EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (3 page)

Vlad The Impaler

When Vlad III came to power in the Balkan country of Wallachia in the 15th century, life was harsh. They were ruthlessly violent times and members of his family had experienced extreme brutality. His brother Mircea II, for instance, had been captured by dissident boyars – nobles – and had his eyes burnt out with red-hot pokers before being buried alive. His father, Vlad III, had suffered a horrific death on the orders of John Hunyadi, regent of Hungary, by being face-scalped – the edges of his face were cut and the skin was then peeled off, while he was still alive.

Vlad was, himself, not averse to cruel practices in his castle at Târgoviste in order to retain power and control in his domain. In one story, he is reported to have received a group of foreign visitors who slighted him in some way. It may have been that they committed the insult of failing to remove their hats in his presence. He punished them by ensuring that their hats would never come off – he had them nailed to their heads.

Because of his fight to remain independent of the Ottoman Empire, Romanians view Vlad as a great hero and an effective, although often harsh ruler, but it is easy to understand why the writer Bram Stoker turned him into one of literature’s great villains, the blood-sucking vampire, Count Dracula. He is said to have killed around 100,000 people in various cruel ways, his brutality extending to torturing, burning, skinning, roasting and boiling, feeding people human flesh – normally their friends or relatives – cutting off limbs and drowning. However, his favourite method of dispatching his enemies and those he, quite simply, did not like, was to impale them.

The victim’s legs were each attached to a horse and a sharpened stake was forced slowly into the body through the anus or, sometimes, the chest. When inserted through the anus, it was forced upwards until it emerged from the mouth. The point of the stake was oiled but was not sharpened to a great extent as that would kill the victim too quickly and spoil Vlad’s enjoyment. Children were impaled on a stake forced through their mothers’ chests.

Death by impalement could take days and was, of course, agonising, the height of the stake indicating the rank and power of the victim. They were often organised in geometric patterns by Vlad and the bodies were left to rot for months.

On one occasion, in 1460, he is said to have impaled 10,000 people in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. The previous year saw him impaling 30,000 merchants, officials and citizens in Brasov that he claimed were questioning his authority – never a good idea.

Impaling was just one of a menu of horrific punishments used by Vlad. He was also partial to blinding, cutting off limbs, strangulation, cutting off the nose and ears and mutilating the sex organs. Now and then he would also scalp or skin his victims.

In terms of controlling his people and keeping crime down, the cruelty of his punishments seems to have delivered results. One story tells how he left a gold cup in the middle of the street for several days and no one touched it for fear of the punishment they would receive if they did.

Wallachia was Vlad’s native land, but his family had lived in exile in Transylvania after losing the throne to pro-Ottoman boyars. His father was a member of the noble Order of the Dragon, a fraternal order of knights sworn to uphold Christianity and defend the Holy Roman Empire against the Ottoman Empire to the east. Vlad’s father, Vlad II, enthusiastically adopted the symbol of the dragon and used it on clothing, flags and coinage. In Romanian, the word for dragon is drac and ul is the definite article. Thus, did Vlad’s father become known to all as Vlad Dracul – Vlad the Dragon. Vlad himself became Vlad Dracula – son of the Dragon – when he was accepted into the order at the age of five.

Wallachia was caught between the advancing Turkish Ottoman Empire that had in 1453 finally captured the city of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. For centuries, the Byzantine Empire had acted as a buffer between the Muslim east and Christendom and now, with its fall, Wallachia was caught between the Ottomans and the Hungarians to the north, appeasing each and forming alliances with one or the other. When Vlad came to power, the Ottomans were the sworn enemy of him and his people. He had developed a great knowledge of them through spending a part his childhood living amongst them. His father had been forced to hand over his children as hostages in return for the Turks not invading Wallachia. They were harsh times for Vlad. He was cruelly whipped for being stubborn and insulting to his captors and he developed a hatred for the future sultan, Mehmed. He also grew to distrust his father for giving in to the Turks, an act that, to Vlad, was a betrayal of all that the Order of the Dragon stood for. He was a faithful adherent to the principles of the Order, festooning flags, banners and his clothing with its imagery.

When Vlad Dracul did not provide support to the Hungarian leader, John Hunyadi, in the Varna Crusade in the 1440s, he was assassinated and the Turks released the young Vlad III from captivity, putting him forward as a candidate for the Wallachian throne, while John Hunyadi established his own man as leader. In 1448, at the age of seventeen, Vlad briefly seized the throne, but Hunyadi forced him to flee. Then, when Hunyadi’s man turned pro-Turkish, Hunyadi turned to Vlad to replace him. In 1456, Vlad succeeded in seizing the throne again. He would reign for six bloody years.

