There was man who served the Lord of Alnwick Castle, who though was known himself for his wicked ways, also had an unfaithful wife. He hid upon the roof above his bed one night, to see the actions of his wife for himself. He fell from the roof and died the next day.

After his burial the man was seen wandering about town. People became afraid of encountering him and would lock themselves within their houses after dark every day. During the time of the man's wanderings, an unnamed disease broke out in town and quite a few people died. The sickness, of course, was blamed upon the presence of the "vampyre."

On Palm Sunday, the local priest finally assembled a group, consisting of the more devout residents and some of the leading citizens. The group proceeded to the cemetary where they uncovered the man's body. The corpse appeared to be gorged with blood, and when the struck it with a spade the blood gushed forth. Determined that the body had fed off of the blood of it's many victims, they dragged it from town and burned it. Soon afterward the epidemic ceased and the town returned to normal again.

Bathory was born th daughter of George and Anna Bathory in 1560. Although she is frequently cited as being Hungarian (due mainly to the Hungarian Empires shifting borders), she was more correctly associated with the area that is now known as the Slovak Republic. Bathory spent most of her adult life at Castle Cachtice. Though the castle was mistakenly reported as being in Transylvania by Raymond T. McNally, it is actually located near the town of Vishine, just north-east of what is present day Bratislava (where Austria, Hungary, and the Slovak Republic come together).

Bathory grew up in an era when much of Hungary had been overrun by the Turkish forces of the Ottoman empire and was a battleground between Turkish and Austiran (Hapsburg) armies. The area was also split by religous differences. Her family sided with the new wave of Protestantism that opposed the traditional Romanian Catholisism. She was raised on the Bathory family estate at Ecsed in Transylvania. As a child Bathory was subject to seizures accompanied by intense rage and uncontrollable behavior.

In 1571, Bathory's cousin Stephen became Prince of Transylvania and, later in the decade, additionally assumed the throne of Poland as well. He was one of the most effective rulers of his time. However, his plans for uniting Europe against the Turks where somewhat foiled by having to turn his attention toward fighting Ivan the Terrible, who wanted Stephen's territory.

Elizabeth became pregnant as the result of a brief affair with a peasant man in 1574. When her condition became evident, she was sequestereduntil the baby's birth, due to her engagement to Count Ferenc Nadasdy. They were married in May of 1575. Since Nadasdy was a soldier, he was frequently away for long periods of time. This left Bathory with the duties of managing the affairs of the Nadasdy family estate, Castle Sarvar. It was here that Elizabeth's career of evil truly began,with the disciplining of the large household staff, espiecally the young girls.

In a time period in which cruel and arbitrary behavior by those in power toward those who were servants was common, Elizabeth's level of cruelty was noteworthy. She did not just punish infringements on her rules, but found excuses to inflict punishments and delighted in the torture and death of her victim's far beyond what her contemporaries could accept. She would stick pins in various sensitive body part, such as under the fingernails. In the winter she would execute victims by having them stripped, led out into the snow, and doused with water until they were frozen.

Bathory's husband joined in some of her sadistic behavior and actually taught his wife a some new varieties of punishment. For example, he showed her a summer-time version of her freezing exercise- he had a woman stripped, covered with honey, then left outside to be bitten by numerous insects. He died in 1604, and Elizabeth moved to Vienna soon after his burial.

Around this time, Bathory also began to spend her time at her estate in Beckov, as well as spending time at her manor house in Cachitice. Both estates were located in what is now the country of Slovakia. There were where her most famous and cruel acts took place.

Anna Darvulia, a woman who very little is known about, was known as Bathory's main associate in crime during the years following her husband's death. In 1609, Darvulia became ill, so Elizabeth turned to the widow of one of the local tenant farmer's, Erzsi Majorova, as her new cohort.

Majorova is noted as being the one mainly responsible for Bathory's eventual downfall, by advising her to include a few women of noble birth amongst her victims. Elizabeth began having troubles in obtaining sevant girls willing to work for her as rumors of her hobbies spread throughout the countryside. She soon followed Majorva's encouragment sometime in 1609. She killed a young noble woman, but was able to cover up the act with charges of suicide.

