Vlad Tepes: Who was the real Count Dracula?

Vlad Tepes, a 15th-century Wallachian prince, was the notoriously blood-thirsty basis for Dracula, Bram Stoker's classic gothic horror character. Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn more about Vlad Tepes.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Knda Skipson, joined day by Josh Clark. Hello Candice,
Hello Ja, Candice. I was walking down the sidewalk the

(00:21):
other day, going to get some lunch, as I do
from time to time, and I noticed lying in the
gutter were a pair of those plastic vampire fangs. And
I thought, oh boy, I'm halfway to my Halloween costume, right,
All I need is to cape and there you go.
So I put the fangs in my mouth and I'm
walking along to go get lunch. And um, I started
thinking about this, uh, this story I'd heard once, Um

(00:43):
about this guy named Max Shrek. He actually played uh
Dracula uh in the first vampire movie ever called Nose
fra Too. It was released in nineteen two. Is a
silent movie, very creepy movie. Is this the one that
they sort of like redid version of John Nalkovich Shadow
of the Vampire? Look at you? So do? I so do?

(01:06):
I'd love to be John Malkovich. Um, actually no, I wouldn't.
I think that I learned my lesson from that cautionary tale.
But So have you seen Shadow of the Vampire then yes, okay, alright,
good wow. Um, So in that movie they basically, uh
portray Max Shrek um as an actual vampire who eventually

(01:28):
kills off all of the cast and crew by by
basically eating them during filming. Um. And there's actually a
rumor that that Mr Shrek was a vampire. He had
a really weird appearance and he had really strange habits. Um.
So I started to do a little research and it
turns out that's not the case. Um, he was not

(01:49):
in fact a vampire. He was actually a very well
respected German stage actor. Um and after No s Ferat
he became very very famous and went on to starting
like twenty more films. So thinking he wasn't actually a vampire,
that's that's what I got. But I do understand that
there actually was a real Count Dracula that Bram Stoker

(02:12):
modeled his character on. Um, that there was a man
who actually lived. Is that is that fact or fiction?
Was there a real Count Dracula? There really really was?
Who it was this man named Vlad Tepish and he
was a fifteenth century prince from Wallachia, Glad the Impaler. Yeah,

(02:35):
and well that wasn't the name he preferred. And Paler
was you know, sort of like I don't know, calling
someone a gossip. Maybe it's true about that person character,
but you wouldn't say to that person's face. And his
subjects didn't, they didn't touch that. There's plenty of propagandist
spread about him at the time that called him the Impaler,
but he actually preferred the name uh Vlaude Dracula, which

(02:57):
translated to a son of the dragon, So that name
really that bram Stoker didn't make that name up straight
from the record to the British Museum, Draculum and son
of the dragon. His mother was vlad drug Cuele, and
he chose the dragon, you know, to embody his character
as a very sort of like fearsome and bow down
before me leader. And ironically enough, he really wasn't like that.
He was pretty subservient to the Turks, and Vlad grew

(03:20):
up essentially being told he also would be subservient to
the Turks. Didn't his father send him as like a
gift to the Sultan. He did, and Vlood started, you know,
plotting his revenge, and he was a defender of Christianity
and so he decided he was going to overthrow the Turks,
and overthrow them he did. He was pretty intense about

(03:40):
his mission. He consolidated power and his hometown as part
of his mission to bring a more unified front eastern Europe.
And it's pretty crazy the way he did this. He
invited all of the regional nobility to dinner, and he
got them in his dining room, and then essentially he
was like, and change of plans. Instead of eating dinner,
you know, we're gonna get readabilitate this old, delapidated castle.

(04:02):
So he had the march fifty miles away and he
put them to work restoring this castle, not like a
fun tie Pennington way, but like in a really scary
work until you die. And if you don't die doing this,
I'm going to and pale you later. And didn't he didn't.
He kill off the infirm and the elderly first, and
then you know, put the stout ones to work and
they worked for a while doing this, right they did,

(04:23):
they did. Finally they got the castle in working order.
And then you know his next step with his kingdom,
and he didn't want any poor people bringing his his
kingdom down, so he murdered all the poor. Yeah, tens
of thousands, if not arguably a hundred thousand people died
thanks to lad right. Yeah. And then he decided that
he was going to you know, counteract the Turkish forces

