Vlad the Impaler, the Real Dracula

Dracula is one of the most popular characters of Halloween. The vampire is fiction. The man behind him was real, and far more brutal than any novel. His name was Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, and history remembers him as the Impaler.

The Son of the Dragon

Vlad was born in 1431 in Transylvania, son of Vlad II, called Dracul, meaning the Dragon, for his membership in the Order of the Dragon, a chivalric order sworn to defend Christianity against the Ottoman Empire. The son was called Dracula, meaning son of Dracul. That name would become legend.

The Impaler

Vlad ruled Wallachia, a small principality between Transylvania and the Ottoman Empire, in three reigns between 1448 and 1476. He fought to keep Wallachia independent as Ottoman armies pressed north. His method was terror. He executed enemies by driving a sharpened stake through their bodies and leaving them on display. In 1462, as Sultan Mehmed II marched on Wallachia with a far larger army, Vlad burned his own villages, poisoned wells, and staged a night attack on the Ottoman camp. When Mehmed reached the capital Targoviste, he found a forest of some 20,000 impaled men, women, and children outside the walls. Mehmed turned back. Vlad had won by horror.

But terror could not hold a throne. In 1462 Vlad was arrested by Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, and imprisoned for more than a decade. He returned to Wallachia briefly in 1476, then was killed in battle near the end of that year. Legend says his head was sent to Constantinople and his body buried at Snagov Monastery, on an island in a lake north of Bucharest.

The Vampire

More than 400 years later, Irish writer Bram Stoker was looking for a villain. In 1897 he published Dracula, borrowing Vlad's name and his reputation for cruelty for a Transylvanian count who drinks blood. Stoker never visited Romania. He invented the vampire, the castle, and the plot. What he took from Vlad was the name and the aura of a ruler who inspired fear.

Bran Castle

That is where Bran Castle enters. Vlad never lived at Bran. The fortress on its crag above the village was built to guard the pass between Transylvania and Wallachia, and later became Queen Marie of Romania's summer home. In the 1900s Romania began marketing Bran as Dracula's Castle and the name stuck. Today the castle leans into the legend each Halloween, but the real story is older and darker. Dracula is fiction. Vlad was real. Bran is where the fiction found a home.

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