In the summer of 1610 an official inquiry began concerning Elizabeth's actions. However, it was not vast number of her victim's that brought Bathory to court, but rather, political concerns instead. The crown hoped to escape from paying back a rahter extensive loan that her husband had made to the king, as well as wishing to confiscate her landholdings, which were rather large as well.

On December 19, 1610, Bathory was arrested, and a few days later, placed on trial. The trial, mainly for show, was conducted by an agent of the king, Count Thurzo, it was initated not only for a conviction, but for the confiscation of her lands as well. One week following the first trial, on January 7, 1611, a second trail was convened.

During the second trail a register that had been retrieved from Elizabeth's living quarters was submitted as evidence. The register recorded the naes of 650 victims, all written in Bathory's handwriting. Bathory's accomplices were sentenced to be executed. The manner of their deaths was determined by thier roles in the tortures. Elizabeth herself was sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement.

Bathroy was held in a room of her Cachtice castle. The room contained no windows of doors, only a few slits for air, and a small opening for food and water to be given to her. Elizabeth remained in confinement there until her death three years later on August 21, 1614. She was buried in the Bathory lands at Ecsed.

Amongst her numerous acts and tortures, the accusation that Bathory drained the blood of her victims and bathed in it was what earned her the title of a vampyre. It is also noted that she occasionally bit the flesh of the girls during their torture. It is said that the reason Bathory bathed in blood was to retain her youthful looks and beauty, and she was, by all accounts, a most attractive woman.

There are various tales as to where Bathory originally got the notion that her blood bath's would keep her looking young and beautiful to begin with. Two of the more popular one's are as follows.
The first tale says that an aging Bathory was having her hair combed by a young servant girl. When the girl accidently pulled Bathory's hair, she turned around and slapped her, drawing forth blood. Some of the young girl's blood had gotten upon Elizabeth's hands, and when she rubbed the blood in, she noticed her hands begin to take on the youthful appreance of the servant girl. This incident is said to have sparked her desire for the blood of young virgins.
The second tale involve's Elizabeth's behavior after the death of her husband. She was said to have associated herself with many younger men during this time. On one occasion while with one of these men, Elizabeth saw an old woman and remarked, "What would you do if you had to kiss that old hag?" Of course he responded as expected, with words of distaste towards the act. The older woman, upon hearing the conversation, accused Elizabeth of excessive vanity, and told her that an aged appearance was unescapable by anyone, even a countess such as her. Afterwhich she became obbsessive with the notion of aging, and began to bath in blood hoping to retain her beautiful appearance and youthful looks.

The account spoke of a wealthy man that lived in the town of Berwick (in the northern section of England, near the Scottish border) during the 12th century. After the man's death, his body was reported to be seen roaming through the streets at night, and causing the dogs to howl all evening, by the local townspeople. Because of the strong association between revenants and plagues within popular lore, people became fearful that such might fall upon the population of the town. To prevent the attack of a plague, the townspeople decided to dismember the man's body and to burn it. After this was done the man's body was no longer seen walking about town. However, nonetheless a disease did sweep throughout the town, causing many deaths. The disease was attributed to the after-effects of the vampyres presence.

Owned at the time by a family named Fisher, the house was rented to a woman and her two brothers: Amelia, Edward, and Micheal Cranswell. During one summer, the district expierenced a hot spell, so when the three retired for the night, the woman slept near the window. She shut the window, but did not close the shutters. Unable to go to sleep, she spotted something approaching that eventually reached the window and began to scratch and then to pick at it, removing a pane. A creature then reached in and unlocked the window. The terrifed woman, frozen in fear, waited as a brown face with flaming eyes came to her, grabbed her, and bit her throat.

She screamed, and her brothers rushed to her rescue, but as they arrived the creature hurriedly left. One brother tended his sister as the other persued the creature, which disappeared over a wall by a nearby church. The doctor who later treated the woman suggested a change of scenery, and the brothers took her to Switzerland for an extended visit. The three eventually returned to Croglin Grange.

