Vlad the Daddy's Boy: As a boy, Vlad's father, Vlad Dracul ("Vlad the Dragon"), traded him to the Turks as a peace offering. That obviously tweaked the kid a bit. Upon his return, Vlad (called Dracula, or "the Little Dragon") invited his father's murderers, the boyars (Romanian nobility) to an Easter dinner. He arrested them all, sending the healthy ones into slavery to build him a palace (which many of them did naked). The rest he had impaled. Vlad the Utopian: As ruler of Wallachia, Vlad wanted his realm to be a model of order and productivity and tried several innovative tactics to achieve this. He once had all the poor and sick invited to a great banquet. Like a good host, he fed ‘em, got ‘em drunk, then burned the hall with them all inside. The result: no more poor and sick people. To demonstrate his kingdom's absence of crime, he placed a golden chalice in the middle of a busy square in Tirgoviste and left it overnight. Not surprisingly, no one touched it, knowing what the penalty for thievery was under Vlad's rule (hint: it probably involved a tall spike). Vlad the Literalist: When Turkish ambassadors said their custom prevented them from removing their hats in his presence, he had their hats nailed to their heads.
Vlad the Renaissance Man and Dietary Innovator: Impaling wasn't Vlad's only pastime. He also enjoyed having people physically disfigured, skinned, dismembered, boiled, eviscerated, or blinded while he watched, and frequently while he ate. His supposed habit of drinking his victims' blood and eating their flesh led to Dracula vampire stories we all know so well. If you happened to be a guest at one of his impaling dinners and you got queasy or expressed disgust, guess what - you got impaled.
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From mental_floss' book Forbidden Knowledge: A Wickedly Smart Guide to History's Naughtiest Bits, published in Neatorama with permission. Be sure to visit mental_floss' excellent website and blog!
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This guy was pretty much as bad as it gets. Most famous, of course, was his penchant for having people impaled - skewered alive through the anus or vagina on giant wooden spikes, to be slowly dragged down by their own weight. In fact, he liked the practice so much he once impaled 30,000 people at one time, for violations of some trade law or other (those of higher social standing got longer spikes). All told, good old Vlad is said to have impaled hundreds of thousands of people. And while his nickname Vlad the Impaler or, in Romanian, Vlad Tepes ("Vlad the Spike") only came about after death, his behavior certainly could have earned him lots of other colorful monikers.
no one has the right to do this to ppl especially that he did that to women and children
and for your information he killed some of his own ppl.. impaling them for minor crimes such as thievery .. if this guy (may his impaled soul rest in hell forever ) is a hero.. then he must be a hero of the criminal land .. and I'm happy the Turks got him eventually :)
But I for one... Applaud VLAD! He was one of the very few European kingdoms with the balls to resist and fight those bastard Ottomans from taking Europe!
and though it was infact the Austrians that stopped the Ottomans from overrunning Europe...(1532)
I think if Vlad hadn't have done what he did the Ottomans probably would have pushed into the heart of Europe faster... and maybe catching the Austrians unprepared...
Vlad did cause alot of problems for the Turks when he was alive... so he probably bought Europe the precious time it needed...
cause if the Austrians hadn't stopped the turks at Guns... we'd probably all be Muslim!
So i guess... THANK YOU VLAD!
>> The Turks conquered much of Eastern Europe but they never got Vlad’s piece of it.
Actually, the first Turkish invaders were so disgusted by Vlad's mass impalements of his subjects that many of them simply turned away. The ones that attacked were repelled by Vlad (and the survivors captured and impaled), but subsequent, larger Turkish forces (led by Vlad's brother Radu) actually succeeded in capturing Wallachia.
Vlad the Impaler ran away, and was imprisoned by Hungary.
If you think he did the impalement thingy simply to scare the Turks away (or to impose order), consider this: he didn't just like impaling people en masse - he liked to *arrange* the impaled bodies in geometric patterns.
Vlad actually enjoyed impaling things so much that when he couldn't impale people while in Hungarian captivity, he impaled rats and insects that he captured in his cell.
He's one sick guy, all right!