Dracula: Fact, Legend and Fiction

Dracula, the vampire that haunts our dreams, is the one created by the 19th-century author, Bram Stoker: but, as Paul Dukes explains here, there is a basis in fact and eastern European legend for the ghoul. First the fact, although as anybody who has ever investigated the life of an historical personage will know, this is by no means easy to establish. Dracula did indeed live, but who was he, and how did he acquire his reputation?
In Romanian history today, he is best remembered as a leader in the medieval struggle against the Turks. From 1456 to 1462 and again briefly in 1476, the ruler of the Daaubian principality of Wallachia was Vlad Tepes, that is Vlad the Impaler, alias Dracula. Six years after the fall of Constantinople in 1459, this valiant prince refused to pay tribute to the Ottoman Porte, and a further two years 'later, he led an army across the Danube to take the fight to the enemy, allegedly killing 24,000 Turks and liberating some of the territory recently occupied by them. But then, in 1462, Sultan Mohammed II the Conqueror in person led a campaign of retaliation against Wallachia. Vlad put up a spirited resistance, and was finally overcome not in the field of battle but by the duplicity of the King of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus (1440-1490), to 'whom he had appealed for support but by whom he was now imprisoned. In 1476, he managed to escape to take part in the fight against Ottoman encroachment in Bosnia and to reoccupy the throne of Wallachia. However, in the same year, as a Romanian account puts it, 'this unyielding fighter for the freedom of his people was killed in a campaign against the Turks'.


http://www.historytoday.com/paul-dukes/dracula-fact-legend-and-fiction