The real-life fellow you're referring to is Vlad the Impaler (c. 1431-1476), also known as Prince Dracula. Vlad briefly ruled Wallachia, next door to Transylvania, in what is now Romania. Vlad was not a vampire, but that's about the only nice thing you can say about him. He was a vicious tyrant who butchered between 40,000 and 100,000 people during the six years of his principal reign, 1456-1462. His preferred method of execution was to impale people on wooden stakes. Typically this was accomplished by inserting the stake where the sun don't shine, tying the victim's legs to a couple horses, and hollering "giddyup" whilst holding the stake in place. The corpse would then be put on display for the edification of the public. The number of rotting bodies hanging outside the Wallachian capital was said to exceed 20,000.
Much of what is known about the Impaler is hearsay. But there appears to be general agreement on several incidents:
- Early in his reign he invited 500 Wallachian nobles, or boyars, to a banquet at his castle. Upon asking how many princes had ruled them over the past few decades, he was told there had been several dozen. He then said something to the effect of, "This is due entirely to your shameful intrigues!" Whereupon he ordered his attendants to seize many of the boyars, impale them, and hang the bodies outside the city walls. Others were dragged off to rebuild Castle Dracula, the remains of which may still be seen near the border between Transylvania and Wallachia.
- On another occasion Vlad invited the local beggars as well as the old, the sick, and the lame to a feast. Having gotten everybody drunk, he inquired, "Do you want to be without cares, lacking nothing in this world?" Sure, said the assembled multitudes. Vlad then ordered the building boarded up and set afire, killing all inside. "I did this so that no one will be poor in my realm," he supposedly said.
- He raided neighboring Transylvania, slaughtering tens of thousands of people. The most notorious atrocity occurred on April 2, 1459, when he looted the church of St. Bartholomew in the town of Brasov, impaled numerous victims on the nearby hills, and then sat down for a meal amid the bodies. This event was commemorated in several widely circulated woodcuts printed in Germany that are largely responsible for Dracula's enduring infamy.
There are also tales claiming that Dracula had a woman impaled for letting her husband go out in a shirt that was too short; that when some Turkish envoys refused to take their hats off to him he had the hats nailed to their heads; that he forced mothers to eat their children and husbands to eat their wives; that he had various people boiled in cauldrons, fried, or cut up like kraut; and so on ad nauseam. How much of this stuff really happened is not known. But the sheer accumulation of stories suggests that Vlad either had the worst case of bad PR in the history of the universe or else was one brutal SOB.
Debate on this point continues down to the present day. In the West, Dracula is generally regarded as a monster who killed for the sake of killing. In his native Romania, however, Vlad to this day is considered a national hero, a cruel but just ruler who mightily smote his enemies, notably the Turks, and enforced strict morality at home. Some historians point out that this was the era of Machiavelli, when princes were brutally attempting to consolidate their power all over Europe. They say that Dracula was merely a product of his times. Cecil, needless to say, regards this as craven bootlicking.
In the end Dracula proved to be too much even for the Romanians. After an inconclusive war in 1462, the Turks set up his brother, Radu the Handsome, as an alternative ruler backed by Turkish troops. Even though it meant losing their independence, the Wallachian boyars abandoned Dracula, who was later arrested and imprisoned by the king of Hungary. Some historians believe the boyars simply feared the superior power of the Turks. I prefer to believe they'd gotten tired of life under a psycho. In 1476 Vlad was restored briefly to the throne, only to be killed under murky circumstances after a few months.
Bram Stoker, who wrote the 1897 horror novel Dracula, apparently read about Vlad while doing research in the British Museum. He cheerfully conflated the historical Dracula with the legends about vampirism that had circulated in Eastern Europe for centuries. The courtly blood-sucker now familiar to all was the result.
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