"Today we're working with someone many of you may be familiar with," Ghanima announced as the class assembled. "If, at any point, today's discussion becomes too much, please feel free to excuse yourselves."

"The inspiration for Bram Stoker's famous vampire, Count Dracula, Vlad Țepeș, better known to Americans as Vlad the Impaler, may not have actually drunk blood, but he was certainly one of the most bloodthirsty rulers to have ever stalked through the annals of history."

"Raised to be a conventional prince, Vlad III was an exceptional warrior, horseman, and scholar: he was fluent in several languages, as well as the art of etiquette. His father had sworn to uphold an allegiance to fight the Turks, and was honored with membership in a secret society known as the Order of the Dragon, or the Dracul. Thus, Vlad gained his famous title, Drăculea, or "son of the Dragon." At the age of eleven, Vlad and his younger brother, Radu, were taken hostage and held at the palace of a Turkish sultan. Vlad and Radu lived under a constant threat of death or torture, and were often beaten and abused by their captors. The experience marked him for the rest of his life."

"Following the death of his father, and years of exile, Vlad returned to his homeland of Walachia and seized control of the throne. Determined to assert his power, he invited all the noble families of Walachia - the Boyar - to a banquet. Vlad suspected that many of them hand betrayed his father and brother, and once the feast was over, the old and infirm were impaled on wooden stakes. The younger and sturdier members of the party were enslaved, and put to work building him a castle. A short time later, he reportedly gathered up the beggars of the region and boarded them up in a great hall before setting it alight and burning them to death. His reasoning was reportedly 'I did this so no one would be poor in my realm.'

"Keep in mind that since the death of Vlad's grandfather, Mircea the Elder, in 1418, Walachia had fallen into a somewhat anarchical situation. A constant state of war had led to rampant crime, falling agricultural production, and the virtual disappearance of trade. Vlad used severe methods to restore some order, as he needed an economically stable country if he was to have any chance against his external enemies."

"The early part of Vlad’s reign was dominated by the idea of eliminating all possible threats to his power, mainly the rival nobility groups. This was done mainly by physical elimination, but also by reducing the economic role of the nobility: the key positions in the Prince’s Council, traditionally belonging to the country’s greatest boyars, were handed to obscure individuals, some of them of foreign origin, but who manifested loyalty towards Vlad. For the less important functions, Vlad also ignored the old boyars, preferring to knight and appoint men from the free peasantry. A key element of the power of the Walachian nobility was their connections in the Saxon-populated autonomous towns of Transylvania, so Vlad acted against these cities by eliminating their trade privileges in relation with Walachia and by organizing raids against them. In 1459, he had 30,000 of the German settlers (Saxons) and officials of the Transylvanian city of Kronstad who were transgressing his authority impaled."

"Vlad controlled his subjects with an iron-fist, and any who opposed his rule or committed even minor crimes could be subject to a gruesome and agonizing death. Adulterous wives, cheating merchants, even one poor woman who had sewn her husband's shirt too short -- all were killed hideously," she said. "Vlad's preferred method of execution was, as I mentioned earlier, to impale his victims. He turned this torture into an art form, arranging the stakes and victims into complex patterns and puzzles." Ghanima's eyes swept the classroom, carefully noting how the students were reacting before she continued. "'The wooden stakes were typically plunged vertically, from the anus to the mouth, and were smoothed and oiled at the tip to ease the passage through the body and avoid damaging vital organs. This ensured an agonizingly slow, yet effective, death. Rumor says that victims of noble birth were given longer stakes, as to be higher from the ground, and were often first invited to dine with Vlad, surrounded by rotting staked corpses."

"Of course, he did not limit himself to staking," she said calmly. "Vlad was reportedly partial to other forms of torture as well, and thought nothing of boiling people alive, skinning, scalping (also while living), and mutilating or roasting children and feeding them to their mothers. Reportedly, he managed to dispose of at least one-tenth of his citizenry during his reign."

"In 1462, when the Turks invaded Walachia, they were totally unprepared for the sight which met them on the outskirts of the capital city of Tirgoviste: rows upon rows of large stakes upon which the bodies of at least 20,000 men, women, and children hung. The horror was enough to make the invading army flee in terror."

"When the Turks invaded again, this time determined to destroy the Dracul, Vlad fled to his allies in Hungary where he was kept under house arrest for several years. His appetite for sadism did not diminish during his incarceration, and he turned to the only victims he could find - rats, mice, and birds. Vlad was reinstated as the King of Walachia upon his release from prison in 1468, and he reportedly died in 1476."

"There are several variants of Vlad the Impaler's death. Some sources say he was killed in battle against the Ottoman Empire near Bucharest in December of 1476. Others say he was assassinated by disloyal Boyars just as he was about to sweep the Turks from the field or during a hunt. Other accounts have Vlad falling in defeat, surrounded by the bodies of his loyal Moldavian bodyguards. Still other reports claim that Vlad, at the moment of victory, was struck down by one of his own men. There are accounts that Vlad's body was decapitated by the Turks and his head was sent to Istanbul and preserved in honey, where the sultan had it displayed on a stake as proof that Kazıklı Bey was finally dead. However, Romanian historian and Vlad biographer Matei Cazacu disputes this, since the Turks tended to remove the scalp of their victims' heads rather than behead them." Ghanima smiled viciously at the assembled students. "After all, Vlad learned picked up that particular torture habit during his time as a hostage in the Turkish court. Clearly, an argument can be made in this case regarding nature versus nurture."

[OOC: NOTE: Today's class is behind the cut-tag for impalement, violence, and lots of people dying.]