Vlad The Impaler, The Possible Inspiration For Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’
Wikimedia CommonsVlad the Impaler was known for impaling his enemies, and some claim that he even dipped his bread in their blood.
Our modern-day conception of vampires was largely sculpted by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Dracula, of course, is about a fearsome vampire who hunts human victims and drinks their blood. And Stoker drew some inspiration from a real vampire — the violent Wallachian ruler Vlad Dracula.
Born between 1428 and 1431, Vlad spent the first part of his life as a hostage with his younger brother Radu in the Ottoman Empire. There, he was possibly tortured and may have witnessed the impalement of the Ottomans’ foes, a technique he’d later infamously use on his own enemies.
After Vlad’s father and older brother were overthrown in a coup, Vlad went home to Wallachia. He was able to wrest power back from his father’s enemies, but Vlad never forgot what they had done to his family. Before long, he set out to establish dominance in the most violent way imaginable.
Wikimedia CommonsVlad the Impaler, known as Vlad Dracula, allegedly inspired Bram Stoker as he wrote his iconic horror novel.
Vlad hosted a banquet and invited those who had opposed him. He never intended to listen to their concerns, however. Those who continued to resist him were rounded up and bloodily impaled on spikes. And, thus, Vlad Dracula became known as “Vlad the Impaler.”
From there, Vlad the Impaler’s bloody reputation only grew. In a 1462 letter to an ally describing his campaigns against the Ottoman Empire, Vlad boasted of killing “peasants, men and women, old and young… We killed 23,884 Turks.” By the time he was imprisoned by the Hungarians, Vlad had killed an estimated 80,000 people, tens of thousands of whom were impaled.
Vlad had also shown a fondness for human blood, as evidenced by claims that he dipped his bread in blood before he ate it. Though this particular assertion has never been verified, many of Vlad’s vicious deeds have been — and they supposedly inspired Stoker as he prepared to write his iconic vampire novel.