Halloween special: How many people did the real Dracula impale?

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Speaker 4 It's that time of year again, so-called spooky season. And what could be spookier than discussing a seriously scary stat has been floating around since the 15th century.

Speaker 4 Now, beware, this episode, more or less, is a bit grislier than usual. And it's all to do with this guy.

Speaker 3 Welcome to my house, Mr. Harker.

Speaker 3 Come freely, go safely.

Speaker 3 Count Dracula? I am Count Dracula.

Speaker 4 Okay, so not exactly him, but the man that inspired Bram Stoker's fictional vampire, Vlad III Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler, due to his penchant for that particularly gruesome form of execution, which, without going into too much detail, involved driving a large stake or pole through someone's body, often vertically.

Speaker 4 Chroniclers and historians claim that he impaled over 20,000 people during his reigns, which, if true, is a very, very big number.

Speaker 4 But is it true? Let's travel back to 1431 to separate the maths from the myth. Vlad was born into a time of huge political change.

Speaker 4 The Byzantine Empire was falling, the Ottoman Empire was thriving, and the Hundred Years' War was still limping on.

Speaker 5 He was born in Transylvania in 1431 when his father, Vlad II, was in exile in Transylvania.

Speaker 4 That's Dinej Harai. He's a historian of early modern history at the Université de Pau et des Pays de La Dor and a member of the ITEM Laboratory.

Speaker 4 He recently wrote a paper that reassessed how many impalements Vlad really ordered.

Speaker 5 His father's name was Dracul because he was member of the Order of the Dragon and Vlad III, Arvlad, was surnamed Dracula, the son of a member of the Order of the Dragon.

Speaker 4 Vlad III grew up to be Prince of Valechia, which is in modern-day southern Romania. He reigned over his principality on three different occasions and each reign was marked by war.

Speaker 5 He was in war for several years with the Ottoman Empire and with Transylvania, at that time part of Hungary, now it's in modern-day Romania too.

Speaker 5 And he had some conflicts with Saxon towns in the southern part of Transylvania.

Speaker 4 The late medieval period was a bloody one, and rulers often used capital punishment as a way to make an example of criminals or opponents. and this included impalement.

Speaker 5 Impalement is capital punishment used mostly in the southeastern part of Europe in Middle Ages. It was used before, during ancient times, in Catholic Christian states as well as non-Christian ones.

Speaker 4 As Dinesh said, impalement was nothing new.

Speaker 4 Neo-Assyrian rulers from the 9th century BC used it as a form of psychological warfare, and we also know that it was the third most common form of execution within Hungary during the medieval period.

Speaker 4 The Ottoman Empire also used it. So, Vlad was not unique.
But if he wasn't unique, why do we talk about his impairments and not others?

Speaker 4 Well, it's in part to do with who was on the winning side of history. Vlad was not.
He was beheaded by Ottoman forces in 1477 at the age of 45.

Speaker 4 Ottoman accounts, as well as Saxon accounts, make up the bulk of what we now think of as Vlad's legacy.

Speaker 5 The number of victims impaled is different from one account to another.

Speaker 4 One of the most famous and most cited pamphlets was called Geschichte Drakolweider. It was written in 1463 by Saxons living in Transylvania.

Speaker 5 Written just after the second reign of Vlad in Wallachia, that mentions many, many different cases of impalements and other atrocities, too.

Speaker 4 The figures in this pamphlet are astonishing.

Speaker 4 Five hundred nobles impaled at one banquet, six hundred merchants, and, most famously, the Forest of the Impaled, which allegedly contained twenty thousand victims.

Speaker 4 But it's very, very important to note that the Saxons in Transylvania were Vlad's political and economical antagonists. Vlad removed their trading privileges.
They supported claimants to his throne.

Speaker 4 Vlad responded violently. And the Saxons used the newly formed printing press to print off pamphlets full of inflated numbers.
But they were the only ones throwing big numbers around.

Speaker 5 An Ottoman witness who saw this so-called forest of impaled, but he didn't give a numbers of the impaled.

Speaker 5 However, we have another account, not from a witness, but from a contemporary chronicle, it's a Byzantine chronicle,

Speaker 5 saying that there could have been 20,000 impaled persons near Targovica, which was the capital of Wallachia at that time.

Speaker 5 So, different chronicles and accounts later on in the 16th century, 17th century, repeated that figure of 20,000.

Speaker 4 Dinej did not believe this figure, so he started looking at numbers cited in chronicles, then comparing it with things like archaeological data, census records, witness accounts, and the findings of previous historians to calculate the true number.

Speaker 4 Let's start with the Easter banquet.

Speaker 5 He invited 500 noblemen that he wanted to kill because of political reasons. Allegedly, he killed those 500 noblemen.

Speaker 5 However, archaeological findings tell us that the palace at that time, on Easter 1459, couldn't host a banquet of 500, maybe

Speaker 5 between 40 and 50 persons, given the size of the reception room. So we have around 10% of probability in that case.

Speaker 4 The Saxon pamphlet had vastly exaggerated the amount of people killed.

Speaker 4 As other historians and archaeologists pointed out, the room the killings were meant to have taken place in was only 12 by 7 meters, large enough for only 40 to 50 people, which is 10% lower than the 500 the pamphlet claimed.

Speaker 4 Research into other numbers within the pamphlet threw up strikingly similar differences.

Speaker 5 When Vlad arrested Saxon merchants from Transylvania, allegedly 600, there is a letter from an adversary of Vlad who was in exile in Transylvania.

Speaker 5 And in his letter, he specified that there were only 41 merchants arrested and impaled. So, once again, I compare the two figures, and now we are less than around 7%

Speaker 5 of probability for that case.

Speaker 4 Other examples include looking at census records in the years after Vlad's massacres. Again, Dinesh found that the number of households within targeted villages fell by around 8%,

Speaker 4 as opposed to 100%, which the pamphlet claimed.

Speaker 5 So those numbers are backing up the numbers that I found in other cases of impalements.

Speaker 4 So If he didn't impale 20,000, how many did he impale?

Speaker 5 I would say approximately 2,000 people were impaled by Vlad.

Speaker 4 Now remember, these are just impalements. Vlad certainly killed many more people via other methods of execution.
But how does this figure stack up against his contemporaries?

Speaker 4 Well, Dinej says that each event that resulted in collective impalement, which is where more than one person is impaled, had similar numbers of victims to people like Mehmed II, one of the Ottoman sultans, who impaled people during the siege of Constantinople and other contemporary leaders.

Speaker 4 However, although Vlad impaled similar numbers of people each time, his impalements were more frequent. I mean, 2000, still quite a lot of people to impale.

Speaker 5 That's a lot of people, yeah.

Speaker 4 And that's all we have time for on this programme. Thanks to Dinej Harai and to loyal listener and historian Jan Mackelson for sending us Denesh's article.

Speaker 4 And if you spot any interesting stats you think we should take a look at, email in to moreorless at bbc.co.uk. Until next time, goodbye.

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