Behind the Bastards - The True Story of Dracula

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

Robert sits down with Jack O'Brien to talk about how the life of a Transylvanian prince turned into the story of Dracula. (1 part) Sources: https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-origins-of-dracula-vlad-the-impaler/ https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-andcivilisation/2023/03/is-the-shamrock-a-myth-the-truth-behind-5-stpatricks-day-symbols https://mythology.net/mythical-creatures/vampire/ https://theconversation.com/vampire-myths-originated-with-a-real-blooddisorder-140830   https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/vampire-disease-origins  https://news.virginia.edu/content/how-spread-disease-juiced-lorevampires-pandemic-proportions https://www.livescience.com/24374-vampires-real-history.html  https://theconversation.com/americas-first-vampire-was-black-and-revolutionary-its-time-toremember-him-149044 https://news.virginia.edu/content/more-disease-dracula-how-vampiremyth-was-born-0 https://www.amazon.com/Vampire-New-History-Nick-Groom/dp/0300232233 https://www.amazon.com/Vlad-Impaler-Search-Real-Dracula/dp/0750929650 https://www.amazon.com/Vlad-III-Dracula-Times-Historical/dp/159211038X/ref=pd_lpo_sccl_3/137-0258767-1043075?pd_rd_w=HwU7a&content-id=amzn1.sym.116f529c-aa4d-4763-b2b6-4d614ec7dc00&pf_rd_p=116f529c-aa4d-4763-b2b6-4d614ec7dc00&pf_rd_r=HVFTK1DHS8NQH2E5J7BG&pd_rd_wg=d6J4W&pd_rd_r=2de9f88d-7743-4f92-8c69-f8f7a740d112&pd_rd_i=159211038X&psc=1 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When Tracy R. Kelburns was two years old, her baby brother died. I was told that Matthew died in an accident. Her parents told police she had killed him. I'm Nancy Glass. Join me for burden of guilt. The new podcast that tells the true and incredible story of a toddler who was framed for murder. Listen to burden of guilt on the iHe I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Calls are media.

Let's fucking podcast. This is a behind the bastards, listeners. It's a podcast about the worst people in all of history. And I got, I got very hyped there. So you might think this is gonna be a high energy podcast episode, but I am a **** years old or something like that. And last night I went to bed at 3 a.m.

And so I just feel like we have to cut that. Because then we'll leave it out. We'll believe it out. So we'll believe it out. I'm not the safety. Yeah, I don't even fully remember. I just, I'm telling you right now, people. I'm the kind of hungover that you get.

Not because you've gotten, you were drinking or doing drugs, but because you are in your mid-30s, and you stay up slightly later than normal. That's where I am right now. I'm pounding coffee, I'm trying to do better, and here to distract from my decrepit elderlyness, is Jack O'Brien! The most decrepit old person you've ever seen.

The crypt keeper. What's up guys? How are you doing Jack? I'm doing all right. Why are you like seven mountain do's in? Or what's going on? I'm zero mountain do's in. But it's still early.

What is it, is it a security risk to tell people how old you are? Or just like I don't know why. We like to filter out disinformation. Like there's a lot of listeners who think my real name is and I don't tell that for a specific reason, but the more lies there are out there, right? Like the better it is for me.

Okay. Yeah. People don't like us Jack. But you also don't know how old you are. So I feel like, no, you could use some crowdsourced research put into that. That's right. But that's right. I was born on the Bayou and they don't take notes about when you were born there. That's actually, I'm actually who that credence song was right. That's true. Yeah. Well, it's great to be here. It's great to see both of your faces. Thank you for thank you for having me back. Good to see you Jack attack Jack.

It's the spookiest month of the year. I think we can all accept that and on the day this drops happy Halloween. Yes, happy happy Halloween everybody happy to stay Halloween. Yeah, Halloween. It's Tuesday Halloween. I do apologize. I feel like we all are getting a little screwed there, right? Yeah. Yeah. Halloween. Halloween, we need to make it be like Thanksgiving where it's always on like a Friday. Yes.

But you get a couple days off before and after. Yeah, exactly. But that's not the case. So it's a Tuesday. I wish you all the best. But because we wanted to try to help make Halloween extra good We have an episode about the man who put the spook in spook tober, which is what I call October Dracula

Yeah, that's right. That's right mother fucking. I mean the title of the episode is just mother fucking Dracula comma bitches But they probably won't let us use that in the episode Exclamation point. Thank you. I don't let us use that in the episode. Exclamation point. Thank you. I don't think we can put that on Spotify. They'll get angry. Jack, what do you know about Dracula?

I am a big fan of his cereal. I can't shock you love, which is, I mean, honestly, Jack, a little racist. All of the, all of the dash in those aren't the same, right? Yeah. I am not that, like I know there are historical roots to the character, but like in terms of who it's based on or what they did to have such a horrible story told about them, which is what it

is. I mean, it feels like it could just be like from a middle school burn book, right? Like just like, I heard they go into people's rooms and try and bite their neck and suck on their lawn. Yeah. So I don't know. What did I, I'm curious to learn more. Yeah, well, you're going to learn way too much today So good that's what I come here for if you're a you know most people I think are broadly aware that

Dracula the vampire from the bram stoker book and then from I don't know like a million other Books and pieces of media sense is based on a real guy of Vlad Tepech, better known as Vlad the Impaler. And we have gotten over the years. Yeah, yeah. Vlad the Impaler, that's right. I always resented this guy a little bit because he took a nickname that I always wanted.

Yeah, Jack the Impaler. Yeah. Yeah, you remember like how hard I tried to get that. Going back in the cracked days. For the record, Jack, you're always the first impaler in my heart, or at least in the top like three, certainly before Dracula. Well, a lot of people say like,

I don't impale that many things. And I would point out like, wait, have you not seen me eat with a fork? Yeah, or I mean, you've cooked kabab a couple of times. A couple of skewers. You've got to have some stuff. I don't generally cook it, but I will eat off of a kabab. So that gives me rights to that.

But yeah, I think he just got to it first. Otherwise, I would be no, you would have been introducing me as Jack the Impaler. There's a lot of unfair things like that. Like the Wachowski's get credit for creating the matrix, even though just seven or eight years later, I had an idea that was very similar to the matrix. So like, who gets the credit, you know, but it's unfair.

It's unfair. Um, and also my version of the matrix, all Danny DeVito, we get, we get those, we get those talentless hacks out of there and we go pure DeVito. It's pure DeVito. It's like a multiplicity matrix. A matrix, a multiplicity, it's where it's all DeVito. It's the matrix. And that's how you kind of tell things are off a little bit.

Yeah. This is a world of all DeVito's. Because you're like, I'm used to some Danny DeVito's, but not quite as many as we're getting. So like, sure, we've heard of like you go into work and it's mostly divitos, but not pure to veto. Not that you tell things are a little bit. Yeah, a little bit twisted. The robots have taken

as universe. So Dracula. So Dracula. Sorry. So before this becomes a director, Bob could be ably played by Danny to veto. Based on a real guy, He should be. Vlad the Impaler. A weird number of fans over the years have been like, you should do of Vlad the Impaler episode. And there are a lot of lurid stories about what he did. But the reason why we haven't covered him before and we're not really going to do an

episode focused entirely on Vlad the Impaler is that he's the kind of historical bastard where like You don't actually know if any of that's true or if most of that is true Like every if I was just doing a Vlad the Impaler episode every other sentence would be me being like Reading a paragraph where somebody from like the 1600s is writing about an atrocity He was supposed to have committed a couple hundred years earlier Right and then me going but also maybe that's not true because it's It's more based on these like other myths or whatever that came about in a previous age or you know Here's all these reasons why that might not be the that's the case

It's asking flying around yeah for some reason so there's reasons to yeah I always got the sense and I think this is why I like didn't dig into it that much. Is I always got you know how Einstein gets credit for every smart thing or smart sounding thing that anyone's ever said now? They're like, well, you know what Einstein said the definition of Einstein or Tom Stady is doing the same thing over and over And it's like first of all, that's not insanity and that's not a smart thing, but second of all, Einstein. Like, never said any of that, but it's like, I always got the sense of Vlad, the impaler, and slash Dracula, just like got,

his brand was really strong. Like, we needed somebody to be spooky, and so we just gave him all the dark shit. Yeah. History. Yeah, that is probably a lot of what happened. It's one of those like he was a ruler in the 1400s, which was a pretty brutal time, especially in Eastern Europe.

Eastern Europe doesn't have a lot of periods of time where things weren't fairly brutal. True, true. It is. And he's, but I don't know it on his own. I don't know that I would qualify him as a bastard because like for this show, just kind of to make things narratively make sense.

I have adopted sort of a definition where it doesn't just, being a bastard doesn't just mean you're a bad person. It means you actively like made the world worse and stood out in your time as a shitty person. Like I wouldn't do a behind the bastards on a random plantation owner in the South, right? Not because that's not a bad thing to do, but because like, what is there to say, right?

Like, he was one of a bunch of people who were part of this really awful system. I would do an episode on Robert E. Lee, right? Because the things that he was trying to do, not only extended the Civil War, made this conflict bloodier, but he was actively attempting to set this system up in a way that would allow it to persevere longer into the future. So he was somebody who was actively not just part of a bad system, but making things worse in his existence. Whereas in Vlad the Impaler, I'm not sure if that really qualifies. He's a ruler in Wallachia, which, part of Romania now,

during this really brutal period. He definitely, like all rulers in that, does some horrible shit. But most of the stuff about his, like, real horrible crimes against humanity, um, some of it may be true, but a lot of it is the result of propaganda for a bunch of Catholic monks

who were, like, really pissed at him because he had killed a bunch of the Germans in his country. And I don't know, you know, mixed bag as to whether or not like it's fair or just kind of like a part of a political dispute basically that is echoed down. And like anybody who is a ruler in Europe in this period, it's gonna do some massacres.

But if like you're doing the same kind of horrible shit as everybody else in the area, I don't know that I'm going to like want to cover you in behind the bastards. So what makes Teppish interesting is the degree to which is how he becomes Dracula, right? And that is a story that involves a lot of other people's bastardry. It involves a really fascinating look into human folklore and the kind of stories that we tell about our monsters. And I think ultimately it has a lot to say about like why we are the way we are. So that's kind of the story we're going to be talking about today. How Vlad became Dracula.

But that is going to start with a little bit of a bio on Vlad the Impaler. So are you ready to learn about V the MP? V the MP. I am. A little V, the MP? V, the MP. I am. A little VMP action. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So Vlad was born in 1431.

Maybe. He may have been born as early as 1428. We're not gonna know because nobody really, nobody was like putting down birth certificates. I mean, I guess people didn't always know what year it was. Like if you traveled like seven miles by foot, you probably would go to a place like, no, it's not 1428, it's 1429, whatever. You like to keep a mysterious like you do with your birth year?

Exactly. Exactly. Vlad also is trying to avoid getting doxed. Yes. So he was probably born in Transylvania. That part of the books is likely accurate. The town he was born in is, I'm going to do my best here, Sigiswara, which was then part of the Kingdom of Hungary. Hungary in Romania, I mean, Romania is not a thing at this moment as like an

independent nation, but they're going to wind up spending quite a bit of time having a little kerfuffle over this specific area that he's born in. Eastern Europe in his time was a place of chaos and violence, one in which the medieval traditions of Serfdom and feudalism, they were starting to fade in the West, right? In Western Europe in the 1400s, Serfdom and kind of a lot of these feudal attitudes are giving way to what's going to result in like a more modern concept of like states in the relationship between people and rulers that starting to happen in the West, but in the East, all of that shit is really kind of coming into its height, right?

