VLAD III of Valachia
Born in 1431, Vlad III was Prince of Valachia, a region of Romania located between the Carpathian mountains and the Danube, from 1456 to 1462. His name probably doesn't mean much to you, but you certainly know his nickname: DRACULA. This nickname, inherited from his father, Vlad Dracul, means son of the dragon, or of the devil, in Romanian, made up of the diminutive "a" and the noun "dracul." His particularly bloody story plus the dual meaning of his name would contribute in large part to creating his legend. This legend was Bram Stoker's source of inspiration for his novel. At the start, the name "Dracula" was less diabolical than it seemed. Vlad Dracul received it from the Order of the Dragon, created by the emperor Sigismond of Luxembourg in 1431 to mount a crusade against the heretical Turks. So the son of Dracul took the name of the son of the Dragon as a reference to his father. But the inhabitants of Valachia gae the name a more demonical meaning than a chivalrous one because of Vlad Dracul's harshness.Afterward, his son Vlad Dracula went even further in this direction showing enormous cruelty during his reign. The chronicles of the period describe Dracula as a bloodthirsty prince who loved to torture. He was an ardent follower of impalement and he strewed the roads with his victories. This earned him the nickname of Vlad "Tepes," Vlad "the impaler" in Romanian.When he ascended the throne in 1456, he shared power with the Council of Valachia, made up of boyars, the land-based nobility of the period. Dracula then took his kingdom in hand. He wanted to keep his autonomony whereas all the sovereigns in the surrounding areas wanted to favor trade relations in the whole province.While he was fighting to defend Christianity against the Turks, he was betrayed by the sovereigns of the neighboring lands for mundane political and commercial interests, notably with the Saxons. He was then imprisoned for 10 years. When he was freed, he found his castle destroyed. To carry out its reconstruction and to avenge himself on the inhabitants and notables of Targoviste who had killed his brother, he dreamt up a terrible scheme: he invited them to an enormous banquet for the Easter feast and had the army suddenly show up.Dracula had women, children and old people impaled, only keeping the sturdiest of them to work in the mines and quarries to rebuild his castle.During his reign, Dracula had to fight the Turks several times. He drove them beyond the Danube in 1456, braved them in 1460 and pushed them back once again in 1462. According to certain documents, he died on the battlefield fighting them in 1476, near Bucharest. Dracula's tomb is on an island in the middle of a lake not far from Bucharest, at the monastery of Snagov. Exhumed by archeologists in the 1930s, the tomb was found… empty. A few years later, a new search brought to light another sepulcher, disclosing a skeleton covered in princely attributes.