Vlad the Impaler

• 1. Introduction

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  In the last days of June 1462, the army of Sultan Mehmed II reached the Wallachian town of Târgoviște and found it deserted. Its ruler, Vlad the Impaler, was gone. What he had left behind was a field of stakes. The chronicler Laonikos Chalkokondyles wrote that the impaled dead covered ground seventeen stades long and seven wide. By the account he was given, about twenty thousand men, women and children hung there, and birds had made nests among the bodies. Even the sultan was stunned. He is said to have remarked that a man who had done such great deeds, with so diabolical a grasp of how to govern, could not simply be stripped of his country. Who was the ruler who left that scene behind? How much of his terrifying reputation can be trusted, and who decided what the world would remember? And why does his nickname still echo far beyond the Carpathian Mountains?

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• 2. A Dragon's Son

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  Diplomatic reports in the 15th century already spelled his nickname as Dracula, Dracuglia or Drakula. In the late 1470s he signed two of his own letters as Dragulya or Drakulya. The name came from his father, Vlad Dracul, whose nickname meant Vlad the Dragon in medieval Romanian. Vlad Dracul had earned it by joining the Order of the Dragon, a militant fraternity founded by Sigismund of Luxemburg, King of Hungary. Its purpose was to halt the Ottoman advance into Europe. Dracula is the Slavonic genitive of Dracul, so it means son of Dracul. In modern Romanian, dracul means the devil, and that second meaning helped darken the son's reputation.

  Romanian historians know him instead as Vlad Țepeș, or Vlad the Impaler. The nickname points to impalement, which was his favorite method of execution. Around 1500 the Ottoman writer Tursun Beg called him Kazıklı Voyvoda, meaning Impaler Lord. On the 1st of April 1551, Mircea the Shepherd, then Voivode of Wallachia, used the same nickname in a letter of grant.

  Vlad II Dracul was himself an illegitimate son of Mircea I of Wallachia, and the future Impaler was his second legitimate son. Historians place the birth between 1428 and 1431, most probably after the father settled in Transylvania in 1429. Radu Florescu writes that the boy was born in the Saxon town of Segesvár, now Sighișoara in Romania. There the family lived in a three-story stone house from 1431 to 1435. His mother remains uncertain. Some modern historians name a daughter or kinswoman of Alexander I of Moldavia, while others suggest his father's unknown first wife.

  Vlad Dracul seized Wallachia in 1436, after the death of his half-brother Alexander I Aldea. A charter issued on the 20th of January 1437 holds the first mention of Vlad and his elder brother Mircea, calling them their father's firstborn sons. Four more documents between 1437 and 1439 name them, and the last also names a younger brother, Radu.

  In March 1442, after meeting John Hunyadi, then Voivode of Transylvania, Vlad Dracul refused to support an Ottoman invasion of Transylvania. Sultan Murad II summoned him to Gallipoli to prove his loyalty. Vlad and Radu went with their father, and the whole family was imprisoned. The father was freed before the year ended, but the two boys stayed behind as hostages to guarantee his behavior. Ottoman chronicles place them in the fortress of Eğrigöz.

  Their danger peaked in 1444, when Vlad Dracul backed Vladislaus, King of Poland and Hungary, during the Crusade of Varna. The father was convinced that his sons would be "butchered for the sake of Christian peace". Neither boy was murdered or mutilated.

  In 1446 or 1447 Vlad Dracul again accepted the sultan's overlordship and promised an annual tribute. John Hunyadi, by then regent-governor of Hungary, invaded Wallachia anyway in November 1447. Vlad Dracul and his eldest son Mircea were murdered. Hunyadi made Vladislav II, son of Vlad Dracul's cousin Dan II, the new ruler. The Byzantine historian Michael Critobulus wrote that Vlad and Radu fled to the Ottoman Empire, which suggests the sultan had let them go home after their father paid homage. Hunyadi would soon march against the Ottomans himself, and his absence gave the surviving son a first opening.

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• 3. Exile and Return

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  In early October 1448, Vlad crossed into Wallachia at the head of an Ottoman army. His rival Vladislav II was away with Hunyadi, whose campaign against the Ottomans had begun the previous September. Vlad had to accept that the Ottomans had captured the Danube fortress of Giurgiu and strengthened it.

