Vlad III the Impaler

Walachian prince (r. 1448, 1456-1462, 1476)

• Born: Late 1431
• Birthplace: Sighisoara, Transylvania (now in Romania)
• Died: December 1, 1476
• Place of death: Near Bucharest, Walachia (now in Romania)

Vlad III is remembered for his brutality and for his struggle for independence from the Turks. He was ruthless with his enemies and with the people of his own country who did not meet his strict moral standards. Vlad III is believed to have killed up to 100,000 people, with impalement as his preferred means of execution. Along with the life of Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory, his life is considered to have partly inspired the Dracula legends.

Early Life

Vlad III was the middle son of the military governor of Transylvania, who seized power in neighboring Walachia in 1436. He had an older brother named Mircea and a younger brother, Radu (later known as Radu the Handsome). Little is known of his mother beyond that she was a Transylvanian noblewoman. During his early years, Vlad III became an apprentice to a knight, learning the skills necessary to become a knight himself: fencing, jousting, archery, and court etiquette.

Vlad III’s father, Vlad II, was a knight in the Order of the Dragon, founded by King Sigismund of Hungary to defend Christianity against the Ottoman Turks. As “drac” means both dragon and devil in Romanian, Vlad II became known as Vlad Dracul, or Vlad the Dragon. The suffix “ula” means “son of,” so Vlad III became known as Vlad Dracula. “Tepes” is from tse-pesh or teapa, meaning “the stake” in Romanian, and was appended to Vlad II’s name shortly after his death.

Walachia was in a strategically difficult position, being located between the Muslim Turks and the Christians in Hungary. Though a vassal of the king of Hungary, Vlad II was forced to pay tribute to the powerful Ottomans. His attempt to remain neutral when the Ottomans invaded Transylvania in 1442 enraged the Hungarians, who later forced him from power. With the support of the Turks, Vlad II regained the throne in 1443, but in return he was forced to surrender his two youngest sons, Vlad III and Radu, as hostages to ensure his loyalty.

The pair remained with the Turks for four years, and scholars credit this imprisonment during Vlad III’s formative years as a possible cause for his lack of humanity and coldhearted tendencies. During his captivity, he learned the methods of the Turks, specifically their use of terror as a weapon. Vlad III and Radu were treated as guests of the sultan initially, but as relations between the two groups deteriorated, the boys’ situation worsened.

In 1444, the Hungarians launched a campaign to force the Turks from Europe. Still technically a vassal of the Hungarian king, Vlad II once more attempted to remain neutral. The Hungarians were soundly defeated and, blaming Vlad II, had both him and his oldest son, Mircea, assassinated in 1447.

Life’s Work

With the death of their father, the young hostages were released by the Turks. The Turks even supported Vlad III as their own candidate for the throne. With their support, he held it briefly in 1448 but was quickly deposed by the Hungarians, and he fled to Moldavia.

It was not until he switched his allegiance back to Hungary that Vlad III was able to advance his political career. He made an alliance with János Hunyadi (known as the White Knight of Hungary) and was allowed to assume control of his father’s former lands in Transylvania. When Hunyadi made his final push against the Turks in Serbia in 1456, Vlad III invaded Walachia and retook his throne, which he would hold for the next six years.

Vlad III established Tîrgovişte as the capital of Walachia and set out to rebuild a castle for himself near the Argeş River. To solidify his power, he invited the most powerful families to an Easter feast, many of whom were the same people who had his father and older brother assassinated. All were arrested. Those too old to work were impaled, while the rest were sent as slaves to work on his castle.

Subsequently, no one was exempt from Vlad III’s cruelty; however, his main targets were the merchants and boyars (nobles) of Walachia and Transylvania, most of whom were German Saxons. His attempts to eliminate the disloyal boyars and promote the middle class and peasants, whom he knew would be loyal, lead some historians to view Vlad III as a sort of Robin Hood figure.