Because it's, you know, just a different part of the world. The chief powers in Vlad's time in the area where he grows up are Hungary. That's like the big Christian kingdom, which was a closely related foreign kingdom to Wulakia, where his dad is going to be ruling in the not too distant future. And then the other big power. I've heard of Hungary not Wulakia. So just so everybody gets an idea of how dumb I am.

Yeah, on this whole thing. I had a friend in high school who was a Romanian national who would always insist that he was Wollachian, not just not Romania. Like Wollachia is like the center of what becomes the state of Romania. And so the other big power in the region, you've got Hungary on one side, and like the Holy Roman Empire, which is like, you know, kind of governing the major Christian states in that region. And then

the other big power is the Ottoman Empire. And the Ottomans have not taken Constantinople yet, but they're working on it, right? They're in the process of making Constantinople into Istanbul. You can refer to the, they might be giant song if you want a little bit more information on that. It's pretty, pretty, history. A long period of a, a two-month-long. Yeah, so Constantinople has not gotten the works yet, but the Turks are in the process.

So they are making constant incursions into this chunk of Eastern Europe. They control some of the surrounding territories. And like, when you read like weirdo right-wing dudes with like Twitter accounts that are named, I don't know, like cultural critic or whatever. They tend to like, they always like to frame this as this bone deep clash of religions and cultures that are just completely different and can never live together. That's not what anyone living through it sees it as, right?

If you are actually living in the area at this point, your life is a lot more muddled. Vlad the impalers father who is Vlad the second who's gonna wind up ruling Valkyrie. He spends most of his life allied to the Ottomans, right? Like he is an Ottoman vassal and he is also he's fighting when he goes to war. He's often fighting on behalf of Sultan Marad II and a lot of people go back he's gonna go back and forth.

His son's gonna go back and forth. A lot of people in this border area are like, well right now it looks like the Ottomans are a better bet. So I'm an Ottoman vessel and then like, oh of people in this border area are like, well right now it looks like the Ottomans are a better bet, so I'm an Ottoman vessel. And then like, oh, now the Holy Roman Emperor seems like he's got, you know, some shit on his, he's got some weight behind him, so I'm gonna go over there. That's just how people are, right?

Like it, it doesn't make any sense to be super rigorous about it because that'll just get you killed. Sure. So it is from the Emperor's Sigismund that the family gets their imposing title, Dracula. Dracula is not like a last name. It is a title that they are given. And obviously that's the root of the word Dracula. If you've seen that new movie, the last voyage of the Demeter, which is about

one chapter in the Bram Stoker Dracula book, where Dracula travels over to this little coastal English town on a boat. It doesn't go well for the people on the boat. The crate that he's loaded under the ship in has a dragon on it. That's because the word Dracula means dragon. Although in Romania, it can also mean devil. Both are, it's kind of like, it means both. And yeah, the reason why he gets that title is that Sigismund is trying to get Vlad the second, Vlad the Impaillard's dad. And a couple of these other kings and stuff who were sort of on the fence,

a lot of them kind of go back and forth between him and the Ottomans. He wants to get them locked in on his side, right? Because he's trying to build up a solid. He's trying to like make sure his power base stays solid. And so he creates this nightly order called like the order of the dragon. And Vlad the second is one of the guys he brings into this. And most kind of layman's histories of Vlad the second and of Vlad the impaler will describe the order of the dragon this way. And I'm going to quote from

an article by the Warfare History Network, quote, a group of European leaders who were sworn to defend the Holy Roman Empire against infidel. Now, again, that kind of leans into a lot of popular conceptions about how this period of time works. Some of the sources I've read kind of make it look, again, a lot more muddled. There's a pretty interesting book on Vlad the Impaler

by MJ Trowe, who is a crime novelist. And we'll talk about our historian that we have as a source here in a second, but he describes the order. And he has some pretty good sources to back this up in more mafia. So terms, so not this like alliance of Christians against the infidels. But more of like a system of mutual aid designed by Sigisman to tie regional rulers to him and to each other to reinforce his own power. More of like a secret society, right? Where it's like, we get this impressive title and this title will kind of bind them to me and to each other and we'll promise like help each other out. I'm trying to make this kind of like

intimate cultural bond to set us all together. But more because I want them, I want them to feel like they have a sense of like owing me something, right? And they do because that nickname is awesome. It's a dough name, right? If I get to call myself the fucking dragon, yeah, I'm going to be, I'm going to be like, if Kentucky were to award me the rank of Colonel, you know, if I could be at Kentucky Colonel, I would be much more pro-Kentucky than I currently. Yeah, and you have, yeah.

The branding is just incredible. It's great. They had a sense of it at the time. I love that it was just like, well, if you want to have this cool nickname, then you've got to be cool with Sigismend. Yeah, it's like a five- know, a five year old creating a club that's like the super cool ninjas

that like you get to call yourself a super cool ninja if you join up. Like hell yeah, that's worked from the beginning of time. Yeah, because like I think every man, I think I speak for literally the entire male population when I'm like, we all want to be nicknamed the dragon. The dragon. But if you kind of are only goal in life, like if you were to introduce yourself as the

dragon, people would be like, give yourself that nickname. Yeah. Like, right. But if you're like, no, man, somebody else said I'm the dragon and like, they're the Holy Roman Emperor, then you're in, then you're in, you know, like in like Flynn, I guess. That's really the goal here. And it's, I don't know, it's debatably successful, but that's where they get the nickname from.

Now, we have basically no real information on the kind of childhood that Vlad would have experienced, our Vlad, not Vlad the second, his dad. There are some things we can infer. His family was extremely wealthy. These guys are nobility, right? They're their boys, which is like what you call nobles in in in this region. They have numerous

servants and bodyguards. And for most of Lads early childhood, he's effectively like his dad is the governor of Transylvania for Hungary watching for a Turkish incursion. We don't know who his mother was. It's possible she was like basically a prostitute. This is not like normal in like Western Europe and one, that would make him like a bastard, right? Like in a literal sense. A literal bastard, yeah. That's not the case in this part of the world, right?

Wolocchi and in Transylvania culture, certainly in this period is not very pro woman. And so and to the extent that it doesn't really matter who your mother is right what determines whether or not you are a Legitimate and that's in the parlance of the time a legitimate son right in order to like inherit and stuff is just who your dad is right It doesn't actually matter who you're who your biological mother is got so Vlad is his dad's actually is an illegitimate son So it's not one of the things about this is that there's this like quasi aristocratic democracy thing. We're like whining up in charge is the result of a bunch of these other boyers supporting you

having a job. So the fact that Vlad the second is like an illegitimate son probably doesn't really hurt him because he's able to get a lot of support to put him in power. But Vlad, Vlad the impaler is his dad's like legit son and he's the second son of the family. Under his elder brother, Marseille, his youngest brother, Radu, is also known as the handsome and MJ Trowell, yeah, quote, yeah, he's hot as hell. MJ Trowell writes about all of their upbringing actually.

He would have had a steward to organize the servants or to the food and the wine and regulate the day. Numerous skivis would be employed to cook clean and so. The male children would have learned to give orders and adopt the heirs and graces expected of men that one day rule an entire country. However small by modern standards. Yeah.

The one picture of Vlad the Impaler that I've always seen, the main thing that I take away from it is that he looks like a rich guy from another era. Like he's, for sure, bobbles and like just various fanciness, his hair is like, looks like it has been combed by someone who is not him for like hours a day. Oh yeah. His, the thing he's wearing makes him look like a Christmas tree ornament. Yeah.

That's kind of his overall vibe. Do you like his mustache? What do you think of the mustache? The mustache. I always get a soon. That's just from another era. Yeah. And it also looks like he might have taken one of his locks and just like put it across his upper lip. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a serious curl going on on his. Yeah. Yeah. I'm imagining there's like a backstory to that mustache. Like if you guys have watched the kid in the Brenna hercule perro movies, like the second, the second one opens with like the, the gritty backstory of a mustache. It's amazing. Anyway, that's what I imagine. So in his book, MJ Trowe Sites to Historians, Florescu

and McNally, who write this about Vlad's upbringing, there were the usual distinctions that followed the feast days, puppet theaters, ambulance artists, acrobatists, mini singers. And in summer, there were ball games running and jumping contests and games on quadrilateral swings made of red cloth and fashioned in the form of a pyramid. In the winter, they hunted Eagles with slingshots. Slope slingshots. Slope slingshots. Slopes on primitive double runner sleds, trapped heirs. That is pretty cool.

Hunt an Eagles with slingshots. The Eagles with slingshots is red. The degree of deadly skills you had to have even to be like a pampered rich kid in this era is amazing. Like, you're just fucking bullseyeing an eagle with your money. Shooting eagles out of the fucking clear blue sky with a fucking slingshot. Rock in a piece of elastic, yeah. Amazing.

And they didn't have elastic. So it was just like a sling, like you had to swing it around and like do it. David style, right? Yeah, probably. I think maybe they had more modern slingshots than I don't know. I'm not a slant, like you had to swing it around and like, yeah, David style, right? Yeah. Probably I think maybe they had more modern slingshots than I don't know. I'm not a slingshot expert. Yeah. In 1436, the ruler of Valkia, Vlad the second's brother died of natural causes.

Now he had spent Vlad's brother, had Vlad the second's brother had been the kind of guy whose primary focus was not pissing anyone off too much. So he had had he had tried to be friendly with the Hungarians because they're right next door, but he'd also paid tribute to the Sultan and been in a military alliance with him. And this is the kind of thing where like nobody trusts each other. So when you're in a military alliance with a guy like the Sultan, you send them a bunch of your family members, right? Your family, some other nobles, and you send them to Istanbul, and that's like your guarantee of good behavior. If you don't keep up with the treaty, they'll kill your family, you know? Like, that's the way it goes. Hey, everyone,

Robert here. I fucked this up. I misspoke. Obviously, the Ottomans have not captured as Istanbul at this point, which we talk about later when they do. I believe the capital of the Ottoman Empire at this phase was a Dier nay, a EDIR in E, is how it's anglicized. But if you keep up with the treaty, the family is a pretty good life, right? Like they're not locked in a cell or whatever, like they're in court. They generally attend like schools and whatnot in the area. Like it can be a pretty decent experience depending on where you are.

This puts it in a whole new perspective that you guys made me send my kids to yeah stay with Sophie while we recorded this. That is the case. You said in case things go sideways. In case you just support another group of advertisers. That's right. So Vlad the second, his brother dies and he becomes the ruler of Wallachia next. And he does this with the backing of Sigismund, right? Sigismund was not happy with Vlad II's brother. He's like, this guy is in an alliance with the Sultan. I'm not a big fan of the Sultan.

I want to put a guy on the Wallachian throne who's like my dude, right? And who likes him. Sigismund is Holy Roman Empire? Yes, yes, the Holy Roman Empire. And the King of Hungary, right? Got him. You know, you can Empire and the King of Hungary, right? Got him. You know, he's a triple threat, at least a double threat, probably triple.

