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Hollywood recasts Dracula as a cursed romantic, but history tells a different story: Vlad III was a real Christian ruler whose brutal tactics helped halt Islamic conquest of his homeland.

I was recently looking for something to watch over the holidays and came across the trailer for a recently released movie called Dracula: A Love Tale (2025). It could be summarised as follows: When a 15th-century prince denounces God after the devastating loss of his wife, he inherits an eternal curse and becomes Dracula. Condemned to wander the centuries, he defies fate and death, guided by the hope of being reunited with his lost love.

Ever since the publication of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897), the popular imagination has been fascinated with the horrifying persona of a blood sucking vampire, who attacks at night and can only be killed with a stake to the heart. [1]

There’s only one major problem with this regular Hollywood scenario. Vlad III ‘Dracula’, as he was known, was in fact a real historical figure. And the reason why he is so famous is because he was so effective in terrorising Muslim invaders who sought to conquer his country. In short, Dracula beat them at their own game. [2]

What’s more, Dracula never “denounced God” but upheld the Christian faith to the very end despite constant threats, as well as being abducted by a Muslim Sultan as a child and indoctrinated in the tenets of Islam. What follows is a historical summary produced by Raymond Ibrahim in his excellent book, Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam (Bombardier, 2022), especially chapter 8, “Vlad Dracula: The Dread Lord Impaler”.

The House of the Dragon

During the late 1300s, Muslims sought to invade Wallachia (Transylvania, now modern-day Romania)[3] as part of their regular military jihad or ‘holy war’. However, the voivode,[4] Mircea I, was able to repeatedly repel their military conquest. At a lavish ceremony in 1431, the King of Hungary, Sigismund, formally recognised one of Mircea’s sons, Vlad (1395-1447), as the ruler of Wallachia and also inducted him into the Order of the Dragon. This was a special order which was dedicated to defending Christendom against Muslim invasions. From this time on, he was known as Vlad Dracul, the “Dragon”.

Situated between the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary, the country of Wallachia was often a political pawn between the Muslim and Christian nations on either side. What’s more, because the Wallachians didn’t recognise the custom of primogeniture; all sons of a voivode could make a claim to his throne. This meant that there was constant political infighting with twenty-nine different voivodes in fifty-eight years between 1418 and 1476. What’s more, the ‘boyars’ or nobles of Wallachia constantly switched their support to whichever voivode best represented their own interests.

After Sigmund of Hungary died in 1437, Vlad II accepted vassalage to the Turks. And in the following year, Sultan Murad II raided the country of Transylvania  (Wallacia), enslaving forty thousand Transylvanians. But after 1440, Crusading efforts were rekindled by the Christian King, John Hunyadi, and Vlad II became supportive of his efforts against Islamist tyranny. As a result, the Sultan had Vlad II imprisoned in Adrianople (Turkey).

This gave Hunyadi the opportunity to try and install his own ruler in Wallacia. Murad saw what he was trying to do and released Vlad II on the condition that he offer up his two youngest sons as hostages. Vlad III, who was twelve, and his younger brother Radu, who was six, were immediately imprisoned in a remote Anatolian fortress.

For the next six years, they lived without father, mother, or kin, surrounded by jailers of strange tongue and religion. Tragically, due to his handsome features,[5] Radu was almost immediately sexually groomed by the Sultan to be his own personal ‘catamite’.[6] As the Greek Byzantine historian, Chalkokondyles describes:

It happened that the sultan was almost killed by the boy [Radu] when he had wanted to have sex with him. This was when he [Muhammad] had first gained the throne [in 1451]… He was in love with the boy [then aged 15] and invited him for conversation, and then as a sign of his respect he invited him for drinks to his bedchamber. The boy did not expect to suffer such a thing from the sultan, and when he saw the sultan approaching him with that intention, he fought him off and refused to consent to intercourse with him.

The sultan kissed the unwilling boy, who drew a dagger and struck the sultan on his thigh. He then fled in whatever direction he could find. The doctors were able to treat the sultan’s wound. The boy had climbed up a tree there and was hiding. When the sultan packed up and left, the boy came down from the tree, began his journey, and, shortly afterward, arrived at the Porte and became the sultan’s lover.

