To kick this blog off I’m starting with Vlad III Drăculea, prince of Wallachia. A.k.a. Vlad the Impaler. This guy formed the basis of Dracula the vampire so you know he’s a fucking mad man. Vlad ‘The Lad’ Draculea came sliding out his mother in the winter of 1431 in Transylvania (now actually part of Romania), destined to be the future military leader of Wallachia. His dad being a right dick, sends Vlad and his brother to some Sultan as a bargaining chip to show he’ll be keeping up his end of the deal. But karma’s a bitch and his dad got his head cut off by some rebels, and those bastard rebels used a hot poker to blind his oldest brother then buried him alive. Well if I was Vlad, I’d be fucking fuming. And he was, so he starts his bloody fucking rampage to reclaim his dads throne. This is where he really loses his shit. So why is he called Vlad the Impaler I hear you ask? Well, as the name suggests he left battlefields littered with thousands of semi-living bodies impaled on stakes like fucking marshmallows as if it were some sort of sadist’s fucking camping trip. Was that all? No… Unfortunately not. Rumor spread of him cooking children and wives to feed to the remaining family. Which I hope was just banter. But the guy didn’t give a fuck. It was once said he had Mehmed II (the conqueror of Constantinople) over to his city, but Mehmed II felt fucking sick at the sight of 20,000 impaled corpses outside the city, so he did a straight up U-turn and noped the fuck out of there. If you know you’ve got guests coming over, you clean the place up. Right? Anyway, he did eventually impale his way to the top and was regarded as a pretty good ruler (if you discount the torture etc.). He had a good run with a few loses and an imprisonment. But you know this won’t have a happy ending, Vlads got to go out kicking and screaming… There’s a few variations on how he actually died, so I’ll share my favorite. He was killed at the age of 45 in a battle against a load of Turkish fighters surrounded by the bodies of his dead bodyguards, only to have his head cut off and sent to Istanbul, preserved in honey, then stuck on a spike. No end more appropriate I feel, than a honey-glazed head on a stick . Vlad, you were a fucking nutter.
Leonardo Gavinci 