DRACULA'S REAL LIFE




Yes, there was a real Dracula, and he was a true prince of darkness. He was Prince Vlad III Dracula,
also known as Vlad Tepes, meaning "Vlad the Impaler." The Turks called him Kaziglu Bey, or "the
Impaler Prince." He was the prince of Walachia, but, as legend suggests, he was born in Transylvania,
which at that time was ruled by Hungary.

Walachia was founded in 1290 by a Transylvanian named Radu Negru, or Rudolph the Black. It was dominated by
Hungary until 1330, when it became independent. The first ruler of the new country was Prince Basarab the Great
(1310-1352), an ancestor of Dracula. Dracula's grandfather, Prince Mircea the Old, reigned from 1386 to 1418. He
participated in one too many losing battles against the Turks and was forced to pay tribute to them. He and his
descendants continued to rule Walachia, but as vassals of the Ottoman empire.

The throne of Walachia was not necessarily passed from father to son. The prince, or voivode, was elected by the
country's boyars, or land-owning nobles. This caused fighting among family members, assassinations, and other
unpleasantness. Eventually the House of Basarab was split into two factions - Mircea's descendants, and the
descendants of another prince named Dan. Dan's descendants were called the Danesti.

Mircea had an illegitimate son, Vlad, born around 1390, who was educated in Hungary and Germany. Vlad served
as a page for King Sigismund of Hungary, who became the Holy Roman Emperor in 1410. Sigismund founded a
secret fraternal order of knights called the Order of the Dragon to uphold Christianity and defend the empire
against Turkey. Because of his bravery fighting Turks, Vlad was admitted to the Order, probably in 1431. The
boyars started to call him Dracul, meaning "dragon." Vlad's second son would be known as Dracula, or "son of the
dragon." Dracul also meant "devil." So Dracula's enemies, especially German Saxons, called him "son of the
devil."

Interesting fact: members of the Order of the Dragon had a special costume to wear on Sundays. It was a red
garment with a black cape over it . . . that's why the fictional Dracula wears a cape!

Eventually Sigismund made Vlad the military governor of Transylvania, a post he held from 1431 to 1435. During
that time he lived in the town of Sighisoara or Schassburg. You can still visit the citadel there and even the house
where Vlad's son Dracula was born. Today there's a restaurant on the second floor. There's also a mural in the
house that may depict Vlad Dracul.

                                      YOUNG DRACULA

         Dracula was born in November or December of 1431. His given name was Vlad. He had an older brother,
         Mircea, and a younger brother, Radu the Handsome. Their mother may have been a Moldavian princess
         or a Tranyslvanian noble. It is said that she educated Dracula in his early years. Later he was trained for
         knighthood by an old boyar who had fought the Turks.

Dracula's father was not content to remain a mere governor forever. During his years in Transyvlania, he gathered
supporters for his plan to seize Walachia's throne from its current occupant, a Danesti prince named Alexandru I.
In late 1436 or early 1437 Vlad Dracul killed Alexandru and became Prince Vlad II.

Vlad was a vassal of Hungary and also had to pay tribute to Hungary's enemy, Turkey. In 1442 Turkey invaded
Transylvania. Vlad tried to stay neutral, but Hungary's rulers blamed him and drove him and his family out of
Walachia. A Hungarian general, Janos Hunyadi (who may have been the illegitimate son of Emperor Sigismund)
made a Danesti named Basarab II the prince of Walachia.

The following year Vlad regained the throne with the help of the sultan of Turkey. In 1444 he sent his two younger
sons to Turkey to prove his loyalty. Dracula was about 13. He spent the next four years in Adrianople, Turkey as a
hostage.

In 1444 Hungary went to war with Turkey and demanded that Vlad join the crusade. As a member of the Order of
the Dragon, Vlad was sworn to obey this summons. But he didn't want to anger the Turks, so he sent his eldest son,
Mircea, in his place. The Christian army was demolished at the Battle of Varna, and Vlad and Mircea blamed
Janos Hunyadi.

In 1447 Vlad and Mircea were murdered. Mircea was killed by the boyars and merchants of the Walachian city
Tirgoviste. There are different stories about how he died - he may have been tortured and burned, or buried alive.
Apparently his father died at the same time. Some say that the assassinations were organized by Hunyadi.

Since Vlad and Mircea were dead, and Dracula and Radu were still in Turkey, Hunyadi was able to put a member
of the Danesti clan, Vladislav II, on the Walachian throne. The Turks didn't like having a Hungarian puppet in
charge of Walachia, so in 1448 they freed Dracula and gave him an army. He was seventeen years old.

It seems that Dracula's little brother Radu chose to remain in Turkey. He had grown up there, and apparently
remained loyal to the sultan.

                                    DRACULA'S REIGN

         With the help of his Turkish army, Dracula seized the Walachian throne. However, he only ruled for two
         months before Hunyadi forced him into exile in Moldavia. Again Vladislav II became Walachia's prince.

         Three years later Prince Bogdan of Moldavia was assassinated and Dracula fled the country. By now
Vladislav II had become a supporter of Turkey, and Hunyadi was sorry he had put him on the throne. Everyone
switched sides - Dracula became Hunyadi's vassal, and Hunyadi now supported Dracula's attempt to regain his
throne. In 1456 Hunyadi invaded Turkish Serbia while Dracula invaded Walachia. Hunyadi was killed, but Dracula
killed Vladislav II and took back his throne.

He established his capital at Tirgoviste - you can still see the ruins of his palace there. And nearby a statue of Vlad
Tepes still stands. He is considered an important figure in Romanian history because he unified Walachia and
resisted the influence of foreigners.

