Vlad the Impaler...

[Sarethi]

Check out this thread: The Truth about Vlad the Impaler

[King Kurt]

Vlad - was he the victim of a bad press? - was he just misunderstood??

Even by the standards of the day Vlad was cruel beyond belief. The Wikpedia article is, as always, an excellent source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlad_II...nian_attitudes

He undoubtedly defended his country well and held off the Turks, but his terror methods are beyond the pale.

[matteus the inbred]

well KK, i was about to argue with you, but having read the Wikipedia article i can't really justify defending Vlad Tepes! Undoubtedly they were desperate times and he needed to defend himself with everything available, but some of the things he seems likely to have done were quite astonishingly inhumane and cruel.
i suppose he's not available as an MTW 'character', being too late for the time period...maximum dread and some 'Butcher' vices, i reckon!

[Cronos Impera]

Vlad the Impaler was a victim of the press.He declined the privilages of the Hungarian merchants from Brasov, and their revenge was to portray him as bad as they could in the eyes of the western powers. That's how Bram Stocker got the job. He became ruler of an lawless Wallachia, where voievodes (kings) whare nothing more than puppets in the hands of the boyars.
Terror was necesary, as it produced excellent results, impaling made the people respect the law once again to an unprecedented level ( eg. If you ware a merchant travelling in Wallachia and dropped your bag of gold in the middle of the market, you cold return a week later and find the same bag of gols sitting exactly where you dropped it).
Implaing the nobles was necesary to put them in line so that they could stand against the Ottoman threat.

[Scurvy]

he was also brought up to that kind of thing... (from what i'v read) his experiences made him think that life was cheap and so he didnt really mind impaling people

[King Henry V]

Even his portrait is scary...

[Cronos Impera]

By the runes, Vlad the Impaler's only fault was to introduce the death penalty for all crimes ( from robbery to betrayal) in the form of impalement.
Though bloody, this punishment guaranteed the safety of merchants, the loyalty of the boyars and the fear of the Turks.
By the time of Vlad the Impaler Wallachia had lost the Black Sea Coast, some cities along the shores of the Danube and the state was tributary to the sultan of Istambul. Furthermore the kings ware puppets in the hands of the boyars.
"IMPALING WAS NECESARY, THOUGH IT WAS A PAINFULL WAY TO DIE"

Remember the french revolution, when thousands ware beheaded, should we portray the revolutionaries as vampires? Or Napoleon Bonaparte he was responsable for the massacres of Jaffa yet noone makes a picture of him with fangs and claws.

Sometimes brutal measures are necesary to keep unity.
" The purpose excuses the means " Machiavelli