Vlad the Impaler

History is replete with bloodthirsty tyrants, though perhaps none were quite as terrible as the infamous Prince Vlad Tepes, ruler of Wallachia (now part of Romania) from 1431 to 1471. Vlad Tepes was also known as Dracula, because his father's name was Dracul (meaning devil or dragon), and adding an 'A' to the end of a word in Romania is one way of saying "son of". His nickname "impaler" derives from his favourite method of dispatching his enemies, which was impaling them on wooden stakes. He is said to have killed thousands in this way. He would usually use stakes with rounded ends that would not cause gaping wounds, to prolong the torment suffered by his unfortunate victims. On one occasion 20,000 Turkish captives were exterminated in this manner and displayed in a mile long semicircle outside Vlad's capital city, Tirgoviste, to ward off oncoming enemy troops (a very effective, if morbid tactic).

We know a great deal about Vlad's life and adventures, as they were widely reported at the time, and many of these records still survive. As well as his trademark impaling, he is also believed to have skinned, roasted, boiled and diced people, as though they were ingredients for a stew, then fed the remains to the families of the victims. By all acounts, Vlad reveled in the death agony of those he disliked and often dined in the shadow of their rotting corpses. On one such occasion, when Vlad sat down to dine, surrounded by slowly dying victims, one guest dared to comment on the screams and the stench. The impudent felllow was immediately impaled on a particularly tall stake so that he would be above the smells he had so unwisely objected to. This incident illustrates what a grave mistake it was to offend Vlad. It is even said that he nailed hats to the heads of nobles who refused to remove them in respect for his rank.

In spite of all this, there were many at the time who described Vlad as a "cruel but just ruler". Moreover, he was destined to become a hero of Romanian history, on account of his proficency in protecting his country against foreign invasion. It was for this reason that people in Romania took such offence to Francis Ford Coppola's film adaptation of the novel Dracula, which went out of its way to stress the link between Vlad and the evil Count Dracula. In his day, Vlad was famed for his courage in battle. When he won a great victory over the non- Christian Turks, the bells of Christendom rang out in celebration as far away as the island of Rhodes. On the other hand, as we have already seen, he was especially cruel to his prisoners of war. On one occasion for example, he had 300 of them burnt alive.

In 1476, at the age of 46, Vlad was beheaded and buried in a monastry. Many years later, some time in the early 1890s, Bram Stoker came across a reference to the Voivode (Prince) Dracula in William Wilkinson's 1820 book Account of Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, and decided to use the name for the vampire villain of a novel he was working on (Dracula), instead of his original idea of Count Wampyr. Much has been made of the link between Prince Vlad and Count Dracula, but in reality, Vlad the Impaler did not inspire Bram Stoker to write Dracula; he merely provided a historical anchor for a story Stoker had already conceived. In addition to this, he provided Stoker with the perfect gothic villain. For one thing such characters tended to be from the aristocracy; for another they were often Hungarian. Moreover, Stoker needed a geneology for his vampire that went back to Attila the Hun, and had read that the 'Szekelys' claimed kinship with Attila. He also needed a physical desciption, and the woodcut of Vlad on the front of a pamphlet at the British Musuem was perfect.

Sadly, it is here that the resemblance ends. Vlad the Impaler was certainly no vampire, despite the fact that he is reputed to have once dipped his bread in the blood of a victim. As for the stake connection, this is purely coincidence. Having said that, there are those who would say that the bloodsucking ways of the Count in Bram Stoker's novel, pale in comparison to the atrocities committed by the real Dracula. Vlad the Impaler might not have been evil in a supernatural sense, but he was certainly evil.

If you would like to know more about Vlad the Impaler, the following two books are very informative: In Search of Dracula and Dracula: Prince of Many Faces. Both of these are by Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally.

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