: blood and brains and throws them into the alchemists cauldron
Speaker 2: and Marx and a bunch of other guys who are
Speaker 2: proto socialists and socialist thinkers in this period use vampires
Speaker 2: to describe capitalism because it's like, it's pretty good metaphor, right,
Speaker 2: Like it's not. And this is where, if you'll notice,
Speaker 2: when we're talking about the Great Vampire epidemic, vampires aren't
Speaker 2: rich people. They're not powerful people. It's just whoever, right,
Speaker 2: it's a disease. Right now, This is how vampires become wealthy,
Speaker 2: cultured people, right is in this period of time they
Speaker 2: start being discussed in like the concept of a banker.
Speaker 2: That's why, ultimately, when Bram Stoker writes his Dracula book,
Speaker 2: he envisions Dracula as a count, right, not just a count,
Speaker 2: but like a real estate Baron. Right, A big chunk
Speaker 2: of the Dracula book is Dracula doing like real estate transactions.
Speaker 2: You know, he's like buying and selling properties and shit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Sophie, Vampire diaries, do we have confirmation they're definitely.
Speaker 1: It depends on how old they are, like new vamps now.
Speaker 3: But they don't care about real estate because they can't
Speaker 3: afford it.
Speaker 1: But they do seek out like foreclosured houses, and like
Speaker 1: they kind of pick out like the best house in
Speaker 1: the neighborhood and they like take it over because they
Speaker 1: technically have to be invited in if it's a human
Speaker 1: owned house.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, so that part holds up.
Speaker 2: Okay, that does hold up. So a couple of things here.
Speaker 2: One is that the stories that Bram Stoker grows up
Speaker 2: with the vampires, it's both this mix of like he's
Speaker 2: a politically savvy, you know, guy who's plugged in. He's
Speaker 2: reading a lot of articles that are using the vampires
Speaker 2: as a sort of like an insult really to describe
Speaker 2: these like rapacious early capitalists. The other place he's going
Speaker 2: to encounter vampires is in kind of some of the
Speaker 2: first horror stories, right, and these are like one of
Speaker 2: the guys. Who is responsible for this is Lord Byron right,
Speaker 2: who in eighteen nineteen writes an article called The Vampire,
Speaker 2: a Tale by Lord Byron, and this is this is
Speaker 2: going to spread. This is a very popular story. These
Speaker 2: guys are kind of like some of the fact along
Speaker 2: with Poe, some of the foundational horror authors. And the
Speaker 2: Vampire is a really popular story by Lord Byron, and
Speaker 2: in fact it spreads. This is kind of a little
Speaker 2: bit of an aside, but it was too interesting not
Speaker 2: to mention. Byron published this thing in eighteen nineteen, and
Speaker 2: it's it takes you know.
Speaker 3: I'm actually just.
Speaker 2: Going to read a quote from this article in the
Speaker 2: conversation quote. The Vampire did away with the Eastern European
Speaker 2: peasant vampire of old. It took this monster out of
Speaker 2: the forest, gave him an aristocratic lineage, and placed him
Speaker 2: into the drawing rooms of the Romantic era England. It
Speaker 2: was the first sustained fictional treatment of the vampire and
Speaker 2: completely recast the folklore and mythology on which it drew. Now,
Speaker 2: this story is initially credited to Byron. It's later found
Speaker 2: out it was like a friend of his, this guy,
Speaker 2: John Polodori. But that doesn't really matter all that much
Speaker 2: other than that, like Byron kind of a fame hound.
Speaker 3: Yeah, with a cool name. People would rather cool vampire
Speaker 3: story be written by Polidori Byron rather than Hey, it's
Speaker 3: my boy, Johnny Pulidari, Yeah, j pol Yeah.
Speaker 2: So one of the things that I didn't know until
Speaker 2: I started doing that I was familiar with, like Byron
Speaker 2: and him getting credit and being by this other guy.