  On the 17th and the 18th of October, the Ottomans defeated Hunyadi's army at the Battle of Kosovo. Hunyadi's deputy, Nicholas Vízaknai, urged Vlad to meet him in Transylvania, and Vlad refused. A surviving letter explains why. An emissary from Nicopolis had told him with great certainty that Murad II had won. If he went to Vízaknai, he feared, the Ottomans could come and kill them both. He warned that if Vízaknai turned hostile and something happened, the blame would be answered for before God.

  Vladislav II returned with the remnants of his army. By the 7th of December 1448, Vlad had fled to the Ottoman Empire.

  Vlad first settled in Edirne. Before long he moved to Moldavia, where Bogdan II had taken the throne in the autumn of 1449 with Hunyadi's support. Bogdan was his father's brother-in-law and possibly his maternal uncle. In October 1451, Peter III Aaron murdered Bogdan. Bogdan's son Stephen then fled to Transylvania with Vlad to ask Hunyadi for help.

  Help did not come. On the 20th of November 1451, Hunyadi agreed a three-year truce with the Ottoman Empire. It acknowledged the right of the Wallachian boyars to elect Vladislav II's successor if he died. On the 6th of February 1452, Hunyadi forbade the burghers of Brașov to shelter Vlad. Brașov was a center for the boyars whom Vladislav had expelled. Vlad went back to Moldavia, and the following years of his life are unknown. By the 3rd of July 1456, Hunyadi was telling the townspeople of Brașov that he had tasked Vlad with defending the Transylvanian border.

  The date and circumstances of Vlad's return to Wallachia are uncertain. He invaded with Hungarian support in April, July or August 1456, and Vladislav II died during the invasion. On the 10th of September, Vlad sent his first surviving letter as voivode to the burghers of Brașov. He promised to protect them if the Ottomans invaded Transylvania, and he asked for their help if the Ottomans occupied Wallachia. He also wrote a sentence that historians read as a window into his character: "when a man or a prince is strong and powerful he can make peace as he wants to; but when he is weak, a stronger one will come and do what he wants to him".

  Several sources, including Chalkokondyles, record that hundreds or thousands of people were executed at the start of his reign. The targets were boyars who had joined in the murder of his father and elder brother, or whom he suspected of plotting against him. Chalkokondyles said Vlad "quickly effected a great change and utterly revolutionized the affairs of Wallachia" by handing his victims' money, property and goods to his retainers. Lists of the princely council show that only two members, Voico Dobrița and Iova, kept their positions between 1457 and 1461. The boyars he drove out found friends in the Saxon towns across the mountains, and that is where his next fight began.

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• 4. The Saxon Quarrel

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  On the 11th of August 1456, John Hunyadi died, and his elder son Ladislaus became captain-general of Hungary. In a letter to the burghers of Brașov, Ladislaus accused Vlad of having "no intention of remaining faithful" to the king. He ordered them to back Dan III, a brother of Vladislav II, against Vlad. The burghers of Sibiu supported another pretender, a "priest of the Romanians who calls himself a Prince's son". He is identified as Vlad's illegitimate brother, Vlad Călugărul, and he seized Amlaș, a district traditionally held by Wallachia's rulers in Transylvania.

  On the 16th of March 1457, Ladislaus V of Hungary had Ladislaus Hunyadi executed. The dead man's mother, Elizabeth Szilágyi, and her brother Michael stirred up a rebellion against the king. Vlad used the civil war to his advantage. In June 1457 he helped Stephen, son of Bogdan II, seize Moldavia, and he plundered villages around Brașov and Sibiu. The earliest German stories about him say he carried "men, women, children" from a Saxon village to Wallachia and impaled them. Because the Saxons stayed loyal to the king, the attack strengthened the Szilágyis.

  Peace talks followed between Michael Szilágyi and the Saxons, and Vlad's representatives took part. Brașov agreed to expel Dan from the town. Vlad promised that merchants from Sibiu could freely "buy and sell" in Wallachia, in exchange for the "same treatment" for Wallachian merchants in Transylvania. On the 1st of December 1457, Vlad addressed Szilágyi as "his Lord and elder brother".

