Sunday, July 12, 2009

Vlad The Impaler

This documentary examines the bloody career of Vlad the Impaler, the 15th-century prince of Wallachia who took no prisoners in his resistance to the spread of the Ottoman Empire. Known as Dracula, he learned the arts of war as a hostage of the Turks, but asserted his independence by working his own disloyal nobles to death and repelling a Turkish invasion by filling the battlefield with 23,000 impaled corpses.




When he came to power, Vlad immediately had all the assembled nobles arrested. The older boyars and their families were immediately impaled. The younger and healthier nobles and their families were marched north from Târgovişte to the ruins of Poienari Castle in the mountains above the Argeş River.





Vlad was determined to rebuild this ancient fortress as his own stronghold and refuge. The enslaved boyars and their families were forced to labor for months, rebuilding the old castle with materials from another nearby ruin. According to tradition, they laboured until the clothes fell off their bodies and then were forced to continue working naked. Very few of the old gentry survived the ordeal of building Vlad's castle. This documentay is a must for those that like to seperate fact from myth.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

excellent glad to see you back!

Anonymous said...

Yes, our Romanian history is one of the richest and heroic of most European countries. Because the Romanian principates were always small, outnumbered, the war tactics, strategies and the heroism was required. As such under these qualities of the true army leaders, many important victories were recorded. Only like that we survived as a nation in a country no bigger than 600 miles from East to west and 500 from North to South, that have fought in many times stopping the Roman, Mongol, Hungarian, Turk, Polish empires. 2000 years ago the dacs tribes reunited under Burebista and later Decebal had delayed years and years and stopped the greatest Roman empire found in his full expansion over the Danube (Dunarea).
Laters Romanians, have stopped the expansion of the Turk empire in Europe. The Turk armies have fallen repetitively years and years, losing mostly of their battles and great warriors in the Romanian territories. Stefan Cel Mare, Mircea Cel Batran, Vlad Tepes (Dracula), only a few kings that even outnumbered have score huge victories among Turks. And we are talking about numbers of 30.000 Turks against a few hundred Romanians. Yes those times required extreme measurements. The civilians always questioned faith and the war, there were times when this war consumed all resources and to keep the population away from revolts, crimes and treachery some high security measures were taken including the sadistic anal penetration by the stick (because this is what it was). These punishments were applied only to the criminals and the history doesn’t record any victims that were proved innocent.
Yes us, Romanian we are proud of our history more likely than we are in regards to current times. In fact many of the modern politic manners and men’s in power would probably be considered outlaw and impaled/punished in the old times by those true rulers of our nation that formed and bonded Romania as nation.

Ron Deschenes said...

I'm glad to see you're back; I check onlinedocumentaries4u.com daily, and was disappointed to see no new docs coming forth; please, keep up the w great work; just when I thought I'd seen it all, along comes your site to show me everything I haven't!

I hope whether the rough patch was physical, emotional, or external, that you're doing better now.

Regards,

Ron