pyrrhus of epirus

I will be writing a review here today as well! Short story below! Vlad Dracula was also known as Vlad Tepes, Tepes meaning "Impaler" cause, well, that is what he did. The Turks were very frightened of him, calling him "Kazıklı Voyvoda" ("The Impaler Prince"), and mounted his head on the walls of Istanbul, to assure people that he was really dead. Consider the fact this man saw the Turks invading his land, turned to the Turkish prisoners and said 'Well, they aren't doing anything', and created a forest of roughly 30,000 impaled Turkish soldiers. In addition, the name 'Dracula' is derived from dracul, the old Romanian word for dragon. Vlad's father was a knight of the Order of the Dragon, and so Vlad's name means 'son of the dragon'. That's so awesome that if it wasn't true, someone would've had to make it up. Dracul can also mean devil, which also makes it appropriate for anyone who could scare away the Turkish army — and for the demonic imagery Bram Stoker used in his novel several centuries later. His greatest accomplishment, for which the people of modern-day Romania still revere him, was to keep his small, not particularly wealthy or powerful country independent while it was pretty much the front line of a generational war between two powerful civilizations (largely Christian Europe and the largely Muslim Ottoman Empire). Few rulers could have managed that, no matter how clever or how insanely brutal. His ex-Janissary compatriot and co-rebel Scanderbeg got the name that means Lord Alexander, third greatest fighter of the Balkans after Alexander the Great and Pyrrhus, by the Turks. Another associate of Vlad Dracula was János Hunyadi, a Hungarian military figure known as "The White Knight of Wallachia". Even his son was given the name "Corvinus", making his complete name "Matthias the Raven". In Hungary, Hunyadi is known to this day as "Törökverő" (Defeater of Turks), a moniker he gained after turning the tides of the seemingly hopeless Siege of Belgrade and defeated the much more numerous Ottoman army. His son, the aforementioned Matthias Corvinus, who ruled Hungary for several decades, got dubbed "Igazságos Mátyás király" (Righteous King Matthias) after his death, and became reimagined as a folk hero who walks among his people in disguise to put uppity noblemen in their place. In his life, he was actually rather disliked for his harsh taxation of his people to support his numerous military campaigns.