Vlad III Dracula (c. 1431–76), the three-time voivode (prince) of Wallachia (1448, 1456–62 and 1476) and the historical inspiration for Bram Stoker’s famous novel, has been best known since the fifteenth century as Vlad the Impaler (‘Țepeș’ in Romanian and ‘Kazıklı Voyvoda’ in Ottoman Turkish). The violence and cruelty associated with his name by medieval chroniclers, pamphleteers and poets explains much of the fascination that Vlad has exercised on biographers and readers over the centuries. In order to portray the voivode and his violent conflicts with his subjects and neighbouring states, historians routinely cite the astonishing numbers given by Renaissance sources of impaled Wallachians, Saxons from Transylvania (an autonomous province within the kingdom of Hungary) and Ottomans. They generally do not, however, call these numbers into question. In her 2021 article about ‘facts and myths from the life of Vlad III the Impaler’, Aleksandra Bartosiewicz, for instance, simply observes that, ‘according to various estimates, between 40,000 and 100,000 people were sentenced in this gruesome manner during the Impaler’s rule, of which approx. 20,000 were exposed to the public in the capital city of Targovişte’.Footnote 1
These grisly estimates derive from fifteenth-century accounts. Bishop Nicholas of Modruš (c. 1427–70) heard the figure of 40,000 victims at the court of Matthias Corvinus, the famous humanist king of Hungary from the Hunyadi family, where he was papal legate in 1463–4 and where Vlad was under house arrest between 1462 and 1476.Footnote 2 In 1476, Gabriele Rangoni, bishop of Eger (1475–86) and previously bishop of Transylvania (1472–75),Footnote 3 put the total number of impalements at 100,000.Footnote 4 The latter figure adds together various tallies of Vlad’s victims found in contemporary Transylvanian Saxon accounts.Footnote 5 As for the 20,000 victims ‘exposed’ in Targovişte, this figure is provided by the Historiarum demonstrationes, a chronicle covering the last centuries of the Byzantine empire composed by Laonikos Chalkokondyles (c. 1423–74). According to historian Peter Mario Kreuter, this chronicler ‘was then obviously the source for other later Ottoman authors as he mentioned a kind of forest of 20,000 wooden pales found by Ottoman troops near Tîrgoviște [Targovişte], on which Vlad III allegedly fixed men, women, and even children’.Footnote 6
These figures of 20,000, 40,000 and 100,000 victims were already quoted by Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally in their influential 1973 Dracula biography. Even if these scholars warn that ‘statistics are very difficult to establish, particularly for that period’ and acknowledge that other figures originating from Vlad’s adversaries ‘must be viewed with caution’, they nevertheless use them without any further attempt at verification. They only specify that the figure of 100,000 victims ‘undoubtedly includes’ Vlad’s ‘Turkish war victims as well’.Footnote 7 As Aleksandra Bartosiewicz’s 2021 discussion shows, these figures continue to be reported with appropriate notes of caution, but they have in general proved simply too good to check.Footnote 8
Attempts at verifying the figures have been few. In 2008, observing that ‘the mechanics of impalement are cumbersome’, Robert Easton suggested that ‘stories of Vlad’s impaling some 100,000 people in his lifetime are therefore highly improbable’ before adding: ‘If a tenth of the tales of his brutality deserve any credence, however, Vlad was one of the most barbaric men of the Middle Ages, and any gory scenes in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula are the lightest of entertainments in comparison.’Footnote 9 In a similar vein, Meirion James Trow, Matei Cazacu and Peter Mario Kreuter have all urged scepticism.Footnote 10 This article takes up the challenge that these scholars have put down by carrying out a reassessment of the voivode’s impalements in fifteenth-century south-eastern Europe. The following pages demonstrate that Vlad’s use of this punishment was simultaneously influenced by impalement practices and by legal frameworks that existed in both the neighbouring kingdom of Hungary and the Ottoman empire. Furthermore, this article argues that it is possible to estimate the degree of literary exaggeration and provides the first plausible estimations of Vlad’s impalements based on deep contextualisation and the critical comparison of multiple sources from different origins. This remains a daunting task: the surviving chronicles are steeped in sensationalist rhetoric and alternative sources are scarce – but they do exist and must be found.
Because ‘Count Dracula and Vlad Ţepeş’ are ‘intertwined within Western popular culture’,Footnote 11 there is also more at stake than arriving at a precise body count. In turn, any reassessment of impalement will provide a more nuanced image of Vlad. Beyond its contribution to the historiography of Vlad III, this analysis may even have an impact beyond academia, given that ‘the Impaler’ is one of the two ‘central characters of Dracula-tourism’.Footnote 12 As Tuomas Hovi observed in 2014, ‘the history of Vlad the Impaler that is used in the tour-guide narrations, for example, is partly based on the legend tradition about Vlad, which, although to an extent based on historical events, has many fictitious elements in it’.Footnote 13 Vlad’s impalements, however, are historical events. Their reassessment is the key to discovering the extent of the reality behind the fiction.
