Dracula’s Real Origins Have Surprisingly Little To Do With Vampires

In 1431, the future Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund admitted Vlad II into the Order of the Dragon, a chivalric group created to protect Christendom from the Ottoman advance. Vlad II began calling himself Dracul (dragon). His son, who was born around the same time, was called Dracula (son of the dragon).

Vlad III was born around 1431, probably in Sighișoara, Transylvania, where his father was living in exile at the time, although Wallachia remained the family’s home principality. In 1442, Vlad and his brother, Radu, were sent to the Ottoman court as political hostages, a detail historians often point to when explaining Vlad’s later dealings with the Ottomans.

Vlad III was the voivode (prince) of Wallachia, a principality south of the Carpathian Mountains. Wallachia was not the same as Transylvania, which was a different region ruled by the King of Hungary. He served as voivode in three different stints between 1448 and 1476. His primary reign, which began in 1456 and is the best documented, ended in 1462.

Wallachia was situated between the growing Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary. Its rulers had to play both sides against each other if they wanted to survive. The Wallachian voivodes often paid tribute to the Ottoman sultan, but relied on the Kingdom of Hungary for support as well. Vlad III’s later relationship with the Ottomans, including his decision to defy them once he took the throne in 1456, must be understood in light of this.

Vlad III used impalement as a documented method of executing political opponents, criminals, and Ottoman soldiers. Historians have described impalement as a form of 15th-century asymmetric psychological warfare and legal deterrent, meant to instill terror, intimidate enemies, and deter attacks. The act was also consistent with the common use of violent, public punishment in the period.

On the night of June 17, 1462, Vlad III attacked the army camp of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II near Târgoviște, the Wallachian capital, with the aim of killing the sultan himself. Although the attack did not succeed in killing Mehmed, it disrupted the army, causing significant casualties. This remains one of the best-documented events of Vlad III’s reign.

Vlad III lost the Wallachian throne later in 1462 and was held captive in Hungary for several years until he managed to briefly regain his throne in 1476. He was killed in a battle outside Bucharest shortly afterward; historians disagree on the precise details of his death. According to some versions of events, his severed head was sent to Constantinople to prove that he was dead, although there is no conclusive evidence to support this.

Bran Castle, which today stands as Romania’s main Dracula attraction, was actually a customs post built to control trade between Wallachia and Transylvania and administered by Saxons living in Transylvania. There is very little evidence that Vlad III ever lived in Bran Castle, and even if he did visit, it was never his home, castle, or headquarters.

Poenari Citadel, located on a cliff overlooking the Argeș River, was Vlad III’s fortress, which, according to tradition, he rebuilt with forced labor. Unlike Bran, which functions mainly as a tourist attraction today, Poenari was a genuine military stronghold, and its remote location and high cliffs are consistent with that use in the difficult terrain of Wallachia.

Vlad III had frequent disagreements with the Saxon merchants who lived in the southern part of Transylvania regarding commercial rights, and allegedly executed large numbers of Saxon merchants and members of their colonies for breaking the rules. These Saxon merchants maintained extensive commercial ties with other German-speaking countries and had access to a flourishing book publishing industry. This would have provided them with both motivation and resources to produce reports critical of Vlad after his downfall.

The first pamphlet describing Vlad III’s horrific deeds in print was Die geschicht dracole waide (The story of Dracula of Wallachia), published in Nuremberg in 1488. This was probably the first time that a mass-produced printed pamphlet had been used to propagate negative stories about someone across German-speaking Europe, and the story in this pamphlet established Vlad III’s reputation for brutality in the German-speaking world much more effectively than anything recorded in Wallachia.

Several additional pamphlets and woodcut illustrations of Vlad III’s atrocities were published in German during the decades following the original pamphlet of 1488. These pamphlets cemented his image as a tyrant in the minds of the people living in Central Europe, long before anyone had the idea that he was a vampire. None of these pamphlets mention any supernatural qualities about Vlad III, only that he was extremely cruel, often in a theatrical way.

Romania has an ancient and genuine folk belief in strigoi, the undead or restless spirits of people who cause trouble for the living. These are not Dracula, nor are they related to Bram Stoker’s vampire. The belief in strigoi, and in ways to deal with them, is genuinely old and has existed independently of any connection with the Dracula story, as part of authentic Romanian and wider Balkan culture and folklore relating to how to treat the dead and bury them correctly.

In 1885, Emily Gerard published her essay “Transylvanian Superstitions,” in which she introduced the word “nosferatu” to an English-speaking audience as the name of a type of vampire in Romania. The name is most likely a corruption of an existing Romanian word, such as nesuferitu (“the insufferable one”) or necuratu (“the unclean one”). It is not a part of common Romanian folklore.

Bram Stoker didn’t travel to Eastern Europe and knew very little about Vlad III’s military exploits. He did his research for Dracula in libraries in London and on holiday in Whitby, England, in 1890. He used travel books, folklore articles such as Gerard’s, and history books, rather than firsthand observations of his own.

While researching in Whitby in 1890, Stoker read the name “Dracula” in a footnote of William Wilkinson’s An Account of The Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, published in 1820. Wilkinson said the name meant “devil” in the local language. Stoker adopted the name for his vampire character, who until then had been called “Count Wampyr.” He seems to have been attracted to the name because of its exotic sound and sinister connotations, rather than because he knew anything of Vlad III’s life.

In 1897, the novel Dracula was published. It described the evil Count Dracula, a Transylvanian vampire nobleman, who shared little with the Wallachian ruler except for a name and a vaguely Eastern European setting. As the novel gained in popularity, and was turned into a play and then into movies, the name “Dracula” became attached to a fictional, supernatural being rather than the historical Vlad III. Most people reading Dracula were unaware there had once been a historical person named Dracula.

It was long assumed that Vlad III was buried at Snagov Monastery, an island monastery near Bucharest that he is said to have patronized. His burial at Snagov became an accepted claim, passed down in regional sources, but it had never been tested by archaeological excavation.

The grave at Snagov Monastery, traditionally identified as Vlad III’s final resting place, was excavated by archaeologist Dinu Rosetti between 1931 and 1933. Instead of human bones, the excavators found animal bones under the altar. The long-held belief in Vlad III’s burial at Snagov was cast into doubt, and historians began to look for another burial location.

Comana Monastery, in southern Wallachia near the Danube and founded by Vlad III himself, is now considered by historians to be the most likely burial place of Vlad III, but this too is only an interpretation. There has been no conclusive excavation. To this day, the exact burial site of Vlad III remains unknown.

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