Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler, is one of history’s most murderous figures — and the inspiration for Count Dracula.
Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler, is one of history’s most murderous figures — and the inspiration for Count Dracula.
The Romanian prince was behind countless acts of unspeakable barbarity and ruthlessness.
His favourite method of murder was impalement — in which victims were lowered on to sharpened stakes, suffering an agonising death as their weight pulled them down.
Vlad was born in late 1431. His father, also Vlad, was military governor of Transylvania and belonged to the Order of the Dragon, a band of knights whose duties included crusading against Turks.
Vlad senior was given the surname Dracul because it means dragon in Romanian. Dracula is a diminutive form.
At 11 the young Vlad was seized by Turks and spent six years in captivity in Turkey, during which time he grew into a monster without compassion.
While he was away his father was overthrown as prince of the Romanian province of Wallachia and murdered, along with Vlad’s older brother.
At 25, Vlad killed his father’s murderer Vladislav II and seized power. Thus began a six-year reign of terror.
Vlad took revenge on those who helped topple his father by impaling the older ones and forcing the younger ones to march 50 miles to another town.
There they were made to build him a fortress — and many died in the process.
Vlad was a law and order fanatic. Petty criminals were impaled. Merchants who flouted trade laws were impaled.
Pretty much anybody Vlad disliked was impaled.
He considered all poor people thieves.
Once, he invited a crowd of them to a feast at his court in Tirgoviste. When they had finished he had the hall locked and burned to the ground with them inside, saying they were scroungers.
On another occasion he is said to have rounded up peasants and driven them off a cliff, beneath which he had placed row upon row of sharpened stakes.
Once, two Turkish ambassadors came to his court. Asked to remove their turbans, they refused on religious grounds — so Vlad got his guards to nail them to the screaming Turks’ skulls.
Vlad had a particular hatred for Germans, and many of his worst atrocities are depicted in German propaganda printed on the newly invented press.
One shows Vlad’s most appalling act of savagery, which came in 1462 as his heavily-outnumbered army fled through Romania from Turkish invaders.
Along the way Vlad torched his own villages and poisoned wells so the chasing Turks had nothing to eat or drink.
At Tirgoviste, he impaled 20,000 Turkish prisoners and ate as he watched them die.
The Turkish soldiers who found the “Forest of the Impaled” were so distraught they gave up the chase and went home.
Vlad was assassinated in 1476 — but 400 years on his bloodthirsty deeds provided the inspiration for Dracula, a fictional character literally thirsty for blood.
The ghoul first appeared in the 1897 novel Dracula by Irish writer Bram Stoker and has made dozens of movie appearances since.