Vlad the Impaler

Happy Saturday, it's a long weekend in the US and there's a pandemic so that means there will probably be more than one thread in #EuropeanBios. Today's is #37, Vlad The Impaler, also known as Vlad Dracula, yes, like the vampire.

I always enjoy when a biography up-ends my preconceptions about somebody and this was one of those. I would go so far as to say ol' Vlad was one of the earliest victims of a viral misinformation campaign.

Let's start at the beginning: Vlad, or Vladdy as absolutely nobody called him, was born in 1428 in what is now Romania, the son of the local Voivode, something between a king and a warlord. He inherited the title and ruled intermittently until his death in 1477.

The name "Dracula" means "son of Dracul". Like "Genghis Khan", "Dracul" was a title, not a name, that he inherited from his father. It came from a Christian religious order, the Order of the Dragon, formed to defend Christianity from its enemies, in particular the Ottomans.

Being a member of very Catholic religious society is kind of the opposite of being a vampire! But some confusion arises because "Dracul" in modern Romanian means "devil". There are no contemporaneous reports of blood sucking or satanism on Vladdy's part.

So how did "Dracula" come to be indelibly associated with vampires? Well, it's Bram Stoker's fault. When he wrote his book in 1897 he attached the "Vlad Dracula" name to pre-existing Romanian legends about vampires, permanently fusing these unrelated things.

I dunno about you, but the fact that Bram Stoker wasn't re-telling an existing legend about Dracula the Vampire but in fact inventing it for the first time was news to me! Vampire stories existed intermittently before Stoker's book but he firmly defined the genre thereafter.

Also: Vlad's name is pretty much the only thing Stoker used. Nothing else Stoker wrote in Dracula has any basis in Vlad's life or history. He was borrowing random bits of lore from everywhere and munging them together with no regard for canon, like an old-timey Stephanie Meyer.

So Vladdy: not a vampire, never suspected of being one. But the other thing you may have heard is that he killed tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people, in particular by impaling them on spikes, hence his other nickname. This too is partially misinformation.

It's not *entirely* wrong. He was certainly a murderous bastard and had a lot of people put on spikes (though the bulk of his victims died by more standard methods). But the scale at which he did this has been tremendously exaggerated.

In one instance he is said to have murdered 20,000 residents of a town as a punishment, but the town in question had at most 10,000 people living in it at the time, and the stories don't claim the town was wiped out. He might have killed a tenth as many.

Obviously putting 2,000 people on spikes is still pretty bad! But he was actually a pretty minor warlord in a very messy and bloody point in local history and not terribly more murderous or cruel than anybody else wandering around the landscape at that time.

Where his long-lasting reputation for cruelty came from is his opponents in war: German-speaking Saxons who had quite recently mastered movable type printing presses. They wrote exaggerated and gruesome stories of his exploits and they became one of the first "best-sellers".

Vlad and his side were much less literate and didn't have any printing presses, so the German narrative won, making Vlad the Impaler arguably a victim of one of the earliest viral misinformation campaigns. He wasn't a nice guy! He just wasn't as evil as they said.

Another point for Vlad being no more of a bastard than normal is that the people of Romania, who could reasonably be expected to know him best, are apparently quite fond of him to this day and regard him as a folk hero who brought order and successfully defended the country.

Romanian history is pretty honest about Vlad and all the people he killed but tend to regard his murders as necessary acts to defend the country, preserve order and suppress traitors, and their estimates of his body count are notably lower and more realistic.

Overall Vlad was a run-of-the-mill central European warlord, a little more successful than most, and nearly all of his international, perpetual fame comes from books, originally written by his defeated opponents to smear him and then a horror novel that wasn't even about him.