The Hungarian and Ottoman influences on Vlad’s use of impalements
On 25 November 1452, a ship ‘bearing a cargo of grain for Constantinople’ was sunk by the Ottomans. The vessel’s Venetian captain Antonio Rizzo and crew ‘were brought to Dimotika, where the sultan happened to be at the time’: ‘he had the sailors beheaded on the spot, and the captain was impaled’.Footnote 14 This event caused considerable alarm in the territories neighbouring the expanding Ottoman empire. It also occupies a central position within the debate regarding the origin of this method among the capital punishments used by Vlad. In 1989, Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally explained that, during the final Ottoman siege of the Byzantine capital, ‘this act was aimed at persuading the citizens’ of Constantinople ‘to surrender without a struggle; then, in accordance with custom, the Turks could show leniency toward the population’. They also added that ‘the description of this gruesome scenario raised a few eyebrows, though impalement was known and used by the German Saxons as a form of punishment for capital offenses’.Footnote 15 Meirion James Trow has similarly presented the event as ‘a rare and perhaps even unique spectacle’, maintaining that impalement ‘was not a Turkish custom, even in a war of attrition’.Footnote 16
If impalement was therefore apparently rare in Ottoman lands, where then did the practice originate? And how did Vlad come to embrace it? In his 2006 article, Constantin Rezachevici pinpointed one possible source. He argued that Vlad ‘applied to foreign offenders the kind of punishment used in their country of origin rather than those provided by Romanian feudal law’.Footnote 17 As for the Saxons of Transylvania, both those captured and impaled in Wallachia and the victims of Vlad’s attack on Transylvania in 1459, the author observed that ‘Vlad employed impalement from the legal provisions of the Saxon towns in Transylvania’ where this punishment ‘was done according to various German laws, mentioned in the Altenberg Codex – for killing of babies, rape, killing of relatives and adultery (when both partners shared one stake)’.Footnote 18
As we shall see, the idea that Vlad drew exclusively on the Saxon use of impalement has to be nuanced and placed within a broader Hungarian context, given that the Saxon settlements of Transylvania (Siebenbürgen) were part of the kingdom of Hungary. As such, their judicial autonomy and law codes developed with the approval of the kings of Hungary, beginning with the Andreaneum (1224) issued by Andrew II (r. 1205–35). It is significant that the charter that grants privileges to the Saxons of Transylvania dates from the same period as the first recorded use of impalement in Hungary.
The first well-known case dates back to 1213 when one of the murderers of Gertrud of Merania, queen consort of Hungary (1205–13), was impaled.Footnote 19 Impalement, however, was part of a range of capital punishments used in the kingdom of Hungary during both the medieval and early modern period. As Pál Engel, a leading historian of medieval Hungary, pointed out, both the royal tribunal and those run by the counts (comes in Latin) who headed every county (comitatus; the kingdom’s basic administrative, judicial and political unit) ‘had held the exclusive right to execute or mutilate criminals’ until the early fourteenth century.Footnote 20 Landlords were also able to pronounce such sentences but were required to hand over the convict to the count’s men for punishment. During the Anjou dynasty, royal authority – the king or the governor of the kingdom acting on behalf of the king – began extending the right to impose capital punishments (‘right of the sword’: jus gladii in Latin), including impalement, to noblemen and towns. In Hungarian, the generic name of this privilege (pallosjog) is even etymologically linked to impalement, given that palus (or pallus in Latin) meant ‘stake’.Footnote 21 Granting this privilege was a royal grace which acknowledged the important services performed by noblemen and towns to the Hungarian crown. The first known concession of jus gladii dates back to the 1320s during the reign of Charles I Robert of Anjou (r. 1308–41). Such concessions have traditionally been considered quite rare. In his index of fourteenth-century diplomas published in 1835, György Fejér lists only eighteen between the 1320s and the end of the 1390s.Footnote 22 Although Sándor Márki noted in 1885 that Mary of Anjou, queen of Hungary (r. 1382–85; 1386–95) and her husband, Sigismund of Luxemburg (r. 1387–1437), issued numerous jus gladii letters,Footnote 23 scholars did not examine these royal deeds until the twenty-first century.