Speaker 2: It's like kind of the first vampire story in a
Speaker 2: modern sense. But there's actually another vampire book that gets
Speaker 2: that's extremely influential, that comes out before Bramstoker's Dracula, and
Speaker 2: it's an American response to the Polidari story, The Vampire. Right,
Speaker 2: And the title of this is The Black Vampire, A
Speaker 2: Legend of Saint Domingo by one Uriah Derek d' rc.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: I think a lot of people are thinking about the
Speaker 2: movie Blackula, right, which is a black exploitation movie. But
Speaker 2: this is actually this is not we're not talking about
Speaker 2: like I don't know, Like, this is actually a serious
Speaker 2: and influential work of literature, right, And it's interesting because
Speaker 2: it is one of the first popular anti slavery narratives. Right,
Speaker 2: This is written in the early eighteen hundreds. It is
Speaker 2: the first American vampire story is of a black vampire,
Speaker 2: and it is also it might be the first short
Speaker 2: story to argue in favor of emancipation right. This is
Speaker 2: published fourteen years before Lydia Child is going to write
Speaker 2: a book called An Appeal in Favor of that class
Speaker 2: of Americans called Africans, which is kind of probably the
Speaker 2: first big anti slavery book. So it's one of the
Speaker 2: first popular pieces of literature arguing for emancipation right. It
Speaker 2: is not super well known, although you can find some
Speaker 2: You can find copies of it online. Now I'm going
Speaker 2: to quote again from the conversation here. Darcy's narrative begins
Speaker 2: with a slave owner, mister Person in what is now Haiti,
Speaker 2: repeatingly trying to kill a ten year old slave. Much
Speaker 2: as he tries, though the corpse keeps reviving. Person orders
Speaker 2: the child to be burned, but the boy moves with
Speaker 2: supernatural speed and miraculously causes the slave owner to be
Speaker 2: flung into the fire instead. Before mister Persone dies, his
Speaker 2: wife informs him that the cradle of their unbaptized son
Speaker 2: is empty apart from his skin, bones and nails. Some
Speaker 2: years later, we returned to person's widow, Euphemia, who is
Speaker 2: in mourning for her third husband. She is visited by
Speaker 2: two strangers, an extremely handsome black man dressed as a
Speaker 2: Moorish prince accompanied by a pale European boy. He charms
Speaker 2: her with his elegance and beauty and rapidly wins her
Speaker 2: hand in marriage, which takes place that evening. The same night,
Speaker 2: he reveals that he is a vampire and converts Euphemia
Speaker 2: to his bloodthirsty set. Married to a monster and now
Speaker 2: a monster herself, Euphemia learns that the prince's pale young
Speaker 2: companion is her vanished son, now also a vampire. And
Speaker 2: so part of what's going on here is like vampism
Speaker 2: is kind of standing in as like this thing that
Speaker 2: people are judged for in the same way they're judged
Speaker 2: for like interracial marriages and stuff.
Speaker 3: Like.
Speaker 2: There's a lot going on in this story. It's also
Speaker 2: very much like a sympathetic narrative about the Haitian Revolution.
Speaker 2: I had no idea this book existed, but this is
Speaker 2: the first American vampire right as well as this black
Speaker 2: vampire in this early pro emancipation narrative America loves to
Speaker 2: forget about great shit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's pretty cool. I think that's pretty neat.
Speaker 3: It seems relevant, it seems relevant all these different themes.
Speaker 3: Huh yeah. And was it not popular at the time
Speaker 3: at the time, or.
Speaker 2: It is it is it's reasonably popular at the time.
Speaker 2: It's not huge, obviously, it gets kind of like forgotten
Speaker 2: for the most part because it's not a touchstone. But
Speaker 2: it's not like an unsuccessful story, I don't think. But
Speaker 2: it's not going to be nearly as successful as Bram
Speaker 2: Stoker's Dracula. And you know Bram, one of the things,
Speaker 2: he's the manager of a theater, right, that's how he
Speaker 2: makes a job money in his early life. So he's
Speaker 2: he probably he reads, you know, Polidars the Vampire. He
Speaker 2: also when he's kind of you know, doing this this
Speaker 2: this gig managing a theater, he comes across this book
Speaker 2: that had been written in eighteen twenty by a British
Speaker 2: politician about the history of Wallachia and Moldavia. And because
Speaker 2: lad the Impaler has become this sort of the Shield
Speaker 2: of the West type figure and also this demonized figure
Speaker 2: by the Germans, this book has a lot of stories
Speaker 2: about the brutality of lad the Impaler. So, you know,
Speaker 2: bram Stoker is becomes he's kind of obsessed with this
Speaker 2: area that becomes Romania. He reads a lot about it.
Speaker 2: He's also reading these stories about you know, cultured vampires,
Speaker 2: getting these like rants about the vampires the symbol of capitalism,
Speaker 2: and all of this kind of fuses together to create
Speaker 2: the Dracula that he writes in his book Dracula in
Speaker 2: eighteen nine, right, and that is eighteen ninety something like that.
Speaker 2: That's how we get Dracula. That's where he comes from, everybody.
Speaker 3: And that's he's just kind of pulling a cool name
Speaker 3: from this history book that he's reading. It's too cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he reads this and he's like, well, that's too
Speaker 2: cool a name to not use. I gotta I gotta
Speaker 2: call him fucking and he's got This guy is so brutal.
Speaker 2: I want this to be a scary monster. Dude, this
Speaker 2: guy scary as shit. Like, yeah, let's go for it.
Speaker 3: You know, is the is the impaling and the like
Speaker 3: staking the vampire? Like are those two suspected two have
Speaker 3: been yinked? I think they? I mean, it certainly fits together, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: and then the chocolate cereal with marshmallows, Like does it
Speaker 3: where does that come up?
