Vlad the Impaler

Vlad III of Wallachia, commonly known as Vlad Țepeș and Vlad the Impaler, was a 15th century voivode of Wallachia (in modern-day Romania) who lived from 1428/31 to 1476/77 and reigned from 1448 to 1476 (except the years when he was imprisoned, 1463-75).
He was also known as Vlad Drăculea. Drăculea is a diminutive form of his father's nickname "Dracul" (from his membership of the Order of the Dragon - Dracul meaning "Dragon" and "Devil" in Romanian). This word became anglicized to "Dracula" and Bram Stoker used this form as the eponymous title for his 1897 Gothic novel and its main antagonist, Count Dracula. Although both the real Vlad and the fictional Dracula originated in Romania, it is to be noted that their specific ethnicities and default languages differed: Vlad the Impaler was ethnically Vlach and spoke Romanian during his time, while Dracula was depicted as being Szekely, a Hungarian-speaking ethnic group still in existence in the current day.
==Historical information==
Vlad III, commonly known as "Vlad the Impaler" or "Vlad Dracula", was voivode of Wallachia three times between 1448 and his death in 1476/77. He is often considered one of the most important rulers in Wallachian history and a national hero of Romania.
He was the second son of Vlad Dracul, who became the ruler of Wallachia in 1436. Vlad and his younger brother, Radu, were held as hostages in the Ottoman Empire in 1442 to secure their father's loyalty. Vlad's father and eldest brother, Mircea, were murdered after John Hunyadi, regent-governor of Hungary, invaded Wallachia in 1447. Hunyadi installed Vlad's second cousin, Vladislav II, as the new voivode. Hunyadi launched a military campaign against the Ottomans in the autumn of 1448, and Vladislav accompanied him. Vlad broke into Wallachia with Ottoman support in October, but Vladislav returned and Vlad sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire before the end of the year. Vlad went to Moldavia in 1449 or 1450, and later to Hungary.
Relations between Hungary and Vladislav later deteriorated, and in 1456, Vlad invaded Wallachia with Hungarian support. Vladislav died fighting against him. Vlad began a purge among the Wallachian boyars (nobility of Moldavia and Wallachia) to strengthen his position. He came into conflict with the Transylvanian Saxons, who supported his opponents. Vlad plundered the Saxon villages, taking the captured people to Wallachia where he had them impaled.
The Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed II, ordered Vlad to pay homage to him personally, but Vlad had the sultan's two envoys captured and impaled. In February 1462, he attacked Ottoman territory, massacring tens of thousands of Turks and Bulgarians. Mehmed launched a campaign against Wallachia to replace Vlad with Vlad's younger brother, Radu. Vlad attempted to capture the sultan at Târgoviște during the night of 16–17 June 1462. The sultan and the main Ottoman army left Wallachia, but more and more Wallachians deserted to Radu. Vlad went to Transylvania to seek assistance from Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, in late 1462, but Corvinus had him imprisoned.
Vlad was held in captivity in Visegrád from 1463 to 1475. During this period, anecdotes about his cruelty started to spread in Germany and Italy. He was released in the summer of 1475. He fought in Corvinus's army against the Ottomans in Bosnia in early 1476. Hungarian and Moldavian troops helped him to force Basarab Laiotă (who had dethroned Radu) to flee from Wallachia in November. Basarab returned with Ottoman support before the end of the year. Vlad was killed in battle before January 10, 1477.
Vlad's patronymic inspired the name of Bram Stoker's literary vampire, Count Dracula.
===Reputation of cruelty===
====First records====
Stories about Vlad's brutal acts began circulating during his lifetime. After his arrest, courtiers of Matthias Corvinus promoted their spread.
Meistersinger Michael Beheim wrote a lengthy poem about Vlad's deeds, allegedly based on his conversation with a Catholic monk who had managed to escape from Vlad's prison. According to one of Beheim's stories, Vlad had two monks impaled to assist them to go to Heaven, also ordering the impalement of their donkey because it began braying after its masters' death.