In 2015, Rebeca Gliga counted thirty-nine patent letters granting jus gladii for the same period in a pioneering article that confirmed the increase of the number of jus gladii letters (twenty-one) during the reign of Louis I of Anjou (1342–1382) and especially (thirty-four) during the rule of Sigismund of Luxemburg (1387–1437).Footnote 24 My own examination of royal deeds issued by Sigismund has identified a total of forty-six during the period 1388–1418 alone.Footnote 25 The total of jus gladii letters increases to fifty if we also consider four deeds issued by Queen Mary in 1388, 1392 and 1393.Footnote 26 As Gliga observed, the use of the stake is not explicitly mentioned in these letters, which typically insist on the gallows as the main symbol of jus gladii. From the 1430s onwards, however, stakes become a prominent feature of the letters issued by Albert of Habsburg. Indeed, the impalement of nine peasant revolt leaders in Transylvania was a particularly notable event of the king’s reign.Footnote 27
Gliga’s statistics regarding the prominence of different types of capital punishment put stakes in a relatively modest third place, although they appear more frequently towards the end of the medieval period.Footnote 28 Indeed, the Hungarian royal deeds offer no shortage of examples of such grants for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. On 31 August 1439, Albert granted to the Egervári family the right of installing and using the gibbet (patibulum), wheel (rotas), stake (palos) and other torture instruments to punish murderers, thieves, robbers, arsonists, etc. on their lands.Footnote 29 The same right is granted on 12 November 1447 by János Hunyadi, governor of the kingdom, to several members of the Vessződi family (Péter, Lőrinc and János) as well as to Tamás Bobai and Gergely Hidegvizi.Footnote 30 On 18 November 1452, the same governor granted a similar right to members of the Tordai family (András, Miklós and Tamás) for their possessions in the county of Bihar.Footnote 31 Hunyadi’s son, King Mathias, granted the use of capital punishment not only to noblemen, such as the members of the Mérey family on their lands regardless of their location in the kingdom of Hungary (22 May 1475),Footnote 32 but also to religious establishments exercising lordship, like the eremites of the St. Lawrence monastery (17 January 1466).Footnote 33 Mathias’s successors continued to grant the privilege of ius gladii well into the sixteenth century.Footnote 34
Even if the number of beneficiaries of such royal deeds varied from one county to another, after several decades, the jus gladii exercised by counties and towns,Footnote 35 as well as by hundreds of noble families, notably increased the number of gallows and literally raised the stakes across the kingdom of Hungary. This was particularly the case in Transylvania. Major German-speaking Saxon towns could carry out capital punishments and even some smaller Saxon localities, such as SeidenFootnote 36 and Bulkesch,Footnote 37 received the jus gladii in 1448. Given this article’s broader concerns, it is worth noting that Vlad spent time in Bulkesch in October 1475 where he received 200 florinsFootnote 38 following an order issued by Matthias Corvinus on 21 September 1475.Footnote 39 He would have seen Bulkesch’s stake just as he probably encountered the dozens of stakes belonging to other Transylvanian and Hungarian towns and lordships during the period 1462–76.
Stakes, then, were a prominent feature of the Transylvanian landscape and by extension of the Saxon settlements as well. Constantin Rezachevici is therefore certainly correct to present the Saxon use of impalement as a reference and possible inspiration for Vlad, but his interpretation overlooks the essential wider Hungarian context. Crucially, Rezachevici goes further than many earlier historians to rule out the possibility that Vlad could simultaneously also have been influenced by any Ottoman methods of execution. Indeed, he argues that it was instead Vlad who introduced impalement to the Ottomans: ‘The Turks learned about it looking at the forest of the impaled Turkish prisoners, in the summer of 1462, set near Târgoviște to frighten and discourage the enemy.’Footnote 40
Other historians have taken a different view. According to Norman Housley, the Renaissance regarded impaling ‘as a peculiarly Turkish manner of execution’.Footnote 41 This historian attributes the wider spread of impalement to Ottoman influence: ‘those Christian countries where it was practised, notably Hungary and Transylvania, had good reason to be familiar with Ottoman ways’.Footnote 42 As we have seen, however, impalement had long been known in Hungary and in the voivodeship of Transylvania before the Ottoman empire became a perennial threat during the second half of the fifteenth century. Following the 1450s, the stakes – both literal and metaphorical – were raised, as confrontations between Hungary and the Ottoman empire became increasingly frequent. As a Wallachian ruler hemmed in between the Ottoman empire and the kingdom of Hungary, Vlad must have been exposed to the news and the practice of impalement from both sides.
