And what would a week’s worth of Eastern European Vampire posts be without a story on Vlad “the Impaler” Dracula? I should especially include Vlad because Boston College, where I got my Ph.D., had not one but *two* Dracula specialists when I was studying there.
In American pop culture, the Vampire repertoire takes its cue from the literature generated from the publication of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel _Dracula_. But Stoker pretty much just liked the name and Eastern-European provenance, and didn’t try to write a monster based on the historical Vlad.
But Vlad Tepes (1428/31-1476/77) was a brutal leader. Although stories of his violence were certainly amplified in contemporary German sources (such as in this 1499 woodcut shown here) as well as by his political rivals, he did earn his moniker “the Impaler.” Vlad himself recorded that he had killed “23,884 Turks and Bulgarians” in one military campaign, and he taught his neighboring Turkish enemies the practice of killing by thrusting a long stake through an opponent’s body. This type of death could take a very long time and incurr a great deal of pain.
In the words of the Greek writer Laonikos Chalkokondyles, “there were large stakes on which they could see the impaled bodies of men, women, and children, about twenty thousand of them, as they said; quite a spectacle for the Turks and the Sultan himself! The Sultan, in wonder, kept saying that he could not conquer the country of a man who could do such terrible and unnatural things, and put his power and his subjects to such use . . . “
Source(s): OMG Facts, “Was history’s most brutal murderer really so bad?” Ines Vuckovic/Dose. Oct 2016. _Journal of Dracula Studies_, vol 8 2006, article 4, “Punishment with Vlad Grows- Punishments in Europe Common and Differentiating Traits,” Constantin Rezachevici.
