Toast of the Christian World
From his surviving correspondence, it is clear that Vlad Tepes was a man of faith. A typical extract from his letters – regarding his near-ambush on the way to Giurgiu — demonstrates this point: ‘by the grace of God… I found out about their trickery and slyness, and I was the one who captured Hamza Bey in the Turkish district’. His Christianity sits uncomfortably with his burning of churches in Brasov, but perhaps he justified this with the thought that they had been built by the Saxons who were challenging his Divine Right to sovereignty in Wallachia, and hence were not sacred.
Until his betrayal and imprisonment by Matthias Corvinus, Tepes’s exploits against the Turks made him a hero in Christian Europe. Christian diplomats were in awe of his achievements, and moreover grateful that someone was taking the initiative against the invading Muslim army. Pope Pius II himself spoke of Tepes in glowing terms after reading dispatches from his representatives, and sent subsidies from Rome to help his camaign. Te deums rang out in praise of Tepes’s victories, and the inability of Mehmed’s army to cross Wallachia into Central Europe saved a great many cities and countries from being conquered themselves.
Rome and Venice, who saw Tepes as a crusader and had spent vast sums provisioning his army, expressed their deep concern about his arrest. This is why the forged letters had to be produced: only by portraying Tepes as a Christian traitor could Corvinus persist in his plan to avoid the expenses of fighting Mehmed, which the popular Tepes would surely scupper if freed. The official explanation regardless failed to convince the Pope, and so an emissary was sent to meet the incarcerated Dracula. The emissary left us with a description of Tepes which corresponds closely with his Renaissance portraits.
Ultimately, he was kept in prison as a bargaining chip to achieve and maintain an armistice with Mehmed. With the threat of releasing the ‘impaler king’ (as the Ottomans knew Tepes), who was present at negotiations, Corvinus ended hostilities. Though this was fairly short-lived, it was only 12 years after his capture that Tepes was finally released when Radu the Handsome died of syphilis in 1475. As voivode of Wallachia, Radu had pursued a policy of balancing his duties to the Sultan and Corvinus, but his successor, Basarab Laiota, defected wholly to the Ottoman side. Tepes was needed once more.