I’m sure you’ve heard of Vlad the Impaler, the 15th-century Romanian king who was more ruthless than Mehmed the Conqueror. But how much do you know about him?
My image of Vlad changed over the years as I questioned the history I grew up with. For Romanian children in my generation, Vlad the Impaler was as present in legends and poems as Caliph Harun al-Rashid in The Arabian Nights. Vlad always came to the rescue when an injustice happened, and the culprits paid with their lives for their crimes. I still remember the story of the public well with a golden cup on its rim, meant for thirsty travelers. No one dared to steal it, though, the legend said. The day the cup was gone, people knew that Vlad was no longer king.
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That was the Vlad the Impaler I knew as a child. A just king, with a bejeweled hat. The impaling, the beheadings, the torture were as abstract to me as the horrors in the folktales of Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, or Ion Creangă.
When I moved to the United States, I was baffled by people’s belief that Vlad the Impaler had been a vampire. Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, had been banned under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s communist regime and had only been published in Romania after the Revolution of 1989. My mother had read it and told me to skip it if I wanted to sleep at night. And so, I had been going through life oblivious of one of the two things that the West associated with Romania. (The other was Nadia Comăneci.)
When I tried to tell a better story of Vlad to any American who asked me, I realized I wasn’t doing a very good job. So what did I know about this king?
I knew that Vlad the Impaler was a posthumous title. While he was voivode (king) of Wallachia, he was known as Vlad III and Vlad Dracula, meaning son of Vlad Dracul (the Dragon). He only ruled for about six years (1448; 1456–1462; 1476), but in that short time, he revamped the economy and kept the country independent from its two neighboring empires, the Hungarians and the Ottomans. But that version of Vlad came from the patriotic poems of 19th-century Romanian authors, by the nationalistic ideals of the 1848 European revolutions. Others came from communist school textbooks that promoted the greatness of Romanian history in an effort to justify our growing isolation from Europe behind the Iron Curtain. In America, books, documentaries, and websites about Vlad the Impaler focused on disentangling the Wallachian ruler from Bram Stoker and from vampire stories in general.
That’s when it occurred to me that between the two extremes—a savior and a vampire—I had no idea who Vlad the Impaler had been. So I looked closer. From a confusing mix of research, a character both fascinating and implausible emerged.
The house where Vlad Dracula was born in 1431 still stands in the Citadel Square of Sighişoara, Transylvania, close to the Clock Tower, with its torture chamber, where, to this day, the ceiling is still black from the fires that heated torture instruments during the Middle Ages, and where the bricks in the walls are still scribbled with the victims’ last words.
As a young boy, Vlad witnessed scores of public executions. When he was eleven, he was taken hostage to the Ottoman court together with his younger brother, Radu, as a guarantee for his father’s loyalty to Sultan Murad. That’s where Vlad met the future sultan Mehmed II and their lifelong rivalry began. While Vlad was away, Romanian boyars (noble landowners) murdered his father, Vlad Dracul, and buried his older brother, Mircea, alive.
So, when Vlad became king and chose impalement as his method of execution, was he merely acting in accordance with the mores of the 15th century, when heads were taken as trophies, thieves were flayed and quartered, and criminals were buried alive? Or, because of his childhood trauma, he became a monster who loved watching people die in agony? A monster who also rebuilt the agriculture infrastructure of Wallachia, who regulated foreign trade to allow the local merchants to thrive, and who offered a system of rewards for worthy citizens regardless of their birth rank—an unprecedented step up the economic ladder. A monster and a strategic mastermind who, having lived at the Ottoman court, knew that displaying 20,000 impaled bodies in Mehmed’s path through Wallachia would scare off the great sultan—a sultan who was known to the world as “the Conqueror” because he had taken Constantinople and destroyed the Byzantine Empire in 1453.
Historical accounts of Vlad III have always been contradictory, even while he was alive. His story was one of the first non-biblical tales to be produced for mass entertainment in Germany after the invention of the printing press.
Those pamphlets were gory and far-fetched, such as this one, printed in Nuremberg in 1499, that showed the king dining in the fresh country air reeking of curdling blood and emptied bowels. He was despised in the Hungarian and Ottoman empires, but in Russia, he became a role model of just and strong leadership for czars such as Ivan the Terrible.
Vlad died in battle in 1476, at the age of 45. His head was brought to Mehmed the Conqueror as a trophy. Mehmed II died in 1481, at the age of 49 of apparent poisoning, of which his son Bayezid II might have been responsible.
After his death, Vlad III, like Richard III of England, became a palimpsest, written over after the earlier writing had been erased. To this day, he has been claimed by the most unlikely causes. In an interview for the BBC Travel Channel’s “Wild Carpathia” in September 2011, then-Prince Charles of Wales said, while promoting an initiative to save Transylvania’s virgin forests:
“The genealogy shows that I am descended from Vlad the Impaler, so I have a bit of a stake in the country.”
More recently, the Netflix docudrama series Rise of Empires: Ottoman – Mehmed vs. Vlad (2022) brings together expert historians and spectacular reenactments to offer a nuanced portrait of Mehmed and Vlad. Check out the entire series, if you have a chance. It’s really fascinating.
Even though I’m still not sure how much history and how much myth are blended in the story of Vlad the Impaler, one of the things that stuck with me over the years was his daring Night Attack on Mehmed’s camp near Târgoviște in 1462. So I used it as inspiration for an inciting incident in my historical fantasy, The Exiled Queen. I even kept the name of the battle—because I liked it.
Here’s my Night Attack in The Exiled Queen, seen through the eyes of King Nicetas, who suffers from PTSD caused by the battle:
The scent hit Nicetas—it was Moesian wine, the same wine he’d had in his tent during the Night Attack. In an instant, he saw himself again waking up to clatter and smoke and the smell of spilled wine. The flames licked his skin through his clothes. Scorilus, clad in bronze armor, broke into the tent, wielding a falx pole arm with both hands. The ground trembled under his heft.
Nicetas grabbed his sica and fought back with all his strength. His shorter, curved blade even hooked and yanked the falx from Scorilus’s hands. But then the Steppewynder grabbed Nicetas’s beard, forced him to his knees, twisted his wrist, and squeezed the sica from his hand. Scorilus pushed him down, trapping him under a mountain of armor. Nicetas wanted to punch, but Scorilus gripped his arms. He wanted to bite, but Scorilus was covered in scales. He wanted to shout, but Scorilus was crushing his throat.
A horse with its mane on fire tore through the tent’s canvas, and Nicetas grabbed that chance to throw Scorilus off. He groped around in the grass for a blade. There had to be a weapon on the ground—a shard from the broken wine pitcher, a bread knife, anything. He glanced back up and saw a dagger stabbing down at him.
He rolled away from its path, but a blaze had ripped through his left side…
I’ll keep using Eastern European history as inspiration for my next novel, The Foreign King, the sequel to The Exiled Queen. That’s because I love trying to make sense of real history, with its contradictions that don’t easily follow a narrative. The story structure that readers love but that doesn’t exist in real life, combined with the authenticity of real-life events, can create page-turners. Which remains my goal with every novel I write.