Several prominent examples of impalement by Ottoman authorities disprove claims that impalement was unknown to the Ottomans until 1462. We have already mentioned the case of the Venetian captain impaled in 1452 at the beginning of this section. An even earlier example comes from Albania under Ottoman rule. After having spent almost twenty years in Ottoman serviceFootnote 43 and after participating in a raid on Transylvania in 1442,Footnote 44 Gjergj Kastrioti (c. 1405–68), alias Skanderbeg, deserted the sultan’s army with his Albanian soldiers and took control of the town of Krujë on 28 November 1443. After massacring the Ottoman garrison, Scanderbeg converted from Islam to Catholicism, and, according to contemporary chroniclers, he ordered the impalement of those who did not follow his example.Footnote 45 While capital punishment was a regular feature of Albania’s law codes,Footnote 46 impalement was an exceptional method of execution – one that Skanderbeg probably adopted from his erstwhile Ottoman paymasters.Footnote 47 Having been educated in the Ottoman empire, Skanderbeg both used and threatened to use impalement against the Ottomans in the Ottoman way.
Ten years later, as we already noted in passing, Mehmed II ordered several impalements during the siege of Constantinople. According to chronicler Kritovoulos, seventy-six Byzantine soldiers captured in the forts of Therapia (forty) and of Stoudios (thirty-six) were impaled on 11 April 1453.Footnote 48 A few weeks later, on 28 April 1453, the fusta (small galley) of twenty-four rowing benches commanded by Giacomo Coco was sunk by Ottoman artillery and the forty surviving crew members were impaled in front of Constantinople’s walls.Footnote 49 The punishment was also used in other campaigns. Nikola Skobaljić, commander of a Serbian army, ‘defeated the Turks advancing from Macedonia at Vranje (24 September 1454), but in a second battle further south was defeated (16 November), taken prisoner, and impaled alive’.Footnote 50 As historian Miloš Ivanović has shown, the uncle of Skobaljić was also impaled.Footnote 51 In 1455, after successfully defending the Albanian town of Berat against Skanderbeg’s troops, the Ottomans sold some prisoners into slavery and impaled others.Footnote 52 In 1460, the soldiers defending the castle of Kastritzi (Çandarlı) were massacred. Another Byzantine chronicler, Georgios Sphrantzes (1401–c. 1478), reported that ‘some’ of them ‘were decapitated and others were impaled’.Footnote 53
Given the handful of known examples of collective impalements before 1462, one may still be tempted to conclude that impalement was not widespread in the Ottoman empire during the first half of the fifteenth century. Certainly, it had not been regularly used during wartime. For instance, petitions to the Apostolic Penitentiary in Rome by inhabitants of south-eastern Europe who witnessed Ottoman attacks do not mention impalement as an instrument of Ottoman terror.Footnote 54 Impalement was instead regarded as an exceptional tool for exceptional situations, to punish individuals who represented a threat to the empire. As Shadeen Ali has shown, obeying the principle to ‘rule by [martial] custom’ (örf-i idare), ‘high-ranking military officials, primarily the grand vizier’ could ‘act on behalf of the sultan and impose so-called siyaset during military campaigns or armed conflict against rebels and bandits’.Footnote 55 According to Honey El-Moghazi, such discretionary punishments were meant to take on a particularly gruesome form, including ‘capital or severe corporal punishments, which varied from execution, cutting off the hand, beard, male organs, nose, public scorn, to branding of the forehead’.Footnote 56 Gustav Bayerle commented that Ottoman executions ‘usually took place by hanging though cases of beheading, impalement and strangling were also mentioned’.Footnote 57
Vlad’s use of impalement was therefore influenced simultaneously by Hungarian and Ottoman practices. The voivode was born in Transylvania at a time when stakes were becoming an increasingly prominent element of the landscape from the 1430s onwards. Similarly, news of Skanderbeg’s impalements in 1443 reached the Ottoman empire during Vlad’s time there as hostage (1442–7).Footnote 58 We can make similar connections to other collective impalements. At the end of 1452, for instance, the news of Antonio Rizzo’s impalement reached Transylvania during Vlad’s stay there between 1452 and 1456.Footnote 59 Word of other collective impalements – those during the siege of Constantinople (1453), the execution of Nikola Skobaljić (1454) and the Ottoman impalement of Skanderbeg’s Albanian troops (1455) – also reached Transylvania during this period, either directly from Istanbul, the new Ottoman capital following the conquest of Constantinople, or via Moldavia, a territory with which the city of Brașov enjoyed an intensive correspondence.Footnote 60
Evaluating the number of victims of Vlad’s collective impalements
In a 2018 chapter, Peter Mario Kreuter considers the ‘forest’ of 20,000 impaled Turks at or near Târgoviște to be ‘an exaggerated literary episode’ created by Vlad’s enemies. In his view, the high number was intended to underline Vlad’s cruelty and ruthlessness, and over time the figure merged with the sylvan metaphor, becoming part of the forest itself.Footnote 61 Adrian Gheorghe’s work, however, has uncovered invaluable Ottoman sources that independently corroborate the massacre. The chronicler Enveri, a participant in the 1462 Ottoman campaign against Vlad, had personally witnessed a full field of impaled Turks.Footnote 62 Unfortunately, this rare eyewitness did not provide a figure. That Vlad captured both civilian and military opponents for impalement near the Wallachian capital during his deadly second reign (1456–62) is, however, well documented. It is the true size of this ‘forest’ that we will attempt to estimate in this section.
