Vlad the Impaler and Dracula: history, legend and the castle

Vlad III ruled Wallachia three times: in 1448, from 1456 to 1462, and in 1476. His birth is not documented: historians place it between 1428 and 1431, and Radu Florescu writes that he was born in Sighișoara, where his father lived between 1431 and 1435. The name comes from his father, Vlad Dracul. The Order of the Dragon, created by King Sigismund of Luxembourg in 1408, admitted Vlad Dracul in 1431, in Nuremberg; hence the nickname "Dracul", meaning "of the Dragon". "Drăculea" means "son of Dracul". The nickname "Țepeș" (the Impaler) comes from impalement, a punishment he used often.

The princely residence was at Târgoviște, where, on the night of 16 to 17 June 1462, he attacked the camp of Sultan Mehmed II, but failed to capture him. Poienari Fortress, in the Argeș valley, is tied to his name: the Cantacuzino Chronicle says he made the boyars build it. At the end of 1462 he was arrested on the orders of King Matthias Corvinus and held captive until 1475. He died fighting Basarab Laiotă and the Ottomans in late December 1476 or early January 1477, near Snagov.

His burial place is unknown. Tradition, first recorded only in the late 19th century, places it at Snagov Monastery, but the excavations of archaeologist Dinu V. Rosetti in 1933 found no grave under the slab attributed to him, only animal bones. Historian Constantin Rezachevici argued that he was more probably buried at Comana Monastery, his own foundation, close to the battlefield. Both remain hypotheses.

Stories about his cruelty circulated during his lifetime. The first printed work about him appeared in Nuremberg in the autumn of 1488 and was followed by other editions. Historian Daniel Ursprung links them to the propaganda conflict between Emperor Frederick III and King Matthias Corvinus.

Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula", published in 1897, is the first book to link the name Dracula with vampirism. Elizabeth Miller (Memorial University of Newfoundland), who studied Stoker's working notes, shows that he knew very little about Vlad: nothing in the notes shows he even knew the historical figure was called Vlad. Stoker took the name Dracula and a few facts about Wallachia from William Wilkinson's book (1820), where a note explained the name as "devil".

Romanian folk beliefs about strigoi and moroi are not the same as the literary vampire. Ethnologist Romulus Vulcănescu, cited by Mariana Cocieru, places them among the "archetypal demons of death", while other researchers note that it is hard to say whether the strigoi and the moroi are the same being or different ones. A field study among the Romanians of the Timok valley shows that a dead person becomes "restless" mainly when funeral rituals were not respected; it also describes the "living moroi", a living person regarded as restless dead.

Stoker learned of these beliefs indirectly, from the article "Transylvanian Superstitions" by Emily Gerard (1885), which spoke of "living and dead" vampires and of remedies such as a stake driven into the grave or garlic. Elizabeth Miller stresses that such beliefs were never connected to Vlad.

Bran Castle was built by the people of Brașov after a privilege issued by the chancellery of King Louis I of Anjou on 19 November 1377. Abroad it is marketed as "Dracula's castle". The castle's official website justifies the label by saying it is the only castle in Transylvania that matches Stoker's description and that it is "suspected" the writer used an illustration of Bran: these are tourism marketing claims, with no published evidence. The same website acknowledges that Stoker never visited Romania and that documents do not show that Vlad ever took the castle; his army passed through Bran in 1459, when he attacked Brașov. The site also states, with the words "it seems", that Vlad was imprisoned at Bran for two months in 1462; according to the chronicler Laonikos Chalkokondyles, he was jailed at Alba Iulia, then at Visegrád.

Vlad Dracul House in the Sighișoara citadel now has a restaurant and a small weapons exhibition. In Târgoviște you can visit the Princely Court ensemble and the Chindia Tower (15th century, rebuilt in the 19th), with an exhibition about Vlad. The ruins of Poienari Fortress are reached by climbing 1,480 steps. Snagov Monastery, on an island in the lake, keeps the slab attributed to him, and Comana Monastery was rebuilt in the late 16th century on the site of his foundation. Bran Castle operates as a museum.