Decoding History: Vlad Dracula’s Letters and Their Scientific Secrets

There are moments in history when the past reveals itself willingly to those who study it with patience and passion. One such arrived recently, when historical chemist researchers bent over three 500-year-old letters written by voivode Vlad III of Wallachia, the man the world remembers as Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad Drăculea, the Son of the Dragon.

Since the beginning of this millennium scientists analyzed many items belonging to the World Cultural Heritage: documents, paintings, even fossils. By studying ancient biomolecules scientists were able to find new information regarding our ancestors’ diet, their diseases, and our evolutionary history in general.

But it is strange, almost unnerving, to imagine a prince’s sweat and breath surviving half a millennium. Stranger still to think that modern hands can coax these remnants into testimony.

I imagine storms rolling across the Carpathians; dogs howling, lightning forking over old forests as the team of scientists bent over Vlad Dracula’s letters. Transylvania was being itself, an ancient land where legend and weather often conspire. While in their lab, however, another kind of weather unfolded: controlled, governed by precision and light.

Using high-resolution MS (mass spectrometry) and a minimally invasive sampling technique known as EVA (ethylene-vinyl acetate), scientists examined traces preserved on the surface of parchment that had survived half a millennium of handling, storage, and silence.

I explain the process at the end of this blog post.

What they sought was never spectacle or legend, but something far stranger: biochemical residues that time had failed to erase.

What they found reached beyond individual illness. It opened a window, however narrow, onto the environmental and biological conditions of 15th-century Wallachia: a borderland where soldiers, traders, migrants, and envoys moved through the same corridors, carrying not only goods and ideas, but also the invisible passage of disease.

The Letters from 1457 and 1475

The three letters analyzed, penned on rag paper, were written in Latin and signed by Vlad Dracula and addressed to the rulers of the city of Sibiu (then Hermannstadt) by a man describing himself as “prince of Transalpine regions,” signing Vlad Dracula.

Written in Bălcaciu and Braşov, Transylvania, the two letter dated 1475 have been kept for their entire 500 years’ history in the archives of the city of Sibiu, founded in 1465 and operating ever since.

These two letters are in excellent condition and have not been restored. One of them even has Vlad Dracula’s personal signature.

On the front side is the text of the letter, on the reverse side to whom this letter was intended. We can see Vlad Dracula’s original signature, calligraphy, as well as the way he folded the letter and the seal used.

Letter 1, dated August 4, 1475, ddressed to the Mayor of Sibiu, Master Thomas Altemberger (archive catalog number is II 365).

This letter addressed to says:

“We, Vladislav Dracul, voivode of the Transalpine regions, publicly notify and recognize/by the present witnesses, who are all responsible, that the illustrious master Thomas/Altemberger, master of the people of the town of Sibiu, for himself and the other people of/said town and of the town of Braşov, in order to pay the twentieth-part [tax] as by written/command of our gracious lord and king, effectively gave and allotted to us two hundred/Hungarian florins. About those two hundred florins, we free the said master and the consuls of the/aforementioned towns, making them unencumbered and entirely released by the power and/testimony of this document. Written in Bălcaciu, in the day of St. Coloman martyr, in the year of the lord/1475.”

Though often described as a letter announcing Vlad’s intention to settle in Sibiu, the 1475 document examined in Transylvania tells a more grounded story. Written in Latin and signed by Vlad himself, it is in fact a formal receipt acknowledging the payment of 200 Hungarian florins from the towns of Sibiu and Brașov—funds delivered at the order of King Matthias Corvinus. Dated to the feast of St. Coloman and penned at Bălcaciu, the parchment reveals a prince engaged in the practical machinery of power: taxation, political obligation, and the delicate financial ties that bound Wallachian leaders to their Hungarian overlords. Even this bureaucratic fragment, touched by Vlad’s own hand, becomes a rare, tangible thread connecting the legendary figure to the rhythms of his real 15th-century world.

The second letter dated 1475 shows Vlad Dracula’s personal signature (archive catalog number is III 32 N 484):

The third letter was written in 1457 and was carefully restored in Bucharest during the 20th century (archive catalog number: V 1658).

In it, Vlad announced his intention to take up residence in their town—a political and military gesture typical of his turbulent reign. The ink, the pressure of the quill, the faint traces of handling: all of it carried the residue of a life lived amid war, betrayal, shifting alliances, and relentless danger.