I assume there's another threat to him. Holy Roman Empire ordered the dragon. They're the ones who came up with that idea to let them call themselves dragons. Okay. Yeah. So the family, the dragon family, moves to the capital of Wulakia, Tirogovista, and into a big fancy castle. Now, Vlad the Impaler, age six or seven, starts his night training at this point, which

is like every little boy's dream. I think we all wish we could have trained as a night when we were six or seven. Oh, at KNIGST. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so cool. But I thought they were like, okay, you're now ready to do battle at night, like a ninja. That is what he's going to wind up doing. Under cover of darkness.

This is when we do our night time seals training. It is, you have to start early, not just for the kid, but oftentimes, I'm not 100% sure if this is the way, but I think it is the way that they do in Wallachia, but like even going back to ancient Greece, if you're the kind of dude who, because of your position in society, you're going to be expected to fight on horseback. You are often raised with your horse because

it takes sometimes 10, 15 years to really train a military horse to be able to, because horses don't want to fight, right? They don't want to charge a bunch of angry armed men. That's scary for a horse. So you have to, it often like the societies, like this is the case with the Baccadonians back at the time of Alexander, they spend a lot of their childhoods like both kind of growing up and training with their horses so that they can fight together because it takes that long to make a good war horse. Yeah. It's been a constant struggle with me and my horse. The my horse is more into the arts. Yep.

Drisage. Yeah. And yeah, he hates when I just try and ride it into a fist fight. No, you have tried to invade Persia several times and your horse just won't do it. It's not going well. It's not going well. Yeah, very bad at it.

This period in his life where he's kind of living in Degaviste, he's training on being a night, it ends pretty quickly for Little Baby Blad, the impaler. Because in 1437, when he's somewhere between seven and nine years old, probably, the Emperor Sigisman dies. And his plans to create this grand anti-automated alliance kind of crumble, the whole order of the dragon thing.

They keep the title. They're always gonna use that title. That's fucking dope. It's not going anywhere. You know, it doesn't really mean much in the, now that Sigismens died and there's this like kind of right as he dies, there's a peasant uprising in Wallachia that's pretty brutal to put down,

weakens them militarily. And then there's a wave of plagues probably spread by rats that hits right at the same time and kills just a fuck load of people. So, you know, get rid of rats people. It just makes sense. Now, glad the second, glad the impaylor's dad, has no choice but to make the same decision that his brother had made and been the knee to the Sultan, right? Now, thankfully, Marad II is a pretty cool dude as Sultans go.

He's famous for being tolerant, particularly of like heretical religious sects in his own country, right? There's all these like little weird religious groups that have some take on, you know, the, the, the Corona or whatever that's like kind of very much not in the mainstream and like a lot of other Sultans probably would have punished them. But Morat is just kind of like interested in that sort of stuff. So he he'll give a money, he'll like support them and be like, yeah, I just am kind of curious what you're gonna, I just

want to let you cook, you know, like tell me some shit, you know, there's not TV back then. So maybe like encouraging heretical religious sects is kind of like funding Netflix. Yeah. These crazy fuckers come up with. He's also known as being super nice to his slaves, which is, again, kind of the, like, are you a good person? It doesn't mean like not having slaves. It means you're nice to them, right?

Right, nice to me. Yeah. But that said, as that probably suggests, good dude is a relative term when we are talking about medieval rulers. And as relatively chill as Merad is, he's still the kind of dude who punishes his enemies by impaling them in mass because that's just kind of how the Ottomans be right everybody's got their own ways of like killing your enemies the Ottomans one of the things they like to do is impale that's

not they're not the only people doing impaling right impaling's popular but we always like a good impaling oh yeah but yeah lots of ugly, no other ways people kill each other in the middle ages are nice. Yeah. They like to really make a show of it. Make a meal. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. going through you in a way that's unpleasant. And then gravity doing some work is that? I think gravity often, I mean, the same way that like, that's what kills you to an extent when you get like crucified, right? Yeah. Yeah, that whole process.

So do they impale you and then just like, let you slide down a poll, like, do they put it upright? Is that what, when they're, when we're saying someone's an impaler, because I am, again, still trying to get the nickname to go. And I'm trying to see what type of impaling I could do to get this shit to finally catch on.

Like, is it a big wooden stick, sharp wood stick, and then you put it upright, and they're just kind of like hanging there in the air. Yeah, like a Json X, the kill and Json X with the screw. You kind of like hanging there in the air. Yeah. Like it's Jason X, the kill and Jason X with the screw. You kind of are letting them slide down it. It's often a punishment for like crimes against the state, right? It is a particularly nasty one. So people who like it threaten sort of the stability of the government often do it.

There's a few different ways. It's one of those things where sometimes people are dead when they do this ability of the government often do it. There's a few different ways. It's one of those things where sometimes people are dead when they do this and you're just kind of doing it as a general force. Sometimes it's a very quick death, right? Like you're, and there's a couple of different ways. There's like through the abdomen or whatnot,

like directly to the heart. There's like the reverse way. There's like putting it basically going in through the outdoor, so to speak. I'm sure you can kind of guess what I'm saying there. Through the but hole. Through the but yeah. Yeah. And there's a, you know, it can be the kind of thing where like you die pretty quickly or it could be the kind of thing where it's like slow when it takes days. That sort of depends on the region and what you did. Okay. So that will, that sort of thing will get people's attention.

Yeah. I can understand where somebody who does that a lot would get a nickname. It'll get your attention, but back to what we were saying about like where this lands within the morality of the time, pretty common. A lot of states do impaling, right? Okay. Basically any ruler has the potential to impale a dude if they commit the right crime in this. And then, you know, the most important thing is that you're going to have a lot of things to do with the pandemic.

And then, you know, you're going to have a lot of things to do with the pandemic. And then, you know, you're going to have a lot of things to do with the pandemic. And then, you know, you're going to have a lot of things to do with the pandemic. And then, you know, you're going to have a lot of things to do with the pandemic. And then, you know, you're going to have a lot of things to do with the pandemic. Syrians are some of the first people we know we're doing in paling. So this has always been a popular way to get rid of people you don't like. So Marad the second pretty nice guy also an impaler Vlad the second Signs a treaty with him because he's like well Sigismans down now. He's still going by Vlad Dracula. Don't get me wrong here. Okay smart man

Understands branding. Yeah, he gets branding. So when 1438, the year after Sigisman dies, the Sultan goes to war with Transylvania, with the Hungarians, right? And Vlad the Second has to join on his side and winds up fighting against the people he had just been governing. Now, he's willing to do this because he doesn't really have any other option, but his heart is not in it. And within a couple of years, he's like publicly, you know, a vassal of the Ottomans, but he's also covertly supporting an anti-automine alliance led by John Hunyadi,

who's the Transylvanian governor for the Hungarians. There's this series of battles. Hunyadi does pretty well against the Ottomans. They win a few of them, and this causes problems for the Dracula family, because like now they've picked the wrong side of this conflict, right? They bet on the Ottomans, they win a few of them, and this causes problems for the Dracula family, because like now they've picked the wrong side of this conflict, right? They bet on the Ottomans, the Ottomans aren't doing great so far. And I'm going to quote now from a biography of Lad Tepej by Kurt Trepto, who is an American historian from Miami Beach, Florida.

Quote, after Haniyadi defeated Ottoman forces in Transylvania in March 1442, Vlad Dracula was called to Adrianople to demonstrate his loyalty to his Susurrain, leaving his eldest son, Marseha, as governor in Wallachia. As a result of what he considered to be Dracula's treachery, the Sultan imprisoned the Prince at Gallipoli and ordered an attack on Wallachia. This new Ottoman assault was again repulsed by Hanyadi, who used the occasion to install his protégé, Bess grab the second on the throne. Realizing the danger posed to the empire, if Hanyadi controlled Valkia, the Sultan decided to release Vlad Dracula, the end of 1442,

but required him to leave his two youngest sons as hostages. So, there's this kind of, you see how messy this is, right? Yeah. Sultan gets angry that he's been supporting the Hungarians. So he arrests Vlad the second son is in charge and will lock you for a while. But then the Hungarians push him out of power and stick a new guy on the throne. And the Sultan's like, well, I guess this family, they're still my

best bet, right? So I'm just going to take his kids as hostages and hope that that works to keep him loyal, right? Right. Yeah. I think that inspires a lot of him loyal, right? Right. Yeah. I think that inspires a lot of loyalty and people generally like it when you do that. Yeah. That's a big, big, big fans.

So Vlad and his sexy brother, Radu, are going to be the hostages here. Now, is this how last names happened back then? Because it feels like we're going from their old last name to like the Dracula family. Was it just a thing where people are like, actually this is cooler. Somebody called me this. I don't think that they would have been called the Dracula family.

It's more that because the dad has this title when he dies, the one who inherits it is going to be Dracula, which is like son of the Dracula. Yeah, exactly. Right, that's the way. I was just, it's fun to use this name a lot because it's pretty fucking cool. Yeah. So I just said Vlad and his sexy brother Rado would be those hostages I probably shouldn't have said that about Rado because I have to note something uncomfortable here about our historian source Kurt trepto. So again, we've got the two books I read one is by this guy who is, you know, it's a pretty good pop history book, but it's not perfect. And the other is this book by Kurt,

who is definitely a historian. He is a full bright scholar and an expert on Romanian history. He is somebody who certainly has the academic credentials to back up his book. Unfortunately, a scholar is not the only thing that he is because as I was writing this episode, I came upon a 2007 article by the History News Network

that notes about Kurt Trepto, quote, he was sentenced to the maximum of seven years in December 2002 for offenses involving two girls aged 10 and 13 who invited to his home in Lossi, a Romanian woman convicted of being his accomplice is still in prison. Trepto, who looked visibly amaciated as he left the prison to climb to comment. The historian was released early because he wrote a book entitled The Life and Times of Lad Dracula while he was in prison. His lawyer, Liview Braun, said, the book pinned from September 2003 until October 2006 was counted as community service, Brontold reporters. Brontold the court during his trial that his client had sex only with the 13-year-old

girl and that he did not know she was a minor. So there's a lot there. Oh my god. That is something else. Yeah. I didn't. Primary source here. Yeah, it's, it's, he is a historian. He's a full bright scholar. He also wrote his Dracula book as fucking community surface for being a pedophile. He's being a pedophile. Yeah. You know, I don't know what else to say about that, but I figured I should be able to not much to say. You know, Trepto's book is okay.

Treau was a better writer, right? But he's not a historian and I did find a couple minor errors in there. So I wanted to like read both of them. And then as I was writing the script, I learned that unpleasant reality. The lesson here should be obvious. Never check your work, right? There you go.

There you go. Then you won't learn stuff like this. Yeah, absolutely. So in the time when Vlad the second had been out in Ottoman captivity, he had lost control of Wulakia to one of his many noble rivals. He took it back in 1443 and our friend, the pedophile historian, notes that this is probably

because he was a pretty popular ruler. From what we can tell, captivity was not like bad for the Dracula brothers, right? The Dracula's, the Dracula's? The Dracula's, the Dracula. The Dracula's law? Anyway, they learned how to fight in the Ottoman style now. So Vlad, future Vlad the Impaler has now learned how to fight as a European knight and how to fight as an Ottoman, right?