But much to the Sultan’s great regret, Vlad III (Count Dracula) would go on to terrorise the Turks in ways which no vampire ever could and which no modern horror movie has ever properly displayed.

The Making of a Monster

Vlad III was the second of Vlad II’s three sons. His upbringing was focused on military training and the development of physical resilience, much like the ancient Spartans. He was referred to as Vlad III Dracula, which means “son of the dragon”. The Muslims, though, referred to him as the “Lord Impaler” due to his penchant for that type of execution.

Two years into their imprisonment, their father, Vlad II, supported a Christian crusade to Varna, sending four thousand Wallachians to assist. Unfortunately, the effort failed, and the fate of his sons looked perilous. However, rather than be tortured or killed, the Sultan used the boys’ lives to guarantee Vlad II’s future political ‘neutrality’. This caused John Hunyandi and the voivode Vladislav II to overthrow Vlad II. He was subsequently beheaded, and his eldest son Mircea was tortured and buried alive.

Sultan Murad sent the eighteen-year-old Vlad III to recapture the throne, with the assistance of an Ottoman force, which he did. However, it only lasted for two months. But then, from 1448 to 1454, Vlad III completely disappears from the scene, and we know very little about him. Only to reappear again suddenly in 1456, where he defeats Vladislav II in single combat.

To ensure his position, he created a personal bodyguard of trusted and loyal warriors to protect him at all times. He then invited all the backstabbing and scheming boyars (noble men) to a banquet where he had them killed, putting an end to any further undermining.

Vlad III also had all those who had engaged in his father’s and brother’s murders impaled, terrifying anyone from daring to scheme against him. And finally, he transformed the military by transferring the wealth of the boyars to a trusted group of soldiers and advisors.

Most importantly of all, though, Vlad III completely broke away from the Ottoman Empire and made an agreement with Hungary to be political allies and come to each other’s aid. But only three months later, the Hungarian governor tried to betray Vlad III in support of another voivode named Dan. Vlad III defeated his attempted cue and forced Dan “to dig his own grave and ordered that the funeral service be read according to the Christian rite, and then he had him beheaded next to his tomb.”

Vlad II was extremely popular with the peasants because they no longer had to pay the Islamic tax of money to the Ottomans or send their children to fight in the Muslim armies. He also married a relative of the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus, to secure the allegiance between the two nations.

The Muslim Response

In 1461, the new Sultan, Muhammad II, sent a delegation to Vlad III demanding three years’ worth of tribute and five hundred boys for the janissary corps. In response, Vlad III had their turbans nailed to their heads and sent back with nothing. The Sultan then tried to trick Vlad III with a false offer of peace. But he found out about it and defeated the key people involved—Yunus Bey and Hamza—impaling their heads on stakes outside his castle.

Vlad III then got together an army of two thousand men, crossed the Danube River and captured the military fortress of Giurgiu in Nicopolis. 23,884 Turks were killed. Vlad III then went through the surrounding countryside killing men, women and children, setting everything on fire. The response of the Turks was terror, and many fled.

In 1462, Sultan Muhammad II gathered an army as “vast as the sea” comprised of somewhere between 150,000 to 300,000 men. In comparison, Vlad III could only raise 30,000, and these were mostly peasants. They hid their women and children in secret mountain and forest retreats.

They used their use of canons to force their way ashore. According to one chronicler, “they inflicted such a merciless punishment on Wallachia that it seemed as if the end of the world had come, shedding much blood with their terrifying swords.” The Muslims specifically targeted and sorted out the women and children, whose secret location had been given up by Vlad’s younger brother Radu. Many surrendered, but Vlad and his army fled to the mountains and woods, leaving the water sources poisoned. The Muslim army suffered terribly in the heat of summer, and after seven days were completely exhausted.

Vlad III engaged in guerilla warfare tactics, picking off parts of the army who went astray. Meanwhile, the Hungarians failed to provide any assistance. What’s more, the Romanians saw their opportunity and started to fight against the Wallachians on another front.

