How Vlad The Impaler Stole The Throne From His Cousin

Granted, some stories about Vlad the Impaler, as NBC News tells us, are likely embellished, like how he dipped his bread in victims' blood. But really, if he planted 20,000 pole-impaled corpses in a forest to deter incoming Ottoman troops (as Mental Floss explains), can fiction make things much worse? He definitely razed villages willy-nilly, including livestock, nailed diplomat's hats to their heads when they said that religious custom forbade them to remove their hats, and in 1462 bragged, "I have killed peasants, men and women, old and young... 23,884 Turks, without counting those whom we burned in homes or the Turks whose heads were cut by our soldiers." 

Stealing a throne from his cousin, then, might not seem like too big of an offense. To Vlad, it was his birthright. He'd spent his childhood in the Ottoman Empire as a prisoner after being captured in 1442 along with his brother, Radu. His father, Dracul, brought his sons to a supposed diplomatic meeting with the Ottoman Sultan Murad II, as Live Science explains, and all three were carted off to a dungeon in Tokat Castle, Turkey. Dracul used his sons as collateral to return home to govern as voivode (warlord) of Wallachia, while Vlad and Radu were raised by the enemy.

When John Hunyadi, regent-governor of Hungary, invaded Wallachia in 1447, he murdered Dracul and installed Vlad's cousin Vladislav II to the throne. This, then, drove Vlad's revenge.