His victims included women, children, peasants, great lords, ambassadors from foreign powers and merchants. However, the vast majority of his European victims came from the merchants and boyars of Transylvania and Wallachia. Most of the merchants there were German-speaking Saxons who were seen as bad people because they were not Romanian. He saw the boyars as people who were not loyal (Vlad's own father and older brother were murdered by boyars).
Almost as soon as he came to power, he gave a party for his boyars and their families to celebrate Easter. These nobles were part of the conspiracy around his father's death. Vlad, to avenge his father's death, had all the assembled nobles arrested. The older boyars were impaled on the spot. The younger nobles and their families were marched north from Târgovişte to the ruins of the Poienari Castle in the mountains above the Argeş River. The boyars and their families were forced to work for months rebuilding the old castle. According to the reports, they worked until the clothes fell off their bodies, and then were forced to continue working naked. Very few survived the building of Vlad's castle.
Vlad Ţepeş is also believed to have tortured and impaled some of the Turkish forces. It was reported that an invading Ottoman army turned back when they saw thousands of rotting corpses impaled on the banks of the river Danube. In 1462, Mehmed II returned to Constantinople after being sickened by the sight of 20,000 impaled corpses outside of Vlad's capital of Târgovişte. Many of the victims were Turkish prisoners of war.
Much of the information we have about Vlad III Ţepeş comes from texts published in the Holy Roman Empire in German texts from 1488 and books written in Russian. These were entertainment in a society where the printing press was new. The texts were reprinted over the thirty years following Vlad's death. The German texts said Vlad Ţepeş was a person who terrorized the land and killed innocents. The Russian texts said his actions were justified, because Vlad helped them. The texts agree on some details.
According to the texts, he was particularly cruel against women and wanted his people to work hard. Merchants who cheated their customers were likely to be killed because of that.
The fictional vampire in the novel "Dracula" by Bram Stoker was inspired by the legends of this Wallachian prince. The cruel person of the Impaler was a suitable character for Stoker's purposes possibly combined with Oscar Wilde, a poet whom dated Stoker's wife and was outed as homosexual near the making of Stoker's famous novel. The events of Vlad's life happened in a region of the world that was still medieval in Stoker's time.
Although there were vampire tales originating elsewhere, the vampire, as he became known in Europe, largely originated in Southern Slavic and Greek folklore. The vampire tale is virtually absent in Romanian culture. Vampirism became part of the popular culture in Europe beginning in the late 17th century. Philosophers in the West began to study the phenomenon. It was during this period that Dom Augustine Calmet wrote a famous text on vampirism in Hungary. It was also during this period that authors and playwrights first began to explore the vampire legend. Stoker's novel was a work in a long series of works that were inspired by the reports coming from the Balkans.
Fertile Crescent
The Fertile Crescent is a historical region in the Middle East that includes the Levant, Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. These countries on a map together have a shape that is similar to a crescent, so archaeologist James Henry Breasted spoke of the "Fertile Crescent" because he wanted to show the similarities of the cultures of this region in ancient times.
All these lands are watered by important rivers: Nile, Jordan, Euphrates and Tigris. Together they cover some 400-500,000 square kilometers, and the region extends from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea around the north of the Syrian Desert and through the Jazirah and Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf. These areas are in present-day Egypt, Israel, West Bank, Gaza strip, and Lebanon and parts of Jordan, Syria, Iraq, south-eastern Turkey and south-western Iran. The population of the Nile River basin is about 70 million, the Jordan River basin about 20 million, and the Tigris and Euphrates basins about 30 million, giving the present-day Fertile Crescent a total population of around 120 million, or at least a quarter of the population of the Middle East.
The Fertile Crescent has a very long record of past human activity.
Crescent
In art and symbolism, a crescent is generally the shape produced when a circular disk has a segment of another circle removed from its edge, so that what remains is a shape enclosed by two circular arcs of different diameters which intersect at two points (usually in such a manner that the enclosed shape does not include the center of the original circle).
The crescent was long used as the symbol of Byzantium. Now it is the main symbol for the religion Islam.
Crescent (disambiguation)
Crescent is a shape, form or symbol.
Crescent may also refer to:
The Levant
The Levant is a term in geography that refers to an area in the Middle East. It includes the historic areas of Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Syria, and the modern state of Israel.
The Levant is bounded by the Taurus Mountains to the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the west, the northern Arabian Desert to the south and Upper Mesopotamia to the east.
The word "Levant" entered the English language in the 16th century, together with the first English merchant adventurers in the region. English ships appeared in the Mediterranean in the 1570s and the English merchant company signed its agreement ("capitulations") with the Grand Turk in 1579 (Braudel).
Today, the word "Levant" is usually used by archaeologists and historians who are talking about the prehistory and the ancient and medieval history of the region, as when discussing the Crusades. The term is also used sometimes to refer to modern or contemporary events, peoples, states, or parts of states in the same region, such as Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian territories.
Levant (disambiguation)
Levant may be:
Jordan River
The Jordan River ( ', ') is a river in Southwest Asia that flows through the Great Rift Valley into the Dead Sea. Many people think it is one of the world's most sacred rivers.
It is long. Its tributaries are:
The four rivers join to form the Jordan in northern Israel, near kibbutz Sede Nehemya. The Jordan drops quickly in a 75 kilometer run to Lake Hula, which is a little below sea level in the Galilee sea. Then it drops much more in about 25 kilometers to the Sea of Galilee. The last section has less gradient, and the river begins to twist before it enters the Dead Sea, which is about 400 meters below sea level and has no outlet. Two major tributaries enter this last section from the east: the Yarmouk River and Jabbok River.
In 1964, Israel began operating a dam that takes water from the Sea of Galilee, a major Jordan River water provider, to the national water carrier. Also in 1964 Jordan built a channel that takes water from the Yarmouk River, a main tributary of the Jordan River. This caused great damage to the ecosystem. Syria has also built reservoirs that catch the Yarmouk's waters.
In modern times, 70% to 90% of the waters is used for human purposes and the flow is much smaller. Because of this, and the high evaporation rate of the Dead Sea, the sea is shrinking. All the shallow waters of the southern end of the sea have been drained in modern times, and are now salt flats.
The water from the Jordan is a very important resource to the dry lands of the area. It is a source of conflict between Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Palestine.