Bram Stoker’s
Count
Dracula is the legendary king of the vampires.
Immortalised
on countless cinema screens by
Bela Lugosi,
Christopher Lee, Gary Oldman and many others.
Stoker’s
inspiration was a real historical figure.
Vlad Tepes
known as ‘the Impaler’ or ‘Dracula’ (son of Dracul) was
Prince
of Wallachia (in modern Romania) three times in the 15th Century.
The father
of Vlad ?epe? was Vlad Dracul (Vlad II).
This name
Dracul means Dragon (and also devil)
and had
been given to him because he was
always
wearing a bright armor with a dragon on it,
sign of
belonging to a special
Dragon
Order for bravery against Muslims.
This Dragon
Order had been created in 1408 to honor and thank the bravest Christians
fighting on Muslim lines.
Valachia
was on the border between the christian Europe
and the
Muslim world (Turkey).
Vlad Dracul
had been sent to Hungary and Germany by his father Mircea for his education.
According
to Florescu and Raymond McNally's book
(Dracula
A price of many faces) Vlad Dracul
was a bastered
son of Prince Mircea and unknown mother.
Prince
Mircea ruled from 1386 to his death in 1418.
Vlad Dracul,
also known as Vlad II,
was bornt
around 1390. As a heir,
Vlad Dracul
claimed and won the throne in 1431,
beeing
apparently the only living man who could prove
his right
to the crown at this time.
He ruled
until 1442 then from 1443 to his death in 1447.
He had
three sons with a Moldovan princess:
Mircea
(bornt in 1430 or 1431, died at his side in 1447,
burried
alive by the Hungarians),
Vlad (Vlad
III, Vlad Draculea, later Vlad ?epe?,
bornt in
1431) and Radu (bornt 1438 or 1439,
died from
syphillis in 1500.
He was
a rival of his brother Vlad for the throne,
he was
quite loyal to the sultin and ruled from 1462 to 1475).
Vlad Dracul
left Sighi?oara to Valachia when
Vlad Draculea
was young, and became voivode of Valachia.
Vlad Draculea
was bornt in November or December 1431,
in the
town Sighi?oara in Transylvania where his house still stands.
His name
means Vlad, son of Dracul,
and not
Son of the Devil as we can find in some articles.
This is
where this Dracula word comes from.
Young Vlad
Draculea had a nasty adventure when his father left him as a security hostage
to the Ottomans to proove his good faith.
During
his life,
Vlad Draculea
had the opportunity of winning a war
by putting
his muslim dead enemies (turks) on pals.
Maybe this
way of dying was not acceptable by their religion,
or because
they where horrified by the forest of pals they met...
he ended
up with frihtened them so much that he could win the war.
Turks gave
him then the name Vlad ?epe?
that is
still used nowodays: it means Vlad The Impaler.
It surely
suited him, because Vlad ?epe? had decided to reign by fear.
Many people
think that he could have been inspired
by the
abominations which occured thousands of years earlier.
The Daces
were the Barbarians who first settled in
Tranylvania
(1st century B.C.);
they were
real barbarians as they used to commit savage actions.
Among others,
they used to sacrify young virgins
on pals
once a year to communicate with the god of the deads
Xalmoxis.
It looks
like a Cthulhu story but seems true.