We do, in fact, have some figures for Vlad’s casualties during his 1461–2 campaign against the Ottomans. Writing on 11 February 1462, from Giurgiu, in present-day southern Romania, Vlad himself provides Matthias Corvinus with detailed figures on the figure of Turks and Bulgarians who perished during his attacks along the Danube. Two manuscript versions of this Latin letter survive in libraries in Munich and Wolfenbüttel.Footnote 63 Both versions are followed by a note entitled ‘A register of the locations and the number of people – Turks and Bulgarians, men and women – who were killed on this occasion in Turkey by Prince Vlad, voivode of the Transalpine regions.’Footnote 64 As Matei Cazacu has already warned, however, the figures recorded in the two manuscript copies of the letter are inconsistent – both with each other and internally. The Munich copy gives a total of 23,884 killed, but the sum of the local tallies only reaches 20,099. The Wolfenbüttel version reports 23,889 deaths, yet its internal totals add up to just 22,879.Footnote 65
Vlad’s letter also includes a crucial detail about how the death toll was verified: ‘And the figures given above represent the number of dead whose heads and “signs” were brought to our officers who were placed everywhere.’Footnote 66 Cazacu usefully draws our attention to the contemporary recollections of a Serb who lived through these events as a janissary. Konstantin Mihailović’s memoires make it clear that Vlad’s ‘signs’ were, in fact, slit noses: Vlad ‘had the noses cut off all those living and dead, male and female’ which he sent ‘to Hungary, boasting that as many Turks had been defeated and killed as there were of these noses’.Footnote 67
A third, separate source conveys a figure that is not far from those found in the two registers. A report sent from Venice to Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga in Rome in March 1462 put the number of victims of Vlad’s campaign at 21,660.Footnote 68 Crucially, notwithstanding the evident cruelties committed, none of these sources mentions the use of impalement. That detail appears only in the 1463 German pamphlet Geschichte Dracole Waide [The History of Voivode Dracula]. This lurid pamphlet alleged that Vlad ‘had impaled all the people that he could come across’ and that ‘they numbered twenty-five thousand, besides those who perished by fire’.Footnote 69 Here we may observe the process of literary embellishment that Peter Mario Kreuter has noted in other contexts.
We should be careful, then, not to assume that Vlad invariably reached for the stake. Only a handful of historical records allow us to evaluate the actual number of impalements. During the first months of 1459, Vlad arrested merchants from Brașov and Burzenland in Wallachia and ordered the impaling of forty-one individuals,Footnote 70 probably at the same location. This information about the impaled Saxons comes from a contemporary letter by Dan III, Vlad’s opponent then in hiding in Transylvania.Footnote 71 The incident is also reported in the Geschichte Dracole Waide, the aforementioned German chronicle: ‘Then he had impaled all the merchants, and others with merchandise – the entire body of merchants – from Burzenland to the Danube, near Brăila. They numbered six hundred, with all their goods, and these he confiscated.’Footnote 72 As in other contexts, the tally figure of forty-one reported by a contemporary (but hostile) source increases to six hundred. In this instance, only 7 per cent of the impalements reported by the German pamphlet can be accepted as roughly accurate.
The Geschichte also claimed that on Easter of 1459 Vlad lured boyars (noblemen) who opposed him to a banquet in Târgoviște in order to eliminate them: the impaled lords supposedly numbered 500.Footnote 73 Fact checking this incident in 2004, Meirion James Trow commented that ‘in reality, the whole party cannot have included more than 200 and the place of execution, the ruins of which still stand today, is only large enough to house about forty’.Footnote 74 Matei Cazacu has plausibly linked the incident to Vlad’s efforts to eliminate opposition from within his regime, noting that eleven of the voivode’s twenty-three known councillors ‘completely disappear from the documents which is a stunning percentage’.Footnote 75 Noting the size of the dining room – ‘an unimpressive twelve meters long, and seven meters wide’ – Cazacu puts the total number of victims, including boyars, at no ‘more than fifty in all’.Footnote 76 Both Trow’s and Cazacu’s estimates, based on archaeological excavations, therefore enable a reasonable estimation of the Bloody Easter casualties of between forty and fifty impalements. Here, the number of impaled boyars in the forest at Târgoviște was probably less than 10 per cent of the figure reported by the Geschichte Dracole Waide.
