VLAD DRACULA (english)

VLAD DRACULA

The man who gave his name to the worlds most famous vampire

Forget the vampires and Hollywood, Vlad was a strong and remarkable leader. Even though he stood out as a psychopath he was always considered a great mind and an amazing warrior. As a child he lived in a secure place because his father was a Romanian prince. His father Vlad II Dracul signed a pact with the Saxons in Wallachia, in order to live a more secure life. Since being a prince wasn’t that easy, his father was assassinated by a rival clan who wanted southern parts of Romania.

When his father was assassinated he escaped to the North, Transylvania, vowed to return one day. He became the new Romanian prince and stayed at the incredibly secured Bran Castle that was planned by himself (1450’s). The Bran Castle is visited by tourists as the house of  “Count Dracula” 

At this point of his life Vlad was in a get killed or kill situation. He had to take revenge from his father’s assassins. He wanted to kill rich Saxons, and since he grew up in the Saxon territory he knew the security and plans of it. It was an easy win for him, defeating the close enemies. Yet after seeing Vlad’s brutal way of murdering and slave labor, people were terrified by Vlad The Impaler. (He got the name Vlad The Impaler because he impaled and brutally tortured his enemies.)

It was the time when the borders of the Ottoman Empire hit the borders of Romania. In 1461 Sultan Mehmet and Vlad got into a war and the sultan had an army three times bigger than Dracula. It was one of the most interesting wars ever made since they were both considered great minds. It was a very strategically attractive war.

The war between Romania and Ottoman Empire fixed Dracula’s reputation in a way. The brutal or maybe psycho leader of Romania became the defendant of Christian Europe, the war had its religious dimension. 

Dracula offered 23884 noses cut from enemies as a prize for the other Christian Europe countries if they would consider helping, so he secured his psycho profile at that time too.

Dracula didn’t just stop by usual warfare, he wanted to kill the Ottoman Empire from the inside too, so he poisoned the wells, burnt their supplies, attacked them at night and sent diseased men to their empire.

The Turks gave him the nickname “Kazıklı Bey” –Impaler Lord– after the surprise Vlad left to the Sultan. When Mehmet arrived to Vlad’s fort, Vlad had left him nearly 20000 dead men impaled –by his own style of impaling– in front of his grand castle. The sultan was of course terrified after the thing that he just saw so he retreated whilst Vlad escaped Transylvania. 

Dracula had incredible strategies, when he was escaping they had turned the horseshoes of their hoses around so that when they were going away from the palace it would seem like they were going towards it. 

His wife who was living with Dracula in his more smaller yet still incredibly secured palace that was located right in the middle of Transylvania and Wallachia (in between the mountains, hidden perhaps), she jumped from the high mountain that the castle was located on, into the river that was going by it. That river is called the Princess River for a reason now. She was afraid that the Turks would torture her to death.

Some say Vlad’s death is a mystery, but the shown death of the great leader Dracula is that he was killed in a battle by his rival and was buried by him in a unknown place. Yet some say, his death remains a mystery and his body was never found yet his head was brought to the sultan in order to prove that he was dead. (Vlad Dracula (1431-1477) Romania)

-hande