page_title: Vlad III the Impaler
section_title: Cruelty
hierarchical_section_title: Vlad III the Impaler / Cruelty
caption_attribution_description: Vlad Drăculea of Wallachia
context_page_description: Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, is more commonly known as Vlad "Țepeș". He was born in Sighișoara, Transylvania, Kingdom of Hungary, in 1431. He was the Prince of Wallachia and ruled there three times, in 1448, 1456–1462 and 1476.
  In the English-speaking world, Vlad is best known for the legends of his cruelty. These legends gave Bram Stoker the idea for his main character in the popular Dracula novel.
context_section_description: Vlad III Ţepeş has been described as very cruel. The old Romanian word for dragon is Dracul, which in modern Romanian means "devil". The Wallachians gave Vlad III the Impaler this nickname Dracul, because of his cruelty. 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.
  His victims included women, children, peasants, great lords, ambassadors from foreign powers and merchants. However, the vast majority of his European victims came from the merchants and boyars of Transylvania and Wallachia.  Most of the merchants there were German-speaking Saxons who were seen as bad people because they were not Romanian. He saw the boyars as people who were not loyal (Vlad's own father and older brother were murdered by boyars).
  Almost as soon as he came to power, he gave a party for his boyars and their families to celebrate Easter.  These nobles were part of the conspiracy around his father's death. Vlad, to avenge his father's death, had all the assembled nobles arrested. The older boyars were impaled on the spot. The younger nobles and their families were marched north from Târgovişte to the ruins of the Poienari Castle in the mountains above the Argeş River. The boyars and their families were forced to work for months rebuilding the old castle. According to the reports, they worked until the clothes fell off their bodies, and then were forced to continue working naked. Very few survived the building of Vlad's castle.
  Vlad Ţepeş is also believed to have tortured and impaled some of the Turkish forces. It was reported that an invading Ottoman army turned back when they saw thousands of rotting corpses impaled on the banks of the river Danube. In 1462,  Mehmed II returned to Constantinople after being sickened by the sight of 20,000 impaled corpses outside of Vlad's capital of Târgovişte. Many of the victims were Turkish prisoners of war.
caption: Vlad Tepes and his forest
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