As the Ottoman Turks pressed into Europe, a 15th century Wallacia (Romania) dynasty stood against the Islamic invasion while European princes vacillated and Balkan states capitulated. Vlad III's bloodthirsty psychopathic reign is historic fact stranger than Bram Stoker's 1890 fiction.
The Name "Dracula"
The name "Dracula" is based on the prestigious fraternity of knights "the Dragons" to which Vlad II, Tepes' father, belonged. The order was created by King Sigismund of Hungary (later the Holy Roman Emperor) to champion Christianity against Islam. "Dracul" meant "dragon."
Because Vlad II's coins sported the dragon insignia his nobles called him "Vlad Dracul" "Vlad the Dragon" an epithet similar to the earlier Crusader "Richard the Lionheart." After Vlad II's death, Vlad III was called “Dracul-a” “son of the dragon” which also meant “son of the devil” a sobriquet popularized by his political opponents.
Vlad the Impaler
Vlad III (born 1431 AD) was a cruel and sadistic ruler. His favored form of capital punishment was slow death by impaling, leading to his own sobriquet "Vlad the Impaler." It was a torture he learned while a political hostage (1444-1448) in the court of the Ottoman sultan, but was developed to extremes.
Victims were tied to horses and then pulled onto the stake, then raised up to an agonizing death.
Dracula's Extremes
He devised different ways of impaling, including the use of blunt stakes to prolong agonies. Nails were driven into victims and they were burned, boiled in oil, mutilated and blinded.
On April 2, 1459, Vlad is said to have impaled 20,000 townspeople.
As the Ottomans pressed into southern Wallacia, the Impaler had thousands impaled on stakes to create a literal forest of groaning victims. The Turks were so affected by the boldness and savagery of this act that they turned back and 15th century Europe was spared.
Was Dracula a Psychopath?
Modern researchers have suggested Vlad was a psychopathic personality, traumatized during his exile in Turkey and by the death of his close brother, who was buried alive, as well as the death of his father). His fascination with impaling has been explained as a form of twisted phallic morbidity based on sexual impotence.
Political intrigues and the seesawing vulnerability of Tepes' throne (he ruled 1448, 1456-62, 1476) contributed to deep paranoia and a ruthless approach bordering on savagery. On one occasion foreign language students studying were imprisoned in a building as spies and later burnt alive.
The occasion of Vlad nailing the turbans of Turkish ambassadors to their heads for refusing to take them off in his presence suggests cultural ignorance and xenophobia. A rigid and unbalanced morality indicates a simple mind built on a childlike perception of the world.
Dracula's Sadism
His documented sadism reveals a lack of empathy for victims who crossed all social barriers (men, women, children, the aged, priests, ambassadors, the nobility, and the poor - to remove poverty from Wallacia) as well as a fascination for death and pain. He insisted on watching tortures and even dined among clusters of impaled victims
He had a private collection of images of human mutations and the grotesque that suggests a disturbed mind. As his tyranny grew, Vlad built a series of mountain fortresses, the most famous of which is Bram Castle, a focus for Dracula tourism today.
Sources:
Florescu, R. D. Dracula: A Biography of Vlad the Impaler, Hawthorn Books, New York, 1973.
Summers, M. The Vampire in Europe, Senate Books, 1996.
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