Vlad the Impaler in a German pamphlet of about 1488: its 32 stories and who else tells them

The pamphlet, story by story

Six leaves, twelve sides: the title, the portrait, nine sides of text and a blank. The text is anonymous and has no chapter headings; the numbering from 1 to 32 is that of the historian Christof Paulus, who in 2023 compared the first prints with the older manuscripts.

The text of 1488 describes torture, mutilation, violence against children and forced cannibalism. The translation keeps them as printed. They are what the pamphlet says, not established facts: under each story are listed the other texts that tell it and how their versions differ.

What the count shows

The stories were not new in 1488. All 32 are found, some with differences (the last only as far as the capture), in the poem Michel Beheim composed at the emperor’s court, probably in 1463, a quarter of a century before the prints and when Vlad had only just been imprisoned; only the ending, with the baptism and the return to the throne, is the prints’ own. The Nürnberg printers printed a collection of older stories. A story found in Beheim is older than the prints; that does not make it true.

For five stories a document from the years 1459–1462 also survives: the young men burned, the merchants impaled in peacetime, Dan’s death, the women with infants at their breasts, and the raid across the Danube. In two of them the document gives less than the story: a beheading without a funeral, women impaled with their infants without the further mutilation. For the young men the act says “three hundred or more” and the print four hundred: the figures do not contradict each other. For the raid, Vlad’s own letter counts 23,884 dead, not including those burned in their houses or those whose heads were not presented to his officials: a figure of the same order as the print’s 25,000, but not a like-for-like count.

Another seven stories also appear outside the German texts and the Commentaries of Pius II: in the Russian tale or in Bonfini. Almost all are anecdotes with a moral: the shirt, the beggars, the caps, the monks. The remaining 20 exist only in the German tradition and in the pope’s book. Six of them concern Transylvania (villages burned, a church plundered, merchants impaled), the kind of news that may have come from the Saxon towns (a hypothesis); the others are the accession, tortures and anecdotes with no place named.

1462: what Vlad wrote himself

For one story, the 24th, the testimony of the accused survives.

Wallachia paid tribute to the Ottoman sultan. In the winter of 1461–1462 Vlad crossed the frozen Danube and plundered the right bank, held by the Ottomans. On 11 February 1462 he wrote to the king of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus. The letter, in Latin, survives in copies (one in Munich, another at Wolfenbüttel). Vlad relates that the sultan had sent men to seize him by a trick, that he seized them instead, and then counts the dead: 23,884, “Turks and Bulgarians, of both sexes”, listed by place along the Danube.

exceptis qui in domibus combusti sunt, vel quorum capita officialibus nostris non sunt presentata

“not counting those who were burned in their houses, or whose heads were not presented to our officials”

The pamphlet printed a quarter of a century later says “more than twenty-five thousand”. The annals of the abbey of Melk, in Austria, have the same round number for something else: the voivode is said to have impaled, “on one occasion”, 25 milia hominum, 25,000 people. The largest number in the whole pamphlet is of the same order as the one Vlad himself reported, in a letter asking the king for help against the Ottomans; the letter does not independently confirm the print’s figure.

The summer of 1462, according to those who were there

Mehmed II came in person. Konstantin Mihailović, a Serbian janissary who says he was present, puts the crossing of the Danube at Nicopolis and the losses of the first night at 250 janissaries. Chalkokondyles, a Byzantine chronicler, gives the army 250,000 men; the Romanian historian Ștefan Andreescu considers 100,000–120,000 closer to the truth.

The night attack on the sultan’s camp took place somewhere on the road between Nicopolis and Târgoviște; the place is not known. Andreescu dates it to the night of 17 to 18 June; other historians, one night earlier. According to Chalkokondyles, Vlad had fewer than 10,000 horsemen, “some say no more than 7,000”, missed the sultan’s tent and struck the tents of the viziers Mahmud and Ishak.

Chalkokondyles also describes, beyond Târgoviște, a field of stakes 17 stades long and seven wide, with some 20,000 people, “as was said”. The Venetian bailo Balbi writes from Constantinople that the sultan was back at Adrianople on 11 July. Vlad’s brother Radu, backed by the sultan, took over the principality during the campaign; in November the men of Matthias Corvinus arrested Vlad.

Thirteen editions, down to about 1560

The catalogues of early printing (GW for incunabula, VD16 for the sixteenth century) record thirteen editions, eight of them before 1501. Two are in Low German, for the towns of the Baltic and the North Sea.