The case of the impaled Saxon merchants and that of the Wallachian boyars impaled at Târgoviște indicate that the historical reality of Vlad’s impalements may be estimated between 7 and 10 per cent of the figures contained in the German pamphlet of 1463. This ratio gives a good idea of the literary exaggeration used in the German chronicle – and very probably in others – that shaped Vlad’s image for centuries. We can thus agree with Matei Cazacu that the figures for the 1459 episode and others are ‘clearly exaggerated’. However, this inflation cannot be attributed to ‘confusion with the prince’s other violent actions’: it is a literary exaggeration, the result of a systematic quantitative dramatisation of every violent act attributed to the voivode.Footnote 77
Analysis of a third episode reported in the Geschichte Dracole Waide provides some more speculative support for the argument that the chronicle deliberately overstated the number of impalements. On 24 August 1460, Vlad attacked the Wallachians of the duchy of Amlaș in punishment for harbouring his rival Dan. The chronicle claimed that Vlad had the population massacred and that the voivode ‘brought home their chaplain and those he was not able to kill at that time, and had them impaled’.Footnote 78 The duchy of Amlaș covered eight localitiesFootnote 79 and had an estimated population of 1,190.Footnote 80 A 1488 census, a generation after the alleged incident, counted 219 households as well as nineteen empty houses.Footnote 81 In the case of Amlaș, these empty houses – 8 per cent of the settlement – fall near the midpoint of the 7–10 per cent range, possibly suggesting that a similar percentage of the population may have been executed. Certainly, the overall census figures appear to rule out the indiscriminate massacre described by the 1463 chronicle and still accepted by Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally.Footnote 82
We could therefore adopt a plausibility rate of 8 to 8.5 per cent – that is, the proportion of executions, particularly impalements, reported in the Geschichte that were likely to have been carried out. In cases where other data are exceptionally scarce, the figure may indicate a reasonable upper limit of the likely number of casualties. For instance, in 1460, Vlad attacked the duchy of Făgăraș, where – according to the Geschichte Dracole Waide – he again resorted to his typical seize-and-impale strategy: ‘he rounded up [the population of] an entire region called Făgăraș, and led them to Wallachia, with women, men, and children, and had them impaled’.Footnote 83 This duchy’s estimated population was 10,000 inhabitants, but contemporary accounts suggest a more limited, though still intimidating, death toll. A royal deed of Matthias Corvinus, issued on 3 December 1462, indicates that at least two villages (ŞercaiaFootnote 84 and PărăuFootnote 85) were depopulated due to Vlad’s devastating attack in 1460 – paradoxically, this very specificity makes a wider, more general massacre less credible.Footnote 86 As the duchy counted 65 villages, and therefore an average of around 150 inhabitants per village, this suggests at least 300 missing individuals.Footnote 87 In the absence of further evidence, the 8–8.5 per cent plausibility rate indicates a reasonable upper bound, pointing to an upper limit of between 800 and 850 victims.Footnote 88
We may apply the same approach to a smaller but related incident. The Geschichte Dracole Waide similarly claims that Vlad also targeted the Saxon possession of Talmesch (Tălmaciu in Romanian) in the same region. Here too, its population was allegedly ‘brought to Wallachia, and these he had impaled cruelly and in various ways’.Footnote 89 Using the same assumptions, twelve or thirteen inhabitants of Talmesch may have joined Vlad’s forest of the impaled.
