Vlad III earned the name Vlad the Impaler mainly because he would impale thousands of his enemies (Turks) in front of his camps including women and children. Ottoman army while on their way to attack Vlad came across 20,000 impaled corpses. They were so horrified that they turned around. He also went by the nickname Dracula and went onto become the inspiration for Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. He never sucked blood out of his victims’ necks but did dip chunks of bread into buckets of blood drained from the people he killed. Under his rule, impalement was pretty much the only punishment—whether you stole a loaf of bread or committed murder. In an attempt to clean up the streets of his capital, he once invited all the sick, vagrants, and beggars for a feast and burned the whole building to the ground while everybody was still inside. Historians put the deaths at the hands of Dracula at somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000.
Previous Fact Next Fact