  Matthias Corvinus, Ladislaus Hunyadi's younger brother, was elected king of Hungary on the 24th of January 1458. On the 3rd of March, he ordered Sibiu to keep the peace with Vlad. In late March, Michael Szilágyi allowed the boyar Michael, an official of Vladislav II, and other Wallachian boyars to settle in Transylvania. Before long, Vlad had the boyar Michael killed. On the 20th of September 1459, Vlad styled himself "Lord and ruler over all of Wallachia, and the duchies of Amlaș and Făgăraș", showing he held both traditional Transylvanian fiefs.

  In May 1458, Vlad asked Brașov to send craftsmen to Wallachia, yet relations soured before the year ended. One scholarly theory blames compulsory border fairs that forced Saxon traders to sell to Wallachian merchants. No document confirms such protectionism. In 1476, Vlad himself stressed that he had always promoted free trade.

  The documents describe a smaller spark. The Saxons confiscated steel that a Wallachian merchant had bought in Brașov and refused to repay him. In response, Vlad "ransacked and tortured" some Saxon merchants, according to a letter written by Basarab Laiotă on the 21st of January 1459. Basarab was a son of Dan II, and he had settled in Sighișoara to press his own claim to Wallachia. Matthias Corvinus supported Dan III, who was again in Brașov. Dan III accused Vlad of impaling Saxon merchants, 41 in all. He also said Vlad had gathered 300 boys from Brașov and the surrounding district, impaling some and burning others.

  Dan III invaded Wallachia, but Vlad defeated and executed him before the 22nd of April 1460. Vlad then invaded southern Transylvania, destroyed the suburbs of Brașov, and ordered every captured man and woman impaled. In the negotiations that followed, he demanded that Wallachian refugees in Brașov be expelled or punished. Peace returned before the 26th of July 1460, when he addressed the burghers as his "brothers and friends". On the 24th of August, he invaded the Amlaș and Făgăraș region to punish those who had backed Dan III. The sultan, to whom Vlad had been sending tribute, would soon make a demand that Vlad answered more violently still.

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• 5. Defying the Sultan

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  Accounts disagree about when Vlad stopped paying the Ottomans. The janissary Konstantin Mihailović recorded that Vlad refused to pay homage to Sultan Mehmed II in an unspecified year. The Renaissance historian Giovanni Maria degli Angiolelli wrote that Vlad had withheld tribute for three years. Both texts hint at a break as early as 1459, but both were written decades after the events. Tursun Beg, a secretary at the sultan's court, said Vlad turned against the empire only when Mehmed was away on the long expedition to Trebizon in 1461. Until then, Vlad had sent the customary tribute.

  According to Tursun Beg, Vlad opened new negotiations with Matthias Corvinus, and Ottoman spies reported it. Mehmed sent an envoy, the Greek Thomas Katabolinos, also known as Yunus bey, with orders for Vlad to come to Constantinople. He also sent secret instructions to Hamza, bey of Nicopolis, to seize Vlad once he crossed the Danube. Vlad uncovered the "deceit and trickery", captured both men and had them executed.

  Next came a ruse. Vlad spoke fluent Turkish, and he ordered the commander of the fortress of Giurgiu to open the gates. Wallachian soldiers poured in and captured it. He then invaded Ottoman territory and devastated villages along the Danube. In a letter to Matthias Corvinus dated the 11th of February 1462, he reported that more than "23,884 Turks and Bulgarians" had died at his order. He asked for military aid and claimed to have broken the peace "for the honor" of the king and the Holy Crown of Hungary, and "for the preservation of Christianity and the strengthening of the Catholic faith".

  Mehmed raised an army of more than 150,000 men. Chalkokondyles called it second in size only to the force that took Constantinople in 1453. Historians including Franz Babinger, Radu Florescu and Nicolae Stoicescu argue that the size shows the sultan meant to occupy Wallachia. Others note that Mehmed had already granted Wallachia to Vlad's brother Radu, so his real aim was only to replace the ruler.

  The Ottoman fleet landed at Brăila, the only Wallachian port on the Danube, in May. On the 4th of June 1462, the main army crossed the river at Nikopol, in Bulgaria, under the sultan's command. Outnumbered, Vlad adopted a scorched earth policy and fell back toward Târgoviște. Some accounts add that his armies poisoned wells, burned crops and killed any cattle they could not carry away.