So he gets a whole new set of weapons. He's having fun, different kind of like classes on that sort of stuff. There's some evidence that they converted to Islam for a period of time. This is unclear. Vlad the Impaler is going to like mix and match faiths a bunch. He's a little bit like that one character from the mummy who's just got like all the religious symbols, right? He's going to be orthodox. He's going to be Catholic for a while. He's

going to be probably may have been Muslim for a while. So, you know, let's not. Let's call it just bumper sticker, you know, yeah, he's a very coexist kind of guy. Glad to be a paler. Yeah. So things go less well. His, you know, while Vlad the impaler and and Rado are hanging out with the Sultan, things are not going great for his father Vlad the second. Hunyadi, the Hungarian leader is not a forgiving kind of dude. And once it becomes clear that yet again, the Mr. Dracula has backed the Ottomans, Transylvania goes to war with Volakia. Vlad II loses this war. He gets captured and is executed alongside his eldest son who had ruled in his stead while

he was out fighting. Is that the handsome or is that no, that's mercy up. I don't think he's particularly handsome. He gets, so while his dad is losing this water transylvania, like a bunch of these boys in, in, in, Turgue Vista, like, see where the wind is blowing. And so they capture his son, Marseille, and they, they kill him by burying him alive. Um, and there are, there's some suggestion among scholars

that maybe this is part of how that myth about like Dracula being alive, coming out of it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Maybe that's part of it, right? I feel like if you're executing the eldest son and the next eldest is Vlad the Impaler. I guess he probably doesn't have that nickname. He doesn't have that, yeah, he's not impaling, yeah.

But if he's given off even like the slightest of impaling vibes, I don't know. If he's like trained as both like in Eastern and Western fighting and is like fighting as a knight with one hand. He is like John Claude Van Damven in early 90s movie, right? Yeah. Exactly. I don't just like kind of finish it up, but I don't know.

I say this a lot listeners, if you are executing a family for their loyalties to the sultan, right? You say that's all the time. Yeah. Keep an eye out. Does one of them look like they might be an impaler? Maybe don't do that execution, you know? Yeah.

Keep him second in line, as all I'm saying. So it's unclear if Lod and Rado are free or still with the sultan. They probably are still with the sultan when their dad and brother get killed. But whatever the case, Vlad winds up going back to Murad and is like, hey, they killed my family. I need to go do, you know, pretty dope vengeance quest thing. I feel like I'm a good guy to have a vengeance quest, you know, all of this, all this martial arts training and shit I got.

Can I have some dudes, you know, some like, some like fight and dudes, right? And Marad is like, yeah, that'll probably work out pretty well for me. Have some dudes. So, you know, part of why this is noteworthy is that not long after his death, he's going to become a symbol first of sort of resistance to the Ottomans and eventually of like Romanian and independence. He's going to get this reputation as like the shield of the West from the Marauding Ottomans. And his memory is used.

You can find a lot of weird right wing culture warriors with Vlad the impaylor shit to this day. It's worth noting he only gets to power because he's cool with the Sultan. Right. He's both sides. Yeah. Yeah. He's a both side, which is very much in line with other rulers and with how his dad had played things, you know, and his uncle had played things.

Yeah, you do whatever is going to allow you to survive to the next day. Yeah, it's a rough time out there. Yeah, exactly. So this works. He winds up being coming the ruler of Wulakia for what will be the first of three times. He is in and out of there several times. The first piece of documented evidence we have from Vlad the Impaler is this letter

he writes right after he comes to power. It's the first documented like piece of writing that was done by his hands. And this is not like a big deal, but it's interesting that this first Vlad the Impaler letter is written on all Saints day or Halloween of 1448. Wow. Yeah. And man knows his brand.

That's incredible branding, right? Amazing vision. Visionary. Yeah. Oh my God. So he is 17 when this happens and all probably and he is already a hardened combat veteran. But he is not going to be ruler for very long within two months of taking power. One of his regional rivals invades Wallachia and forces young Vlad, the not yet an impaler

to flee the scene. So by Christmas of 1448, he is out of power. But with that nickname, they should have known he was going to be an impaler, but his name is Vlad, the not yet an impaler. You gotta keep checking his Wikipedia page to see if it's safe to fuck with him. Yeah. Still not, but I've had a feeling bad things are coming for us. Yeah. Yeah. That's the that's the moment in the movie. Like they're checking their smartphones as they wait for the battle to start and they're like, Oh, shit. If God just got updated and like the

mods aren't reverting it guys, we might be fucked. So, of Ladsman, the next couple of years, bouncing around kingdoms ruled by his relatives in Moldova, cementing alliances, building a base of power. By 1452, he's reconciled with him, Hunyadi, and he's promised to serve the Hungarians as defender of Wallachia. So he betrays the Sultan now. This is a bad time to betray the Sultan because right after he's like, nah, I'm totally team Hungary, Constantinople

falls to the Turks, which is not a great position to be in, right? This whole place like this is where, you know, if you're fighting with the Turks and things go badly, you can retreat in the direction of Constantinople, that's going to stop me in an option for these guys very soon. So by July of 1453, Vlad, his retaken power in Wallachia by personally hacking to death the guy who had usurped the throne from him. Probably single combat, which is pretty cool, right? That is how I became the host of this podcast. Right.

It was, it was trying to like combat. Yeah. Yeah. So just hacking to pieces. That's right. Hacked to pieces. So it's 14, 15 makes a statement. Yeah. Yeah. So just hacking to pieces. That's right. Hacked to pieces. So it's 14,000 makes a state. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the best way to hack someone to pieces or a rest and powder that other guy. Yeah. To that other guy. To the captain, I'm not a huge in this podcast. Yeah. Yes. We'll take my kids.

So that's right. That's right. That's why we do it. So 1457 is the year when which Vlad will commit the first massacre that kind of starts his reputation off with a bang. As this history should drive home, there's a lot of turnover and willocke in politics, right? His family is in and out of power constantly and a lot of this has to do with the boyers, right? These local nobles who are the ruler's support system and his primary threat, right?

Because you can't rule without the support of the boyers, but also they're always, you know, angling to get someone in who is better, right? Because you can't rule without the support of the boyers, but also they're always angling to get someone in who's better, right? Better for them. So Vlad eventually gets kind of tired of this whole game. And in Easter of 1457, he invites all of his boyers for a big feast. And while they're eating, he kills the senses. Yeah, don't go do that.

Don't go do that. Don't go do that. Yeah, somebody's like in the bathroom, like, you know, just kind of freshening up and checks his phone. It's like, oh, should they change this Wikipedia, guys? We got a bounce. Oh, man. I'm gonna quote from a called like the red feces.

Yeah, exactly. Real red wedding vibes. Yeah. I'm gonna quote from a contemporary account here. While all the citizens were feasting and the younger ones were dancing, he, Dracula, surrounded them, the boyers, led them together with their wives and children

just as they were dressed up for Easter to Pornari, where they were put to work until their clothes were torn and they were left naked. So basically, he makes them build his castle, these like nobles, he like forces, it enslaves them, forces them to build his castle, and then he impales them to death, right? Them and their wives, all these dudes and their wives, kill shit out of them, right?

Ugly stuff. Now, there's a lot of stories of impalement from his reign. This is kind of the first one, but you're going to get a lot more. The most commonly told one is that he wins this big victory against the Turks, and he has maybe tens of thousands of their soldiers impaled on the road leading to his capital, which is so frightening that the Sultan and his army retreat rather than advance further into Wallachia. It's impossible to know how precisely true that all is, but again, counter to a lot of

these weird right wing myths about the guy. It's worth noting, if he did impale the Sultan's army, which is pretty likely most of the guys, if not all of them, that he impaled would have been like Christian Europeans. Because that's how the Ottoman army works, right? Like a lot of their soldiers are these kind of like local levees and stuff, often who are basically given to them as like, this is part of if you're allied with the Ottomans, you send them X number of kids every year, right? And they train a lot of these guys up as soldiers. Now, it's kind of unclear how many people have led the impaler kills, but it's a shitload. 50,000 is probably a pretty good low estimate. Some higher estimates are up to like 100,000 people. And most of

these are various forms of execution, including impalement. But despite again, this reputation he starts to get is the shield of the West, the majority of the people that he's going to kill are his own folks, right? You've got your boy or Zabias, he kills a few hundred of them. He kills a lot of purported spies and criminals, and also just kind of anyone he thinks is a danger to his rule.

Vlad the impaler early on is gonna be like, you know what's gonna keep me in power is becoming a law and order guy, right? So he declares war on the homeless population on beggars and stuff, indigents. He gathers a huge number of these guys up and he burns them all to death and like a barn, basically. Truly a right-wing hero. This guy. He is very much a right-wing hero. He is again a law and order guy. His royal propaganda bureau will spread all these stories about like, oh, you know, this merchant came to a town that Dracula was controlling one day and was like, somebody stole my gold and Dracula would do something brutal to get it back, right? Because

you don't commit crime, right? There's one of the common stories you'd hear is that there's this watering post for people like traveling through a rural area. And Dracula leaves this ornate golden cup there. And it's the point that he does this is that like, as long as the cup is there, you know that he's in power because nobody would dare steal anything when Dracula's running the shit, right? Almost certainly just like bullshit.

But that's the story. One of the stories that gets told about this guy, the reality myth, like the good branding got him a myth about him being good at branding. Yeah, exactly. That's a cool story. That is a cool story. That is a cool story. Golden Cup.

Again, probably not true because while he's in charge, there's a bunch of uprisings. People are in fact not too scared to piss off Dracula, right? Maybe this should have been because these don't go well, but I'm going to quote again from TRO, who is our source that is not a criminal. Quote, the villages of Satu no, Hoseman and Kassolts were burned to the ground by his cavalry and the supporters of Lad the monk were butchered,

who is one of these uprising leaders, a lot of lads. Bode was totally destroyed. Towns left blazing, and its people hacked light cabbage in the town square. Merchants who were now expected to sell their wares at the specified towns of Tirgovi State, Tirgzor in Simpulun. Is it cabbage? Like cabbage.

Yeah. Oh, it's cabbage. Yeah, just to pieces shredded. Merchants who were now expected to sell their wares at below the market rate were rounded up for non-compliance and according to these sacks and accounts and paled by the road or boiled in cauldrons, the young men to whom it was claimed

had been sent to a locke to learn the language were likewise executed, quite simply because they were clearly spies. And the sacks and the reason he brings that up is that like a bunch of these German types have like moved into Romania over the preceding generation. So there's like German communities in a bunch of the cities in Wallachia. And as is always the case, these guys a lot of them become like merchants, right? So these are kind of like your upper middle class merchant class and a lot of these towns. That's a good group of people to blame all

your problems on. So Vlad's going to really do a lot of murder towns, that's a good group of people to blame all your problems on. So Vlad's gonna really do a lot of murdering of these German types. And so that's where a lot of the stories of him come from, is these, especially these monks who like flee from, you know, his fairly brutal to them reign. And they tell these, they exaggerate these stories, right? He certainly did some fucked up shit, but they're also,

they're trying to like spread propaganda about this guy because he killed their friends. So they're also, they're pumping it up a little bit, right? He certainly did some fucked up shit, but they're also, they're trying to like spread propaganda about this guy because he killed their friends. So they're also, they're pumping it up a little bit, right? Right. But does that help or does that just like make him more terrifying and people want to, I mean, it's why he has this rep, right? Right. Because of these German Germanic like monk accounts of his mentality. Well, the monks had the bitchy as burn books, but they also were some of the only people who knew how to write, is that right? Yeah, yeah.

