麻豆社

Vlad III Dracula, the Wallachian Prince who became Bram Stokers inspiration behind his famous vampire 'Count Dracula,' was a brutal ruler.

So brutal that history dubbed him '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.

Chroniclers and historians claim that he impaled over 20,000 people during his reigns which, if true is a very, very big number. But is it true?
We speak to Historian D茅nes Harai whose paper: 'Counting the Stakes: A Reassessment of Vlad III Dracula鈥檚 Practice of Collective Impalements in Fifteenth-Century South-eastern Europe' attempts to set the record straight.

Let's travel back to 1431 to separate the maths from the myth.

Presenter/Producer: Lizzy McNeill
Series Producer: Tom Colls
Sound Mix: Neil Churchill
Editor: Richard Vadon