  On the night of the 16th to the 17th of June, Vlad rode into the Ottoman camp to capture or kill the sultan. Success would have spread panic through the Ottoman ranks and might have let him beat the army. But the Wallachians "missed the court of the sultan himself" and hit the tents of the viziers Mahmud Pasha and Isaac. At dawn, Vlad and his retainers withdrew.

  Tursun Beg recorded that the Ottomans suffered from summer heat and thirst. Mehmed decided to pull back and marched toward Brăila. Stephen III of Moldavia hurried to Chilia, now Kiliya in Ukraine, to seize the fortress where a Hungarian garrison stood. Vlad also set out for Chilia, leaving 6,000 men to slow the sultan's march, but the Ottomans defeated them. Stephen was wounded during the siege and returned to Moldavia before Vlad arrived.

  The sultan's main army left Wallachia, but Radu and his Ottoman troops stayed on the Bărăgan Plain. Radu sent messengers reminding Wallachians that the sultan could return. Vlad beat Radu and his Ottoman allies in two battles over the following months, yet more and more Wallachians deserted to Radu. Vlad withdrew to the Carpathian Mountains, hoping Matthias Corvinus would help him regain his throne. In mid-August, Albert of Istenmező, deputy of the Count of the Székelys, recommended that the Saxons recognize Radu. Radu offered Brașov confirmed trading privileges and 15,000 ducats in compensation.

  Local tradition places a family tragedy in the same year. Vlad's first wife may have been an illegitimate daughter of John Hunyadi, according to the historian Alexandru Simon. They had one son, Mihnea the Evil, born in 1462. When Turkish forces led by Radu closed in on Poenari Castle, the tradition says, she saw no escape. She threw herself from the tower into the river below, which is remembered as the Princess's River. Another tale says an illegitimate son, not yet in his teens, fell from the saddle he was tied to while Vlad fled into the mountains. A shepherd found the boy the next morning and raised him, and Vlad returned to the area 14 years later.

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• 6. Prison and Last Stand

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  Matthias Corvinus came to Transylvania in November 1462, and his talks with Vlad lasted for weeks. Corvinus did not want a war with the Ottoman Empire. At the king's order, his Czech mercenary commander John Jiskra of Brandýs captured Vlad near Rucăr in Wallachia.

  Corvinus owed Pope Pius II and the Venetians an explanation, since the Venetians had sent money for a campaign against the Ottomans. He produced three letters, allegedly written by Vlad on the 7th of November 1462 to Mehmed II, Mahmud Pasha and Stephen of Moldavia. In them Vlad offered to join the sultan against Hungary if restored to his throne. Most historians agree the documents were forged. Antonio Bonfini, Corvinus's court historian, admitted that the reason for the imprisonment was never clarified. Florescu points to "the style of writing, the rhetoric of meek submission (hardly compatible with what we know of Dracula's character), clumsy wording, and poor Latin". He links the forgery to a Saxon priest of Brașov.

  According to Chalkokondyles, Vlad was first held "in the city of Belgrade", now Alba Iulia in Romania. Before long he was moved to Visegrád, where he was held for 14 years. No surviving document mentions him between 1462 and 1475.

  In mid-1475, Stephen III of Moldavia sent envoys to Corvinus, asking him to send Vlad against Basarab Laiotă, who had submitted to the Ottomans. Stephen wanted Wallachia held by an enemy of the empire, because "the Wallachians were like the Turks" to the Moldavians. Slavic stories say Vlad was released only after converting to Catholicism.

  Corvinus recognized Vlad as Wallachia's lawful prince but gave him no army. Vlad settled in a house in Pest. According to the Slavic stories, soldiers once broke in while chasing a thief who had hidden there. Vlad had their commander executed because they had not asked his permission to enter his home. In June 1475 he moved to Transylvania and tried to arrange a house in Sibiu. Mehmed II meanwhile acknowledged Basarab Laiotă as Wallachia's lawful ruler. On the 21st of September, Corvinus ordered Sibiu to give Vlad 200 golden florins from royal revenues, but in October Vlad left for Buda. He bought a house in Pécs that became known as Drakula háza, Hungarian for Dracula's house.

