Dracula's main reign stretched from 1456 to 1462. His capital was the city of Tirgoviste while his castle was raised some distance away in the mountains near the Arges River.

On Easter Sunday of 1459, Vlad committed his first major act of revenge by arresting the boyar families whom he held responsible for the death of his father and brother. He impaled the older ones outside the city walls and forced the rest to build what is now identified as Castle Dracula. They worked a long time; when their clothes fell off, they worked naked. Most of them died, of course. He then redistributed their estates and positions to those who were loyal to only him. Vlad also began fighting the churches, both Orthodox and Roman Catholic, whom he saw as having foreign influence on Romania.

He also took actions against foreign merchants whom he saw as preventing the development of the Romanian industry. Vlad would use his position to enforce a strict moral code upon his people, and those who offended this code would be killed. He not only would impale people in various ways, but would often execute his victims in a manner that was in some way related to the crime for which they were being punished. In his six year reign, he is said to have had around 40,000 victims.

It was also during this time that he launched his own campaign against the Turks. This campaign was relatively successful at first. His skill as a warrior and his well-known cruelty made him a much feared enemy. However, he received little support from his titular overlord, Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary (the son of John Hunyadi) and Wallachia's resources were too limited to achieve any lasting success against the conquerors of Constantinople. In 1462 Dracula attacked the Turks to drive them out of the Danube River valley.

Sultan Mehmed II retaliated by invading Walachia with an army three times larger than Dracula's. He had a brief victory but was soon forced to retreat back to retreat to his capital, Tirgoviste. He burned his own villages and poisoned wells on the way so that the Turkish army wouldn't have any food or water. When the sultan reached Tirgoviste, he saw a terrifying scene, remembered in history as "the Forest of the Impaled." There, outside the city, were 20,000 Turkish prisoners, all impaled. The sultan's officers were too scared to go on and gave up. Then the Turks provided Dracula's little brother Radu with an army in hopes that he could seize Dracula's throne.

Radu's army pursued Dracula to his fortress at Poenari. According to the legend, the Turks seized the castle, but Dracula managed to escape through a secret tunnel while his unfortunate first wife committed suicide by leaping from the towers of Dracula's castle into the waters of the Arges .