Vlad the Impaler

Jimmy on November 10, 2025 196 views

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Powerful clip. Very few know the true history of the real Vlad the Impaler, whom Irishman Bram Stoker (one of my favorite Gothic writers) loosely dubbed “Dracula” for his 1897 novel. Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad III Dracula, was a 15th-century Wallachian prince. He was brutal, brilliant and terrifyi... View MorePowerful clip. Very few know the true history of the real Vlad the Impaler, whom Irishman Bram Stoker (one of my favorite Gothic writers) loosely dubbed “Dracula” for his 1897 novel. Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad III Dracula, was a 15th-century Wallachian prince. He was brutal, brilliant and terrifyingly effective. His life is a cocktail of medieval politics, Eastern Orthodox-Christian fervor, anti-Ottoman resistance, and savage justice. Strip away the gothic fog of the later “Dracula” myth, and you’ve got a warlord fashioned from fire and blood, and absolutely not a vampire. He was born c. 1431 in Sighișoara, Transylvania, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary. He dies c. 1476/77, likely in battle or by assassination. He had three separate reigns as Voivode (Prince) of Wallachia: 1448, 1456–1462, and 147 His nickname “Tepes” (“the Impaler”) comes from his fondness for impalement, a grotesque but effective method of execution that involved skewering victims on long wooden stakes and letting them die slowly. He used it on Ottoman invaders (non-offensively), Boyars (nobles) he didn’t trust and thieves, beggars, and other criminals. Estimates of his victims range from 20,000 to over 100,000. His most infamous act is leaving a forest of corpses impaled outside Targoviste in 1462 to psychologically cripple an approaching Ottoman army. Christian Defender or Brutal Tyrant? Both. Here’s the rub. He was raised partially in the Ottoman court as a hostage, which bred a lifelong hatred of the Turks. Later, he saw himself as a defender of Christendom, even earning admiration from Pope Pius II, who saw him as a potential hammer against Islam. He ruled with an iron fist. His justice system was swift, severe, and often fatal. He crushed the Boyars who had betrayed his father, stabilized Wallachia, and fought corruption through fear and force. His tendencies towards autocracy and terror are not opinion but historical fact. “Dracula” means “son of Dracul.” His father, Vlad II, was inducted into the Order of the Dragon, a Christian chivalric order and took the name “Dracul” meanings “dragon” or “devil” depending on your Latin/Romanian. Bram Stoker took the name “Dracula” for his vampire novel, but only loosely based the character on Vlad III. The blood-drinking monster is mostly Victorian Gothic fiction, not medieval Wallachian reality. Much of what we know about Vlad comes from a mixture of German pamphlets portraying him as a madman (propaganda), Slavic and Romanian chronicles, which vary between admiration and horror, and Ottoman accounts, which paint him as a monster. In reality, he was likely no worse than most rulers of his time, just more flamboyant and theatrical in punishment. In Romania, Vlad Tepes is often seen as a national hero, a symbol of resistance against foreign domination and domestic treachery. Vlad the Impaler wasn’t a vampire, but he was the nightmare of both East and West, a man who turned violence into policy, cruelty into fashion and vengeance into statecraft. He ruled not by consent but by force and terror. Yet to a land ravaged by treachery and Turkish incursion, he brought a perverse kind of order. He was not a monster in the supernatural sense but a man who mastered the brutal arithmetic of survival in a cutthroat era of attempted conquest and domination of Christian kingdoms. In Vlad’s world, violence was the throne and the law, the cross inverted into a stake. He mimetically mirrored his enemies, out-crueling the cruel and became the very terror he sought to cast out. In the Girardian sense, violence is contagious…a sacred fury that always demands blood. Vlad fed it until it feasted on him. His legacy isn’t justice. It’s a warning: when men try to save the world by the sword, they only crucify it again. Only one Victim broke that cycle not by impaling, but by being impaled Himself. And in that, not Vlad’s forest of corpses is where real terror and triumph sits.

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November 10, 2025