  His second wife was Justina Szilágyi, a cousin of Matthias Corvinus and the widow of Vencel Pongrác of Szentmiklós. The marriage most probably took place in 1475. They had two children, the first an unnamed son who was killed before 1486. Their other son, Vlad Drakwlya, made an unsuccessful claim to Wallachia around 1495 and became the forefather of the noble Drakwla family.

  In January 1476, John Pongrác of Dengeleg, Voivode of Transylvania, urged Brașov to send Vlad's supporters to him, because Corvinus and Basarab had signed a treaty. In early 1476 Corvinus dispatched Vlad and the Serbian Vuk Grgurević against the Ottomans in Bosnia. They captured Srebrenica and other fortresses in February and March. Vlad again used terror, mass impaling captured Turkish soldiers and massacring civilians. His troops mostly destroyed Srebrenica, Kušlat and Zvornik.

  On the 26th of July 1476, Mehmed II defeated Stephen III at the Battle of Valea Albă. Stephen Báthory and Vlad then entered Moldavia, forcing the sultan to lift the siege of the fortress at Târgu Neamț in late August. The contemporary Jakob Unrest added that Vuk Grgurević and a member of the noble Jakšić family joined the fight. On the 6th of September, Corvinus ordered the Transylvanian Saxons to support Báthory's planned invasion of Wallachia. On the 7th of October, Vlad was in Brașov, confirming the burghers' commercial privileges in Wallachia. Báthory's forces took Târgoviște on the 8th of November. Stephen of Moldavia and Vlad ceremoniously confirmed their alliance, and together they occupied Bucharest. Basarab Laiotă fled to the Ottoman Empire on the 16th of November, and Vlad was crowned before the 26th.

  Basarab returned with Ottoman support before the year ended. Vlad died fighting him in late December 1476 or early January 1477. On the 10th of January 1477, Stephen III wrote that Vlad's Moldavian retinue had also been massacred. The most reliable sources say his army of about 2,000 was cornered near Snagov and destroyed by a Turkish and Basarab force of 4,000.

  The exact circumstances of his death are unclear. Jacob Unrest stated that a disguised Turkish assassin killed him in his camp. The Russian statesman Fyodor Kuritsyn, who interviewed Vlad's family afterward, reported that his own troops mistook him for a Turk and killed him. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally noted that Vlad had often disguised himself as a Turkish soldier in military ruses. Leonardo Botta, the Milanese ambassador to Buda, said the Ottomans cut the body into pieces. Bonfini wrote that the head went to Mehmed II and was placed on a high stake in Constantinople. A rumor holds that Voyvoda Han, at Bankalar Caddesi No. 19 in Karaköy, was the last stop of the skull. Local peasant tradition says monks from the nearby monastery found what remained of the body in the marshes of Snagov.

  The burial place is unknown. A popular tradition, first recorded in the late 19th century, placed it in the Monastery of Snagov. In 1933, Dinu V. Rosetti excavated beneath the supposed unmarked tombstone of Vlad in the monastery church. He reported: "Under the tombstone attributed to Vlad, there was no tomb. Only many bones and jaws of horses." The historian Constantin Rezachevici thought Vlad was most probably buried in the first church of the Comana Monastery, which Vlad had established near the battlefield. Long before anyone searched for his grave, stories about his deeds were already circulating across Europe.

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• 7. Tales of Cruelty

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  In 1462, the papal legate Niccolo Modrussiense wrote to Pope Pius II about stories of Vlad's brutal acts. Two years later, the Pope included them in his Commentaries. After Vlad's arrest, courtiers of Matthias Corvinus promoted the stories. Around 1495, Antonio Bonfini recorded anecdotes in his Historia Pannonica, seeking to justify both Corvinus's removal of Vlad and his later restoration. Bonfini called Vlad "a man of unheard cruelty and justice". Sebastian Münster repeated those stories in his Cosmography and noted Vlad's "reputation for tyrannical justice".

  The Meistersinger Michael Beheim wrote a lengthy poem titled Von ainem wutrich der heis Trakle waida von der Walachei, or "Story of a Despot Called Dracula, Voievod of Wallachia". It was performed at the court of Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor, in Wiener Neustadt during the winter of 1463. Beheim claimed to have drawn on a Catholic monk who had escaped from Vlad's prison. In one tale, Vlad impaled two monks to help them reach heaven, then impaled their donkey for braying after its masters died. Beheim also accused Vlad of duplicity, saying he had promised support to both Corvinus and Mehmed II and kept neither promise.