In 1475, Gabriele Rangoni, Bishop of Eger, recorded the rumor that while in prison, Vlad caught rats to cut them up into pieces or stuck them on small pieces of wood, because he was unable to "forget his wickedness". Antonio Bonfini also recorded anecdotes about Vlad in his Historia Pannonica around 1495. He described Vlad as "a man of unheard cruelty and justice".
====German stories====
Works containing the stories about Vlad's cruelty were published in Low German in the Holy Roman Empire before 1480. They provide a detailed narration of the conflicts between Vlad and the Transylvanian Saxons. The stories about Vlad's plundering raids in Transylvania contain accurate details (including the lists of the churches destroyed by Vlad and the dates of the raids). They describe Vlad as a "demented psychopath, a sadist, a gruesome murderer, a masochist", worse than Caligula and Nero. However, the stories emphasizing Vlad's cruelty are to be treated with caution, because his brutal acts were very probably exaggerated (or even invented) by the Saxons.
The invention of movable type printing contributed to the popularity of the stories about Vlad, making them one of the first "bestsellers" in Europe. To enhance sales, they were published in books with woodcuts on their title pages that depicted horrific scenes. For instance, the editions published in Nuremberg in 1499 and in Strasbourg in 1500, depict Vlad dining at a table surrounded by dead or dying people on poles.
====Slavic stories====
The nineteen anecdotes in the Skazanie o Drakule voievode ("The Tale about Voivode Dracula") are a mixture of fact and fiction. Almost half of the anecdotes emphasize Vlad's brutality, but they also underline that his cruelty enabled him to strengthen the central government in Wallachia. For instance, the Skazanie writes of a golden cup that nobody dared to steal at a fountain because Vlad "hated stealing so violently ... that anybody who caused any evil or robbery ... did not live long", thereby promoting public order.
===National hero===
Most Romanian artists have regarded Vlad as a just ruler and a realistic tyrant who punished criminals and executed unpatriotic boyars to strengthen the central government. Ion Budai-Deleanu wrote the first Romanian epic poem focusing on him. Deleanu's Țiganiada presented Vlad as a hero fighting against the boyars, Ottomans, strigoi (or vampires), and other evil spirits at the head of an army of gypsies and angels. The poet Dimitrie Bolintineanu emphasized Vlad's triumphs in his Battles of the Romanians in the middle of the 19th century. He regarded Vlad as a reformer whose acts of violence were necessary to prevent the despotism of the boyars. One of the greatest Romanian poets, Mihai Eminescu, dedicated a historic ballad, The Third Letter, to the valiant princes of Wallachia, including Vlad.
Since the middle of the 19th century, Romanian historians have treated Vlad as one of the greatest Romanian rulers, emphasizing his fight for the independence of the Romanian lands. Even Vlad's acts of cruelty were often represented as rational acts serving national interest. Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol was one of the first historians to emphasize that Vlad could only stop the internal fights of the boyar parties through his acts of terror. Constantin C. Giurescu remarked, "The tortures and executions which [Vlad] ordered were not out of caprice, but always had a reason, and very often a reason of state." Ioan Bogdan was one of the few Romanian historians who did not accept this heroic image. In his work published in 1896, Vlad Țepeș and the German and Russian Narratives, he concluded that the Romanians should be ashamed of Vlad, instead of presenting him as "a model of courage and patriotism". According to an opinion poll conducted in 1999, 4.1% of the participants chose Vlad the Impaler as one of "the most important historical personalities who have influenced the destiny of the Romanians for the better".
===Vampire mythology===
The stories about Vlad made him the best-known medieval ruler of the Romanian lands in Europe. However, Bram Stoker's Dracula, which was published in 1897, was the first book to make a connection between Dracula and vampirism. Stoker had his attention drawn to the blood-sucking vampires of Romanian folklore by Emily Gerard's article about Transylvanian superstitions (published in 1885). His limited knowledge about the medieval history of Wallachia came from William Wilkinson's book entitled Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia with Political Observations Relative to Them, published in 1820.