The Ottomans, for their part, were afraid of Vlad, especially as stories grew about his cruelty towards captured soldiers. They told how he cut off their noses and sent them to Hungary to demonstrate how many he had killed.

There is one story, known as the ‘forest of the impaled’ that horrified the Turks.

Following an unsuccessful attack by a large force under Sultan Mehmed, Vlad took revenge by leading an army across the Danube in the winter of 1462 and laying waste to the lands between Serbia and the Black Sea. His army killed more than 20,000 people.

Mehmed raised an army of 90,000 a few months later in spring, and marched on Wallachia. As they approached Vlad’s lands, however, they were sickened by the sight of a forest of stakes on which Vlad had impaled around 30,000 Turkish captives. Nonetheless, they proceeded with the attack and captured Târgoviste, ousting Vlad and forcing him into a guerrilla campaign against the occupiers who had installed his hated brother, Radu the Handsome as a puppet ruler. Vlad was pursued as far as Transylvania where the Hungarian king, Matthias Corvinus, imprisoned him for four years.

Meanwhile, while Vlad’s castle at Poienari was being besieged, someone – probably a servant delivering a warning – fired an arrow through one of the windows with news that Radu’s army was approaching. Rather than be captured and taken into captivity by the Turks, Vlad’s wife threw herself from a tower into the river that flowed past the castle, legend having her say that she would rather rot and be eaten by the fish than be led into captivity by the Turks.

Vlad was imprisoned from 1462 until 1474, but he gradually began to win round the Hungarian king and even married one of his cousins while in captivity. He was released and reconquered Wallachia in 1476 with a force of dissatisfied boyars, some Transylvanians and a force of Moldavians. By this time, Radu was dead and had been replaced by another Turkish puppet king, Basarab the Elder, a member of a rival clan. As Vlad approached, the king and his supporters fled.

His triumph would be short-lived, however. When his allies departed, he was left weakened and the Ottomans returned to restore their candidate Basarab to the throne. The nobles failed to support Vlad and the peasants were sick of his cruelty. He marched against the Ottomans with a force of only 4,000 men.

It is not known exactly how Vlad the Impaler died. Some say he died in the ensuing battle near Bucharest, fighting the Turks. Others report that he was assassinated, like his father, by disloyal Wallachian boyars. Another story has him being killed by one of his own men. One accounts says that he was decapitated by the Turks who sent his head preserved in honey as proof of his death to Istanbul. He may have been face-scalped, however, just as his father had been.

When his tomb was discovered many years later and opened, his face was covered by a piece of cloth, a sign that he had, indeed, suffered the same fate as his father. Unfortunately, it could not be proved, because, moments after the tomb was opened and the corpse was exposed to light and air, it crumbled to dust, as in all the best vampire movies.

The Borgias

According to the diary of Johannes Burchard, Master of Ceremonies to successive popes in the 15th and early 16th centuries, a gang of unfortunate prisoners, shackled at the wrist, would be dragged into St. Peter’s Square, in front of the Vatican in Rome, while lines of guards protected every exit from the square. On a balcony high above stood the seventy-year-old pope, Alexander VI, the man who had been Rodrigo Borgia prior to his elevation to the papacy. Beside him stood his beautiful twenty-year-old daughter, Lucrezia. On a balcony to one side of them stood another figure, Alexander’s son, Cesare Borgia, accompanied by a servant. In Cesare’s arms he cradled a rifle, taking careful aim into the ragged crowd beneath him. Suddenly a shot rang out, echoing round the vast square. A prisoner collapsed to the ground, blood pouring from a wound. The servant calmly handed Cesare another rifle, fully loaded and ready for use. He fired another round and another unfortunate man folded to the ground. This continued until all the prisoners lay dead, blood pooling around them. A wagon pulled into the square and the limp bodies were tossed onto the back of it. His day’s sport over, Cesare turned and strolled back into his apartment, his father and sister taking one final look around the magnificent holy square before doing the same.

The Borgias dominated large parts of Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. From this one – admittedly very wealthy – family came three popes, eleven cardinals, a saint and a Queen of England. They dominated the politics of Europe, especially during the fifty years of the Renaissance, by murder and intrigue, driven by the greed for wealth and power. Many of them were unrelentingly wicked in their pursuit of power, but they are remembered principally for four members of the family – the two Popes, Callixtus III (Alfonso Borgia) and Alexander VI; Cesare Borgia, a byword for evil, a sometime Cardinal, given that position by his father, Pope Alexander, and later

a corrupt and ruthless nobleman. Last but by no means least, was Lucrezia, wickedness in woman’s clothing.

The Borgias were like the Mafia – a crime family that killed for political gain and for personal wealth. They also killed, however, for pleasure.