For centuries, the man has been known for a single image: a prince who drove stakes into the earth with appalling precision, lifting conquered bodies into the sky as grim warnings. The German pamphlets of the 15th century painted him a monster; Romanian folklore, a protector as harsh as the times that forged him. Bram Stoker borrowed the name and the shadow, shaping a vampire whose immortality devoured the memory of the mortal man.

But the prince himself remains elusive. Until now.

Hunting a Portrait Written in Molecules

The team who handled the letter are historical chemists. Their craft is unusual: they seek “historical biomolecules,” fragments of proteins and metabolites left behind by sweat, fingerprints, even breath. These remnants survive where DNA often fails. They endure war, fire, damp, and centuries folded in archives.

In ordinary hands, a letter is a dead artifact. In theirs, it becomes a witness.

The greatest challenge was separating what truly belonged to Vlad’s time from everything added later by centuries of handling. To do this, researchers studied the natural chemical aging of proteins. Ancient proteins decay in distinctive ways and this allows scientists to distinguish original traces from modern contamination.

From Vlad’s letters they reconstructed a molecular portrait: illnesses, diet, even air particles that clung to his armor and clothing as he wrote. And more.

Was Vlad weakened by battle when he wrote them? Hardened by scarcity? Had he recently breathed the smoke of campfires, the damp of the Carpathian foothills, the dust of long marches?

What they found was remarkable.

On the image above: when Vlad Dracula’s letters were examined under ultraviolet light, different areas glowed in colours such as green, yellow, and red (right image above). Human proteins left behind through touch, sweat, skin oils, tears, or handling contain amino acids that naturally react to UV light by fluorescing. These colours helped scientists identify places where tiny traces of biological material were still present on the parchment. By mapping these glowing areas (the brown paper strips on the left image above), researchers could locate the parts of the documents most likely to preserve microscopic residues dating back centuries.

The letters also carried traces connected to breathing, blood, and tears, suggesting that the voivode may have suffered from chronic irritation or illness affecting his lungs, skin, or eyes.

Science cannot resurrect a prince. But it can catch his outline as he moves across the centuries, like a rider glimpsed through fog.

What emerges from these fragile letters is not the immortal monster of Gothic fiction, but the trace of a living man.

The proteins preserved upon all three letters suggest chronic inflammation of the skin or lungs.

Maybe due to the better quality of preservation, the letters from 1475 included molecules associated with tears and the eyes, perhaps even the rare condition known as hemolacria — tears mingled with blood — a detail so haunting it seems almost too symbolic to belong to history rather than legend.Le Chiffre is a fictional character and the main antagonist of Ian Fleming’s 1953 James Bond novel, Casino Royale

If you remember Mads Mikkelsen portraying the character of Le Chiffre in the James Bond production of Casino Royale you know what it looks like.

Yet the investigation reached far beyond Vlad himself.

The letters also preserved fragments from the wider world around him: bacteria, fungi, insects, plants, even traces connected to diseases that haunted medieval Europe.

Researchers identified evidence of microbes linked to the human gut, fungi that thrive on rotting fruit, and proteins connected to grains and plants common in everyday life. For example tiny molecular remnants from fruit flies hinted that overripe fruit may once have been stored near the documents. They also found traces associated with Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the plague that devastated Europe a century earlier.

Whether carried through people, objects, or the surrounding environment, these microscopic remnants remind that Vlad Dracula, too, lived in a world shadowed by epidemic disease.

Of course, the centuries leave their own fingerprints. Many hands may have touched these documents after Vlad’s own. Monks, scribes, archivists, collectors. Yet beneath those layers, researchers believe the strongest biological traces still belong to the prince who sealed the letters himself.

And perhaps that is what makes the discovery so compelling. Not because science has proven the myths true, but because it has narrowed the distance between legend and flesh. Beneath the stories of impalement, war, and fear stood a mortal man who breathed the same cold air, suffered the same fevers, and left behind, upon parchment and ink, the faint molecular echo of a life history nearly forgot.

The Man Behind the Myth

These traces matter because Vlad Dracula is trapped in a story much larger than himself. Bram Stoker’s immortal count eclipsed the mortal voivode, burying him beneath capes, fangs, and moonlit castles. Yet the historical Vlad walked through a world far bloodier than fiction, a world where survival demanded a ruthlessness modern readers can barely fathom.