But it's Dracula's cruelty that most non-Romanians remember. After becoming prince, Dracula supposedly invited
many beggars and other old, sick and poor people to a banquest at his castle. When his guests had finished eating
their meal and drinking a toast to him, Dracula asked them, "Would you like to be without cares, lacking nothing in
this world?"

Yes, they said enthusiastically.

So Dracula had the castle boarded up and set it on fire. Nobody made it out alive - and that was the end of their
problems, as he had promised. "I did this so that no one will be poor in my realm," he said.

According to another story, he invited 500 boyars to a banquet and asked them how many princes had ruled in their
lifetimes. They said they had lived through many reigns. Shouting that this was their fault because of their plotting,
Dracula had them all arrested on the spot. The older ones were impaled; the others were marched 50 miles to
Walachia's capital, Poenari, where they were forced to build a mountaintop fortress. They worked a long time;
when their clothes fell off, they worked naked. Most of them died, of course. And of course Dracula seized the
boyars' property and passed it out to his supporters. In that way he created a new nobility, loyal to him.

(The ruins of the Poenari fortress can still be seen. You have to climb nearly 1,500 steps and cross a little bridge to
reach it. It's now called Castle Dracula, but several places are called that. Another "Castle Dracula" is Bran
Castle, near the town of Brasov. Although Dracula may have stayed there occasionally, it certainly wasn't his
home.)

Dracula liked to set up a banquet table and dine while he watched people die. His favorite form of execution was
impalement. It was slow; people could take days to die. He liked to impale many people at once, arranging the
stakes in fancy designs. Nothing was too brutal for Dracula - he enjoyed having people skinned, boiled alive, etc.
He prided himself on making the punishment (supposedly) fit the crime.

By 1462, when he was deposed, he had killed between 40,000 and 100,000 people, possibly more. He always
thought up some excuse for these executions. He killed merchants who cheated their customers. He killed women
who had affairs. Supposedly he had one woman impaled because her husband's shirt was too short. He didn't mind
impaling children, either. Afterwards he would display the corpses in public so everyone would learn a lesson. It's
said that there were over 20,000 bodies hanging outside his capital city. Of course, the stories about Dracula's
cruelty might have been exaggerated by his enemies.

Despite all this, Dracula's subjects respected him for fighting the Turks and being a strong ruler. He's remembered
today as a patriotic hero who stood up to Turkey and Hungary. He was the last Walachian prince to remain
independent from the Ottoman Empire. He was so scornful of other nations that when two foreign ambassadors
refused to doff their hats to him, he had the hats nailed to their heads. He was opposed to the Orthodox and Roman
Catholic churches because he thought foreigners, operating through the churches, had too much power in Walachia.
He tried to prevent foreign merchants from taking business away from his citizens. If merchants disobeyed his
trade laws, they were, of course, impaled.

Dracula created a very severe moral code for the citizens of Walachia. You can guess what happened to anyone
who broke the code. Thieves were impaled, even liars were impaled. Naturally there wasn't a lot of crime in
Walachia during his reign.

To prove how well his laws worked, Dracula had a gold cup placed in a public square. Anyone who wanted to could
drink from the cup, but no one was allowed to take it out of the square. No one did.

A visiting merchant once left his money outside all night, thinking that it would be safe because of Dracula's strict
policies. To his surprise, some of his coins were stolen. He complained to Dracula, who promptly issued a
proclamation that the money must be returned or the city would be destroyed. That night Dracula secretly had the
missing money, plus one extra coin, returned to the merchant. The next morning the merchant counted the money
and found it had been returned. He told Dracula about this, and mentioned the extra coin. Dracula replied that the
thief had been caught and would be impaled. And if the merchant hadn't mentioned the extra coin, he would have
been impaled, too.

                                    DRACULA OVERTHROWN

         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. Dracula was forced 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 - Dracula had won again.

Although the sultan retreated, Dracula's little brother Radu did not. The Turks had provided him with an army in
hopes that he could seize Dracula's throne. Many of Dracula's boyars abandoned him to join Radu. Radu's army
pursued Dracula to his fortress at Poenari. Dracula's wife was so frightened that she threw herself from the upper
battlements. The Turks seized the castle, but Dracula managed to escape through a secret tunnel. There were still
some peasants around he hadn't impaled, and they helped him flee from Walachia.

He went to the new king of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus, for help. Instead the king had him imprisoned in a tower.
Dracula remained in Hungary for twelve years while Radu ruled Walachia as a puppet for the Turks. After the first
four years he was allowed to move into a house. He ingratiated himself with the Hungarian royal family, and even
married one of its members (possibly the king's sister). He became a Catholic at this time, which would have
pleased the Catholic Hungarians.

But he was still the same old Dracula. He impaled rats and birds for fun. Once a thief broke into his house and a
Hungarian captain followed him to arrest him. Dracula didn't kill the thief - he killed the officer. Why? Because the
officer was a gentleman, and should have known not to enter a house uninvited.

                                 THE DEATH OF DRACULA

          According to some accounts, Dracula's brother Radu died in 1474. The sultan put one of the Danesti
         clan, Basarab the Old, on the Walachian throne. In 1476 Dracula invaded Walachia with the help of
         Moldavia and Transylvania. They drove Basarab out of the country, and Dracula again became
         Walachia's prince. Most of Dracula's army then went home to Transylvania.

The Turks attacked a few months later. Dracula was killed while fighting near Bucharest. Some say he was
assassinated on the battlefield by his own boyars, or was accidentally killed by one of his men. The sultan displayed
Dracula's head on a pike in Constantinople to prove that he was dead. His body was buried at the island monastery
of Snagov, which he had patronized. But excavations in 1931 failed to turn up any sign of his coffin!

And that is the story of the real Prince Dracula.
 
 
 

EXTRACTED FROM:     http://www.geocities.com/athens/aegean/7545/dracula.html