Vlad III Dracula - The Forest of Men

In the summer of 1462, Sultan Mehmed II — the conqueror of Constantinople, master of the largest army in Europe — marched ninety thousand men into Wallachia to break a vassal who had stopped paying tribute. He marched seventy miles into a country burned to ash by its own prince. He found a field of twenty thousand impaled corpses outside the capital. He turned his army around and went home.The man who turned him around was Vlad III of Wallachia, called Dracula, called Tepes, called the Impaler.He was born in 1431, the son of a Christian voivode sworn to the Order of the Dragon. At eleven he was taken hostage by the Ottomans and held for six years in an Anatolian fortress. At sixteen he learned his father had been murdered and his elder brother buried alive. At twenty-five he took the throne of Wallachia for the second time and began the work of remaking a country that had killed thirty princes in a hundred years.He purged the boyars. He broke the Saxon merchants. He impaled by the thousands — enemies, traitors, criminals, foreigners. He held the law absolute. He nailed the turbans of Ottoman envoys to their heads when they refused to bow. He raided Bulgaria in winter and sent the Hungarian king a letter counting 23,884 dead, in his own bookkeeper's hand.When Mehmed came north to break him, he burned his own country, poisoned the wells, drove the people into the forests, and let the country fight for him. He launched a night attack on the Sultan's tent with seven thousand horsemen. He missed the tent in the dark. By morning he was gone, and Mehmed was riding back to the Danube.He fell to his brother Radu the next year, escaped over the mountains, and was imprisoned by the Hungarians for twelve years. They let him out in 1476 because they needed him. He held the throne for less than two months before he was killed in a winter ambush near Bucharest. His head was sent to Constantinople and set on a pike on the walls of the city Mehmed had taken.He is remembered in the West as a monster. He is remembered in Romania as the man who held the line against the Ottomans with twenty thousand men and a country burned to ash behind him. Both readings have history behind them.This is his story.#vladtheimpaler #vladdracula #wallachia #ottomanempire #medievalhistory #historydocumentary 00:00 — Intro00:27 — Prologue02:40 — The Dragon's Son7:58 — The Throne14:15 — The Turbans16:53 — The Night Attack20:09 — The Brother23:45 — The Last Ride26:312 — The Name28:15 — What Remains