Dracole Waida - The First Stories of Dracula.
In the year 1461 after the birth of Christ, Dracula did many frightful and strange things.......
So starts the pamphlet "Dracole Waida", the pamphlet was first printed in Nuremberg on the 14th October 1488. The stories within probably came from earlier broadsheets that told in gruesome detail the crimes of Vlad III Voivode of Wallachia also known as Vlad The Impaler.
The pamphlet was enormously popular and further editions were printed into the sixteenth century in several other German cities such as Bamberg, Leipzig, Augsburg, Strassberg and Lubeck. Of the 1488 edition only seven copies are known to exist today.
What follows is a translation of the 1488 version.
1. Item : The old governor had the old Dracul killed. And Dracula and his brother
abjured their faith, and promised and swore to defend the Christian faith.
2. Item : The same year, he was put on the throne and became lord of Wallachia,
he immediately had Ladislaus killed, who himself had been lord [of Wallachia].
3. Item : Soon after, in Siebenbürgen and also in Burzenland, he had [a town] called
Beckendorf burned. Both women and men, young and old, [were killed].
Some he brought with him to Wallachia, in iron chains, and there all were impaled.
4. Item : He had all young boys, who had been sent to his country to learn the language, locked in a room and burned. There were four hundred.
5. Item : He concluded a truce agreement, and [during that truce] he had many merchants and wagoners from Burzenland impaled.
6. Item : He had a great [boyar] clan exterminated and impaled, from the smallest to the largest, young and old.
7. Item : He had some of his people buried naked up to the navel and then shot
at. He also had a number [of others] roasted and flayed.
8 Item : He captured young Dan and had a grave made for him, and had a [funeral
service] sung following the Christian order, and had him beheaded next to the grave.
9. Item : Fifty-five ambassadors were sent by the kingdom of hungary and the
Saxons in Siebenbürgen to Wallachia. Dracula let these lords wait for five weeks,
and had stakes erected before their lodgings, and thus they were deeply concerned.
He did this [because] he feared [their] betrayal. He went forth to Burzenland
and destroyed the grain, and had all the crops burned, and he had people
captured and brought outside the [city] called Kronstadt, and there Dracula rested
near the chapel of St James.
He had the suburbs burned. And as the day came, in early morning, he had women and men, young and old, impaled near the chapel and around the hill, and he sat amidst [them] and ate his morning meal with joy.
10. Item : He had the church of St Bartholomew burned, and he made off with all the liturgical vestments and chalices.
11. Item : He sent one of his captains to burn a large village named Seiding. But this captain was not able to burn it on account of resistance from the villagers, and then he came back to Dracula and said: "I wasn't able to carry out what you ordered me [to do]." he immediately had the captain impaled.
 |
| Strassberg Edition 1500 |
12. Item : Merchants and others with merchandise came from Burzenland to the Danube, near Braila, numbering four hundred, all of whom Dracula had impaled and whose possessions he had taken [from them].
13. Item : He had a great cauldron made, and over it [were placed] boards with holes, and he had people's heads shoved through there, and thus he had them imprisoned. And he had the cauldron filled with water, and a great fire made under it. And thus he had the people scream miserably until they were boiled to death.
14. Item : He invented horrifying, dreadful, and unspeakable torments. He had mothers impaled with their suckling babies, so that the babies thrashed about on their [mothers'] breasts until they died.
He likewise cut away mothers breasts, and stuffed their children headfirst [into the gaping wounds], and then impaled them.
And so, the legend of Dracula was already horrifying audiences four hundred years before Bram Stoker's Count made his debut in 1897, if even half of what they wrote in those pamphlets was true Vlad Dracula was the more bloodthirsty of the two, truth is indeed stranger than fiction.
