Vlad III was always on guard against the Dăneşti clan. Some of his attacks into Transylvania may have been efforts to kill or capture Dăneşti princes. Several members of the Dăneşti clan died at Vlad's hands. Rumors say that thousands of citizens of the free towns that sheltered his rivals were impaled by Vlad. One captured Dăneşti prince was forced to read his own funeral speech while he kneeled at an open grave before his execution.
There was a war between the Ottoman Empire and the Hungarian Kingdom. Following family traditions, Vlad decided to side with the Hungarians. To the end of the 1450s there was once again talk about a war against the Turks, in which the king of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus would play the main role. Knowing this, Vlad stopped paying money to the Ottomans in 1459, and at around 1460, he made a new alliance with Corvinus. The Turks did not like this and tried to remove him from power but they failed. In the winter of 1461 Vlad attacked and devastated the area between Serbia and the Black Sea, leaving over 20,000 people dead.
In response to this, the Sultan Mehmed II headed towards Wallachia with an army of 60,000 men in the spring of 1462. With his army of 20,000-30,000 men Vlad was not able to stop the Turks from entering Wallachia. The Turks occupied the capital Târgovişte (June 4, 1462) and chased Vlad away. Vlad was hiding and made small attacks on the Turks. On the night of June 16 Vlad and some of his men entered the main Turkish camp, wearing Turkish clothing, and attempted to kill Mehmed. Later the Turkish army retired and left Vlad’s brother, Radu the Handsome, as the new ruler prince.
Radu the Handsome gathered support from the nobility and Vlad fled to Hungary.
In August 1462 Radu made a deal with the Hungarian Crown.
Vlad was living in exile because he was afraid of the boyars of Wallachia. Vlad escaped to Hungary but he was put in prison there. The exact time of Vlad's captivity is not known for sure. Apparently his imprisonment was not too dangerous. He was able to gradually win his way back into the favor of King Matthias. He was able to meet and marry a member of the royal family (the cousin of King Matthias). However, some do not believe that it was likely to happen that a prisoner was permitted to marry into the royal family.
He had two sons with his new wife. Vlad also became a member of the Roman Catholic Church. Diplomatic letters and writings from Buda during this time show that Vlad's actual period of imprisonment was short.
The openly pro-Turkish policy of Vlad's brother, Radu was probably a cause in Vlad's good treatment while in prison. It is interesting to note that the Russian texts, normally very favorable to Vlad Ţepeş, tells that even in captivity he could not give up his favorite games; he often captured birds and mice which he tortured and mutilated, and some were impaled on tiny spears.
The years before his final release in 1474 (when he began making plans for the reconquest of Wallachia), Vlad lived with his new wife in a house in the Hungarian capital. His sons were about ten years old when he reconquered Wallachia in 1476.
Around 1475 Vlad and Stefan Báthory of Transylvania invaded Wallachia with a mixed force of Transylvanians, some dissatisfied Wallachian boyars, and Moldavians sent by Prince Stephen III of Moldavia, Vlad's cousin. Vlad's brother, Radu the Handsome, died a couple of years earlier and had been replaced on the Wallachian throne by another Turkish candidate, Prince Basarab the Elder, a member of the Dăneşti clan. When Vlad's army arrived, Prince Basarabs army fled, some to the Turks, others in the mountains. After placing Vlad Ţepeş on the throne, Stephen Báthory and his forces returned to Transylvania, leaving Vlad in a very weak position. Vlad had little time to get support before a large Turkish army entered Wallachia to put back Prince Basarab on the throne. Vlad's cruelties over the years made the boyars to believe that they had a better chance to survive under Prince Basarab. Even the peasants, tired of the cruelty of Vlad, abandoned him. Vlad had to meet the Turks with the small forces at his disposal, which were made up of less than four thousand men.
There are several variants of Vlad III the Impaler's death. Some sources say he was killed in battle against the Turks near Bucharest in December of 1476. Others say he was killed by disloyal Wallachian boyars in the war against the Turks, or during a hunt. Others believe Vlad was killed in the war, surrounded by the bodies of his loyal Moldavian bodyguards. Still other reports claim that Vlad was accidentally killed by one of his own men. Vlad's body was decapitated by the Turks and his head was sent to Istanbul preserved in honey. The sultan had it displayed on a stake as proof that "Kazıklı Bey" was dead. The exact place of his grave is unknown.
Tales and legends about Vlad stayed a part of folklore among the Romanian peasants. By constant retelling they have become confused and created an ideal picture of a big national hero. Among the Romanian peasants, Vlad Ţepeş was sometimes remembered as a prince who defended his country.
But sometimes he is remembered as a very cruel and often capricious ruler. There are several events that are common to all tales.
One tale is about foreign ambassadors whom Vlad Ţepeş was meeting at Târgovişte. All versions agree that Vlad, in response to some real or imagined insult, (perhaps because they refused to remove the hats in Vlad's presence), had their hats nailed to their heads.
A good description of Vlad Dracula survives, courtesy of Nicholas of Modrussa, who wrote:
"He was not very tall, but very stocky and strong, with a cruel and terrible appearance, a long straight nose, distended nostrils, a thin and reddish face in which the large wide-open green eyes were enframed by bushy black eyebrows, which made them appear threatening. His face and chin were shaven but for a moustache. The swollen temples increased the bulk of his head. A bull's neck supported the head, from which black curly locks were falling to his wide-shouldered person."
His famous portrait was rediscovered in the late 1800s, in the gallery of horrors at Innsbruck's Ambras Castle.
Vlad III Ţepeş has been described as very cruel. The old Romanian word for dragon is Dracul, which in modern Romanian means "devil". In Old Romanian, it means "dragon". Dracul was the name given to his father, Vlad II, by other members of the Order of the Dragon. Impalement was Ţepeş's preferred method of torture and execution. His method of torture was a horse attached to each of the victim's legs while sharpened stake was forced into the body. Vlad often had the stakes arranged in patterns. The most common pattern was a ring outside of a city that was his target. The height of the spear indicated the rank of the victim. The corpses were often left there for months.
One tale says 10,000 were impaled in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu (where Vlad the Impaler had once lived) in 1460. Another tale says that on Saint Bartholomew's Day (in August), Vlad the Impaler had 30,000 people of the free Transylvanian city of Braşov impaled. One of the most famous woodcuts of the period shows Vlad the Impaler feasting amongst a forest of stakes outside Braşov, while a nearby executioner cuts apart other victims. Impalement was not his only method of torture. Other methods include nails in heads, cutting off limbs, strangulation, burning, cutting off noses and ears, mutilation of sexual organs (especially in the case of women), scalping, skinning, exposure to the elements or to animals, and boiling alive.