 I
am often asked where does my name come from...Vlad is short for
Vladimir, the name I was given at birth, which translated means "Ruler
of the World". But the most famous person with that name is, without
doubt, Vlad the Impaler...or count Dracula. Vlad
the Impaler (Vlad Tepes in Romanian) was descended from Basarab the
Great, a fourteenth-century prince who is credited with having founded
the state of Wallachia, part of present-day Romania. The most famous of
the early Basarabs was Vlad's grandfather, Mircea cel Batrin (Mircea the
Old). As Wallachian "voivode" (a word of Slavic origin, used in Romania
for the leader of a principality, a war-lord, or a supreme chief),
Mircea was prominent for his struggles against the Ottoman Empire and
his attempts to exclude permanent Turkish settlement on Wallachian
lands.
In 1431, the senior Vlad, then serving as a military commander in the
Transylvanian town of Sighioara, was summoned to Nuremberg by Sigismund,
the Holy Roman Emperor, to receive a unique honor. He was one of a
number of princes and vassals initiated by the Emperor into the Order of
the Dragon, an institution, similar to other chivalric orders of the
time, modelled on the Order of St George. It was created in 1408 by
Sigismund and his queen Barbara Cilli mainly for the purpose of gaining
protection for the royal family; it also required its initiates to
defend Christianity and to do battle against its enemies, principally
the Turks. As an indication of his pride in the Order, Vlad took on the
nickname "Dracul." (The Wallachian word "dracul" was derived from the
Latin "draco" meaning "the dragon.") The sobriquet adopted by the
younger Vlad ("Dracula" indicating "son of Dracul" or "son of the
Dragon"), also had a positive connotation.
Dracula is still an image that can manipulate our
imagination. There are books and movies about him, perhaps the most
noted occurrence in film is in Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 rendition
Bram Stokers' Dracula, though a connection between the vampire
Count and his historical namesake had been made almost 20 years earlier
in the Dan Curtis production of Dracula with Jack Palance. Examples of
the fusion in fiction are numerous, including such novels as Anno
Dracula and The Bloody Red Baron (by Kim Newman),
Children of the Night (Dan Simmons), the trilogy Dracula Lives!
(Peter Tremayne), Drakulya (by Earl Lee) and this present
trilogy. Fiction has made Vlad what he never was in life - a vampire -
and has thus granted him, like his fictional counterpart, immortality.
Well, fiction or fact...when it comes to Dracula, I know two things:
1. I am not a Count.
2. Poor Dracula must have had a real hard time finding a place to nap...
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