The following spring the creature appeared again. One of the brothers chased it, shot it in the leg, and traced it to a vault in the local cemetery. The next day, accompanied by some townspeople, the brothers entered the vault, which was in complete disarray except for one coffin. When they opened the coffin, they found a body with a fresh gunshot wound in the leg. The bullet was extracted, and they burned the corpse.

In 1924, Charles G. Harper, basing his assertions on a visit to the area, challenged the Hare book. Harper could find no place named Groglin Grange. Though there were two other buildings, Croglin High Hall and Croglin Low Hall, neither fit the description of Croglin Grange. There was no church, the closest one being over a mile away, and no vault corresponding to the description of the one opened by the brothers and their neighbors.

Harper's own account was challenged at a later date, when F. Clive-Ross visited the area. In interviews with the local residents, he determined that Low Croglin Hall was the house referred to in Hare's story and that a chapel had exsisted near it for many years, it's foundation stones still visible into the 1930s. Clive-Ross seemed to answer all Harper's objections.

The Croglin Grange story continued in 1968 when psychic researcher Scott Rogo offered a new challenge. He noted the likeness of the story at Croglin Grange to the first chapter of Varney the Vampyre, the popular vampyre story orignally published in 1847. The accounts, both of which were published in 1929 by Montague Summers, are very similar, and it is likely that one is based on the other,according to Rogo. He suggested that the whole Croglin Grange story could be dismissed as a simple hoax.

At a later date, Clive-Ross discussed the case again with residents of the area. He was told that there was a signifnificant mistake in Hare's original account: the story took place not in the 1870s, but in the 1680s, almost two centuries earlier. While this fact would definitely place the events prior to the publication of Varney the Vampyre, it also pushes the story far enough into the past as to turn it into unverifiable legend.

The Highgate cemetary, offically named the Cemetery of St. Jame's, was reported to have a phantomlike entity that was seen in the grounds during the evenings. As these rumor's spread and circulated Sean Manchester, an occult investigator and the head of the Vampre Research Society, was recieving the account of a schoolgirl named Elizabeth Wojdyla and her friend. Both girls claimed to have seen some of the graves in the cemetery open, and the dead rise from them. Wojdyla also reported nightmares that she had, during the dream something evil would attempt to enter her bedroom. Manchester collected similar accounts of unusal sightings associated with the cemetery over the next several years.

In 1969, Wojdyla's nightmare's returned, but now the entity would actually come into her room. On her neck were two small wounds, suggestive of a classical vampyre attack, and she had developed the symptoms of pernicious anemia. Both Wojdyla's boyfriend and Manchester treated her as the victim of vampyrism. They filled her room with garlic, crosses, and holy water, and she soon improved. At the same time, people continued to submit reports of seeing a ghostly figure in the cemetery.

The reports, of a fairly common sort, probably would not have been heard of. However, evidence was soon found that the cemetery, and a nearby park as well, were being used for rituals which included the killing of animals. Some of the dead animals had been found completly drained of blood. A local newspaper headline of the time read: "Does a Wampyr Walk in Highgate?"

Manchester soon reported that he was contacted by another young woman, who displayed all the same symptoms as Wojdyla. The young woman was followed while sleepwalking one night, and led Manchester fo a cluster of burial vaults within the cemetery. Manchester told the press that he believed there was a genuine vampyre at Highgate, and that it needed to be dealt with accordingly.

On Friday, March 13, 1970 Manchester and two cohorts entered the vaults before a crowd of assembled onlookers. When they entered the vault, they found three empty coffins. They then placed a cross inside of each coffin and lined the coffins with garlic. The vaults were sprinkled with holy water and salt (which is traditionally used for excorcisms).

In August the dead body of a young woman was found at the cemetery and events took a horrible turn. Someone had attempted to treat the woman as a vampyre, and had decapitated the corpse and tryed to burn it. The enraged citizens of Highgate demanded that the authorities protect the bodies of their loved ones from abuse, and before the end of the month the authorities had arrested two young men claiming to be vampyre hunters.