So like a lot of this stuff is just the guy who was meanest to monks becomes a great historical monster, just because monks knew how to write. Yeah, we say a lot history is written by the victors, but it's also written by the people who know how to write. And so you've got a real advantage if you're the monks in that regard. Yeah.

So yeah, Vlad, again, as we noted above, he's not just impaling people. He'll boil them alive. He's got some more creative methods though, but impalement gets a lot of attention, right? In part because it's kind of identified with the East, even though they're not the only people who do it. And the most infamous story of Vlad the impaling some people comes after a military victory he won against his rival with a very silly name, Dan the third. He's like, he's got at least wild ass Hungarian Romanian names and then there's just Dan hanging out there. Yeah, all these guys, you've got Vlad the Dracula and then like, yeah, and then there's you've got Vlad, the Dracula, and then like, yeah, and then that there's Dan. He's a third Dan. They don't like.

He's a double done who is going to win that one. He had the Dracula, a K, a dad, the impaler or Dan the third. The third Dan. Yeah. The third Dan. So he beats the shit at it. Yeah. This Dan at a town called Brasov. Quote, it was here that the inhabitants were impaled in large numbers as the chapel of St. Jacob burned to the ground.

According to the poet, Mikhail Beham, the impaylor sat at a table in the open air and mopped up from his plate the blood of his writhing victims, the boy who complained of the foul stench was impaled higher than the rest. Now, most, yeah, pretty cool guy. Maybe like watching everybody get impaled and killed and complained that it smelled bad. Yeah, well, and someone who was going to be, yeah, it's fun. Yeah, I gotta tell you man, this place smells like shit. Yeah, all right.

So most of the Wollocky and Seamassacred, are again, Germanic residents who have come to make up a significant chunk of the mercantile class during a series of migrations in previous centuries. And it's from a bunch of these guys that we get the stories of Ladteppers that take him from, he's just another guy in a pretty brutal area to like fucking Dracula. And I'm gonna quote now from the Warfare History Network.

Dracula's atrocities in Transylvania caused a tremendous backlash in the German community, which began to disseminate vicious propaganda against him. After extensive interviews with the survivors of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, German poet Michael Behm wrote, the story of a bloodthirsty madman called Dracula of Lachia. In his poem, Behm describes the Vlad as dining amongst his impaled victims after the massacre. He even accuses Vlad of dipping his bread in their blood, the genesis of the enduring association of Dracula with vampires. Vlad's horrific link to Transylvania is undoubtedly why Victorian novel Bram Stoker later chose

to turn the real life-wulocking prince into a fictional Transylvanian count. So that's one argument as to where the the German this comes from and some of the stories about Vlad are certainly true or at least had a germ of truth, right? But the whole legend of him is this bloodthirsty monster is the result of an effective propaganda campaign. Not just by his enemies, they're one of them, right? These Germans want to turn him into a monster. The fact that he is so horrifying also helps to turn him into this like anti-Turkish figure,

like the shield of the West. But the fact that he's so famous too, he's going to later, primarily under Chowskew, who is the, we've done episodes on Chowskew, the Communist dictator in kind of the mid-20th century. He's going to become this figure of Romanian nationalism, right? Because he's just like your first famous guy, kind of, that you can call the Romanian figure. So the blood sucking of Dracula originated with like dipping, like, with kind of a, like part time. We're going to get it. We're going to get into that.

There's more to the blood sucking, but the first time you've got kind of Dracula directly, like tied to drinking blood, is this story of Lathian paler dipping his bread in blood, which again is almost certainly a lie. Yeah. Because you kill people, but do you drink their blood really? I don't know, pretty gross. I wouldn't. Yeah.

But I also love dipping my bread in stuff and it's like, so I don't have any way to go about drinking blood. I mean, um, but also very much less bad. If you could probably make a bread. I love dipping some bread out of blood every now and then. I bet you could make a nice blood gravy that would be pretty rich, but probably a little salty or the most British have tried that a lot of that. Yeah, they'll do anything with blood, those weirdes.

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So, Vlad is going to go to war with his former allies, the Turks in 1459, the Pope calls a crusade and Vladis the only European head of state to be like, yeah, I'll do that. Everyone else was like, feel like we tried a lot of crusades and most of them didn't go well. So just, for my frame of reference, up to this point, the wars are being waged, or when he's going in and taking out a rival and killing his whole town,

how many people, is it like, sometimes thousands? Yeah, thousands? Okay. Yeah, sometimes like again, we're talking about 50,000 to 100,000 total that he's gonna massacre in very recent years. I remember reading something about like Ancient Greek warfare where it was like the towns were like,

so it was more in line with like a high school football rivalry like a lot of the towns and like the warring and like it was more in line with like a high school football rivalry. Yeah. Like a lot of the towns and like the warring. And like it was like, yeah, and then they like came to our town. And you know, it's just like these small communities going to war with one another. Yeah. Which I don't really have a frame of reference for because war in the modern context is so massive.

Yeah, I mean, this is definitely smaller than modern wars, but he is killing a lot of people. Killing these towns. You probably talking dozens or hundreds of executions, but like, he is going to execute tens of thousands. So like, it's not purely like this little shit either. Yeah. Yeah. So it almost makes it like scary. Oh, it's pretty, I mean, it's all like, yeah, everyone gets wiped out. Wipe out. Wipe out. Or denim massacre. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that is kind of how you have to do it. Anyone left alive? That's like a threat to your, your power potentially. So he breaks his treaty with the soul of 1459. And part of this treaty is that every, you know, so often, Wulakia

has to send several thousand young boys to serve as Janissaries, right, which is like this Turkish elite military unit made up of like the kids of their rivals, basically. And the way Vlad announces, we're not friends anymore, is when the Sultan sends recruiting officers, Vlad impales them. And then when the Sultan is like, what the fuck?

And he sends some diplomats to be like, Hey bro, what's going on? Oh, I'm glad you're feeling about what's going to happen. It's not going to go great. Vlad nails their turbines to their heads, which is going to piss off the Sultan a lot. That would piss me off. Vice sent diplomats and somebody nailed their their hats to their heads. I wouldn't be thrilled. Same time.

It's cool. It's cool. Don't get me wrong. That's a cool thing to do if you're a bad guy, you know, if you're a bad guy and you're really leaning into it. Yeah. Also, like maybe you don't send the second wave of I feel like the first way to send a message. What did we think? Did we think that he just didn't like the recruiters specifically? And was these silver tongueed foxes will come and look cool him down. I'm not going to maybe this isn't the case. I'm not a not an expert here, but if I'm in charge, right, and this happens, first thought I'm going to have

is like, oh, I could promote some guys I don't like to diplomats and get rid of this fucker so I could I could I could drop a few of these dudes, you know? Just you, my top diplomat. Yeah, you're the head of foreign policy. I got a gig for you now. So you breeze past like an elite fighting group made of your enemy's children. Yeah, that's the Janissaries, right? Not necessarily like you're the rulers,

but like basically if you're a vassal to the Ottomans, you send them some kids every year. And there's some rules, like, it's not going to be your only son. If you only have one kid, they're not going to take that kid, generally. And it's not the oldest, usually, I think is one of the other rules, like, they, they try, because they don't want to piss people off too much, but like, they take these kids in and they raise them and train them to be like elite soldiers, the Janissaries. You're spare kids. They'll take your spare kids. Yeah, train them to be elite soldiers.

The Ottomans do a bunch of shit like this. You maybe. That's maybe, if you fuck around. Yeah. It's a weird, weird time. Yeah, it's a good time. It's a good time. I can train you and me.

Yeah, it's a good time. I train you and me. I train myself as one of any of these people. And it seems like, and I'm not going to lie, a fucking waking nightmare to live at this time. Yeah, the past is not just a foreign country, but almost like a different planet. It's wild. It's wild. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, they go to war, Vlad with the Turks. And the thing about Vlad, the impaler that we definitely know is, by I think all accounts,

he's a really good military leader. He's like really very good at running an army. He has outnumbered this whole time, often two to one, but he wins regular victories against the Sultan. And obviously when he captures Sultan's troops, he's got to impale the shitload of these guys. But it's also, the Sultan's army is very big and Vlad is not. And so he suffers pretty high casualties over the course of this fighting. And eventually the elites back at the capital are like, so we're just burning all of this money, fighting this war that we cannot, like the Ottoman Empire is much bigger than Wallachia. We've already burnt through a lot of our army. You are eventually going to lose this thing. So let's get rid of this guy because we don't want to keep doing this shit, right?

We want to do this stuff that's fun, not, not slowly, slowly lose a war of grinding attrition. So they overthrow Vlad. They put his sexy brother, Radoo in charge and Vlad winds up having to like flee the scene after this like battle and ends up in the like care of the Hungarian king. And he's like, hey, could you give me an army to like take back power?

And the King of Hungary is like, dude, you and your family are the least reliable people on the planet. Why would I do that? Right. Why would I do that? You can't be trusted. None of you can.

Yeah. So Vlad spends 12 years as the King of Hungary's prisoner. Writer Mark Longo notes, quote, that he wild away his time torturing and impaling rodents he caught in his quarters. Maybe true. Maybe not. Fun story either way. And on brand, you know, good, good for him. He's at least preventing the next plague by getting rid of those rats. Yeah. I, I got it. Yeah. I'm, I'm not a big rat guy. Like, like, not a big rat guy. We did, we did a, we've like done an article at, uh, crack, I think, uh, where just about how like wondrous rats are, like, they're so smart and resourceful. And they're also a pretty big danger though. Yeah, even in a post-Ratitude world though, I would like at an instinctual level,

rather they all die. Right. Well, yeah, that's that's going to be popular with certain quarters. No, I'm popular with some. Yeah, I mean, like intellectually, I wouldn't do it because balance and nature, but like my gut is just like, uh, anti rat. Yeah, I read too many stories about the black plague to trust him. You know, so he catches a lucky break, Vlad, because his brother loses power in 1473. And Vlad, or Rod who gets replaced by a guy who wants to be friendly with the Ottomans. So with Hungarian backing, Vlad is able to retake the throne from the Skies over throne

his brother in 1476. And he takes power for the third time, which lasts about two months after which he is found to capitate in a field. Vlad is? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's the ending of no country for old men, man. Right. Yeah.

Yeah, I haven't very killed all the screen. Tommy Lee Jones walks on to the side, said, then give some monologue that message. It'll do till the mess gets here. Yeah, exactly. It's a different part, but good. Yeah. Good line. A lot of good lines. So he came back, did, did power for a little bit longer and then they took him out. Yeah, then they took him out. It's like, you know, that banned the scorpions, Jack. Yeah. Of course, that's a big one.

Yeah, it's like when after they broke up and then came back, it's just like that. Don't look up the scorpions. I don't know if that's true. Pretend that's right. And then we're all found beheaded in a field somewhere. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, that is what happened to the people who wrote, rock you like a hurricane. Yeah. It is also worth noting that like, you know, during this period of time where he's this

military leader of Vlad, his big move is attack people at night, also feeds into the vampire myths, right? He's this blood drinking dude who comes after you at the night, you know, at night his brother got buried alive. You can see some of the pieces of, right? He's this blood-drinking dude who comes after you at the night. You know, at night his brother got buried alive. You can see some of the pieces of this. But there's a lot more to the story about how he goes from this dude who is again, pretty standard brutal Eastern European medieval leader to Dracula, the guy recently played by Nicholas Cage in a fairly fun movie.