Their origins can be found in two Spanish cousins – Domingo and Rodrigo de Borya whose respective children, Isabella and Jofre, married each other. Isabella’s brother, Alfonso, meanwhile, became pope as Callixtus III in 1455, the first Spaniard to occupy this position, but not the first ruthless, greedy individual to do so. He was not first choice, however, emerging as a compromise candidate between two rival factions. He was old and gout-ridden, was considered a stop-gap choice and sat on the throne of St. Peter for only three years. That was enough time, however, for him to elevate two of his nephews to the rank of Cardinal. One of these was Rodrigo, who would become Alexander VI.

In those days, popes were very keen on crusades and Callixtus proclaimed such a venture to liberate Constantinople from the Turks who had captured it in 1453. A crusade was not an inexpensive initiative and to fund it, Callixtus sold works of art, valuable books and offered indulgences for a price, including marriage annulments, church positions and grants of papal territories. He also imposed heavy taxes. Of course, none of this was guaranteed to make him popular and when he died, the Spaniards he had brought in to run the papal empire were summarily chased from office and from Rome.

One member of the family who escaped the wrath of the populace was Rodrigo Borgia, as the de Boryas were called in Italy. He remained in Rome and became pope thirty-four years and four popes after his uncle, Callixtus. It was with him that the reputation of the Borgias for nepotism, greed, ruthlessness and murder really began and he is considered the most notorious pope in history. He was elected to the pontificate – seventeen of the twenty-two cardinals voting for him – but those votes had been bought.

Born near Valencia in Spain, Rodrigo de Borya became a cardinal at the age of twenty-five in a flagrant act of nepotism by Callixtus and Vice-Chancellor of the Holy See a year later. In this role, he became extremely wealthy and was openly promiscuous – he would eventually father seven children in spite of his religious status. At one point, Pius II, who had succeeded Callixtus, had to have a word in the young cardinal’s ear to advise him to cut back on his participation in orgies as it was ‘unseemly’.

Nonetheless, he took a mistress, Vannozza de Catanei, with whom he had four children, including Lucrezia and Cesare, to add to a couple he already had. He then left her and lived with Giulia Faranese with whom he had another two or three children.

When Pope Innocent VIII died in 1492, Rodrigo was elected pope, having won the election with the purchase of the vote of a ninety-year-old cardinal who was lacking all his faculties. Like his predecessors, he embraced the role and the wealth it would bring to him and his family. Innocent had unashamedly openly acknowledged his illegitimate offspring and had lavished riches and titles on them. Alexander VI saw no reason why he should not follow this precedent. Along the way, he would, of course, also use his position to indulge his other passion – women.

He appointed as cardinals his son Cesare, still only eighteen years of age, and the even younger Alessandro Farnese, son of his mistress. He arranged three marriages for his daughter, Lucrezia, annulling the first and having Cesare murder the second when he, too, became inconvenient. When Alexander was away from Rome, she effectively ran the Vatican and church affairs.

Italy in those days was run by powerful families and Alexander made efforts to link the Borgias with one of those. Lucrezia was married, therefore, to Giovanni Sforza, bastard scion of the family that ran the city of Milan. Jofre was married to Sancia of Aragon, linking him with not only Aragon in Spain but also Naples in Italy where the kings of Aragon also held power. Sancia was no angel – she would have adulterous relationships with both Cesare and Giovanni Borgia, Jofre’s older brothers.

By 1500, murder was a commonplace part of the lives of the Borgias with Cesare as the chief executioner. However, the tables were turned on Alexander when he dined with Cardinal Adrian Corneto, a man that he planned to kill. At the dinner Corneto, suspecting that they were trying to poison him, surreptitiously switched drinks with Alexander and the pope and Cesare both drank from it. Cesare recovered, but Alexander died, after lingering for a few days. He was seventy-seven.

While his father lay dying, Cesare wasted no time. He ordered his men into the Vatican to steal whatever they could lay their hands on. Meanwhile, Alexander’s body had to be guarded to prevent it being taken and desecrated by the populace of Rome who were ecstatic at the news of his death. When Vatican officials came to prepare him for burial, the corpse had become so swollen in the heat of the August Roman sun that they had to remove his mitre – the headgear worn by popes – before they could stuff him into his coffin.

As for the family, it was devastated by his death, but not because they missed him. Rather, they missed the power and wealth his position brought them. Cesare suffered especially in the aftermath.

Alexander was a nasty piece of work but could not hold a candle to the evil wrought by his children. Cesare was the oldest and like his father populated the world with illegitimate children, the oldest of whom was Pedro Luis, the first Duke of Gandia, born in 1462.

