When the King of Hungary created the Order of the Dragon in 1408, one of the knights to receive this honor was the illegitimate son of the Voivode of Wallachia (modern Romania). When the legitimate son died, Sir Vlad of the Order of the Dragon became the Voivode (Old Slavic for rank below the king but above the boyars). Vlad Drakul had three sons: Mircea, Vlad, and Radu (all of these names, strange to us, were quite traditional, like Louis in France). All of these sons could be called “Drakula,” essentially Son of the Dragon.
The Drakula sons were born at a time when Wallachia was a battlefield that sometimes acted as vassal to the Ottomans, and sometimes joined Christian kings in a Crusade effort. The strongest ruler in the area was John Hunyadi, the Voivode of Hungary and Transylvania, vassal to the King of Poland. Hunyadi was a determined enemy of the Ottomans; his career was made of battles, negotiations to find more allies and resources, and attempts to choose the Voivodes around him.
Vlad Drakul joined Hunyadi in a rebellion and was captured; his sons Vlad and Radu were taken from him as hostages. They grew up at Edirne, speaking Turkish, while their older brother had his turn to rule and be murdered. Hunyadi installed a Drakul cousin as Voivode, but Vlad, who was something like 20, decided to make a play for his inheritance. First he tried to oust his cousin with Ottoman support, but failed. He must have decided that power was going in the Hungarian direction, because next he left the Ottomans to live in Hungary for about six years. At the end of that time, he came back to Wallachia with their support, now the enemy of the Ottomans.
Radu, meanwhile, seems to have been pretty well assimilated to the Ottoman court. A Greek chronicler asserts that Mehmet II and Radu, who were about the same age, were very close friends—-and further that Mehmet tried many times to make Radu his paramour, while Radu resisted virtuously but stayed on good terms. Without further evidence, I’m not buying it. Resisting sexual advances (by cutting the prince with a dagger and hiding in a tree) is not consistent with staying on good terms, and Radu’s later nickname “the Handsome” may have suggested the idea. Was Mehmet (who had a large harem) interested in men too? He may have been, but it just doesn’t easily square that Radu was a target. And while Vlad was contesting for the Voivodeship of Wallachia, Radu became a Muslim and lived at the Topkapı Palace.
Vlad killed his cousin in battle, but there were more cousins who were apparently preferred by the locals. The German colony in Transylvania, which dated back to the early years of the Teutonic knights, didn’t support Vlad. He not only razed their towns, he also took captives back to Wallachia and used them for a public demonstration: he impaled them. That’s when his notoriety began. Even then, impaling people alive was shocking.
By 1460, Vlad was solidly in control. His old frenemy Mehmet II required him to come pay homage, but Vlad decided to stay on the Hungarian side. Not only that, he impaled the envoys and began to ravage Bulgaria, killing Slavs and Turks alike. Mehmet brought an army to remove him and install Radu, landing 150,000 soldiers and Janissaries at a Danube port.
Now Vlad cemented his reputation. First, he made a daring night attack on Mehmet’s camp, trying to assassinate Mehmet himself. The Wallachians, an army with some knights but mostly peasants (and probably no artillery), then retreated toward their capital Târgoviște with the Ottomans in pursuit. They destroyed everything in the Ottoman path: poisoned wells, burned crops, flooded land, and dug pit traps. Vlad’s army also sent anyone with an infectious disease to the Turks, so that the weary Ottomans not only went hungry but began to catch the plague.
When they arrived at Târgoviște, the Turks found that Vlad had rounded up about 20,000 ethnic Turks. His peasant army had been busy: the Turks were impaled on 20,000 stakes along the road for miles. The city was deserted, its gates wide. The Ottoman army was sickened and shocked by the impaling: it included men, women, and children; there were babies impaled with their mothers. If Vlad was aiming at shock value, he achieved it, and the Ottoman main army quickly withdrew. They burnt the town where their fleet waited.
Vlad won some more battles, but Radu and the Janissaries remained in the field. Vlad’s peasants could not win, and the nobles were also sickened by his brutality. So Vlad went to Hungary, where Hunyadi’s son Matthew Corvinus had been elected King. Instead of backing him, the king arrested Vlad.
Vlad stayed imprisoned in a small castle near Budapest for 14 years. The official cause was a charge that Vlad had actually gone back to the Ottomans, to betray Hungary; but from this time, legends about his cruelty were circulating in Germany and Hungary. Mehmet II had made Radu the Bey—-not Voivode, notice the war of language terms for “ruler”—-of Wallachia, with Janissary support. Radu may have crossed back over to Christian rituals, and he got along well enough with the nobles. He married an Albanian girl and had a daughter. However, Wallachia became an Ottoman stronghold, and its Christian neighbor Moldavia felt (rightly) threatened. Then even Radu died. Now what?
In 1475, at Moldavia’s request, Hungary released Vlad but refused to provide him with an army. Another cousin, Basarab, was now the ruler with Mehmet’s support. Vlad lived in Hungary as a free man for a year or so, but eventually Hungary gave him enough funds to join the Prince of Moldavia. Technically, this was Vlad’s third reign as Voivode, but it didn’t last long since he died in battle. The Ottomans cut him into pieces.
It wasn’t long before biographies of Vlad were being printed in German and Slavic. By now, he was widely known as a sadistic psychopath, which is probably true. But with early movable type, printers could invent new adventures and crimes for Vlad, who was soon on the Strasbourg Best Seller List. He became known as Dracula (his son also used this as the surname for the noble house they established). Probably most of the interest was generated by refugees from the German colony in Transylvania, so that his name became associated with this place. By 1500, about 25 years after his actual death, gruesome woodcuts showed him feasting with impaled bodies nearby, and other stories said he boiled people to death. It wasn’t much of a stretch for him to become an undead bogeyman.
Romania, on the other hand, recalled Vlad Țepeș (the Impaler) as a national hero. If he was harsh, it was to uphold public order and national strength. If he executed nobles, it was because they were disloyal. By the 19th century, Romanian literature celebrated his life. In the Communist years, he was lionized, and he is still best known in Romania as one of its strongest kings in history.