Vlad Dracula laid the foundations of the modern state of Romania. Just like Skanderbeg, Vlad would not only go on to be honored in his homeland of Romania, but his fame would spread around the world, indeed, much more so than the Albanian warlord. That is where their similarities end, for whatever fame Skanderbeg currently enjoyed in the West still revolved around his heroic resistance against the Turks. Today, Dracula is best remembered as an undead bloodsucker. With the publication of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula in 1897, it was deja vu all over again. For if the fifteenth-century Saxons had transformed Vlad into a maniacal but still human sadist, the twentieth-century Irish novelist transformed him into a vampire, a citizen of the night, fluttering about in the darkness in search of his latest victim before retiring for the day in a coffin.
From the Court of Matthias Corvinus began history's earliest propaganda campaigns, or, in modern parlance, "fake news," with the aid of his Transylvania Saxons. The first set of stories against Vlad detailing his diabolical cruelties appeared in December 1462, complete with fantastical, lurid engravings; thanks to the new movable-type printing press invented a few years earlier by Johannes Gutenberg, these tales quickly spread throughout Europe. Appearing under titles such as The Frightening and Truly Extraordinary Story of a Wicked Blood-Drinking Tyrant Called Prince Dracula, these pamphlets became instant best sellers.
No depravity was spared Vlad; the stories discussed in graphic detail how he boiled people alive and shredded others like cabbage. Force parents to eat their children [and the list goes on and even worsens, which I don't care to mention]. Most historians dismiss these early stories attributed to Matthias Court as obvious propaganda. Reading the first German set, one can see why. From beginning to end, line after line, the entirety of the text depicts Dracula engaging in one vile or bizarre act after another, with nary a word of explanation or context. He supposedly did it all because he was a sadist, an immoral monster, in short, the devil's son, as the name Dracula, originally "Dragon's Son," came to mean following the publication of these stories.
In short, Dracula did resort to cruel punishments, though the lurid early descriptions in the German publications are largely fictitious. It can't be emphasized enough that although impalement has now been synonymous with Vlad III Dracula, most of his contemporaries, not just the Turks, practiced it. Stephen the Great and the legal written codes of the Saxons of Transylvania prescribed impalement as a suitable punishment for a variety of crimes. Ironically, these accounts would be sensationalized to cast Vlad as a sadistic terrorist, which is often left out.
An excerpt from Chapter 8 by Raymond Ibrahim
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