The Romanian national hero now infamous as the inspiration for Dracula the vampire has received a rather unfair rap from history. He was cruel to Muslim invaders, but that’s how he saved Christians from Islamic tyranny.
While Halloween was last week, November 8 is the anniversary of Bram Stoker’s 1847 birth. The Irish writer is most famous for his horror novel Dracula, which launched a new era of vampires and other inhuman monsters of legend in popular entertainment and culture. But Count Dracula was not purely a figment of Stoker’s imagination. Stoker based the villain on a number of stories, including the life of the historical warrior prince Vlad.
Vlad Tepes, also called Vlad III Dracula or Vlad “the Impaler,” was a 15th-century prince of Wallachia, which is now part of Romania. His alarming nickname comes from the fact that he cut off the heads of Muslim jihadis and stuck them on spikes to create the “Forest of the Impaled.” Vlad certainly did not invent this method of terrifying invaders, but he did use it so effectively that he saved his country from a much larger horde of Muslim jihadis. He was a Christian champion and a national hero, as historical expert Raymond Ibrahim has explained.
Ibrahim noted that Vlad had been a hostage of the Ottoman Turks as a teen and suffered serious abuse at their hands. He saw the sultan sexually exploit his brother, and watched the Turks impale their enemies. After he returned to Wallachia and became leader of the defending force against a Turkish army outnumbering them ten to one, Vlad remembered all those years of torment and barbarism in the Ottoman empire. The “Forest of the Impaled” was not only a brilliant deterrent tactic, but also revenge by a method the Turks themselves had used so many times.
But revenge wasn’t Vlad’s only motivation. He also wanted, of course, to save Wallachia from foreign tyranny, and contemporaneous sources noted that he was zealous about his faith. Vlad would severely punish domestic criminals but insisted on Christian burials for the executed. He declared that his war on the Turks was “for the preservation of Christianity.” Ibrahim quoted a letter from 1462 in which Vlad described his intent not to “flee before their [the Turks’] savagery, but to stand by all of the Christians,” to attain “victory over the Infidels, the Enemies of the Cross of Christ.” Should Wallachia have fallen, it would have been “a loss for all Christianity.” Vlad absolutely saw himself as a crusader, and many of his contemporaries admired him for it.
This larger-than-life Wallachian prince became the loose basis for the Transylvanian count whom Stoker made the villain of his 19th-century novel. Stoker certainly read some of the sources that emphasized Vlad’s harshness rather than his faith and patriotism. Hence, Dracula became the blood-sucking nightmare of legend.
It is worth noting that Bram Stoker does seem to acknowledge more than once in his novel that the historical inspiration for his Dracula was at one time a great and even a good man. Indeed, there is a constant theme in the book of not only killing vampires but also saving their souls, the presumption being that the doomed undead were virtuous during life. The doctor in the book who tries unsuccessfully to save Lucy from Dracula but does succeed in saving Mina is Van Helsing. He, Mina, her husband, and Lucy’s former lovers (two Englishmen, one American) are trying to make a plan that will enable them both to save Mina and end Dracula’s reign of terror once and for all. This involves not only cutting off the vampire’s head and using plants like garlic, but also using sacramentals such as a crucifix and Christ in the Eucharist.
Van Helsing tells his little group:
“Thus when we find the habitation of this man-that-was, we can confine him to his coffin and destroy him, if we obey what we know. But he is clever. I have asked my friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University, to make his record; and, from all the means that are, he tell me of what he has been. He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land. If it be so, then was he no common man; for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the ‘land beyond the forest.’ That mighty brain and that iron resolution went with him to his grave, and are even now arrayed against us. The Draculas were, says Arminius, a great and noble race, though now and again were scions who were held by their coevals to have had dealings with the Evil One. They learned his secrets in the Scholomance, amongst the mountains over Lake Hermanstadt, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due. In the records are such words as ‘stregoica’—witch, ‘ordog,’ and ‘pokol’—Satan and hell; and in one manuscript this very Dracula is spoken of as ‘wampyr,’ which we all understand too well. There have been from the loins of this very one great men and good women, and their graves make sacred the earth where alone this foulness can dwell. For it is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in all good; in soil barren of holy memories it cannot rest.”
So even while acknowledging the satanic influence and the evil results, Stoker does state that Dracula was once a very great man and that his family was filled with good people. Perhaps more Americans need to read the book rather than simply rely on movies, especially since Hollywood even turned Dracula into a funny animated kids’ character. If they did read as well as watch, Vlad might not have such an undeservedly black reputation. Cruel as he was by modern standards, he knew how to use the weapons of a demonic enemy against them and how to defend Christian Europe.