The arrested men, amongst other things, were among the many factors in the declining relationship between Manchester and the police. However, while the authorities were distracted with the two "vampyre hunters," Manchester had discovered what he though to be a real vampyre on his own. He had quietly entered another vault where he had discovered the vampyre, rather than mutilating the body however, which is a crime in England, he read an exorcisim and sealed the vault with cement that was permeated with pieces of garlic.

In the summer of 1970, another ameteur vampyre hunter was arrested, David Ferrant. Ferrant claimed to have seen the vampyre, and went hunting after it with a crucifix and a stake. David later became a convert to a form of Satinism, and was concicted on two charges of breaking into tombs at Highgate.

In 1978, Ferrant denounced the Highgate vampyre, and claimed it was a hoax he created by himself in 1970 when he was orginally arrested. However, Manchester quickly responding, pointing out that the Highgate events and reports had orginated long prior to Ferrant's involvement, and that he was not privy in any way to the incidents that had made the Highgate vampyre newsworthy to begin with.

In 1973 Manchester began the investagation of a reportedly haunted mansion that resided near the cemetery. He and his associates entered the house on several occasions. In the basement a coffin was found, and they dragged it to the backyard. When they opened the casket, Manchester saw the same vampyre that he had seen in the cemetary four years earlier. This time he conducted an exorcism by staking the body, which then disintegrated into a slimy, foul-smelling, substance. Afterwhich they burned the coffin. He had suceeded in destroying the Highgate vampyre. Shortly after this incident, the mansion was destoyed and an apartment complex was built in it's stead.

The consequences of the Highgate vampyre did not end with the death of the vampyre though. In 1980 reports of dead animals that had been drained of blood soon began to surface in Finchley. Manchester believed the cause to be a second vampyre, caused by the bite of the orginal Highgate vampyre. He then contacted many of the people that he had met in 1970.

The group eventually targeted a woman that he called Lusia as the perpetrator. It was discovered that Lusia had died, and then been buried in Great Northern London Cemetery. Manchester had dreams in which she came to him as well. In Autumn of 1982, Manchester entered the cemetery. There he encountered a spider-like creature that was about the size of a large cat, which he drove a stake through. As dawn approached the creature changed into the form of Lusia, finally truly dead.

Manchester returned Lusia's remains to her grave, and the case of the Highgate vampyre had finally come to an end.

When Ivan was three years old, he inherited the title of Grand Duke of Moscovy. He grew up watching the boyars (the leading families) of his land lead the other countries through a period of chaos, as they were fighting for various bits of power. When he was 17 years old, a Chosen Council emerged to bring about reform. Though they did suceed in ending the chaos, Ivan continually fought with them over a great many administrative matters. He suddenly abdicated in 1564 out of frustration.

People soon demanded his return, and Ivan was able to dictate the terms of his reinstatement to office, and gained almost absolute power in the process. He quickly moved to establish the Oprichinina, his own ruling elite. The Oprichinina wrestles much of the remaining power from the boyars.

Ivan's two decade riegn was partly marked bu his conquest of the lands alon the Volga River and his movement into Siberia. Also known, is a disastrous war that he led, in his unsuccessfull attempt to capture Livonia (modern Estonia). However, Ivan is not mostly remebered for his political actions, but rather his personal conduct.

Ivan had a great desire to establish a strong central Russian government. In this desire he was quick to punish, as well as execute, many who challanged his rule, as well as those who showed disrespect for what he considered to be his exaulted status in anyway whatsoever. Ivan also had a quick and fiery temper, and exhibited maifested symptoms of extreme paranoia. In the year 1580, he killed his own son, a prospective heir, in a moment of rage.

Amongst the traits remebered by his contemporaries in particular, was Ivan's dark sense of humor (quite similar to that attributed to Vlad Tepes). This often would characterize the tortures or executions of the unfortunate that had become objects of his rage. However, it is noted that many of the stories that are told about Ivan, were actually variations of those that were orignally ascribed to Vlad a century earlier. One such example of this is a Romanina folk story about the leading citizens of the town of Tirgoviste, Dracula's capital. The citizens had mocked Dracula's brother year's before, so, in revenge he rounded the boyars following the Easter Day celebrations. In their fine clothes, he marched them off to work on building Castle Dracula. Ivan is reported to have done something fairly similar in the town of Volgoda. When the people were said to have slighted him on Easter morning, he rounded them all up, still in thier Easter finery, and made them to build a new city wall for the town.

