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What this episode is about
Nuremberg, 1488: Marcus Ayrer prints “Die Geschicht Dracole Waide” (“The Story of Voivode Dracula”), one of Europe’s first media sensations. The second part of my Carpathian trilogy is about the man behind it, Vlad III. I show him neither as just a sadist nor as just a national hero, because both images contain truth and both contain propaganda.
Son of the dragon
In 1431, Emperor Sigismund admitted Vlad’s father to the Order of the Dragon, which gave him the byname Dracul, “dragon” or “devil.” Vlad III was born the same year in Sighișoara, into a world in which the throne of Wallachia changed hands twelve times in fifty years.
Hostage of the sultan
At eleven, he and his brother Radu were sent to the Ottoman court as hostages. Radu, later called “the Handsome,” became a courtier and a confidant of the future Sultan Mehmed II. Vlad got to know the Ottoman system from the inside. When he was sixteen, boyars murdered his father and buried his older brother Mircea alive.
Easter 1457 and the golden cup
In 1456 Vlad took the throne for the second time. At an Easter feast he had the old boyars executed and made the younger ones rebuild Poenari Castle. At the same time, Russian sources tell of the golden cup at the well that nobody stole for six years. Vlad reorganized the administration and taxes and filled his council with men loyal only to him.
The stake
Impalement was not Vlad’s invention. It was common in the Balkans and in the Ottoman Empire. The German pamphlets give victim counts as high as 100,000; modern historians estimate a few tens of thousands.
Saxons, the sultan and the forest of the impaled
Vlad led punitive raids against the Transylvanian Saxons, whose chanceries later produced the reports against him. In 1459 he stopped paying tribute to the sultan, and in the winter of 1461–62 he crossed the frozen Danube and reported 23,884 dead to the Hungarian king. In June 1462 his night attack on Mehmed’s tent failed. Outside Târgoviște, the Ottoman army then found a field full of impaled people, described by Laonikos Chalkokondyles, and Mehmed turned back.
Arrest and pamphlets
Vlad still didn’t win. Radu became rival prince, and Matthias Corvinus had Vlad arrested in November 1462, based on letters most historians consider forgeries. This is when the German horror stories were written. The Russian “Tale of Voivode Dracula,” probably by Fyodor Kuritsyn, shows him instead as a strict but just ruler.
Death, Dracula and Ceaușescu
Vlad died at the end of 1476; the circumstances are disputed. His head was sent to Constantinople. The only link to Stoker’s Dracula is the name, taken from a footnote. The identification of the two goes back to Florescu and McNally in 1972, and Bran Castle has very little to do with him. In 1976, Ceaușescu made him a model for his own rule.
Frequently asked questions
Was Vlad the Impaler the real Dracula?
Hardly. Bram Stoker only took the name “Dracula” from a footnote. His notes contain nothing about Vlad’s life.
How many people did Vlad the Impaler kill?
Nobody knows exactly. Modern historians assume a few tens of thousands; the German pamphlets give much higher numbers.
Is Bran Castle Dracula’s castle?
No. Vlad was probably there briefly at most. His fortress was Poenari, above the Argeș River.
Where Stoker’s vampire really comes from: Strigoi in the lexicon.
About this episode
Nuremberg, 1488. A printing press spits out a pamphlet with a woodcut on the cover: a crowned prince dining at a table, surrounded by a forest of stakes. Men, women, children — skewered like insects. It becomes one of Europe’s first mass-media sensations. And it creates a myth that refuses to die.
But who was the man behind the woodcut? Was Vlad III Țepeș really the bloodthirsty monster of the German pamphlets — or the just ruler of the Russian chronicles? A sadist who turned impalement into a system of government — or a moderniser who centralised a failing state? A war criminal — or the only man who made Sultan Mehmed II turn his army around?
In this episode, we follow Vlad from his childhood as an Ottoman hostage to the Easter massacre at Târgoviște, from the forest of 20,000 impaled bodies to his mysterious death in the Wallachian swamps. We trace the German pamphlets and their Russian counterpart. We ask why Matthias Corvinus needed a scapegoat — and why Ceaușescu needed a hero. And we settle the question once and for all: did Bram Stoker base Dracula on Vlad the Impaler? The answer is no. And the real story is far more interesting.
This episode is a direct sequel to our Strigoi episode. If you haven’t seen that one yet, I’d recommend watching it first.