  In 1475, Gabriele Rangoni, Bishop of Eger and a former papal legate, understood that Vlad had been imprisoned for his cruelty. He recorded a rumor that Vlad caught rats in his cell and cut them up or stuck them on small pieces of wood, unable to "forget his wickedness". Another report claimed that he dipped bread in the blood of his victims, but nobody has confirmed it. A third tells of Turkish messengers who refused to remove their turbans. Vlad is said to have strengthened their custom by nailing the turbans to their heads with three spikes.

  Works collecting such stories appeared in Low German in the Holy Roman Empire before 1480. They were apparently written in the early 1460s. They describe Vlad's campaign across the Danube in early 1462 but say nothing of Mehmed's invasion that June. Their detailed account of the clashes with the Transylvanian Saxons suggests they originated "in the literary minds of the Saxons". The raiding stories rest on an eyewitness account, since they list the churches Vlad destroyed and the dates of the raids. They call him a "demented psychopath, a sadist, a gruesome murderer, a masochist", worse than Caligula and Nero. Yet Vlad's brutal acts were very probably exaggerated or even invented by the Saxons, so the stories need careful handling.

  Printing turned them into some of the first bestsellers in Europe. Publishers added woodcuts to the title pages showing horrific scenes. Editions from Nuremberg in 1499 and Strasbourg in 1500 show Vlad dining at a table surrounded by dead or dying people on poles. One pamphlet claims he built a copper cauldron with a perforated wooden lid, put people inside with their heads through the holes, and boiled them to death.

  More than 20 Russian manuscripts, written between the 15th and 18th centuries, preserve the Skazanie o Drakule voievode, or "The Tale about Voivode Dracula". It is commonly attributed to Fyodor Kuritsyn, a courtier under Ivan III of Moscow who led an embassy to Hungary from 1482 to 1485. Some Romanian scholars argue it was first recorded in a South Slavic language. Its 19 anecdotes are longer than the German stories. Raymond T. McNally calls them a mixture of fact and fiction.

  Almost half of those anecdotes stress Vlad's brutality, declaring that "his life was the image of his name", which means "devil" in the author's language. But they also say his cruelty let him strengthen the central government in Wallachia. One tale describes a golden cup left at a fountain that nobody dared steal, because Vlad hated theft so violently that wrongdoers did not live long. The German story of the campaign across the Danube dwelt on his cruelty, while the Skazanie praised his diplomacy and called him "zlomudry", or "evil-wise". The Skazanie sharply criticized his conversion to Catholicism and blamed his death on that apostasy. Some of its elements were later attached to Russian stories about Ivan the Terrible.

  Later descriptions add detail about his methods. Stakes were reportedly set in concentric circles on the outskirts of cities so all could see them. Victims were placed on "high spears and low spears" according to rank. Anyone who removed a body from a stake was hanged from a tree. Before punishment he reportedly demanded confessions, and a victim's last words, age, rank and sex affected the sentence. Women accused of infidelity or unchastity are described as receiving especially brutal punishments. One account says he encouraged people with diseases such as leprosy, tuberculosis and bubonic plague to mingle with enemy soldiers. Scholars caution that time, fearful witnesses and enemies eager to damage his reputation could all have exaggerated these tales.

  The numbers are just as hard to verify. In 1464, the papal legate Nicholas of Modruš told Pope Pius II that Vlad had massacred 40,000 men and women of all ages and nationalities. In 1475, the papal nuncio Gabriele Ragone, Bishop of Erlau, reported that Vlad had personally authorized more than 100,000 executions. By current standards, the mass killings would most likely amount to genocide and war crimes. The Romanian defense minister Ioan Mircea Pașcu asserted that Vlad would have been condemned for crimes against humanity at Nuremberg. In Romania, though, the same man was remembered very differently.

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• 8. Hero, Vampire, Likeness

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  The Cantacuzino Chronicle was the first Romanian historical work to record a tale about Vlad the Impaler. It describes the impalement of the old boyars of Târgoviște for the murder of his brother Dan. It adds that he forced the young boyars, with their wives and children, to build Poenari Castle. In 1747, Neofit I, Metropolitan of Ungro-Wallachia, mentioned the Poenari legend and paired it with the story of Meșterul Manole, who allegedly walled in his bride to stop the castle walls from crumbling.