Vlad III used cruelty to enforce morality among the people as well. Women were particular targets, especially those he viewed as unchaste. Dishonest merchants and thieves suffered the same gruesome fate. Vlad III would have stakes arranged in geometric patterns outside the city, and the impaled corpses would remain on the stakes for months. According to some reports, a Turkish invasion met an abrupt end when the Turkish army encountered twenty thousand impaled Turkish prisoners outside the capital. This was known as the Forest of the Impaled.

In 1459, thirty thousand merchants and landowners were impaled in Braşov. A famous image of that period shows Vlad III feasting while the executioner does his work. Ten thousand victims were impaled in Sibiu, Transylvania, in 1460.

Many of the stories of Vlad III’s authority and cruelty are anecdotal. He was reported to have ordered a golden cup displayed without guard in the center of Tîrgovişte. Thieves, fearful of the stake, dared not touch it, and it remained untouched throughout his reign. Another famous story has him receiving some Turkish noblemen in his court, but when they refused to remove their turbans out of respect, Vlad III had the turbans nailed to their heads. His dismay over the number of indigent people in his realm led him to invite all the poor, infirm, beggars, and lame to a massive feast, proclaiming that none should go hungry. The grateful guests were permitted all they could eat and drink, and the feast lasted well into the night. Vlad III asked them, “What else do you desire? . . . Do you want to be without cares, lacking nothing in this world?” When they answered yes, he ordered the building boarded up, and he burned them alive.

Vlad III was driven from the throne by the Turks in 1462. When the Turks arrived, his wife, Elizabeth, leapt into the Argeş River and committed suicide rather than allow herself to be captured. Vlad III escaped to Transylvania, where he was placed under house arrest by Matthias I Corvinus, the Hungarian king. The duration of his imprisonment is disputed. During the next twelve years, however, he converted to Catholicism, married into the royal family, and fathered two sons. Vlad III’s successor to the Walachia throne was his younger brother, Radu the Handsome, who had remained with the Turks after Vlad II’s death.

Vlad III and the Transylvanian prince Stephen Báthory invaded Walachia in 1476. Radu had since died, replaced by Basarab the Old, who fled as they approached. Vlad III retook the throne but lacked the support to hold it. He died in a battle against the Turks at the end of the year. The victorious Turks decapitated his body and sent his head, preserved in honey, to Constantinople. The sultan displayed it on a stake as proof that Vlad III the Impaler was finally dead. The rest of Vlad III’s body was reportedly buried at the island monastery of Snagov, near Bucharest.

Significance

Horror novels were very popular in late nineteenth century England, so when novelist Bram Stoker searched for a subject, his research led him to Romania. Belief in vampires and other superstitions was strong in Eastern Europe, and much of the traditional vampire lore emerged from that region. While there is no evidence that Vlad III was an actual vampire, his bloody legacy contained enough horror real and imagined to inspire Stoker to write his 1897 novel, Dracula. Furthermore, Vlad III is reported to have provided inspiration for such notorious historical leaders as Ivan the Terrible and for twentieth century despots, including Romanian president Nicolae Ceaušescu.

Despite his cruelty, Vlad III is remembered differently in his homeland of Romania. Many Romanians view him as a hero who both withstood invading foreigners and supported the peasant class against the merchants and wealthy landowners.

Bibliography

Boia, Lucian. Romania: Borderland of Europe. Translated by James Christian Brown. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. A history of Romania from the Middle Ages to 2002, including the reign of Vlad III and his struggles against the Turks.

Florescu, Radu, and Raymond T. McNally. Dracula: A Biography of Vlad the Impaler, 1431-1476. New York: Hawthorne Books, 1973. The first complete biography of Vlad III.

McNally, Raymond T., and Radu Florescu. In Search of Dracula: The History of Dracula and Vampires. 1972. Rev. ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. Focuses on the vampire legends in general and those that trace back to Vlad III.

Treptow, Kurt W., ed. Dracula: Essays on the Life and Times of Vlad Tepes. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. From the East European Monographs series, these essays provide a different scholarly view of Vlad III. Includes a chronology and a bibliography.

Wolf, Leonard. Dracula: The Connoisseur’s Guide. New York: Bantam Books, 1997. A collection of essays on the mythology of Dracula and vampire legends in general.