(04:46):
that might be closing in on him. So he took
his people who were really sick, dress them up as Turks,
send them to go live with the Turkish forces. And
that was one of the first forms of biological warfare
on record, because they spread their diseases. Yeah, and it
worked like a charm as far as it did. But
he he did hate the Turks that he was actually
raised um for many years. He spent his formative years

(05:07):
basically under Turkish control as a prisoner when his father
sent him as a gift to the sultan Um. So
he learned to hate the Turks. But he also learned
something other, something very significant, from the Turks, and that
was impaling, which is where he got vlad Tepish the impaler.
He loved to impale people. And this is not one
of my favorite part of the story, but I know
it is one of yours, hopefully, y'all. Oh, you dazzle

(05:28):
everyone with your definition of impalement. So basically with when
you when you think about being impaled, you know that
sounds bad enough, right. Um. I did some research on this,
and there's actually a very strict procedure for impaling a
human being. Uh. And Lad had this thing down, Pat,
let's hear it. Okay, So you take some money, Um,

(05:48):
you take a poor victim. Uh, and you tied one
one foot to a horse and the other foot to
another horse, and very slowly the horses would start to separate.
So the eyes now up on his hands, with his
legs spread behind him, with no recourse for shutting his
legs whatsoever. Vlad preferred spears that were rounded at the

(06:10):
tip and oil because he didn't want to tear any
internal organs on the way in. Um, there's really no
polite way to put this. Basically, while with the legs spread, uh,
the the uh, the staff was introduced into the victim's
anus and slowly pushed all the way through until it

(06:31):
literally came out his or her mouth. Okay, that was
just the beginning. After that, after they were fully impaled,
they would be lifted up into a vertical position, h
planted into the ground, and left to die, where they
would spend sometimes days. Some some of these people actually
died in starvation. They were fully aware of what was

(06:52):
going on, and um, it was probably the worst way
to die ever imagined by man. So if any of
you were listening after that, um, As though that weren't
bad enough, there were records that supposedly say that flawed
Tepish a k a lad Dracula like to take his
meals outside among the dying, impaled victim and you I

(07:17):
imagine that there was a lot of groaning and screaming
and it probably wasn't very pleasant sound, No, but he
was a very sick man, Yeah, he was. There was
also well I think this is probably where the Dracula
legend came from. Uh. He supposedly once invited some Turks
uh to meet with him, and when they got there, um,

(07:39):
he had some prisoners that he'd already captured that were
Turks uh, and he killed one of them in front
of the Turks and and drank the blood of this victim,
which caused the Turks to turn around and leave very quickly. Um,
which I I imagine that's probably where the vampire legends
that sort of sort of worked like a charm, and

(07:59):
we invent and earlier, there was a lot of propaganda
spread about Vlad Dracula, and conveniently enough this sort of
coincided with the invention of Guttenberg's printing press, so it
had more recently been used to print copies of the Bible,
and next people turned to printing just volumes and volumes
and volumes of documents against the horrors of Vlad Dracula.

(08:22):
I think historians suggests that we would not even probably
be aware of Lad Tepish had had this propaganda against
him not been printed so voluminously. And uh, we probably
probably would have been even further forgotten had bram Stoker
not basically accidentally ran across these these pamphlets and these
books h in the British Museum, so he his enemies

(08:45):
basically um uh contributed to his everlasting lagend there youk
out And even today apparently there's this new video game
coming out. And I'm not much of a gamer myself.
I'm more likely to sit down with the latte and
a copy of Vogue. But a pair ly you can
play this thing called The Path of the Dragon, and
it takes you through the ruins of Vlad Tapiss Castle,

(09:09):
and they call the village, I think of a lot
of veast or something like that. And we know for
a fact he didn't live in Transylvania. He lived in Lakia.
But um, you could sort of go on a virtual
tour of the castle. Just watch your stuff. You don't
want to get them failed. Yeah, you can read even
more about vlad Tapis in who is the real Countcula?

(09:31):
Where was the real Count Dracula? And for other delightful
stories of people who supposedly drank their victim's blood. You
can also read about Elizabeth Bastery and was a Hungarian
countess the Morald's most prolific serial killer, both on how
staff works dot com for moral this and thousands of
other topics. Because at how stuff works dot com, let

(09:51):
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at how stuff works dot com.