Cesare had a stroke of luck in 1480 when Pope Sixtus IV issued a papal bull that allowed him to dispense with the fact that he was illegitimate. He was, therefore, free to enjoy benefices from the various positions to which Sixtus appointed him, under the influence of the future Pope Alexander. As early as seven years old, he received his first appointment, prebend of the cathedral chapter of Valencia. Other offices that he held also provided stipends, or wages. By nine, he was rector of Gandia, provost of Albar and Jativa and then treasurer of Cartagena. Each of these roles brought money flowing into his coffers.

In the meantime, Cesare was being closely groomed for a career in the church, his education in Rome carefully planned by his father. At the age of twelve he was sent to Perugia to be taught by a Valencian tutor who was appointed a cardinal as a reward. He studied law and humanities at Perugia University and then at Pisa he studied theology. On the completion of his studies, aged eighteen, he was made cardinal by his father.

Cesare was said to be very jealous of the success of his brother, the Duke of Gandia and coveted his secular honours and titles. One night in 1493, the Duke attended a dinner at which his mother, Vannozza and Cesare were present. At the end of the dinner, he rode off with his brother and friends and servants. Some way off, he bade farewell to Cesare and his group, leaving with a groom and an unknown man who was wearing a festive mask. He was never seen alive again. His body was found in the River Tiber a few days later with his throat cut.

Alexander was beside himself with grief and, taking it as a sign from God, declared that he would renounce nepotism and all the abuses he had perpetrated in the Church. His promises were, of course, short-lived and before long he had returned to his old ways.

The convenient death of his brother brought change to the life of Cesare, however. He gave up his positions in the Church and resolved to make his way in secular life. One of the main reasons for his renunciation of his holy orders was the fact that Alexander had arranged for him to marry the daughter of the King of Naples, bringing with her a lucrative dowry of the city of Tarento. Leaving the Church Cesare was proclaimed Duke of Valentois. Alexander was angered, however, by the fact that the Neapolitan king had other plans for his daughter that did not involve a liaison with the Borgias, powerful though they may have been. He would live to regret his decision to turn down Alexander’s offer because the Pope simply entered into an alliance with the French who claimed the kingdoms of both Naples and Milan. The French king, Louis XII had a particularly irritating marriage that he wanted to get out of and Alexander obliged by annulling it. By way of thanks, Cesare was given a French princess to marry, Charlotte d’Albert, daughter of the Duke of Guyenne. Following the wedding, Cesare wrote to his father that he had consummated the marriage eight times on his wedding night.

Cesare was now given the position of general in the French army, winning some important victories. In February 1500, he entered Rome, dragging behind him in golden chains Caterina Sforza, ruler of the two cities he had captured, Imola and Forli. He threw her into prison and only the intervention of the French saved her from dying there.

In the Jubilee year of 1500, there were a great many celebrations into which Alexander and Cesare threw themselves with characteristic gusto. Cesare killed five bulls in St. Peter’s Square, amusing the crowds. It was also at this time that he shot the unarmed prisoners in the square. On another occasion, Alexander, Cesare and Lucrezia watched as fifty Roman prostitutes had sex with fifty palace servants, prizes being awarded for the best performance. During this entertainment, one drunk man enjoying himself too much had his tongue and hand cut off for mocking Cesare. Another man who had the audacity to criticise him in a pamphlet was sentenced to drown in the Tiber.

Money continued to flood in, especially when nine new cardinals were created, but the bloodlust also continued. Cesare strangled the already dying second husband of Lucrezia, the Duke of Bisceglie. He was no longer of any use to the family as he was from Naples and the French had taken that city.

The game was up, however, when Alexander died and Cesare was forced to flee back to Spain where he died three years later, in 1506, while giving a good account of himself as a mercenary. He lives on, however, in Niccolo Macchiavelli’s book, The Prince, a treatise on leadership, featuring the leader who gets on through strength of will. Macchiavelli was undoubtedly thinking of Cesare when he wrote it.

Cesare’s sister, Lucrezia married Giovanni Sforza at a young age but was not short of help on the day – she was attended by 500 ladies-in-waiting. Soon, however, Sforza had outlived his usefulness and Cesare announced to Lucrezia that he was to be murdered. She warned her husband, however – one of the rare kind acts for which she was responsible – and he fled. He was stupid enough, however, to refuse to grant her a divorce. Alexander used non-consummation of the marriage as grounds for an annulment so that Lucrezia could be free to marry again.

First, however, while the negotiations over the annulment were going on, she retired to a convent. Unfortunately, however, she became pregnant following a liaison with the young chamberlain who brought messages from her father, a youth named Perotto. When she was brought before Vatican judges a short while later, obviously pregnant, she was solemnly judged by them to be a virgin. Incredibly the divorce was finalised.