Probably the most famous Dracula story that was told of Ivan was that of the impolite envoy. A Turkish envoy refused to remove his hat in Dracula's presence, so in turn, Dracula had the man's hat nailed to the top of his head. It was reported that Ivan did the same thing to an Italian diplomat, though in other accounts, it is a French ambassador.

However, unlike Vlad, Ivan often would turn on powerful figures withing Russian society, humilating them to prevent thier return to the dignity of their offices. One example told, is the story of his attack on Pimen, who was the Russina Orthodox metropolitan of Novgorod. He had Pimen stripped of his church vestments and dressed as a strolling minstrel, which was an occupation that was offically denounced by the church. Ivan then staged a mock wedding of Pimen to a mare, and presented him with the signs of his new status, a lyre and a bagpie, and sent him from the city.

Ivan also differed from Vlad in his personal sexual desires. He was a polygamist with seven seperate wives, and as many as 50 concubines. Ivan also left his immediate successors with a rather mixed inheritance.

Although Ivan had expanded Russia's territory, he had left the country bankrupt. Discontent steadily began to spread with his rule. However, Ivan died quietly on March 18, 1584 in the middle of a chess game.

The account begins with a priest who had neglected his holy vows, and instead devoted his days to frivolous activities. Following his death, he was reported to come from his grave and try to enter the cloister at the monastary. Having failed on several occasions, he soon began to wander throughout the countryside. The man found his way to the bedside of a lady, whom he had once been chaplain to. After several visits, she was soon prompted to report the incidents to the brothers at the monastary.

Several brothers set up a watch at the graveyard where the priest had been buried. On monk kept the watch as the rest of his companions sought relief from the chilly night air by a fire, the lone monk saw the priest rise from his grave and begin to approach him. The monk hit the priest with a battle axe and then forced him back to his grave. The earth opened up to recieve the corpse of the priest, and then closed over again, giving the appearance that it had been undisturbed.

When the three monks that had been warming themselves returned, the monk told them of his account with the body of the dead priest. The three listened to him and believed his story, so, at the break of the day, they opened the grave. Within they found the corpse of the priest, bearing the mark of the wound that the monk had previously reported to them, and the coffin was filled with blood. The monks then burnt the body and scattered the ashed.

Paul was born in the early 1700s in Medvegia, north of Belgrade, in an area of Serbia then part of the Austrian Empire. He served in the army in what was caled "Turkish Serbia" and in the spring of 1727 returned to his hometown. He was noted as being a good natured and honest person and was welcomed by the townspeople upon his return. However, it was also noted that a certain gloom pervaded his personality. Paul purchased several acres of land and settled down to farming. He was pursued by a young woman at a neighboring farm and was eventually engaged to be married.

Paul finally told his intended wife that his problem stemmed from his war days. In Turkish Serbia, he had been visited and attacked by a vampyre. Eventually, he killed the vampyre after following it to it's grave. He also ate some of the dirt from the vampyres tomb and bathed his wounds in the blood of the vampyre to clense himself of the effects of the attack. However, he was still fearful of having been tainted by the attack. A week later, Paul was the victim of a fatal accident. He was buried immediately.

Some three weeks after his burial, reports surfaced of appearances made by Paul. Four people who made reports died and a panic began to spread through the community. Community leaders decided to act to quell the panic by disinterring the body to determine if Paul was a vampyre. On the 40th day after the burial, the grave was opened. Two military surgeons were present when the lid was removed from the coffin. They found a body that appeared as if it had just recently died. What seemed to be new skin was present under a layer of dead skin, and the nails had continued to grow. The body was pierced, and blood poured forth. Those present judged that Paul was a vampyre. His body was staked, and he was heard to utter a loud groan. His head was also severed and his body burned. The case could have ended there, but it did not. The four other people who had died were treated similarly lest they also begin to reappear as vampyres.