The Renfield movie, I enjoyed it. I didn't see it for this whole thing. I didn't see it for this whole thing. I didn't see it for this enjoyed it. I didn't see it for the whole thing. I didn't see it for the whole thing. I didn't see it for the whole thing. I didn't see it for the whole thing. I didn't see it for the whole thing. I didn't see it for the whole thing. I didn't see it for the whole thing.

I didn't see it for the whole thing. I didn't see it for the whole thing. I didn't see it for the whole thing. I didn't see it for the whole thing. I didn't see it for the whole thing. I didn't see it for the whole thing. I didn't see it for the whole thing. Nick Cage and Nick Holt need to be in more things together.

Both, both, fascinating faces, both of those guys. So, back to, back to the story. So, we're going to talk about how he goes from this European military leader to the Dracula guy. And to do that, we have to, thankfully, finally get to move from the shady and virgins of ill-documented old history into a well-trot field of solid folklorist research. And my main source here is the book The Vampire, A New History by English Professor Nicholas Grum. Grum also writes articles about Nick Cave as a folklorist. This is another thing he's interested in.

And I think that's pretty based. Nick, yeah, definitely a vampire. I will say I hire odds that Nick cave has drank the blood of his enemies. Then Vlad the Emperor, like almost certainly like I have trouble imagining Nick cave drinking anything that's not the blood of his enemies. Yeah, of course. Yeah. That's kind of his vibe. That is his vibe.

Definitely mopped it up with a nice guitar. Oh, yeah. He's a waste not kind of guy. That thing you know about Nick Cave. Murder ballads, great album everybody. Check it out. Got a good song about staggerly. Anyway, Groom, this folklorist, notes that the origins of the word vampire are somewhat controversial.

It is often credited to the coming from the French term avant-paré, which means ancestor, but this is inaccurate. The terms most likely origins are in the Lithuanian word Vompti, which means to drink, and the Serbo-Croation Vompir, or the old Russian word Upir, both of which are names. While the word vampire is quite modern, stories of blood sucking undead monsters that can change shape are about as old as civilization. It's often noted that the ancient Egyptian deity Segment had some vampiric traits, but just drinking blood that doesn't make you a vampire, right?

That trait is old and folklore, so it gets kind of put into vampires because we've always had blood-drinking monsters and gods in our myths. But the most direct precursor to the actual like cryptid basically monster, the vampire, comes from Serbia, where the term vukodlak refers to both a vampire and a werewolf, right? And it's worth noting considering how often these two go together in like our modern horror stories, right? They come from the same origin, right? Vampires and werewolves were originally the same thing.

And it makes sense. They're both, they both eat people and they they're both like, change shape in the monsters, right, into animals, right? Both the vampires into bats, were wolves into wolves. So they started with like a regime thing. So I have a five year old, and what he's playing, he's like,

and then I can do this, and then I can also do that, and like sometimes it turned into a wolf, and then I have wings, and then I'm a bat, like originally it was all just like somebody doing that. Yeah, you look, the winter is long. You spend most of it sitting inside your shack, hoping the wolves don't get you and eating,

I don't know, whatever like fucking shit you manage to save from harvest time. There's not much to do and you're drinking. So you're going to wind up telling a lot of stories about bullshit. Yeah, yeah. And just kind of like adding stuff to it over time. Yeah. Now, while the word vampire, again, vampire is very modern. This is not an old concept like what we consider a vampire. So both kind of the werewolf and vampires we have today started off as these kind of like the Vucodeloc, the Serbian mythical creature, and they split pretty recently, as groomrites. Quote, there is however a significant distinction to be made in the English language.

In English, the werewolf was established by medieval times as a human shape changer, with origins and Anglo-Saxon and possibly old Norse culture, as well as in classical accounts of the disease of Lycanthropy. The word vampire, however, was adopted in the 1730s to describe a contemporary wonder. And this is really interesting to me, because the concept we have of a vampire is inherently modern. You don't get a vampire with just with people telling stories in the woods, right? The concept of a vampire inherently brings it like comes out of the sudden explosion in scientific understanding and knowledge that occurs in the 18th and 19th centuries, which come with both not just an understanding of like

germ and disease theory, which is part of the vampire myth, right? This disease that gets spread through biting. Bloodborne, yeah. Yeah, it comes with an increased appreciation of understanding of like the importance of blood in a medical and a forensic sense, right? The 1700s is when we start to use blood to convict people of murders, right? You obviously, you're not doing DNA tests then, right?

But in 1741, this English murderer, James Hall, gets convicted because he kills a guy and he can't clean up all of the blood, right? So there's like blood from the murder, and it's also on some of his stuff. And this is like, I think the first time, or at least one of the first times, that like blood as forensic evidence was used to convict a dude. Is it because like prior to that,

just everything was covered with blood? All this stuff. There was a lot of blood. Yeah, right. I just slipped in some blood coming out of my house. And it's like, I don't know where the blood came from. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure there were other times where that connection was made. But this is like a famous case and it's famous.

It's also like really noteworthy in the history of forensics. And that's part of what's going to be a cut build to us understanding vampires, right? Another key aspect, key ingredient to creating the vampire is the birth of print journalism, right, which plays a major role in disseminating these true crime stories. The vampire, as a concept, is inherently linked to true crime because starting on the 1700s, in particular, we get all of these viral news stories about serial killers and murderers. And this really takes off in the 1800s, because true crime has always been a reliable moneymaker. And that's a big part of this myth. Bloom cites a book published by demonologist George

Sinclair in 1685, who describes the murder of a man named Spalding in a town called Dalkeeth. And this, or he describes a murder committed by a man named Spalding in a town called Dalkeeth. And Spalding gets caught and hung, but reanimates several times, right? They don't quite kill him successfully, so he keeps coming back. And this is sort of one of the stories that contributes to the birth of the vampire myth, right? Because it's really noteworthy this guy is this, commits this brutal murder and then you can't kill him, right? It's kind of like the, the Rasputin stories.

It gets spread a lot, right? And so people start like talking about it and it's in their mind consciously or subconsciously as they're continuing to spend these folklore stories about monsters. Yeah. And it's like, there is, I think, an underrated, like blurriness to the barrier between life and death.

Yeah, like you see even today, and it's just like at a certain point, it's like, I guess they're like pretty dead, right? Yeah, like they're at the end. You know, it's like, you don't know when a work of art, the artist is just like done when they're done. Yeah. And it's like, yeah.

So, yeah, it makes sense to me that that would be a contributing factor because it's still kind of confounding and I think something that people don't like to think about. Yeah. It's also. We hear from doctors about like not wanting to do a DNR or not wanting to be resuscitated.

It's because there's like this weird blurringness where you can be like kept alive even though you're mostly dead. Yeah, and it's also, you know, it's not uncommon for people to be buried alive back then. And it's also not uncommon for people to commit murder. And some folklorists, there's a theory that a lot of monster myths and the vampire would be kind of chief among them have their origin and unreal crimes by like what we now call

serial killers, right? And people, somebody in your community who you've known surprises everyone by committing this brutal series of murders. It's really, maybe you don't want to acknowledge that this you could have just gotten this person wrong, right? Somebody had something dark inside them that you didn't see and they committed this terrible crime. So, the more comforting thing to believe is that they've caught some sort of demonic infection, right? Sure. And for a while people just say, yeah, demons in them,

but like vampirism in this age of science is a transmissible infection. And that can explain how somebody can do something seemingly out of character for them. Oh, this guy that we all knew killed his wife and kids in this horrible way, he's a vampire. He caught the vampire infection, right? And because there's this growing understanding of like vampirism as an illness, there's a thing you can do. As opposed to just being horrified at this terrible crime, you execute the murderer, but you also have to ensure that he's not going to reanimate,

which gives you some action that you can take that maybe makes you feel like you're protecting yourself. Right. So you just hang some garlic around their neck? Well, that is one of the things that you do. Yeah, there's a couple of things that you do that play into the later myths, right? When somebody, when you think somebody is a vampire,

you cut their head off often after you kill them, and you stake them. Not the, the initial version is not that the stake kills the vampire, but you stake them to their coffins so they can't get out. So they can't get out. That's why I do it mainly, and I, but I did, I only rarely do the head-tracking off thing.

Yeah, well, that's partly why you got such a vampire problem. Yeah, and that's why my property was lousy with vampires. Yeah, you're not's partly why you get such a vampire pro. Yeah, and that's why my property is lousy with vampires. Yeah, you know, watch the vampire diary series. Do I have you have you not? I mean, I'm a young person who is pop culturally engaged. So of course, I've watched it and know exactly the reference you're talking about. Yeah, but what do you explain that reference just so the listeners know?

Yeah, so Robert and I obviously know. Yeah, I'm one of the best television shows of all time. But the the staking, yes, the head cutting off, yes, but the garlic, myth. Yeah, oh, okay. Well, I mean, you would often stuff garlic in the mouth of the corpse too. You could also rip their heart out. That's a thing. Yeah, yeah. All sorts of stuff. People do a lot of different shit. And they do it not just as interesting because it's understood as a communicable infection.

You don't just do this to the murderer. You do this to as victims too because they might have caught it and you don't want them to reanimate, right? So again, it's important to note, this is all very tied to old folklore and superstitious beliefs about monsters, but it's also tied to medical science. You can look at all these things that become part of the lore of how you defeat a vampire as people trying to create diagnostic and treatment criteria for the disease. Now, it's the 1600, 1700s, early 1800s.

They're not good at that yet, right? Like, they know, this is not, I'm a saying, this is rigorous science, but it is born out of an attempt to do, to think scientifically, right? That is a key aspect to it. A lot of the modern serial killer, psychological profiling stuff is also equal leaf. Just complete bullshit.

Yeah, lots of bullshit. And it does, I think a lot of our beliefs about like forensic science working a lot better than it does. A lot of our desire to believe in like these competent hyper detectives does come out of like the same thing as the concept of a vampire, which is that like it's just scary that people can commit murders and get away with them sometimes. And so it's comforting if you can find an explanation, even if that explanation, a lot of it's nonsense, right? You know, forensic profiling is a flawed scientific field, but at least it provides an answer,

you know. Bring the scientists in. Yeah. Now, make us feel better. Yeah. Vampers, it's not just people wanting to like make things seem comfortable. There are also good at the time, pretty good scientific reasons to believe that vampirism might be a real illness. A lot of it comes from the fact that rabies explodes in large parts of Europe during the time in which vampires are born as a mythical creature, right? There's these huge outbreaks, animals will bite several people, and then those people, rabies can cause you to get violently aggressive, they'll bite bite people and they'll transfer the disease to those people, right?

And people who have rabies, there are certain things that seem kind of like vampirism in them. One of them obviously is this sudden unexplained violent aggression. They also have a fear of water, right? That's noted as like a side effect of rabies. Vampires in folklore can't cross running water. Not true on the vampire diaries. Thank you so much. I'm glad the vampire diaries disagree. So we just shared a fact check everything for us using the text of the vampire diaries.