Other instances make clear that Vlad selected a representative – and usually high profile – sample of victims for transport and impalement at Târgoviște. For example, the list annexed to Vlad’s letter to Matthias Corvinus (11 February 1462) specifies that ‘at Giurgiu, on both sides [of the river], 6,414 were killed and the fortress on the other side of the Danube was conquered and occupied’ and that ‘the lord of the stronghold, the subașı, was killed and it was there that Hamza Bey was captured’.Footnote 90 The Historiarum demonstrationes by Laonikos Chalkokondyles confirms that, during the winter campaign of 1461–2, Vlad captured Hamza Bey, governor of Nicopolis, and Thomas Katabolenos, the sultan’s Greek secretary, at GiurgiuFootnote 91 and that, ‘after capturing them, he led them all away to be impaled, but first he cut off the men’s limbs’.Footnote 92 According to the Serbian janissary Konstantin Mihailović, Vlad ‘had the emissary seized with all his servants – they were thirty in number – and he ordered him to be taken to a very secure stronghold isolated by waters, called Târgoviște’ and ‘he had Hamzabeg, the Emperor [i.e. sultan’s]’s emissary, impaled first, and around him all his servants’.Footnote 93
The eventual impalement of Hamza Bey and the other Ottomans happened, according to sources analysed by one modern historian, beneath the palace windows at Târgoviște.Footnote 94 The fact that chronicles and pamphlets establish a connection between Vlad’s residence and the site of impalement is not surprising because executions, as Bogdan Petru Maleon explains, ‘were to be performed as to have maximum of visibility’ and, ‘in Moldavia as well as in Wallachia, they were made in front of the royal court and other highly frequented urban places, especially in fair days, when publicity was maximum’.Footnote 95 Execution sites located inside towns were often temporary, whereas those outside the city walls, in the vicinity of towns, were permanent.Footnote 96 The ‘forest of the impaled’ belonged to this second category. Due to its proximity to a major road used by travellers as well as by the Ottoman army in 1462, ‘the sickening sight of the field of the impaled’ could be interpreted by Meirion James Trow as ‘the last straw in a psychological battle Țepeș had been waging since the previous year’.Footnote 97
To sum up, if we apply the 8–8.5 per cent plausibility rate to the 20,000 people who were said to be impaled at or near Târgoviște according to the chronicler Chalkokondyles, the number of impaled individuals on the field seen by the chronicler Enveri in 1462 was more likely to have been between 1,600 and 1,700. Of this estimate, two-thirds (c. 1,000–1,100) can be traced to events in the historical record, including those already discussed (see Table 1 below). In other words, the ‘forest of the impaled’ was the culmination of several years of impalements carried out from 1456 to 1462, with an annual average of just under 250 impalements a year.
Table 1. Estimate of the number of impaled individuals at Târgoviște by Vlad III
* Data directly extracted from historical records.
** Estimate using an 8–8.5 per cent plausibility rate on numbers mentioned in historical records.
To arrive at an overall estimate for Vlad’s impaled victims, however, we must provide further evidence for collective impalements taking place beyond Târgoviște. Two such incidents survive in the sources. During the voivode’s incursion into Transylvania, Saxons were impaled on the Tâmpa mountain outside the city of Brașov to intimidate the city’s population. A chronicle kept by the monastery of Melk, in Austria, quoted by Matei Cazacu, reports ‘that two hundred people were impaled near the chapel of St. James, and that the table on which Dracula [i.e., Vlad] took his breakfast was wrested from the chapel’s main altar’.Footnote 98 In a letter sent to Venice on 28 July 1462, Domenico Balbi, the Venetian ambassador to Istanbul, relayed a rumour that an Ottoman contingent of 4,000 soldiers – left in Wallachia by Mehmed II to support Radu III the Handsome, Vlad’s brother and rival – had been taken prisoner and impaled.Footnote 99 Much like the Geschichte Dracole Waide, these sources report uncertain events at a distance, relying on rounded figures and rumours of absolute punishment. If we were to apply the same plausibility rate developed earlier for the Geschichte, these two incidents would yield a further 330 to 360 victims. This would put the total number of impaled victims at just over 2,000. This estimate constitutes ‘only’ 5 per cent of the 40,000 victims reported by Nicholas of Modruš (1463–4) and 2 per cent of the 100,000 victims described by Gabriele Rangoni (1476). When we set it against Vlad’s own estimates of the casualties of his anti-Ottoman campaign (between 20,099 and 23,889 deaths), impalement appears to be far from a routine punishment – perhaps inevitably so, given the time and resources required to carry it out on a large scale.
Conclusion
In 2016, James Waterson observed that ‘whether the number killed [by Vlad] was 70,000 or 7,000 does not matter; the question of magnitude of terror depends on the number left alive, and the sources on the massacres in Transylvania make it very clear that this number was a fraction of those who died’.Footnote 100 This reassessment of Vlad III’s impalement practices contradicts this assumption – the stakes were real and the number of victims does matter. While scholars such as Matei Cazacu and Peter Mario Kreuter have already identified the exaggeration encountered in sources, especially in the Geschichte Dracole Waide (1463), this article has attempted to estimate the true extent of Vlad’s use of impalement.