He was a hostage in his youth, a warrior in adulthood, a ruler who fought for Wallachia at a crossroads where empires collided. To understand him, one must understand his century: a Europe trembling under the Ottoman advance; a land fractured by noble rivalries, and a frontier where mercy was a luxury that often ended in a blade.

The 15th-century Wallachia he ruled was a frontier region positioned between Europe and the Ottoman world. Soldiers, merchants, diplomats, slaves, and travellers moved constantly through this crossroads, carrying goods, languages, beliefs — and inevitably disease. Europe at the time was still recovering from periods of plague, famine, and harsh climate, and the molecular evidence preserved on the documents reflects a world shaped by movement, hardship, and close human contact.

If science can reveal hints of his health, environment, and lived experience, it will not soften his legend. It may just as well bring it into focus by revealing a life preserved in the smallest, most fragile grains of evidence, still waiting for us to listen.

Vlad Dracula has always lived at the intersection of myth and material truth. He has always been a figure who refuses to remain in the ground.

Today, as the storm clouds gather again over Transylvania, just as they did the night he was violently killed, the past stirs.

A letter written 500 years ago revealed new meanings.
Not of vampires.
But of a man.

If you’re interested in the process itself, below I tried to explain it:

How the telling was done

Simply put what the scientists did was lift proteins from the three letters, analyze them, eliminate the modern ones, keep only the medieval data, run it through a machine that reads molecules and thus uncover physical facts about Vlad Dracula the Impaler and his time.

During the last decade, different minimally invasive methods have been developed to harvest and investigate ancient samples.

Because the letters are large and fragile, scientists first needed to identify the areas most likely to contain preserved biological material before taking samples. To do this, they used ultraviolet light to detect the natural fluorescence produced by certain amino acids commonly found in proteins. Under UV illumination, areas containing higher concentrations of these proteins glowed more strongly.

The researchers used a UV LED light together with a smartphone camera fitted with a special optical filter that could capture the fluorescent signals. Software then converted the fluorescence levels into colour-coded maps displayed on the screen. Green indicated lower concentrations of proteins, while yellow and red marked areas with increasingly stronger signals. This allowed the team to quickly locate the parts of Vlad Dracula’s letters most likely to preserve microscopic biological traces for further analysis.

The EVA (ethylene-vinyl acetate)process basically uses a plastic film specially coated that, when applied to any type of surface, is able to extract proteins and small molecules by gently lifting the microscopic material. Instead of chipping off pieces of an artifact, museum exhibits or historical manuscripts are gently swabbed with humidified EVA films to extract organic molecules.

One of the greatest challenges in studying ancient biological traces is separating the past from everything that came after it.

Over centuries, historical documents pass through countless hands: archivists, collectors, conservators, researchers. Each contact leaves behind modern proteins that can contaminate the original material. Even the laboratory itself poses a risk. To distinguish authentic ancient molecules from later contamination, scientists look for the subtle marks time leaves on proteins as they slowly decay.

One of the clearest indicators is a chemical process called deamidation, in which amino acids gradually alter over centuries, almost like the molecular equivalent of aging skin. Ancient proteins also carry distinctive patterns of degradation and chemical change that modern contaminants lack. By studying these microscopic scars of time, researchers can begin to tell which traces belonged to the medieval world and which arrived long after the ink had dried.

MS (mass spectrometry) is a scientific technique used to identify tiny particles — such as proteins, chemicals, or biological traces — by measuring their mass and molecular structure.

The results were analyzed against various databases: human (with 20,386 entries, release July 2022), bacteria (340,707 entries, release January 2023), fungi, viruses, insects, plants. as well as against proteins that frequently contaminate biological samples .

The EVA approach together with MS-based methods has been applied with promising results to documents, clothing items, and ancient tissue remains.

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Read the complete article: Count Dracula Resurrected: Proteomic Analysis of Vlad III the Impaler’s Documents by EVA Technology and Mass Spectrometry

Maria Gaetana Giovanna Pittalà, Antonella Di Francesco, Annamaria Cucina, Rosaria Saletti, Gleb Zilberstein, Svetlana Zilberstein, Tudor Arhire, Pier Giorgio Righetti, and Vincenzo Cunsolo Analytical Chemistry

202395 (34), 12732-12744 DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.3c01461

The Supporting Information is available free of charge at https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.analchem.3c01461.

Similar methods of historical investigation were conducted on Alessandro Volta’s 18th century manuscripts and 30,000 years old mammoth DNA from trunks.