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Vlad II (Romanian: Vlad al II-lea), also known as Vlad Dracul (Vlad al II-lea Dracul) or Vlad the Dragon (before 1395 – November 1447), was Voivode of Wallachia from 1436 to 1442, and again from 1443 to 1447. He is internationally known as the father of Vlad the Impaler, or Dracula.
- His Family Name Means “Dragon”
- He Was Born in Wallachia, Present-Day Romania
- He Was Held Hostage For 5 Years
- His Father and Brother Were Both Killed
- He Invited His Rivals to Dinner – and Killed Them
- He Was Named For His Preferred Form of Torture
- He Ordered The Mass Killing of 20,000 Ottomans
- The Location of His Death Is Unknown
- He Remains A National Hero of Romania
- He Was The Inspiration Behind Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’
The name Dracul was given to Vlad’s father Vlad II by his fellow knights who belonged to a Christian crusading order known as the Order of the Dragon. Dracultranslates to “dragon” in Romanian. In 1431, King Sigismund of Hungary – who would later become the Holy Roman Emperor – inducted the elder Vlad into the knightly order. The Order of the Dragon...
Vlad III was born in 1431 in the state of Wallachia, now the southern portion of present-day Romania. It was one of the three principalities that made up Romania at the time, along with Transylvania and Moldova. Situated between Christian Europe and the Muslim lands of the Ottoman Empire, Wallachia was the scene of a great number of bloody battles....
In 1442, Vlad accompanied his father and his 7-year-old brother Radu on a diplomatic mission in the heart of the Ottoman Empire. However the three were captured and held hostage by the Ottoman diplomats. Their captors told Vlad II that he could be released – on condition that the two sons remain. Believing that it was the safest option for his fami...
Upon his return, Vlad II was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by local war lords known as the boyar. He was killed in the marshes behind his house while his oldest son, Mircea II, was tortured, blinded and buried alive.
Vlad III was freed shortly after his family’s death, however by then he had already developed a taste for violence. To consolidate power and assert his dominance, he decided to hold a banquet and invited hundreds of members of his rival families. Knowing his authority would be challenged, he had his guests stabbed and their still-twitching bodies i...
By 1462, he had succeeded to the Wallachian throne and was at war with the Ottomans. With enemy forces three times the size of his own, Vlad ordered his men to poison wells and burn crops. He also paid diseased men to infiltrate and infect the enemy. His victims were often disembowelled, beheaded and skinned or boiled alive. However impalement came...
In June 1462 as he retreated from a battle, Vlad ordered 20,000 defeated Ottomans to be impaled on wooden stakes outside the city of Târgoviște. When the Sultan Mehmed II (1432-1481) came across the field of the dead being picked apart by crows, he was so horrified that he retreated to Constantinople. On another occasion, Vlad met with a group of O...
Now long after the infamous impalement of Ottoman prisoners of war, Vlad was forced into exile and imprisoned in Hungary. He returned in 1476 to reclaim his rule of Wallachia, however his triumph was short-lived. While marching to battle with the Ottomans, he and his soldiers were ambushed and killed. According to Leonardo Botta, the Milanese ambas...
Vlad the Impaler was an undeniably brutal ruler. However he is still considered one of the most important rulers in Wallachian history and a national hero of Romania. His victorious campaigns against the Ottoman forces which protected both Wallachia and Europe have won him praise as a military leader. He was even praised by Pope Pius II (1405-1464)...
It is believed that Stoker based the title character of his 1897 ‘Dracula’ on Vlad the Impaler. However the two characters have little in common. Although there is no concrete evidence to support this theory, historians have speculated that Stoker’s conversations with the historian Hermann Bamburger may have helped provide him with information on V...
Vlad II Dracul, father of Vlad III, was admitted to the order around 1431 because of his bravery in fighting the Turks and was dubbed Dracul (dragon or devil), thus his son became Dracula (son of the dragon). From 1431 onward, Vlad II wore the emblem of the order and later, as ruler of Wallachia, his coinage bore the dragon symbol.
YearTitleActor Playing Dracula2025Motel TransylvaniaTBA20242024Matthew Goode (implied to be the real ...2023—Oct 22, 2024 · Vlad was the second of four brothers born into the noble family of Vlad II Dracul. His sobriquet Dracula (meaning “son of Dracul”) was derived from the Latin draco (“dragon”) after his father’s induction into the Order of the Dragon, created by Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund for the defense of Christian Europe against the Ottoman Empire .
- Richard Pallardy
- Vlad was a voivode (prince) of Walachia (part of modern Romania). Surrounded by enemies that included the Hungarians, the Ottomans, his younger bro...
- Vlad was the second son of Vlad II Dracul. When he was 11 years old, Vlad was sent to the court of the Ottoman sultan Murad II as a hostage. His fa...
- Vlad was a minor player during the early period of Ottoman domination of what is today Romania. He likely would have remained a historical curiosit...
- In 1476 Vlad was ambushed by an Ottoman patrol and killed. He was reportedly decapitated, and his head was sent to the sultan in Constantinople as...
Dracul is a 2018 prequel novel to Bram Stoker's classic 1897 work Dracula. The book was written by Bram Stoker's great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker and American author J. D. Barker. It is Stoker's second novel, after his 2009 Dracula sequel, Dracula the Un-dead.
His sobriquet Dracula (meaning “son of Dracul”) was derived from the Latin draco (“dragon”) after his father’s induction into the Order of the Dragon, created by Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund for the defense of Christian Europe against the Ottoman Empire.
Oct 3, 2018 · Dracul, the new book from Bram Stoker’s descendant, Dacre Stoker, attempts to reconstruct the missing hundred pages of the original Dracula manuscript.