Why Nürnberg, in 1488? Paulus suggests possible occasions, among them the roughly 7,000 indulgences for the crusade against the Ottomans distributed in the town that year, and calls them no more than background noise. The Nürnberg physician Hartmann Schedel, who had a taste for material “from the East”, entered the pamphlet in the catalogue of his library, among the books in German.

The abbot Johannes Trithemius noted what readers felt:

Cuius horribilia facta circumferuntur in quodam libello dudum impressa, que et risum et horrorem legentibus movent.

“His dreadful deeds, printed some time ago, go about in a certain little book and move those who read them to both laughter and horror.”

The others who wrote about him in the fifteenth century

Six texts, in five languages. None is an inquiry; each has an audience and an interest.

Michel Beheim, 1463

A Meistersinger at the court of Emperor Frederick III at Wiener Neustadt. His poem about “Trakle waida” runs to 1,070 lines and survives in a manuscript at Heidelberg; it contains nearly all the stories of the pamphlet and others that the prints do not have. Beheim names a friar, Brother Jacob, who had escaped from Vlad, as the man from whom he heard part of Vlad’s misdeeds. The poem ends with Vlad in prison. In Beheim the tyrant washes his hands in the blood of his victims before dining; from this, in books of the twentieth century, came the bread dipped in blood, which the verses do not contain.

Pius II, by 1464

The pope who had called for a crusade entered a list of Vlad’s cruelties in his Commentaries, most of them also in the pamphlet. He wrongly calls him “John” and writes while Vlad was still imprisoned.

The Russian tale, 1486 and 1490

The copyist Efrosin, of the monastery of St Cyril on the White Lake, notes at the end that he first wrote the text on 13 February 1486 and copied it again on 28 January 1490. The tale is anonymous; it is usually attributed to Fyodor Kuritsyn, Ivan III’s envoy to Hungary from 1482 to 1484. The narrator says “we saw” Vlad’s eldest son at Buda. It begins with the name: Dracula “in the Wallachian language, and in ours, devil”. It calls him zlomudr, “evil-wise”.

Laonikos Chalkokondyles

A Byzantine chronicler; book IX of his Histories is the fullest account of the war of 1462, with the night attack and the field of stakes.

Konstantin Mihailović, 1496–1501

A Serb taken by the Ottomans who became a janissary. He writes that Vlad cut off the noses of people, living and dead, on the right bank of the Danube and sent them to Hungary, boasting of the number of Turks killed.

Antonio Bonfini

An Italian humanist at the court of Matthias Corvinus. He sums Vlad up in a phrase: a man “of unheard-of cruelty and justice”. He also writes that, after his death, his head was sent as a gift to the sultan.

Vlad died at the end of December 1476 or the beginning of January 1477, a few weeks after regaining his throne. The place is recorded in no document. A dispatch sent from Venice by Leonardo Botta on 1 February 1477 says he was “cut to pieces” together with some 4,000 men; the Russian tale, that his own men took him for a Turk; the Austrian chronicler Jakob Unrest, that a Turk who had entered his service cut off his head from behind.

The name: from Dracula to Țepeș and back

His father, Vlad II, was received in 1431, at Nürnberg, into the Order of the Dragon founded by Sigismund of Luxembourg, and was known thereafter as Dracul. The son called himself after him: in Latin documents of 1475 and 1476 he is “Wladislaus Dragwlya” and “Ladislaus Drakulya”. The pamphlet calls him Dracole.

The name Țepeș (pronounced “TSE-pesh”, from țeapă, “stake”) first appears in a Slavonic charter of the Wallachian prince Radu the Great, dated by its editors to 21 January 1506: “Vlad the voivode called Țepeș”. The Ottomans called him Kazıklı, “the one with the stake”.

In 1820 the British consul William Wilkinson published in London a book on Wallachia and Moldavia. On page 19 he mentions a voivode Dracula who crossed the Danube and attacked the Turks, and explains the name in a footnote. Bram Stoker read the book in the library at Whitby, probably in the summer of 1890 (his note is undated), and copied the note into his working papers. In his earlier notes the count was called “Count Wampyr”; the name is struck through and replaced with Dracula.

Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil. The Wallachians were, at that time, as they are at present, used to give this as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous either by courage, cruel actions, or cunning.

