Before Stoker's vampire, Dracula was a Wallachian prince's family nickname
Long before Bram Stoker borrowed it, Dracula was the name a fifteenth-century prince signed on his own letters, spelled Dragulya or Drakulya. Vlad III inherited it from his father, a knight of the anti-Ottoman Order of the Dragon, and spent part of his boyhood as a hostage of the very empire that order opposed.
Vlad was born between 1428 and 1431, the second legitimate son of Vlad II, who took Wallachia in 1436 and earned the nickname Dracul through membership in the Order of the Dragon, founded by Sigismund of Luxemburg to halt Ottoman expansion. In 1442 Sultan Murad II summoned the father to Gallipoli to prove his loyalty; the father was freed within the year, but Vlad and his younger brother Radu were kept as guarantees. In 1447, after John Hunyadi of Hungary invaded, Vlad's father and eldest brother Mircea were killed and a rival cousin, Vladislav II, took the throne.
Vlad's first reign in 1448 lasted only weeks: he seized Wallachia with Ottoman troops while Vladislav was away fighting, then fled when his rival returned after the Ottoman victory at Kosovo. Years of exile in Edirne, Moldavia and Hungary followed. In 1456, now with Hungarian backing, he killed Vladislav and ruled again, purging rebellious boyars and raiding Saxon villages in Transylvania that sheltered his rivals. The execution method he favoured, impalement, gave him his Romanian epithet Țepeș.
Ordered by Mehmed II to pay homage in person, Vlad instead seized the sultan's envoys and in January 1462 attacked Ottoman lands. Mehmed invaded to replace him with Radu, and on the night of 16 to 17 June 1462 Vlad tried to capture the sultan in his camp at Târgoviște. The Ottoman army withdrew, but many Wallachians defected to Radu, and when Vlad sought help from Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, the king imprisoned him at Visegrád from 1463 to 1475.
Freed at the request of Stephen III of Moldavia, reportedly after converting to Catholicism, he won the throne a third time in 1476 and was killed in battle soon after. Pamphlets about his cruelty became some of the first bestsellers in German lands.
Source: Vlad the Impaler