  In the early 20th century, Constantin Rădulescu-Codin, a teacher in Muscel County, where the castle stood, published a local legend about a letter of grant "written on rabbit skin". Vlad supposedly gave it to villagers who helped him escape from Poenari to Transylvania during the Ottoman invasion. Other villages in the region credit the grant to the legendary Radu Negru. Rădulescu-Codin also recorded legends about burning the lazy, the poor and the lame, and about executing a woman who made her husband's shirt too short. Both stories appear among the German and Slavic anecdotes, which suggests those texts preserved oral tradition. The peasants who told them knew the nickname came from frequent impalements, yet they said only such cruelty could secure public order.

  Most Romanian artists have seen Vlad as a just ruler and a realistic tyrant who punished criminals and executed unpatriotic boyars. Ion Budai-Deleanu wrote the first Romanian epic poem about him, Țiganiada (Gypsy Epic), which was published only in 1875, almost a century after its composition. In it Vlad fights boyars, Ottomans, strigoi (or vampires) and other evil spirits at the head of an army of Roma and angels. In the middle of the 19th century, Dimitrie Bolintineanu praised Vlad's triumphs in Battles of the Romanians and called him a reformer whose violence prevented the despotism of the boyars. Mihai Eminescu, one of the greatest Romanian poets, addressed the ballad The Third Letter to the valiant princes of Wallachia. He urges Vlad to return from the grave with the words "You must come, O dread Impaler, confound them to your care". In the early 1860s, the painter Theodor Aman showed Vlad receiving the Ottoman envoys, who tremble before him.

  Since the middle of the 19th century, Romanian historians have ranked Vlad among the greatest Romanian rulers and stressed his fight for independence. Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol was among the first to argue that only terror could stop the feuds of the boyar parties. Constantin C. Giurescu wrote, "The tortures and executions which Vlad ordered were not out of caprice, but always had a reason, and very often a reason of state". Ioan Bogdan broke ranks in his 1896 work Vlad Țepeș and the German and Russian Narratives. He concluded that Romanians should be ashamed of Vlad rather than present him as "a model of courage and patriotism". In a 1999 opinion poll, 4.1% of participants chose Vlad as one of the historical figures who had influenced the destiny of the Romanians for the better.

  Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, published in 1897, was the first book to link the name Dracula with vampirism. Stoker's attention had been drawn to Romanian vampire folklore by Emily Gerard's 1885 article on Transylvanian superstitions. His slight knowledge of medieval Wallachia came from William Wilkinson's 1820 book Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia with Political Observations Relative to Them. Wilkinson accepted the German stories and described Vlad as wicked. Elizabeth Miller argues that Stoker "apparently did not know much about" Vlad the Impaler. In her view, there is not enough evidence to say that Vlad inspired Count Dracula. Stoker gave his count a Székely origin only because he knew of Attila the Hun's campaigns and the supposed Hunnic roots of the Székelys. His working papers never mention the historical Vlad, and all but the later drafts call the character Count Wampyr. Stoker borrowed the name and "scraps of miscellaneous information" about Wallachian history.

  The only surviving description of Vlad comes from the papal legate Niccolò Modrussa, who met him in Buda. A copy of Vlad's portrait hangs in the "monster portrait gallery" at Ambras Castle in Innsbruck. Florescu says it shows "a strong, cruel, and somehow tortured man" with "large, deep-set, dark green, and penetrating eyes". Modrussa calls Vlad black-haired, while the portrait seems to show fair hair, so his hair color cannot be settled. The picture gives him a large lower lip. Modrussa's text describes a stocky, strong man of no great height, with a "cold and terrible appearance", an aquiline nose and a moustache.

  His bad name in German-speaking lands shows up in Renaissance paintings. He appears among the witnesses of Saint Andrew's martyrdom in a 15th-century painting displayed in the Belvedere in Vienna. A figure similar to Vlad stands among the witnesses of Christ on Calvary in a chapel of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. Research published in 2023, based on samples from letters Vlad wrote, suggests he may have had haemolacria, a rare condition in which tears are partly composed of blood. Five centuries on, researchers are still drawing new evidence from the letters he signed.

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