In 1731 in the same area, some 17 people died of symptoms of vampyrism in a matter of three months. The townspeople were slow to act until one girl complained that a man named Milo, who had recently died, had attacked her in the middle of the night. Word of this second wave of vampyrism reached Vienna, and the Austrian Emperor ordered an inquiry to be conducted by Regimental Field Surgeon Johannes Fluckinger. Appointed on December 12, Fluckinger headed for Medvegia and began to gather accounts of what had occured. Milo's body was disinterred and it was discovered in a state similar to that of Arnold Paul's; the body was then staked and burned. How was it possible that the vampyrism that had been eradicated in 1727 had returned? It was determined that Paul had vampyrized several cows that the recently dead had feed on. Under Fluckinger's orders, the townspeople proceeded to dig up the bodies of all who had died in recent months. Forty were disinterred and 17 were found to be in the same preserved state as had Paul's body. They were all staked and burned.

Fluckinger wrote a full report of his activities that he presented to the Emperor early in 1732. His report soon published and became a bestseller. By March 1732, accounts of Paul and Medvegia vampyres were circulated in the periodicals of France and England. Because of the well documented nature of the case, it became the focus of future studies and reflections about vampyres, and Arnold Paul became the most famous "vampire" of the era. The Paul case was most influential in shaping the conclusions reached by both Dom Augustin Calmet and Giuseppe Davanzati, two Roman Catholic scholars who prepared books on vampyrism in the middle of the century.

The cheif magistrate sent a report of the deaths to the commander of the Imperial forces, and the commander responded with a visit to the village. The graves of all the recently dead were opened. The body of Plogojowitz was an enigma to them- he appeared as if he was in a trance and was breathing very gently. His eyes were open, his flesh plump, and his complexion ruddy. His hair and nails appeared to have grown and fresh skin was found just below the scarfskin. Most importantly, his mouth was smeared with fresh blood.

The commander quickly concluded that Plogojowitz was a vampyre. The executioner who came to Kisolova with the commander drove a stake through the body. Blood gushed from the wound and from the body orfices. The body was then burned. None of the other bodies manifested signs of vampyrism. To protect them, and the villagers, garlic and whitethorn were placed in their graves and their bodies were returned to the ground.

The story was reported by the Marquis d' Argens in his Lettres Juives, which was quickly translated into an English version in 1729. While not as well known as the incidents that began with Arnold Paul, the Plogojowitz case became a major building block of the European vampyre controversy of the 1730s.

Recent interest in Dracula has produced among some researchers a desire to know more about the historical figure behind the fictional character. An important breakthrough came in 1972 with the publication of In Search of Dracula, the intial findings of Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, who gathered the basic contemporary documents concerning the Romanian prince Vlad and visited Vlad's former territory to investigate his career. The following year, the even more definitive Dracula: A Biography of Vlad the Impaler, 1431-1476 also by McNally and Florescu, appeared. These books made the career of this obscure Romanian ruler, who actually exercised authority for only a relatively short period of time, an integral part of the modern Dracula myth.

The name Dracula was applied to Vlad during his lifetime. Vlad's father, had joined the Order of the Dragon, a Christian brotherhood dedicated to fighting the Turks, in 1431, shortly after Vlad's birth. The oath of the order required, among other things, wearing the order's insignia at all times. Thusly his father, also named Vlad, took on the name Dracul as his second name. It was derived from drac, a Romanian word that can be interpreted variously as "devil" or "dragon." The name Dracula means son of Dracul, or son of the dragon, or devil.

The actual birth date of Vlad is unknown, but was probably late in 1430. He was born in Schassburg (aka Sighisoara), a town in Transylvania. Soon after his birth, in February 1431, his father traveled to Nuremburg, Germany, where he was invested with the insignia of the Order of the Dragon. The accompanying oath dedicated the family to the fight against the Turks, who had begun attack upon Europe that would eventually carry them to the very gates of Vienna. Vlad (Dracul) was a claimant to the throne of Wallachia, that part of contemporary Romania south of the Transylvanian Alps. He was able to wrest the throne from his half-brother in 1436.

