Vlad the Impaler was medieval Europe's bloodiest warlord, but is the scale of his murder just a myth?

But curious historians have long questioned the veracity of the tale. Could the story of Vlad’s 20,000 impalings be entirely legend, entirely true, or something in between?

Now, a study led by Dénes Harai, a historian at Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour, might provide the answer.

The research, published in the journal Transactions of the Royal Historical Society under the title ‘Counting the Stakes: A Reassessment of Vlad III Dracula’s Practice of Collective Impalements in Fifteenth-Century South-eastern Europe’ argues that the story of Vlad’s penchant for impaling his enemies has been vastly exaggerated, while still being rooted in horrific elements of truth.

Vlad Dracula: prince of a medieval frontier

Vlad III, known to his contemporaries as Dracula (‘son of the dragon’, a nod to his father’s membership in the crusading Order of the Dragon), was born in 1431 in Transylvania, then a semi-autonomous principality of the Kingdom of Hungary. He ruled the neighbouring principality of Wallachia three times between 1448 and 1476, an era of almost constant warfare.

Wallachia lay on the boundary of Christendom and Islam, squeezed between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Ottoman empire. To the north, the Hungarian crown sought loyal vassals who could secure the Carpathian passes. To the south, Sultan Mehmed II pressed his authority across the Balkans. Vlad’s challenge was to hold his throne in this perilous no man’s land, balancing tribute payments to the Ottomans with demands for resistance from Hungary.

Vlad himself had spent part of his youth as an Ottoman hostage, learning the sultan’s language and court culture. That experience exposed him to the repertoire of Ottoman punishments, including impalement.

When he returned to Wallachia as ruler, he drew on both Ottoman and Hungarian traditions of exemplary violence, wielding extreme cruelty as a deliberate tool of power.

The Ottoman attack on Târgoviște

The summer of 1462 brought the most dramatic clash of Vlad’s reign. Mehmed II, determined to bring Wallachia to heel, marched north with what contemporary sources describe as a vast army of perhaps 100,000 men.

Unable to win in open battle, Vlad turned to guerrilla tactics. On the night of 16/17 June, he launched a surprise assault on the Ottoman camp outside Târgoviște. Vlad’s Wallachian troops cut down thousands of Ottoman soldiers before eventually being repelled.

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It was in the wake of this campaign that the Ottomans were said to have encountered the infamous ‘forest of the impaled’ as they marched on to confront Vlad again. But rather than a field of 20,000 bodies on stakes, as sources later claimed, Harai argues that the true number was likely just eight per cent of that – perhaps closer to 1,600.

Investigating the numbers

To work out how many people Vlad really impaled, Harai assembled a complete dossier of every known reference to impalement, using Byzantine and Ottoman chronicles, papal legates’ reports, Venetian diplomatic letters, local Transylvanian records and Vlad’s own correspondence.

He then cross-referenced each story against these sources, noticing that chroniclers dramatically inflated the numbers by huge proportions.

Whereas contemporary evidence shows that 41 Saxon merchants were impaled in 1459, the reports give 600. At an Easter feast where perhaps 40 boyars were executed, the reports instead say 500. In episode after episode, Harai noted how the ratio shrank by about nine-tenths when tested against firmer sources.

These trimmed totals were tested against other kinds of data, too. A census of the duchy of Amlaș, conducted a generation after one alleged massacre, reveals that only around eight per cent of houses lay empty – close to Harai’s plausibility rate. Meanwhile, the size of the execution ground at Târgoviște and the labour required to erect thousands of stakes also makes the higher figures improbable.

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Only after every incident had been recalculated and cross-checked did Harai reassemble the whole picture. The famous image of 20,000 victims emerges at a more sober 1,600 to 1,700. Scattered episodes across Wallachia and Transylvania lifts the lifetime total of Vlad’s impalings to just over 2,000.

So, why did chroniclers get the figures so drastically and consistently wrong?

Vlad’s enemies in Transylvania and at the Ottoman court wanted to depict him as a blood-soaked tyrant, while his supporters in Hungary found his brutality a useful symbol of anti-Ottoman ferocity. Amplification of the truth served both sides well.

What the revised numbers mean

Scaling down the death toll certainly doesn’t rehabilitate Vlad as a gentle ruler.

Thousands still suffered gruesome deaths, and his regime was marked by regular intervals of extreme violence. But it does change the picture.

Vlad wasn’t the only ruler of his age to use the stake. Across late-medieval Hungary, lords used violence as a means of justice, and in the Ottoman empire, impalement appeared as a discretionary punishment in moments of war or rebellion.

So, rather than a uniquely sadistic outlier, the new research positions Vlad as part of a broader late-medieval pattern in which exemplary and highly visible punishments reinforced authority. His distinctiveness lay in how consistently and spectacularly he used the stake to send messages to enemies and subjects alike, rather than in the sheer volume of his executions.

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