So again, one of the greatest shows of all time that differentiates the vampire from other beasts of legend is that there isn't it is a scientific phenomenon. That is how it's seen. It is a disease you diagnose people with. It's not a, it's not a boggins out in the woods. It's an illness, right? And so there's diagnostic criteria and a lot of beliefs about how vampirism worked come from early attempts to grapple with germ theory and the like. It's the result of an attempt at scientific thinking that fails. And while a lot of monsters and stories drink blood, Dracula, I think, is the first to suck it. So he's not just drinking it to get nourishment. He is sucking it. And like that is providing him with like vital

life force, right? And that is tied to an early understanding of blood transfusion, right? That's, we start transfusing blood into people in the late 1600s. Way too early. Yeah, we are not good at it. You are not going to get a late 1600s in there. Oh boy, we're about to talk about that. Because as soon as people develop the hypodermic needle and realize that we can inject blood into our veins,

it becomes just the quackest quack here. You think these like rich people today shooting their young kids blood into them are quacks? Oh, let me read you from, this is from Grumes book, The Wild Story of a Guy named Arthur Coga. Quote, Coga, a 32 year old divinity graduate of Cambridge University, was looked upon as a very freakish and extravagant man.

On 23rd November, 1667, he was treated to become more docile by receiving a blood transfusion from a lamb. Peppies, who's like one of the doctors, observed that the medical fraternity differ in the opinion they have of the effects of it. Some think it may have a good effect upon him as a frantic man by cooling his blood, others that it will not have any effect at all. Koga saw the lamb as emblematic of meekness and humility, declaring in Latin, the blood of the sheep has symbolic power,

like the blood of Christ, for Christ is the Lamb of God. Good science there. Solid medical thinking. The Lamb's blood was transfused using quills and silver pipes. Koga received a payment of 20 shillings, drank canary wine,

and smoked a pipe in celebration, and the operation was repeated on 12th of December. Cogor's mood was not noticeably softened by the treatment, however, some changes apparently taken place. He wrote a begging letter to the Royal Society, complaining that he had been transformed into another species, and was reduced to ponding his clothes, or as he bombastically put it, he dearly purchases your sheep's blood with the loss of his own wool and the sheep racked vessel of his. Like that of Argos, he addresses himself to you

and the golden fleece. He signed himself, Angus Coga or Coga the sheep. Wow. So this is probably a guy having like a mental health crisis and they're like, we gotta shoot him for the sheep blood. You know what would help this?

Yeah. He doesn't feel good after this and convinces himself it's because he's been turned into a sheep man. Yeah. That'll do it. Yeah. I have a quick question for you. Sure.

Sure, Jack. So we've talked about this on my podcast, The Daily Zeke Gast with Miles Gray. Yeah. The model of vampire fangs. When you picture a vampire sucking blood, do you picture the fangs having little hollow tubes inside them?

Yeah, yeah. That how we'll get the blood up, like a reverse snake fang. And I assume that that leads into their veins, right? And then that they get that blood in their veins. That's my assumption. Well, on the vampire diary, feel like not on the vampire diaries.

And it just like leg pointy little teeth. It doesn't really make sense. We've always we've like talked about where we, I think I got that from Reese's the Reese's peanut butter cup ad. Yeah, that is the most of my medical medical information. Yeah, because it doesn't really, like we've asked this of a bunch of our guests

and half of them are like, yeah, of course, that's exactly what happens in my brain. And the other half are like, what are you talking about? Why would that be it? Like you just, they poke two little holes and then suck your blood. Yeah. As it said, they don two little holes and then suck your blood. Yeah.

As it said, they don't, they don't say I want to like have my, I want to, I want to suck your blood. Now I want to like drink your blood and have it go into my stomach. Yes. I think assuming that that line that I don't even know where that comes from, I think that's like, that's like, hand up our barbera cartoons in the seventies

where he probably started saying that But I do treat that as as vampiric fact for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I was just I basically that is one of the first questions I ask everybody Sure, one of the course objective amp I know for this So by the 1700s blood is a central topic of scientific discussion. And all of these factors, the intellectual people are shooting blood into each other, right? There's the birth of true crime as a genre. You've got constant news stories that are just like lavish tales of bloody, gory murder.

You've got this early understanding of forensics, this early understanding of germ theory. All of that is going to play a role in what's called the great vampire epidemic. Were you aware that this was a thing that we had a vampire epidemic? I was not. No, it's fucking dope. It runs from about 1725 to about, you know, the mid-1750s. And it's basically, there's a moral panic about vampires. Kind of the same way we have it when like you get a terrorist attack and then suddenly people in like rural towns, thousands of miles away are like, they're coming for us next. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You get all this kind of stuff, right? Or you get, yeah, you'll hear a story

about like a serial killer in fucking Idaho and then like people will start flipping out and like, I don't know, suburban Georgia that like their next human beings are not good at threat modeling. That happens with vampires, right? There's this suddenly this explosion in vampire tales all around Europe, primarily Western and Eastern Europe. One right up on the great vampire epidemic that I found by researchers from the University of Virginia credits the epidemic to outbreaks of both rabies and Pallagra.

So you have a bunch of rabies outbreaks, not hard to see why someone, again, not a rational, that if there's a rabies outbreak in your town and someone's like, it's vampires, you'd be like, yeah, it seems like it might be. Certainly looks like it. Sure, it looks like vampires. That pale guy. He has blood all over his mouth. Yeah.

Well, cross the water. He's eating people sure. Yeah, that seems like a vampire to me. Pale guys, not the primary empire. Yeah, that's like a vampire to me. Pale guys not the primary part of it. I think it's a good. Glad to have like nice tans. What was they just looked normal? Yeah, they were just looked normal Jack. Wow, wow, wow. You said that like I was being yeah, you're not you're not familiar with the sacred text. Yeah, the other disease

out of that contributes to vampire understanding is there's these outbreaks of what's called pologra. Now pologra is an illness. It's very new to Europeans, which is why it freaks them out, right? Because it hadn't existed because it couldn't have because pologra is something you get as a result of eating too much corn or improperly prepared corn, right? There's ways you have to prepare corn that we know about now in order to avoid getting pelagra, but corn has just, it's the sexy, new world crop

that we import here and start putting in everything. And so people are getting pelagra because we're not used to corn yet, right? And pelagra has a lot of symptoms that seem similar to vampirism. You get a sensitivity to sunlight, right? You can't be out in the sun, you get burnt really easily, right? Obvious where that comes from. You get severe anemia. Some people with pologna will crave blood.

Now, again, animal blood is often used in this period in various food sausages. So it's not weird that somebody would have access to it, but like people who can't be out on the sun and crave blood. Not hard to see where that fits in, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I'm going to quote from the University of Virginia here, epidemics link rabies to a large number of deaths in Eastern Europe, where vampire hysteria was particularly strong. Several hundred cases of the disease were recorded, spread initially by

rabid wolves, and then in at least some cases, people. The wolf and the vampire have a well-known link as being a creature the vampire can change into, but further, the disease is spread through biting. Victims avoid sunlight and they can be repelled by strong odors, garlic being a possibility. The hysteria that started to spread into the rest of Europe led to the word vampir from the Serbian, first entering German as their vampire,

around 1726, and later into English vampire by 1734 at the latest. As this epidemic is spreading, people are convinced vampires are all over the place. They start decapitating all these suspected vampires, staking them to their coffins. They start executing people and then doing that to them because they believe that they're vampires. And they start doing that to all their victims. So there's this, God knows how many thousands of people get like dug up and decapitated and state to their coffins

because there's this belief that like they've caught the vampire sickness and this is the only way to stop it. Now the real culprit is their corn, right? It's corn and wolves, as it always is in history. Can handle their corn. Can handle their corn, but they don't know that yet because they're stupid old time people, right? Not a smart new time people who understand disease

as always take precautions against them. That's right. They're dummies, stupid dummies, anyway. A bunch of idiots. The great vampire epidemic of the mid 1700s is kind of like the last hurrah for believing in vampires on like a widespread cultural level is like an actual scientific illness because this kind of moral panic or hype or whatever around vampires,

it leads scientific men, men of reasoning and understanding to finally reject vampirism holy as a real disease as they gain an actual understanding about like what's causing their problems, right? So this is in this kind of the late 1600s or early 1700s, you can find a lot of quote unquote educated men who will argue it's an actual illness. That stops after the Great Vampire epidemic. Now the last crucial link in the chain from Vlad the Impaler to modern Dracula myths was the childhood of a guy named Bram Stoker. Bram is an Irishman, and if you know anything about the 1800s, if you are an Irish child in the 1800s,

you're gonna see some shit. Think you're good, right? Think you're having a good time. Famously chill time in Ireland. The 1800s, yeah. So one of his first, he's a sickly kid, and also everyone around him is dying all the time, right? That is Bram Stoker's childhood, because he's an Irish kid in the 1800s.

One of his first early memories is the great cholera outbreak in Ireland that occurs in this kind of in the early mid 1800s. cholera is an incredibly virulent illness that spread initially by contaminated water. As a result, once it hits a city like an urban area, it explodes. And this is, cholera is one of these things when it hits an area where you live, we're talking an end of days virus. This is like the shit we make movies about, right? cholera is a fucking nightmare. And it hits the town of Sligo where the Stokers live in 1832. Bram's mother Charlotte later recalled.

One evening we heard a Mrs. Fini, a very fat woman who was a music teacher, had died suddenly, and by the doctor's orders had been buried an hour after, with blanched faces men looked at each other in whispered cholera, but the whispers the next day deepened into a roar, and in many houses lay one or two or three dead. One house would be attacked, and the next spared, there was no telling who would go next and when one said goodbye to a friend, he said it as if forever. Because one of the things about collar, he mentions that she's fat. I don't, he's not like trying to fat shame or he's because that means healthy, right? If you're fat part, that means that like you're you're nourished and it kills her like that because people you can get collar and be dead in 12 hours.

Right. Like it is. And so it has this, it is almost like a monster, like a vampire is just sweeping through town and massacring families. That is the speed with which this thing kills. So, Bram's earliest memories and the stories that adults tell them are about this implacable wave of death that is supernatural almost in its power and totality. And because it is so contagious, the need to, there's this great need, you have to dispose of the corpses of the people that it's killing. You have to do it quickly. And because medical science still isn't great, a lot of living people get thrown into mass graves that they then dig out over their puttin' demorgs, they're found to later be alive. Some of them even survive through this.

Because there's like very drunk during a cholera outbreak. Yeah, everyone rolls them into a mask grave. Yeah, but also, you can see how this is all filming a, part of a fertile background for Bram Stoker, he's gonna have all this stuff going around in his young mind. Now, cholera is also a disease of capitalism, right? And it's also a result of the new nature of life and these massive crowded cities that are fueled

by products from far away. So, vampism. A bad thing, capitalism, everything. And everything. You're right. But it's also, it's kind of worth noting for Brahm, because he is, when he is growing up, scientists don't believe in vampism as a literal thing anymore.

He wouldn't have been raised that this was a real literal thing, but it has become a cultural touchstone and it becomes deeply associated with capitalism and wealth in the late 1700s. By the time Bram is growing up, he's not hearing about vampirism as this real thing, right? Cosmopolitan young man, he is hearing about it in political treatises. It's being used as a metaphor for the greed of bankers and repacious tax men, right?