In order to be able to evaluate the number of all of Vlad’s impalements specified in fifteenth-century narrative sources, 8–8.5 per cent can be considered as a reasonable and justified plausibility rate. Thus, it is possible to estimate that 1,600–1,700 executed people made up the ‘forest of the impaled’ at Târgoviște rather than the 20,000 mentioned by the chronicler Laonikos Chalkokondyles. These figures certainly do not downplay the brutality of Vlad’s rule, but, contrary to the popular legend and the sensationalist claims of some contemporary chroniclers, impalement was not a principal tool for mass killing.
Contrary to previous scholarship, Vlad’s use of impalement did not have a singular source of influence (either Ottoman or Hungarian), but rather two major influences (Ottoman and Hungarian). Vlad was exposed to the news and perhaps also to the sight of the Ottoman practice of impalement while staying at the court of the sultan (1442–7) and during visits to pay annual tribute (1456–8). He probably heard about collective impalements perpetrated by Ottomans during his stay in Moldavia (1449–52). The voivode was also familiar with the Hungarian customs because of his contacts with and sojourn in Transylvania (1452–6). As we saw, a particularly notorious collective impalement had taken place there in 1438, during Vlad’s childhood, and he would have witnessed first hand the growing number of permanent stakes which proclaimed the jus gladii of lordships and towns who had received this privilege from the king of Hungary. Several Transylvanian Saxon towns already used impalement before Vlad’s lifetime, while some were granted the jus gladii during Vlad’s stay in Hungary as Matthias Corvinus’s hostage.
Vlad used collective impalements against Wallachians (both in Wallachia and in the duchies of Amlaș and Făgăraș), his former Saxon allies (especially in Burzenland), and even his Ottoman suzerains (notably the unfortunate Hamza Bey) – all of whom, he claimed, had betrayed him in one way or another. In this, however, he acted much like the king of Hungary, who (as we saw) had rebellious Transylvanian peasant leaders impaled, and the Ottoman sultan, who had ordered the same fate for Byzantine soldiers who resisted him. Vlad, then, adopted a known form of punishment and offered justifications very similar to those of his neighbours, while the scale of each collective punishment was often much the same. He simply carried out many more of them.
That said, as this article has also demonstrated, the death toll by impalement has been vastly inflated, often at the expense of other types of execution. The voivode’s roughly 2,000 impaled victims – estimated and partly documented here – constitute a group eleven times smaller than the 23,889 individuals whose heads were counted in Vlad’s letter to the king of Hungary on 11 February 1462.Footnote 101 In light of this comparison and the fact that Vlad, according to contemporary narrative sources, clearly employed other execution methods, the strong emphasis on impalement in the numerous representations of the voivode is somewhat surprising. The cruelty of this form of capital punishment and the spectacle of its collective implementation are probably the main explanations. Our reassessment of Vlad’s impalements in a wider fifteenth-century south-eastern European context reveals that the ‘monstrous’ nature of the voivode’s image partly rests on this exaggerated – perhaps even hyperbolic – scale of impalements.
This, finally, brings us back to the central visual metaphor of the ‘forest of the impaled’. In face of the Ottoman threat, as well as rival claimants to his throne, the site at Târgoviște was clearly designed by Vlad to demonstrate and proclaim his authority. Here too, however, he was copying and amplifying rather than innovating wholesale. Others had transformed impaled bodies into a demonstration of strength against the Ottomans before. On 12 June 1458, Roberto da Sanseverino and his companions visiting the island of Rhodes were invited by the Knights Hospitaller ‘for the next day to see the execution of 250 Turkish prisoners that were to be cut to pieces or impaled’.Footnote 102 In 1464, a few years after Vlad’s forest, the Venetian admiral Orsato Giustiniani similarly ordered the execution by impalement or by hanging of 300 Ottoman soldiers captured at Mytilene on the island of Lesbos in a gruesome, visual display of anti-Ottoman defiance.Footnote 103 These figures, of course, pale in comparison to the 1,600–1,700 stakes raised at Târgoviște. This is, however, an already notable, indeed sobering, figure, even without the literary exaggeration of the chroniclers and pamphleteers. Just as the stakes once dominated Vlad’s capital, they have also taken hold of our collective imagination, downplaying at the same time Vlad’s extensive use of other methods of execution and the cruelties committed by his nearest contemporaries.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Florin Nechita (Transilvania University of Brașov, Romania), who welcomed my contribution on the history of Bran Castle to the UNITA Blended Intensive Program ‘Dracula Between Pop Culture and Tourism’ (Brașov, 28 October–1 November 2024) where the necessity of reassessing Vlad’s collective impalements became apparent to me. The reviewers provided helpful suggestions for further reading. Constructive comments by Jan Machielsen and Paul Readman were invaluable during the editorial process.
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