Speaker 1: Uh?
Speaker 3: Well, marshmallows, Jack, are the blood of uh candy, So
Speaker 3: oh okay, yeah, yeah, yeah that makes sense though. Anyway, Jack,
Speaker 3: that is the story of the vampire. You gotta got
Speaker 3: a name. How you feeling. I'm feeling good, Man, Like
Speaker 3: I'm a little bummed out because the guy did impale
Speaker 3: a lot of like he earned number of people, sure,
Speaker 3: like I was not. I think I'm gonna stop trying
Speaker 3: to get people to call me Jack the Impaler because like,
Speaker 3: I don't think I can impale that many people. Jack,
Speaker 3: I just the nickname that ended up sticking. Sleepy Jack
Speaker 3: the pumpkinheaded bitch is like terrible, It's not good, and
Speaker 3: I just wish people would stop calling me that.
Speaker 2: But I'm going to tell you something Jack that my
Speaker 2: grandma told me, which is that you're never going to
Speaker 2: be judged by the number of people you were impaled.
Speaker 2: You're always going to be judged by the last person
Speaker 2: you impaled, right.
Speaker 3: And and the people you impale will not remember how many,
Speaker 3: They will remember how you made them feel. Yeah, when
Speaker 3: you when you were impaling them. Yeah, Grandma was so wise.
Speaker 3: I have so many of her saying written down. He
Speaker 3: said that a lot of them, almost all of them
Speaker 3: had to do with him paling. Actually, it's really strange. Yeah,
Speaker 3: what a what a tale. There's a lot of political
Speaker 3: stuff happening in the middle in the middle there that
Speaker 3: I was not fully aware of or able to wrap
Speaker 3: my head around. But yeah, it's Bromstoker. Also an awesome name.
Speaker 3: This story full of cool names and yeah, and then
Speaker 3: people were shitty names that nobody remembers, like Dan the Third,
Speaker 3: Dan the Third and John and whatever the fuck whoever.
Speaker 2: Is not a bad last name, but he really, he
Speaker 2: really was fucking falling down on that first ass name.
Speaker 3: Yeah, John, just don't name your kids John John Damn. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Isn't there also a John something that wrote vampire vampire
Speaker 3: or vamp pull the door or whatever? Come on something
Speaker 3: like Brohm Stoker?
Speaker 2: Yeah, or Lord Byron. I'm a Lord Byron Truther just
Speaker 2: because I would rather say that name than John Polidori.
Speaker 3: What a dweb Anyway, it's funny there there are like
Speaker 3: conspiracy theories that like Lord Byron actually wrote Mary Shelley's
Speaker 3: Frankenstein and like would just like let her take the credit.
Speaker 3: This motherfucker like didn't even write the one that he
Speaker 3: supposedly write. Lord Byron just put his cool name on things. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm sure there's some Lord Byron heads who are gonna
Speaker 3: get mad at me for saying Byron. Yeah, the Byronians,
Speaker 3: What a bunch of drips.
Speaker 2: Yeah me, I'm a Dan the Third Stand. I'm a
Speaker 2: Dan stand baby the third.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh, Dan the Third. All right, everybody? Well, Happy Halloween.
Speaker 3: Halloween everyone listening? You know, plug Jack Attack. Yeah, you
Speaker 3: can find me over five days a week at a
Speaker 3: podcast called The Daily Zeitgeist that I record Miles Gray
Speaker 3: and we also do an NBA podcast called Miles and
Speaker 3: Jack Got Mad Boosties. It is an official partnership with
Speaker 3: the NBA that I have to think the NBA regrets. Yeah,
Speaker 3: just it's it's a very silly podcast. Yeah.
Speaker 2: You can also check out my partnership with the NBA,
Speaker 2: which is has nothing to do with the sport is
Speaker 2: an illegal gambling operations. So yeah, check that out too.
Speaker 3: There you go. Well, thank you guys for having me on.
Speaker 3: And yeah, happy all hallows Eve, Happy Halloween. Everybody go
Speaker 3: out and cast some mischief, you know, mayhem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, don't impale any one.
Speaker 3: Do not impale. And I'm going to tell you that
Speaker 3: look impale if you if your heart tells you it's
Speaker 3: the right thing to do. Yeah, yeah, well maybe yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: no I should say that thing. Sophie said, no, don't
Speaker 3: do that. Ye'll do that. But it's just there's so
Speaker 3: many people. He impaled, going to catch up.
Speaker 1: We're ending it.
Speaker 3: I believe it's over.
Speaker 1: Bye. But Behind the Bastards is a production of cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media. Or more from cool Zone Media, visit our
Speaker 1: website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.