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Many of us have heard the stories about Dracula, the most famous of all vampires. If you haven’t you must be completely sheltered or just ignorant. Anyway, there have been many rumors throughout time as to just who Dracula was and whether or not he actually existed. He’s been portrayed in many films as being an evil being who has fangs, drinks blood, and sleeps during the day because he can’t be exposed to sunlight. Well needless to say, the facts have been somewhat skewed and exaggerated, as Hollywood is known to do. But that could also come partly from the “legend” getting passed down throughout generations. People add or take away things to make it interesting. As crazy as the legend has become, surprisingly it still is mostly based on fact.

The closest person that resembles the Dracula that we have come to know has to be a fifteenth century prince of Wallachia in Romania called Vlad Tepes Dracula or Vlad the Impaler. . His nicknamed “The Impaler” came from his habit of slowly impaling criminals and drinking their blood with his dinner. Vlad was the son of Vlad Dracul and princess Cneajna of Moldavia. Vlad spend most of his life around death and destruction. At five years old, he would spend his free time watching the criminals being marched to their execution. At that same age, he became a skilled marksman with a bow and arrow and he rode horses bareback. A few years later, he was inducted into a secret military confraternity known as the Order of the Dragon to which his father also belonged and was given the nickname, Dracula, meaning son of Dracul.

Vlad’s father wasn’t content with his position in the brotherhood and he gathered supporters to seize the Wallachian throne from Alexandru I. In 1473 Vlad Dracul became Prince Vlad II. Dracul was a wily politician when he was on the throne and he made a lot of foolish mistakes. Eventually, John Hunyadi, the leader of the Hungarians, assassinated him because he had become angered by Dracul’s alliance with the Turks. After this, Vlad swore to get revenge. With Dracul off the throne, Hunyadi was able to take over and rule. Eventually, the tricky Vlad managed to convince Hunyadi that he was sorry for his pro-Turkish sentiment. Hunyadi believed him and let him come into his court and taught him anti-Turkish strategy.

That year, 1456, Halley’s Comet appeared in the sky and that meant trouble to the people of that time. A comet was looked upon as a warning of natural catastrophes, plagues, or threat of invasion. Well, that was looking at things positively. That year was the year that Vlad killed Vladislav (Hunyadi’s hand picked successor) and took over the throne. The murderous and bloody reign of Prince Vlad II Dracula had begun.

Vlad’s first act as ruler was to solidify his position of power. He wanted complete and utter allegiance from his subjects. He accomplished this task by a technique that the Turks had taught him at a young age - impalement. Whenever anyone stepped out of line, Vlad would impale them. He considered it a form of art and took meticulous detail in his impalings. He usually had a horse attached to each of the victim’s legs, and a sharpened stake of about six to eight feet long and six inches wide, was gradually forced up vertically through the body. The end of the stake was not too sharp or else the victim might die too rapidly from shock. The stake normally started at the butt and was worked out through the mouth, but sometimes it was just stabbed through the victim’s chest or stomach. Sometimes people were hung upside down, and babies were impaled on the stakes that killed their mothers. The stake was then turned upright and planted into the ground – the longer the stake, the more important the victim. Vlad displayed the impaled bodies on the outskirts of the city as a warning to foreigners to stay away.

Vlad also had a thirst for other forms of torture. He had a large pot with boards placed on top of it, so that people’s head would be put in the holes and trapped there. Then he would fill the pot with water and set a fire underneath it so that the victim’s flesh would burn. He cherished the screams of agony, as the victims were boiled alive.

Vlad did numerous things to instill fear in the hearts of people. Thieves, liars, adulterers and even children were impaled. A visiting merchant once left his money outside all night, thinking it would be safe because of Vlad’s draconian policies. But, to his dismay, some of the coins were stolen. He complained to Vlad, who promptly issued a proclamation that the money be returned or the city would be destroyed. That night, Vlad secretly had the missing money, plus one extra coin, returned to the merchant. The next morning the merchant found the money and counted it. He told Vlad the money had been returned, and mentioned the extra coin. Vlad replied that the thief had been caught and would be impaled, adding that the merchant himself would have been impaled if he hadn’t mentioned the extra coin.

Fear of Vlad’s wrath ensured that crime was kept to a minimum and, as a sign of his absolute power, he had a golden cup placed in a public square. Anyone was allowed to drink from it, but no one was allowed to move it. The cup remained in the square throughout his reign.

But there were two sides to Vlad’s personality. One was the well known torturer and inquisitor, who believed in terror as a way of commanding respect; the other was a deeply religious man who had turned to piety to ease his conscience. He took the precaution of surrounding himself with priests, abbots, bishops, and confessors. He meditated and was intent on belonging to a church, receiving the sacraments, being buried as a Christian and being identified with a religion. Vlad felt that good works, along with giving to charity and an appropriate ritual at the moment of death, would contribute to sin being erased completely.

Throughout the years, Vlad lost and reclaimed the throne a few times with his final reign coming in 1475. By this time Vlad had numerous enemies, and when his allies left, he was extremely vulnerable. In 1476, near the monastery of Snagov in Vlasia forest near Bucharest, Vlad and his force were killing Turks. Because of his success during the battle, he climbed a hillside to watch his men killing. Away from the rest of his army, Vlad was wounded by a lance thrown by an assassin. He was able to put up a valiant fight, killing five of his assassins, but in the end sheer numbers prevailed and Vlad was slain. His severed head was sent to Constantinople, where it was impaled on a large stake for the population to see that the master Impaler had been impaled.

So Vlad the Impaler is the closest thing that there is to a “real” Dracula. He didn’t live forever, but it must have seemed like it to the people that were unfortunate enough to bear witness to his horror. There isn’t any information about whether or not Vlad had fangs that he used to bite people with. But, with his inclination for inventing new forms of torture, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he had invented them. The not being able to stay out in the sunlight and the garlic things seem kind of out of the ordinary if we are to believe that this fifteenth century prince is the predecessor to the Dracula phenomenon. Maybe those were things that people added on as the legend was passed down to make the story more interesting. Or maybe, we just haven’t uncovered Vlad’s secret underground coffin…

-Matt

(With excerpts from: “The Most Evil Men and Women in History” by Miranda Twiss)