Stoker "apparently did not know much about" Vlad the Impaler, "certainly not enough for us to say that Vlad was the inspiration for" Count Dracula, according to Elizabeth Miller. Stoker's main source, Wilkinson, who accepted the reliability of the German stories, described Vlad as a wicked man. Actually, Stoker's working papers for his book contain no references to the historical figure, the name of the character being named in all drafts but the later ones is 'Count Wampyr'. Consequently, Stoker borrowed the name and "scraps of miscellaneous information" about the history of Wallachia when writing his book about Count Dracula.
==In the Castlevania series==
In Romanian, Vlad the Impaler is translated to Vlad Ţepeş, and some Castlevania games give Dracula's full name as Dracula Vlad Ţepeş (or variations thereupon), implying a link between the two. However, in Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, Dracula was identified as Mathias Cronqvist, a fictional 11th century crusader who lived 400 years before Vlad the Impaler. Because of this, the position (and existence) of Vlad in the Castlevania continuity is unclear. Presumably, in the 15th century, Mathias changed his name to Vlad Ţepeş and committed the atrocities which, in time, would become associated with the historical character. It is also possible that Mathias simply liked the surname of "Dracula", and adopted it at some point after Lisa was killed. Dracula originally meant "son of the dragon", but in time it would come to mean "son of the devil", a name Mathias would naturally be attracted to.
More interesting information is the existence of Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, a man who took Vlad as vassal during a few years because he was married to his cousin, Ilona Szilagyi. His name resembles Mathias Cronqvist, the man who would become Dracula in Lament of Innocence. It is said that Matthias Corvinus, after a request from Christian rulers, was obliged to imprison Vlad during 12 years. The fictional character Mathias Cronqvist's name would be created from Corvinus'. Another speculation would be the imprisonment itself; in Lament of Innocence, Joachim Armster is imprisoned by Walter Bernhard in his castle.
Poenari Castle was one of Vlad's most significant outposts in his lifetime. Located in Southern Romania in the Făgăraș Mountains, the castle itself was said to have been constructed entirely from materials from the Argeș River valley, and true to his brutal disposition, was constructed with enforced Boyar slave labor. Poenari was chosen for its strategic location: built high atop a precipice to gauge properly the lands of southern Romania all around, with a bottlenecked path in and out of its domain, making it hard to infiltrate, and large enough to accommodate a small army, making it difficult to siege. Long after his reign, Poenari Castle is reported to have hauntings and unusual phenomena within its grounds by visitors. Although not exactly the sprawling and grandiose mansionesque estates as found in fictional depictions of Dracula, Poenari's strategic layout and storied history as one of Vlad's more famous outposts brings to mind the Castlevania series' penchant of infiltration and headstrong confrontation within Castelvania's heavily defended and fortified walls, with Vlad Ţepeş himself as the main target.
==Gallery==
Vlad the Impaler - 03.jpg|Medieval illustration.
SOTN Power of Sire.gif|The Power of Sire's splash in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is a multi-colored version of Vlad the Impaler's portrait.
==Trivia==
*Vlad III's moniker, Drăculea, the basis for Dracula's name, as noted above, originally meant "Son of the Dragon". This was given a subtle reference with various incarnations of Dracula in the Castlevania series, in particular the Nintendo 64/Legacy of Darkness version, as well as the Lords of Shadow version, where they transform into dragon-like creatures.
*Although called "Count" Dracula in most interpretations based on him in entertainment media, Vlad III never used such honorific when he was operating in Transylvania. He was a boyar, one of the aristocrats of the region, and voivode, a high military rank.
*Vlad III was believed to have suffered from acute porphyria, which is a blood condition that might leave the person allergic to sunlight. It is possible that this condition could be responsible for the common vampire trait of being weak to sunlight.Porphyria: Notable cases at Wikipedia.
==References==
es:Vlad Țepeș
Category:Dracula
Category:Real Life Based Characters