Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Real Dracula

Episode Date: October 31, 2021

Vampires have been been a part of folklore for centuries. Perhaps no mythical vampire is more famous than Count Dracula. While Count Dracula might be fictional, believe it or not, he was based and named on a real person who lived in 15th century Romania. While he might not have been a vampire, he was still plenty deadly. Learn more about Vlad the Impaler, also known as Vlad Dracula, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vampires have been a part of folklore for centuries. Perhaps no mythical vampire is more famous than that of Count Dracula. While Count Dracula might be fictional, believe it or not, he was based and named on a real person who lived in 15th century Romania. While he might not have been a vampire, he was still plenty deadly. Learn more about Vlad the Impaler, also known as Vlad Dracula, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep,

only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day, or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep.

If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. The classical interpretation of Dracula involves a whole bunch of things. He sleeps in coffins, only comes out at night, has a weakness for garlic and crosses, can't see himself in a mirror, and of course, drinks other people's blood. None of this really has anything to do with the historic Dracula, however. The real Dracula was named Vlad III, or Vlad Dracula, who is the second son of Vlad Dracul. The word Dracul meant dragon in medieval Romanian, and he got the name when he was initiated into the order of the dragon, which was a chivalric order.

Draculia, or Dracula, just means son of the dragon. In modern Romanian, Dracul has come to mean a word for the devil. His father, Vlad Dracul, was the ruler of Wolakia. It was situated in modern-day Romania and was located north of the Danube River and south of the Carpathian Mountains. In the mid-15th century, it was sandwiched between a rock and a hard place. The rock was known as the Ottoman Empire and the hard place was known as the Kingdom of Hungary. Vlad and his brother Radu both grew up in the Ottoman Empire, held hostage there by the Ottoman Turks. Vlad's father and eldest brother were killed when forces backed by the Kingdom of Hungary invaded Wallachia

and installed his cousin Vladislav the second on the throne. In 1448, Vlad then struck back with the support of the Ottomans, and he took control of Wallachia, taking his first turn as ruler there. It didn't last long, however, as Vladislav came back and pushed Vlad out, back into Ottoman territory, and then he was in exile for eight years. In 1456, Vlad returned to Wallachia, this time with the backing of Hungary, and Vladislav was killed in the invasion, and Vlad became the ruler for a second time. It was during his second reign where Vlad developed his reputation and his taste for killing people.

He began his reign by enacting revenge against the Boyers, who were the aristocracy in the region. Many of the Boyers plotted against his father and his brother to have them killed. He held a banquet for the Boyers and had everyone killed at the banquet in his own version of the treachery of the Long Knives. Estimates are in the hundreds to thousands for this first round of killings. He then had a falling out with the Saxons who lived in Wallachia. The Saxons were German migrants who had moved the region centuries earlier. He impaled or burned alive many Saxon merchants and their entire families. And here I need to take a moment to talk about the thing which gave Vlad his nickname,

impalement. Impalement is not a nice way to die. In a nutshell, impalement basically is putting someone on a vertical pole with the pole up their bum. They are placed such that they can't get themselves off the pole because their feet are barely touching or not at all touching the ground. Death could take several days, as the pole keeps going further and further into the victim's body. And no, the pole is not necessarily pointed. It was so bad that it was considered too cruel even by the standards of the Middle Ages.

People consider crucifixion to be a more humane form of execution, and crucifixion is a pretty horrible form of execution. But back to the subject of Vlad. Vlad didn't have much love for the Ottomans, having been held hostage by them when he was younger. When Ottoman envoys refused to take off their turbans in his presence, he had the turbines nailed to their head. He began military campaigns against the Ottomans in region south of Wallachia. It turns out his previous impalings were just a warm-up. A Greek historian by the name of Leonikos Kelkakundis, who was a contemporary of the period,

said, quote, the Sultan's army entered into the area of the impalments, which was 17 stades long and seven states wide. There were large stakes there, on which, as it was said, about 20,000 men, women, and children had been spitted, quite a sight for the Turks and for the Sultan himself. The Sultan was seized with amazement and said that it was not possible to deprive of his country a man who had done such great deeds, who had such a diabolical understanding of how to govern his realm and his people. And he said that a man who had done such things was worth much. The rest of the Turks were dumbfounded when they saw the multitude of men on the stakes. There were infants too affixed to their mothers on the stakes, and birds had made their nests in their entrails.

This scene of a forest of people being impaled was repeated several times. His victories against the Ottomans received praise throughout Christian Europe, but his reputation for victory was soon overshadowed by his reputation for cruelty. In addition to impaling tens of thousands of people, he also supposedly had banquets in the middle of his forest of impalments, and the rumor was he would dip his bread, in the blood of his victims. It has been estimated that he may have killed up to 80,000 people,

a large number of which were killed via impalement. Vlad was later removed from power, imprisoned, and came back to power briefly before being killed, and a severed head being sent to the Ottoman Sultan. So the story of Vlad Dracula, or Vlad the Impaler, is an interesting one, but it's a far cry from the modern-day depiction of Dracula. How did one medieval psychopath end up as a vampire hundreds of years later?

Well, that had everything to do with Bram Stoker, the author of the novel Dracula that was published in 1897. The character of Count Dracula was a mishmash of history and folklore, as well of some of Bram Stoker's own inventions. The character name obviously came from Vlad Dracula, in addition to the location of Transylvania, which is where Vlad was born. Another person who may have been a source of inspiration was a woman by the name of Elizabeth Bathory. She was a noble woman of the late 16th and early 17th century in Hungary who was a serial killer. She may have killed between 80 and 650 people and may have taken baths in their blood, and I am absolutely going to do an episode on her in the future. Vampires actually come from European folklore.

There were undead creatures who fed on the life essence of the living, usually in the form of blood. Stoker took all of these elements, added much of his own, and created the character of Count Dracula. The image we have of Count Dracula today mostly comes from the 1931 film Dracula, where the title character was played by the Hungarian-American actor Bella Lagosi. Since then, there had been dozens and dozens of representations of Count Dracula in movies, TV, stage productions, books, cereal boxes, and Sesame Street. The fictional Count Dracula has received a great deal of attention in popular culture, whereas the real-life Vlad Dracula has received very little.

There hasn't been a single major motion picture or TV series, focusing on the life of Vlad Dracula. The actual legacy of Vlad Dracula is surprisingly mixed. History has judged him to be cruel and evil, and that's why he has the nickname, The Impaler. However, there are still some that think Vlad is a hero. He fought against and had victories against the Ottoman Turks when they were on the ascendant throughout Europe, and they're willing to overlook a couple of tens of thousands

of impalings. I'll close by noting that if you visit Sigismhire, Romania, you can view in person the only known painting of Vlad Dracul, the father of Vlad the Impaler, in Casa of Laud Dracul. Today, it's a restaurant, but it's also believed to have been the birthplace of Vlad Dracula. I got to visit it several years ago, and it was a really interesting experience. So in summary, there was a real Dracula, and he was in many ways far more horrible of a person than the fictional Dracula. However, the Transylvanian vampire that we know today bears little resemblance to the 15th century

madman who preferred to kill his victims by putting them on spikes rather than biting them in the neck. The associate producers of Everything Everywhere Daily are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener, display name here now over at Apple Podcasts. They write, Excellent. This is a terrific podcast for people who are curious about the world around them. If you like to know the details behind things, I can't recommend it enough. The episodes are bite-sized, and the host makes everything entertaining. Thank you very much. Display. name here now, I'm glad to know that people enjoy the show format. Remember, if you leave a review or send in a question, you too can have it read on the show.