Târgoviște

He impaled corrupt officials, thieves, enemy envoys, and rival boyars.

In 1462, during the night attack of Targoviste, Glad disguised his soldiers in Ottoman uniforms and launched a surprise night raid into the camp of Sultan Mehmed II, attempting to assassinate the Sultan himself.

Though Mehmed survived, as his army marched toward the Wallachian capital, they rounded a bend and encountered the infamous Forest of the Impaled, a field nearly a mile long filled with an estimated 20,000 impaled corpses of Ottoman prisoners and soldiers.

The horrific sight psychologically broke the morale of the invading army, forcing a retreat.

Anyways, uh, like this Order of Dragon is who they were connected to, and it's pretty perfect for someone who later inspired one of the creepiest vampires of all time.

Um, as a boy, he moved to, I'm gonna s- totally butcher these names, in Targoviste when his father became ruler of Walla- Wallachia.

And so I'll show you a quick map c- so you can see what it looked like back then versus...

And I'll show you a map of kind of present day.

To peasants terrorized by bandits and boyar corruption, Vlad’s cruelty against the powerful could feel like justice.

One story, repeated often, described how he placed a golden cup by a public fountain in Târgoviște, his capital.

The cup remained untouched for years, so great was the fear of theft under his rule.

No merchant dared steal it; no peasant risked a hand upon it.

It was a weapon, aimed not at bodies but at minds.

One of the most infamous episodes occurred during the campaign of 1462, when Sultan Mehmed II led a massive army into Wallachia to crush Vlad once and for all.

As the Ottomans approached Târgoviște, they found outside the city a spectacle beyond comprehension: a field of twenty thousand corpses impaled in ordered rows.

The sight horrified even the battle-hardened Mehmed.