Okay so I read that legend has it, Vlad III impaled a bunch of dudes on some stakes and the Ottomans got so scared at the sight that they ran away.
But what I didn’t read was, how did his army get all those stakes to begin with? I mean cutting down the trees would have been a lot of effort and even if they had them on hand, wouldn’t it be more economical to use them elsewhere?
I suspect he wasn’t particularly worried about conservation of natural resources back then. Probably safe to say no one else was, either
Did he reuse some of them? Possibly, but go cut down a bunch of trees to make a bunch of stakes, or I’ll kill you is a pretty powerful motivator.
Also the question of how many he had to impale to get his point across. Are we talking thousands upon thousands everywhere he went, or just a few dozen here and there?
It is said by historians that had Vlad been alive today he wouldn’t have been able to repeat the feat since all the stakes would have been stuck on container ships waiting at the port of Los Angeles.