The Terror of the Night

Out of desperation, Vlad III launched one of history’s most daring assaults by trying to attack the Sultan directly in the dead of night. This surprise move caused much terror and confusion in the Muslim camp. Vlad III retreated to his castle. But when the Sultan came to it, he was met with a literal forest of victims. Namely, the impaled bodies of Turkish captives spanning a distance of six miles in circumference around Vlad III’s castle.

There thousands of stakes of various heights held the remaining carcasses of some 20,000 Turkish captives; their bodies were in a state of complete decomposition, due to the heat of the summer and the ravages of ravens and other Carpathian birds of prey, many of which had made their nest within the skulls and skeletal remains of the victims.

Barely recognisable because of the higher stakes used in deference to their position, were the remains of the Greek Katabolinos (Yunus Beg) and Hamza Pasha, who had been impaled months before. The tattered remains of their gaudy vestments fluttered against the evening sky.

The entire area reeked with the stench of death—the smell of rotting flesh. Dracula had deliberately stage-managed this sinister spectacle as part of his terror tactics to destroy whatever spirit was still left in Muhammad after the unsuccessful assassination attempt a few days before. Indeed, the “forest of the impaled” was horrible enough to discourage the most stout-hearted officers who witnessed the scene.

As a result of all this, the Sultan decided to return home. But in what would prove to be a masterstroke of political diplomacy, Muhammad sent Vlad’s brother Radu back to Wallachia to broker a settlement. In short, they could continue to suffer with Vlad Dracula or submit to the Islamic sultan and prosper with Radu as their new voivode. Radu was quoted as saying:

I am aware of the mighty forces that the sultan controls, which sooner or later he will use to lay waste what remains in your country. If we continue to oppose him, we shall be despoiled of all that is left to us. Why do you not reach an agreement with Sultan Muhammad? Only then will you have peace in the land and in your homes. Are you aware that there are no cattle, no horses, no farm animals, no food left in this country? [Before retreating, the Turks “drove away more than two hundred thousand pack animals, horses, and cattle” from Wallachia. [7]] Surely you have borne such suffering long enough because of my brother, because you were loyal to this man who was responsible for more suffering than any other prince.” [8]

Vlad III, though, still held out hope that the King of Hungary would still come to his aid. As Ibrahim explains:

Not, of course, that the indefatigable Impaler thought he was through. In the fall of 1462 he still harboured hopes that the Hungarian king, Matthias Corvinus—this defender of Christendom and son of John Hunyadi—would be true to his provision and help spear a counterattack to oust the Turkish puppet Radu from Wallachia. Even the pope expected this; following the aforementioned Council of Mantua in 1459, Pius II had given Matthias much of the funds raised for Crusading to liberate the Balkans from—not sit idly by and cede more territory to—the Turks. [9]

In response, the Hungarian king engaged in a massive propaganda campaign. This was greatly aided by the invention of the printing press. As Ibrahim describes:

Appearing under titles such as “The Frightening and Truly Extraordinary Story of a Wicked Blood-Drinking Tyrant Called Prince Dracula”, these pamphlets became instant bestsellers. No depravity was spared Vlad; the stories discussed in graphic detail how he boiled people alive, shredded others “like cabbage”, forced “parents to eat their children impaled and broiled, husbands to eat their wives’ breasts,” forces Tatars to swallow their own semen, and built secret trapdoors to drop his victims “on cunningly located stakes below”. [10]

Due to these alleged atrocities, Dracula went from being known as the “Son of the Dragon” to the “Son of the Devil”. Vlad III was captured and imprisoned for thirteen years, from 1462 to 1475.

But in one of those incredible twists of history, the king of Hungary releases Vlad from gaol and asks for his help against the Turks. This is because Stephen of Moldavia had helped to overthrow Radu and then assisted in the Turks’ invasion of Moldavia. To sweeten/secure the deal, Vlad III was given the king of Hungary’s first cousin, Jusztina Szilagyi, in marriage.

