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One of the most infamous chararacters from the Middle Ages was Vlad III Dracula, the prince of Wallachia. Here is the story of how he gained the name of 'the Impaler'.
Oct 29, 2020 · Vlad II was defeated and was soon murdered in the marshes of Bălteni, near the site of an ancient monastery (north of Bucharest). His eldest son, Mircea, suffered an even worse fate: blinded by red-hot iron stakes and buried alive in Târgovişte.
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- The Gory Sacking of Brașov
- The Burning of The Beggars
- The Forest of The Impaled
- The Feet-Flaying Torture
- The Massacre of The Boyars
- The Impalement of The Monk
- The Cauldron of Death
Growing up, Vlad had learned about the art of governing through fear and cunning. Ottoman Sultan Murad IIhad held a teenage Vlad, and the powerful Hungarian nobleman John Hunyadi, under whose flag Vlad fought battles against the Ottomans in his twenties, as hostages. It was in these initial battles in the early 1450s that Vlad began to acquire his ...
Vlad loved to burn things, living up to his last name which means ‘son of the dragon'. There were many occasions when Vlad was said to have had enemy combatants, or the people of towns and villages he was sacking, roasted alive. One particularly nasty example did not occur on the battlefield, though – it happened at a banquet in a great hall in Vla...
In 1462, about 60 miles from Târgoviște, Sultan Mehmed II (who had led his army west to destroy Vlad) and his men were stopped in their tracks by a grisly sight. It was what one contemporary historian called a ‘field of stakes’ and must have resembled a forest of impaled Ottoman men, women, and children. Babies were impaled with their mothers and r...
A favourite method of torture of Vlad’s that he would mete out to Turkish prisoners was to have their feet flayed (the skin removed). The raw, bloody limb was rubbed in salt, and goats were brought up to lick the salt off with their rough tongues.
One of Vlad’s most infamous acts of brutality was his purge of the boyars. The boyars were an aristocratic ruling class in many parts of Eastern Europe, including Wallachia. Vlad, once he became prince in 1456, saw the corrupt and scheming boyars as a potential threat to his position. In Easter1457, Vlad summoned the principality’s boyars to an aud...
In about 1490, a Russian monastery compiled a set of nineteen stories about the life of Vlad. One of these tales concerned two Hungarian monks who paid a visit to the prince at his capital. Vlad, according to the account, proudly showed the monks a gruesome display of some of his dead victims' mangled bodies broken on wheels and ‘countless people o...
One medieval chronicle describes a truly awful method of execution that Vlad employed from time to time. The wicked nobleman had, according to the story, a huge copper cauldron in his castle topped with a wooden cover. In the centre of the wooden lid was a hole big enough for a man’s head to fit through. The pot was filled with water, a fire was li...
Oct 28, 2021 · Also known as Vlad III, Vlad Dracula (son of the Dragon), and—most famously—Vlad the Impaler (Vlad Tepes in Romanian), he was a brutal, sadistic leader famous for torturing his foes.
Jan 17, 2022 · For many people, the name of Vlad the Impaler conjures up images of violence, bloodlust, and cruelty. An image painted during his lifetime and reinforced further by the popularity of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula .
- Radu Cristian
May 10, 2023 · An early portrait of Vlad Dracula, known as Vlad the Impaler, the 15th-century prince of Wallachia whose cruel methods of punishment made him notorious across Europe. Image: Wikimedia Commons. Only Vlad Dracula was prepared to face the Turkish hordes.
Oct 31, 2013 · It's not known whether tales of Vlad III Dracula dipping his bread in the blood of his victims are true, but stories about his unspeakable sadism swirled throughout Europe. Tens of thousands...
