Vlad the Impaler

Vlad III, known as Vlad the Impaler or Vlad Dracula, was voivode, or prince, of Wallachia, the principality between the Carpathians and the Danube in what is now southern Romania. He ruled three times, briefly in 1448, from 1456 to 1462 and for a few weeks in 1476, and is remembered for his war against the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II and for the mass executions, above all by impalement, with which he terrorised enemies and subjects alike. His family name later passed to the vampire of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, but the historical prince and the fictional count have little in common beyond the name.

Vlad was born around 1431, probably between 1428 and 1431; the place is not recorded, and both Sighișoara in Transylvania, where his father lived for a time, and Târgoviște, the Wallachian capital, have been suggested. He was the second son of Vlad II, an illegitimate son of the Wallachian prince Mircea the Elder. In 1431 the elder Vlad was admitted to the Order of the Dragon, a knightly society founded by Sigismund, King of Hungary, to fight the Ottomans, and he became known as Dracul, from the Romanian word for dragon. His son was called Drăculea, "son of Dracul", which gave the form Dracula; Vlad III himself signed letters as Dragulya or Drakulya. In Romanian drac also means devil.

Wallachia was caught between the Kingdom of Hungary and the expanding Ottoman Empire, and its princes had to balance between them. In 1442 Vlad II went to the court of Sultan Murad II to prove his loyalty and left Vlad and his younger brother Radu behind as hostages. Vlad spent some years in Ottoman hands, where he learned Turkish. In 1447 John Hunyadi, the regent of Hungary, invaded Wallachia; Vlad's father and elder brother Mircea were killed by rebellious boyars, Mircea reportedly buried alive, and Hunyadi installed a rival, Vladislav II.

In October 1448, while Vladislav was away with Hunyadi's army, Vlad seized Wallachia with Ottoman help, but he was driven out within weeks after the Hungarian defeat at Kosovo. For several years he moved between the Ottoman lands, Moldavia and Transylvania. By the mid-1450s he had gone over to the Hungarian side, and in 1456, the year of Hunyadi's relief of Belgrade, he invaded Wallachia with Hungarian backing; Vladislav was killed.

Vlad's second reign was marked by ruthless consolidation. Contemporary and near-contemporary sources record mass killings of boyars, the landholding nobles whom he blamed for his family's deaths or suspected of disloyalty. He replaced them with men who owed their position to him. He also fought a series of conflicts with the German-speaking Saxon towns of Transylvania, Brașov and Sibiu, which sheltered rival claimants and with which he quarrelled over trade. In raids across the mountains in 1457 to 1460 he burned villages and suburbs and impaled captives, men and women alike. A charter he issued in September 1459 is the earliest surviving document to mention Bucharest.

Like his predecessors, Vlad paid tribute to the sultan, but by around 1459 he had stopped. Sultan Mehmed II, whose conquest of Constantinople in 1453 had ended the Byzantine Empire, sent envoys to summon him; Vlad had them killed, and in the winter of 1461 to 1462 he crossed the frozen Danube and devastated Ottoman territory along the river. In a letter to King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary he claimed more than 23,000 people killed, many of them Muslim and Christian Bulgarian peasants.

Mehmed answered in 1462 with a large army, which Byzantine-Greek chroniclers put at well over 100,000, aiming to replace Vlad with his brother Radu, who had grown up at the Ottoman court. Vlad retreated, burned crops, poisoned wells and on the night of 16 to 17 June led a raid on the sultan's camp, which caused heavy casualties but failed to kill Mehmed. Near Târgoviște the advancing Ottomans found a forest of stakes on which, according to the chronicler Laonikos Chalkokondyles, some 20,000 prisoners had been impaled. The sultan withdrew, but Radu stayed with Ottoman troops, and as the boyars deserted Vlad, Radu took the throne.

Vlad fled to Transylvania to seek help from Matthias Corvinus. Instead, in late 1462 Matthias had him arrested, producing letters, probably forged, in which Vlad supposedly offered to submit to the sultan. The arrest let Matthias explain why he had spent papal crusading money without fighting the Ottomans. Vlad was held for over a decade, mostly at Visegrád, and then lived under supervision in Pest.

In 1475 Matthias released him to fight the Ottomans again. Vlad fought in Bosnia and in 1476 helped Stephen the Great of Moldavia force the sultan to retreat. With Hungarian and Moldavian support he retook Wallachia in November 1476, but within weeks he was killed in battle against his rival Basarab Laiotă and his Ottoman allies, near Bucharest, in late December 1476 or early January 1477. According to Ottoman and other reports his head was sent to Constantinople. His burial place is unknown.

There is no serious doubt that Vlad executed very large numbers of people, often by impalement, which he used deliberately as public terror. The numbers are another matter. Papal envoys of the 1460s and 1470s credited him with tens of thousands or even 100,000 victims, figures that cannot be checked. Much of what was written about him came from enemies: the Saxon towns he raided, the Hungarian court that needed to justify his imprisonment, and Ottoman chroniclers. German stories about him, circulating from the 1460s and printed from the 1480s with lurid woodcuts, were among the earliest printed bestsellers, and the poet Michael Beheim performed a long poem on his crimes at the court of Emperor Frederick III. These stories mix eyewitness detail with stock tales of tyranny, so historians treat individual anecdotes with caution while accepting the general picture.

A separate Russian tale, probably written by Fyodor Kuritsyn, an envoy of Ivan III who visited Hungary in the 1480s, presented him more ambivalently, as a terrible but effective ruler who enforced justice through fear. In Romania, from the nineteenth century onward, Vlad Țepeș was celebrated as a defender of independence against the Ottomans and a stern enforcer of order against corrupt boyars, a view that tends to excuse his cruelty. His Romanian byname Țepeș, "the Impaler", itself appears only after his death.

Bram Stoker's Dracula owes the historical Vlad little more than a name and a few sentences. Stoker came across the word Dracula in a book on Wallachia and Moldavia, which did not mention Vlad, and noted that it meant "devil" in Wallachian. His notes refer to the voivode's war against the Turks, and the novel's count boasts of an ancestor who crossed the Danube and beat the Turk, but the book never calls him Vlad, makes him a Székely nobleman from Transylvania rather than a Wallachian prince, and says nothing of impalement. Scholars such as Elizabeth Miller have argued that Stoker knew too little about Vlad for him to be called the model for the character.

The vampire itself came from central European folklore and earlier Gothic fiction, not from the life of the prince. Nor is there any medieval tradition that Vlad drank blood, beyond an unconfirmed story that he dipped bread in the blood of his victims. Bran Castle in Transylvania, marketed as Dracula's castle, has no proven connection with him. The fortress most closely tied to him is Poenari, on the Argeș river in Wallachia, which he rebuilt. The fame of the novel and its films has nevertheless made Vlad the best-known ruler in the history of the Romanian lands.