Vlad went on to secure victories against the Turks in Bosnia and Serbia as well as Moldavia. Such was the fear surrounding Vlad III that:

As soon as he [Sultan Muhammad] learned of the approaching of Stephen Bathory and Vlad the Impaler, he lifted the siege [of the city of Neamt] abandoning the canons. He took flight and never stopped until three days later when he arrived at the Danube, when the original journey had taken several weeks.[11]

Vlad regained the throne of Wallachia in late 1476, but just a month later, the Turks again entered the country and this time defeated him. Florescu explains the events as follows:

Dracula was killed with great cunning, because the Turks wished to avenge the great enmity which he had borne against them for so long and also the great damage inflicted on them. They hired a Turk as one of his servants with the mission of killing him while he served him. The Turk was apparently instructed to attack Dracula from the back. He was then to cut off his head and bring it back on horseback to the sultan.

Assessing Dracula’s Legacy

While the violence of Vlad III is unquestioned, it’s important to stop and consider what would have been the result of a more pacifist approach. Raymond Ibrahim argues:

Despite it all, Vlad always managed to rise again and defy the Turks in ways few others could. Regardless, following his death, Wallachia—like Albania and Hungary following the deaths of Skanderberg and Hunyadi, respectively—was quickly subjugated by the Turks, and would remain under Ottoman rule (effects of which are still apparent) for nearly half a millennium

Without such men as Lord Impaler, the Albanian Braveheart, and the White Knight to guide and inspire—and through sheer acts of will to defeat the Muslims in several encounters despite outrageous odds—it was inevitable that the entire Balkans region would eventually succumb to the Ottomans, thanks to selfish, cowardly, or opportunistic rules and nobles, but even more so, to Christendom’s fractious nature, exacerbated by the Catholic/Orthodox and later Protestant divide. [12]

While it would be easy to dismiss the actions of Vlad III ‘Dracula’ as going too far, we must remember the day and age in which he lived. Vlad III had been abducted as a child, and his brother became the sexual plaything of the Muslim Sultan. Dracula himself was inflicted with terrors that very few people have experienced or could imagine.

Not only that, but Vlad III successfully defended his nation against the constant threat of Islamic invasion. These were not the actions of mere ‘lone wolves’ but the sustained attack of them hunting in ‘packs’…

They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and that is definitely the case with the legend of ‘Dracula’. Vlad II ‘Dracula’ was a real Christian historical hero, and as such, there is still a lot we can admire and learn. [13]

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[1] See Raymond T. McNally & Radu Florescu, In Search of Dracula: The History of Dracula and Vampires (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).

[2] It is difficult to know exactly what was fact and fiction. “One German pamphlet produced a couple of hundred years after Vlad’s death came with the salacious title: The shocking story of a MONSTER and BERSERKER called Dracula who committed such unchristian deeds as killing men by placing them on stakes, hacking them to pieces like cabbage, boiling mothers and children alive and compelling men to acts of cannibalism.” See McNally & Florescu, In Search of Dracula, 84.

[3] Transylvania became part of the Kingdom of Romania in 1920 by the Treaty of Trianon.

[4] A ‘voivode’ is a local governor or ruler in central or eastern Europe, in particular a semi-independent ruler of Transylvania.

[5] He was known as “Radu the Handsome”.

[6] A catamite is a young boy kept for homosexual practices.

[7] Chalkokondyles, 397.

[8] Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, Dracula: Prince of Many Faces (New York: Back Bay Books, 1989), 151; Kurt W. Treptow, (ed) Dracula: Essays on the Life and Times of Vlad the Impaler (Oxford: Centre for Romanian Studies, 2019), 438. Quoted in Raymond Ibrahim, Defenders of the West, 294-295.

[9] Ibrahim, Defenders of the West, 296.

[10] Ibid, 297.

[11] Ibid, 302. Treptow, 187.

[12] Ibrahim, Defenders of the West, 305.

[13] For an excellent historical overview of Vlad III ‘Dracula’, see especially Kurt W. Treptow, Vlad III Dracula: The Life and Times of the Historical Dracula (Las Vegas: Histria, 2022) as well as Raymond Ibrahim, Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam (Bombardier, 2022). Chapter 8, Vlad Dracula: The Dread Lord Impaler.

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Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: Theodor Aman, “Vlad the Impaler and the Turkish Envoys”.