Badass Study Suggests Vlad the Impaler Cried Actual Tears of Blood

• New research shows that Vlad the Impaler may have cried tears of blood.
• This condition, known as hemolacria, adds another bloody footnote to the legend of the famously brutal monarch.
• Vlad the Impaler is believed by many to be the inspiration for the character of Count Dracula.

Count Dracula is without question the most famous vampire character of all time. Considering his dark and bloody reputation, it’s not a surprise that when people were searching for the inspiration for the character, many landed on a source who was just about as bloody and brutal as it is possible to be—Vlad the Impaler.

Vlad Drăculea, or Vlad the Impaler, was a famously ruthless and brutal 15^th century monarch who was known for his unrelenting defense of Wallachia, which was located right next to Transylvania. He was especially well known for a favored method of execution: impaling. It’s estimated that he was responsible for something like 80,000 deaths, of which many were impaling. History didn’t give him his moniker for nothing.

But even the most bloodthirsty or rulers had to, well, rule. And it’s from some of the more mundane aspects of this ruling that researchers were able to learn some surprising new things about the physical wellbeing of an alleged vampire-muse in his prime.

An international team of researchers recently published a study detailing their analysis of three letters known to have been penned by Vlad the Impaler. While not particularly riveting on their own—they were mostly about run-of-the-mill, bureaucratic things like tax collection—they held within them a wealth of data about the famed ruler.

If you touch a piece of glass, you’ll often see a fingerprint left behind. Well, the same goes for if you touch a piece of paper, even if you can’t usually see the print. As Vlad the Impaler was writing these letters, his hand was resting on the paper. And researchers were finally able to analyze that “print” without damaging the historical document on which they were preserved.

To do this, the team applied a coat of a substance called ethylene-vinyl acetate. They then removed the substance and tested it using mass spectrometry. In that analysis, the researchers were able to identify about 100 human peptides that had been left behind on the paper. Human proteins were also discovered.

The team could then use these peptides and proteins to see what diseases or conditions Vlad the Impaler would have lived with. And they found a surprising number. According to the paper, the medieval ruler likely dealt with some kind of inflammatory disorder of either the respiratory tract, the skin, or both. And strangely appropriately, given the legends surrounding the historical figure, he also may have had hemolacria—a condition that allows blood to mix with the fluid in ones tear ducts, and those tear ducts to thus produce tears of blood.

While the researchers acknowledge that it is highly unlikely that Vlad the Impaler was the only person to have touched these documents, and thereby left peptides and proteins behind, they remain confident that as the writer, his biological mark would have been the most prominent—and as such, the conditions uncovered can reliably be assigned to him.

Despite all we knew about the bloody nature of the life of Vlad the Impaler, it seems we still had one more secret to uncover.

Associate News Editor

Jackie is a writer and editor from Pennsylvania. She’s especially fond of writing about space and physics, and loves sharing the weird wonders of the universe with anyone who wants to listen. She is supervised in her home office by her two cats.