In the novel the count says of an ancestor: “who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground?” This echoes a Danube raid like that of story 24, reaching Stoker through Wilkinson, who dates his version to 1460. Stoker’s notes contain neither the name Vlad, nor the word Impaler, nor any impalement, and nothing shows that he knew the German pamphlets. Dracula appeared in London in May 1897, from Archibald Constable and Company, at six shillings. Stoker never visited Transylvania.

The link between the count and the Wallachian prince was made widely known by scholars of the twentieth century: Bacil Kirtley in 1956, then Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu, with In Search of Dracula, in 1972. The first Romanian translation of the novel appeared as a newspaper serial in 1928–1929, signed by Ion Gorun.

What the documents do not say

The vampire belongs to the novel of 1897. In the pamphlet Dracole is a tyrant, wütrich, with nothing supernatural about him.

The year and place of Vlad’s birth are not recorded; Sighișoara is a hypothesis of historians. No document connects him with the ownership of Bran Castle. At Snagov, the excavations of 1933 found animal bones under the slab attributed to him; the grave remains unknown.

Dracula: Six Places, Myth vs Record. Bran, Sighișoara, Snagov, Poenari, Târgoviște and the Borgo Pass, each with its evidence.

On the same subject

• Dracula: Six Places, Myth vs Record (opens in a new tab): from the archive to the legend
• How a Serbian village word became your vampire (opens in a new tab): and why Romanian also has strigoi
• Poenari Fortress (opens in a new tab): the fortress on the Argeș attributed to Vlad
• The strigoi atlas (opens in a new tab): what historical sources record about the strigoi

Sources

The texts, in the edition used.

The pamphlet

• facsimile Dracole Wayda, [Nürnberg: Peter Wagner, c. 1488]. München, BSB, 4 Inc.s.a. 697
• catalogue Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, GW 12524–12531
• catalogue VD16 D 2635–2639
• study Christof Paulus, „Dracula in Nürnberg oder: Warum Humanisten Schauergeschichten lasen“, Deutsches Archiv 79 (2023)
• text Die geschicht dracole waide, Marx Ayrer, 14.X.1488 (Wikisource)

The parallel texts

• text Pius II, Commentarii rerum memorabilium, Roma, 1584, XI, pp. 544–547
• text Сказание о Дракуле воеводе, ed. Ia. S. Lurie, trad. O. V. Tvorogov (Библиотека литературы Древней Руси, 7)
• text Laonikos Chalkokondyles, Historiarum libri decem, ed. I. Bekker, Bonn, 1843, IX, pp. 499–517
• text Konstanty Michałowicz, Pamiętniki janczara, ed. J. Łoś, Kraków, 1912, cap. XXXIII, pp. 102–108
• text Antonio Bonfini, Rerum Ungaricarum decades, Frankfurt, 1581, III, 10, pp. 532–533
• text Michel Beheim, ed. G. C. Conduratu, Michael Beheims Gedicht über den Woiwoden Wlad II. Drakul, București, 1903

The war of 1462 and Vlad’s life

• document Ioan Bogdan, Vlad Țepeș și narațiunile germane și rusești asupra lui, București, 1896, pp. 76–82
• study Ștefan Andreescu, Vlad Țepeș (Dracula): între legendă și adevăr istoric
• document Magyar diplomacziai emlékek Mátyás király korából, I, Budapest, 1875, nr. 91–92, 105
• document Ioan Bogdan, Documente privitoare la relațiile Țării Românești cu Brașovul și cu Țara Ungurească, I, București, 1905
• document Documenta Romaniae Historica, B, II, București, 1972, nr. 41
• study Constantin Rezachevici, “The Tomb of Vlad Țepeș”, Journal of Dracula Studies 4 (2002)

The name and the novel

• text William Wilkinson, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, London, 1820, p. 19
• study Robert Eighteen-Bisang, Elizabeth Miller (ed.), Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula: A Facsimile Edition, 2008
• text Bram Stoker, Dracula, New York, 1899, pp. 30, 240–241
• study David B. Dickens, Elizabeth Miller, “Michel Beheim, German Meistergesang, and Dracula”, Journal of Dracula Studies 5 (2003)
• study Anca Simina Martin, “The interwar Romanian translation of Dracula”, Babel, 2024

Type: Fraunces and Source Serif 4 (SIL Open Font License).