Because vampires suck blood, you can call a fucking tax man a blood sucker, right? That is his first, the first time Brahm is going to encounter vampires. It's going to be people writing about them as like a fill-in for their enemies enemies generally like these businessmen cat and whatnot and I do call them that the tax man. I do call him a blood sucker every year on my tax returns. That's right. That's right. But no, it's worth noting

one of the major guys who spreads this kind of the use of the term vampire to describe, you know, bankers and the like is Karl Marx. He's a major figure in this period of like the popular conception of the vampire. Grume writes, quote, in the class struggles in France, 1850, the French national assembly is described as a vampire living off the blood of the June insurgents. Similarly, in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852, in a reversal of Edmund Burke's language, condemning the French revolutionaries, the bourgeoisie order has become a vampire that sucks out the rural workers' blood and brains and throws them into the Alchemist's cauldron.

And Marx and a bunch of other guys who are proto-socialists and socialist thinkers in this period use vampires to describe capitalism because it's like it's pretty good metaphor, right? It's not, and this is where, if you'll notice when we're talking about the great vampire epidemic, vampires aren't rich people. They're not powerful people. It's just whoever, right?

It's a disease, you know? This is how vampires become wealthy cultured people, right? Is in this period of time, they start being discussed in like the concept of a banker. That's why ultimately when Bram Stoker writes his Dracula book, he envisions Dracula as a count, right? Not just a count, but like a real estate baron, right? A big chunk of the Dracula book is Dracula doing like real estate transactions, you know? He's like buying and selling properties and shit. Yeah. Sophie, vampire diaries, do we have the confirmation? Um, they're definitely, it depends on how old they are. Like new vans, no.

They don't care about real estate because they can't afford it. But they do seek out like, for a closure to houses and like they can't pick out like the best house in the neighborhood and then they like take it over because they technically have to be invited in if it's a human-owned house. Yeah. So that part holds up. Okay. That does hold up.

So a couple of things here. One is that the stories that Bram Stoker grows up with the vampires. It's both this mix of like he's a politically savvy, you know, guy who's plugged in. He's reading a lot of articles that are using the vampires is a sort of like an insult really to describe these like rapacious early capitalists. The other place he's going to encounter vampires is in kind of some of the first horror stories, right?

And these are like one of the guys who is responsible for this is Lord Byron, right? Who in 1819 writes an article called The Vampire, a tale by Lord Byron. And this is going to spread, this is a very popular story. These guys are kind of like the, some of the, along with Poe, some of the foundational horror authors. And the vampire is a really popular story by Lord Byron. And in fact, it spreads,

this is kind of a little bit of an aside, but it was too interesting not to mention. Byron publishes this thing in 1819. And it takes, I'm actually just gonna read a quote from this article in 1819, and it takes, you know, I'm actually just going to read a quote from this article in the conversation. The vampire did away with the Eastern European peasant vampire of old. It took this monster out of the forest, gave him an aristocratic lineage, and placed him into the drawing rooms of the romantic era England. It was the first sustained fictional treatment of the vampire and completely recast the folklore and mythology on which it drew.

Now, this story is initially credited to Byron. It's later found out it was like a friend of his, this guy John Poladori, but that doesn't really matter all that much other than that, like Byron, kind of a fame hound. Yeah. With a cool name. People would be called. A pretty cool name. The first vampire story to be written by a Poladori. Lord. Byron. Yeah. Rather than, hey, it's my boy, Johnny Poladari. Yeah, Jay Pol. So one of the things that I didn't know until I started doing this, it was familiar with like Byron and him getting credit

and then being by this other guy, it's like kind of the first vampire story in a modern sense. But there's actually another vampire book that gets, that's extremely influential that comes out before Bram Stoker's Dracula. And it's an American response to the Poledari story, the vampire, right? And the title of this is The Black Vampire, a legend of St. Domingo by one, Eureia direct

to RC. Now, I think a lot of people are thinking about the movie Blackula, right, which is a black exploitation movie, but this is actually, this is not, we're not talking about like, I don't know, like, this is actually a serious and influential work of literature, right? And it's interesting because it is one of the first popular anti-slavery narratives, right? This is written in the early 1800s. It is the first American vampire story is of a black vampire, and it is also it's it might be the first short story to argue in favor of emancipation. Right. This is published 14 years before Lydia Child is going to write a book called An Appeal

in Favor of that Class of Americans called Africans, which is kind of probably the first big anti-slavery book. So it's one of the first popular pieces of literature arguing for emancipation, right? It is not super well known, although you can find some, you can find copies of it online now. I'm going to quote again from the conversation here. Darcy's narrative begins with a slave owner, Mr. Person, in what is now Haiti, repeatedly trying to kill a tinier old slave. Much as he tries, though, the corpse keeps reviving, Person orders the child to be burned, but the boy moves with supernatural speed and miraculously causes the slave owner

to be flung into the fire instead. Before Mr. Person dies, his wife informs him that the cradle of their unbaptized son is empty, apart from his skin, bones, and nails. Some years later, we return to Person's widow, Yphemia, who was in mourning for her third husband. She is visited by two strangers, an extremely handsome black man dressed as a murish prince, accompanied by a pale European boy. He charms her with his elegance and beauty, and rapidly wins her hand in marriage, which takes place that evening.

The same night, he reveals that he is a vampire, and converts Euphemia to his bloodthirsty set. Married to a monster and now a monster herself, Euphemia to his bloodthirsty set, married to a monster, and now a monster herself. Euphemia learns that the prince's pale young companion is her vanished son, now also a vampire. And so part of what's going on here is like, vampirism is kind of standing in as like this thing that people are judged for in the same way they're judged for like, interracial marriages and stuff. Like there's a lot going on in this story. It's also very much like a sympathetic narrative

about the Haitian revolution. I had no idea this book existed, but this is the first American vampire, right? Of course. This black vampire in this early pro-emancipation narrative. America loves to forget about great shit. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty cool, I think.

That's pretty neat. Seems relevant. Seems relevant. Seems relevant. All these different themes. Huh. Yeah. And was it not popular at the time or? It is, it's reasonably popular at the time.

It's not huge. Obviously, it gets kind of like forgotten for the most part because it's not a touchstone, but it's not like an unsuccessful story, I don't think. But it's not going to be nearly as successful as Bram Stoker's Dracula. And, you know, Bram, one of the things, he's the manager of a theater, right? That's how he makes a job, money in his early life.

So he's, he, he reads, you know, Polidari's the vampire. He also, when he's kind of, you know, doing this, this, this gig, managing a theater, he comes across this book that had been written in 1820 by a British politician about the history of Wallachia and Moldavia. And because Vlad the Impaler has become this sort of the shield of the West type figure and also this demonized figure by the Germans, this book has a lot of stories about the brutality of Vlad the Impaler. So, you know, Bram Stoker is, he's kind of obsessed with this area that becomes Romania.

He reads a lot about it. He's also reading these stories about, you know, cultured vampires, getting these like rants about the vampires, the symbol of capitalism, and all of this kind of fuses together to create the Dracula that he writes in his book Dracula in 1890, right? And that is 1890, something like that. That's how we get Dracula. That's where he comes from everybody. And that's, he's just kind of pulling a cool name from this history book that he's reading. It's too cool. Yeah, he reads this and he's like, well, that's too cool a name to not use. I got a,

I got a column fucking and and he's got this guy is so brutal. I want this to be a scary monster, dude. This guy's scary as shit. Like, yeah, let's go for it, you know? Is the impaling and the staking the vampire, like are those two suspected two have been dinked? I think they, I mean, it certainly fits together, right? Yeah. And then the chocolate cereal with marshmallows, like, where does that come up? Well, marshmallows, Jack Jack are the blood of candy.

So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Then anyway, Jack, that is the story of the vampire. You got a, got any, how you feeling? I'm feeling good, man. I like, I'm a little bummed out because the guy did impale a lot of it.

Like he earned the shit out of the nickname. He impaled a pretty good number of people, sure. Like I was not, I think I'm gonna stop trying to get people to call me Jack the impaler because I don't think I can impale that many people. Jack, the nickname that ended up sticking Sleepy Jack, the pumpkin-headed bitch, is like terrible. It's not good.

I just wish people would stop calling me that, but. I'm gonna tell you something, Jack, that my grandma told me, which is that you're never gonna be judged by the number of people you're impaled. You're always gonna be judged by the last person you impaled. Right. And the people you impaled will not remember how many, they will remember how you made them feel. Yeah. When you were impaling. When you were impaling them. Yeah. You were almost so wise. I have so many of her sayings written down. She said that a lot.

A lot of them, almost all of them had to do with the daily. Actually. It was really strange. Yeah. What a, what a tale. There's a lot of political stuff happening in the middle there that I was not fully aware

of or able to wrap my head around. But yeah, it's Brom Stoker, also an awesome name. This is a story full of cool names. And then people are shitty names that nobody remembers. Yeah, like Dan the third, what a Dan the third and John and whatever the fuck. Oh, yeah, John. I mean, Hunyadi's not a bad last name, but he really, he really was fucking falling down on that first ass name.

Yeah. John. Just don't name your kids, John. Don't name your kids, John. Yeah. Yeah. Wasn't there also a John something that wrote vampire vampire or vampire? Yeah, Polidory or whatever.

John Polidory. Come on man. I'm looking at something fucking like Brahms stoker. Yeah, or Lord Byron. I'm a Lord Byron truth or just because I would rather say that name than John Polidory would. What a dweeb. Anyway.

It's funny. There are conspiracy theories that Lord Byron actually wrote Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and like, yeah, just like let her take the credit. This motherfucker like didn't even write the one that he supposedly wrote. Yeah. Lord Byron. Yeah. Lord Byron just put his cool name on things. Yeah. I'm sure there's some Lord Byron heads who are gonna get mad at me for saying. Byron stands, yeah. Yeah. Oh, the word. Yeah. Byrony. Yeah. Byrony. And it's. Byron stands, yeah. Yeah. They're the word right here. They're the name. Yeah. Byronians.

What a bunch of drips. Yeah. Me, I'm a Dan the Third Stan. I'm a Dan Stan, baby. Dan the Third. Yeah. Oh, Dan the Third. Yeah.

All right, everybody. Well, happy Halloween. To you. Happy Halloween to get on listening. You know, a plug. Jacketaff. Yeah, you can find me over five days a week at a podcast called The Daily Zeit guys that I record a lot of

days a week. Miles Gray. And we also do an NBA podcast called Miles and Jack got mad boosties. It is an official partnership with the NBA that I have to think the NBA regrets. Yeah. Just it's, it's a very silly podcast. Yeah. You can also check out my partnership with the NBA, um, which is, has nothing to do with the sport. What is the stand for?

Again, is in a legal gambling operation. So yeah, check that out too. There you go. Well, thank you guys for having me on. And yeah, happy, all hellosy. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween, everybody. Go out and call some mischief, you know.

Mayhem. Yeah. Don't impale anyone. Do not impale anyone. I'm not going to tell you that. Look, impale, if you, if your heart tells you it's the right thing to do. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, maybe, yeah, yeah. Now I should say the thing. So if he said, no, don't do that. Yeah. Well, we'll do that. But it's just there's so many people he impaled. You're never going to catch up.

We're, we're ending it. Come on. I believe it's over. Bye. Bye. We're ending it. Come on. I believe I said it. It's over.

Bye. Bye. Behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, CoolZoneMedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. When Tracy Rekel Burns was two years old, her baby brother died. I was told that Matthew died in an accident. Her parents told police she had killed him.

I'm Nancy Glass. Join me for Birdon of Guilt, the new podcast that tells the true and incredible story of a toddler who was framed for murder. Listen to Byrdon of Guilt on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.