Two years later, Vlad Dracul entered into an alliance with the turks that called for sending two sons, Mircea and Vlad, with the sultan on a raid into Transylvania. Doubting Vlad Dracul's loyalty, the sultan had him brought before him and imprisoned. Dracul nevertheless reaffirmed his loyalty and had Vlad (Dracul had two sons named Vlad, born to different mothers) and Radu, his younger sons, remain with the sultan to guarantee their pact. They were placed under house arrest at Egrigoz. The period of imprisonment deeply affected Vlad. On the one hand, he took the opportunity of his confinement to learn the Turkish language and customs. But his treatment ingrained the cynicism so evident in his approach to life and infused in him a Machiavellian attitude toward political matters. His early experiences also seem to have set within his personality the desire to seek revenge from anyone who wronged him.

In December 1447 his father was murdered and his older brother, Mircea, was burned alive under the orders of Hungarian governor John Hunyadi (aka Ioande Hunedoara), with the assistance of the boyars, the ruling elite families of Wallachia. The death of Mircea made Vlad the successor, but with Hunyadi's backing, Vladislav II, a member of another branch of the family, assumed the Wallachian throne. Vlad tried to claim the throne in 1448, but his reign lasted only a couple of months before he was forced to flee the neighboring kingdom of Moldavia. In 1451, while he was at Suceava, the Moldavian capital, the ruler was assassinated. For whatever reasons, Vlad then went to Transylvania and placed himself at the mercy of Hunyadi, the very person who had ordered his father's assassination.

The alliance between Hunyadi and Vlad may have been made possible by Vladislav II's adoption of a pro-Turkish policy which alienated Hunyadi. Vlad fought beside Hunyadi, who in the end acknowledged Vlad's claim to the Wallichian throne.

Hunyadi died of the plague at Belgrade on August 11, 1456. Immediately after that event, Vlad left Transylvania for Wallachia. He defeated his cousin Vladislav II, and on August 20 caught up with the fleeing prince and killed him. Vlad then began his six-year reign, during which his reputation was established. In September he took both a formal oath to Hungarian King Ladislaus V and, a few days later, an oath of vassalage to the Turkish sultan.

Early in his reign, probably in the spring of 1459, Vlad committed his first major act of revenge. On Easter Sunday, after a day of feasting, he arrested the boyar families, whom he held responsible for the death of his father and brother. The older ones he simply impaled outside the palace and city walls. He forced the rest, still in the easter finery, to march from the capital city of Tirgoviste to the town of Poenari, where over the summer, in the most humiliating of circumstances, they were forced to build his new outpost overlooking the Arges River. This chateau would later be identified as Castle Dracula. Dracula's actions in destroying the power of the bowers was part of his policy of creating a modern, centralized state in what is today Romania. He turned over the estates and positions of the deceased boyers to people who owed their loyalty only to him.

Vlad's brutal manner of terrorizing his enemies and the seemingly arbitrary manner in which he had people punished earned him the nickname "Tepes" or it's translation, "the Impaler," the common name by which he is known today. He not only used the stake against the boyers, whom he was trying to bring into subservience, he also terrorized the churches, both the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic, each of which had strength in his territory. He gave particular attention to the Roman Catholic monastic centers, which he saw as points of unwelcome foreign merchants, especially the Germans, whom he saw as preventing the development of Romanian industry. Vlad Tepes used his position to enforce his personal moral code of honesty and sexual morality, and various stories have survived of his killing people who offended his sense of moral value. He would, on occasion, retaliate against an entire village because of the actions of one person.

Vlad also used terrorist tactics against his foreign enemies. When he thought that merchants from Transylvania had ignored his trade laws, he led raids across the border in 1457 and again in 1459 and 1460 and used impalement to impose his will. During the latter incursion he looted the Church of Saint Bartholemew, burned a sectiong of Brasnov, and impaled numerous people. That raid was later pictured in anti-Dracula prints showing him dining among the impaled bodies.

During his reign, Vlad moved to the village of Bucharest and built it into an important fortified city with strong outer walls. Seeing the mountains as protective bulwarks, Vlad built his castle in the foothills of the Transylvania Alps. Later, feeling more secure and wishing to take control of the potentially wealthy plains to the south, he built up Bucharest.