The True Vlad Dracula (A Video Essay) 

One of the best part in the anime... shame about the ending with Vlad.

@badgamemaster He was a Lancer. That's just how they go down.

We know that. I hope that some people will learn that too in the future

I just hope that Vlad would find his current fame amusing. I mean his name is known by pretty much everyone. A villain or a hero he's a favourite character of many people.

If it's any consolation, even in the novel it's pretty clear to anyone who knows what the hell they're reading that Vlad III Dracula and Count Dracula are not the same individual. Bram Stoker was under the belief, thanks to a wildly-inaccurate book about Romanian history, that the name "Dracula" was simply given as a surname to anyone with a reputation for cunning, courage, and/or cruelty; so he gave the name to his Count who existed in a later age than Vlad and actually tried to replicate one of Vlad's exploits. But the historic Voivode and the Count are not and have never been the same person, not in fiction and certainly not in real life.

And to those who are properly educated in history consider him one of the great heroes of the ancient world. Yet Prince Vlad would be highly amused at his current year reputation

Dude that's Bad Ass Ive always saw him as a fair but firm ruler who did what he had to to protect his people mad respect for the guy

Dang! That is a good comparison!

Definitely

Meanwhile, there's no nuance with the Austrian Painter.

@@lucascoval828 honestly, I'd say nowadays people are more empathetic towards Hitler as they learn more about his history. He was still an evil bastard at then end of the day but the question remains, what went wrong?

@Kieran Adamson Fair enough. It's good to discuss these aspects of history without someone every 5 minutes going, "So what you're saying is?"

Not really he turned Wallachia and Ottoman Bulgaria to a battleground and rural people paid the price of his thirst for power He was neither a villain nor a hero and like the every monarch of his time he had only one goal: power For military matters he was mid and never faced an Ottoman army head on and only contucted a raid which was an ultimate failure and forced him to flee his country only to be imprisioned in Hungary like a clown and when he returned this time Turks captured and beheaded him He was nothing mora than a nuisance for Ottomans compared to real threats like Skanderberg, Stephan the Great, Jon Hunyadi and Uzun Hasan He’s only known today because of his vampire fan-fiction

@@rohansensei5708as stated in the OP, he is revered in Romania. He’s basically their George Washington figure and credited for his part in helping forming the country that went on to be what we know today. Because of this, a lot of his less stellar feats are swept under the rug. Every nation does this with their founding heroes, even if in reality those people were kind of pieces of shit. To suggest know that the Dracula story is the only reason he’s known today is just baffling. There is an entire country who revers him not for his part in the Dracula story, but for what he did in life. And he obviously was of some Notoriety to have been put into the story in the first place. Who knows how well known he would be today if that story had never been written, but it is most certainly not the only reason we know his name

Did you think that it would be like a movie where the protagonist is literally perfect to the point of being inhuman in how flawless they are? Reality is far less clear cut. Black and white give way to a lot of gray. Case in point; to us Romanians he's a national hero that fought tooth and nail for our independence and sovereignty, only to betrayed time and again , often be those closest to him, and yet it's because of his rule of Wallachia and his cousin Stephen the great who ruled Moldova that the seeds of what would eventually become the Romanian national identity were planted. I also see it as incredibly ignorant of history abd unfair to single out Dracula when everyone in that time period did things that when we look at them through a modern lense, seem so barbaric, and yet we must account for two things. The first is that in that time period everyone did cruel and unimaginable things to their enemies. For instance, polish raiders would sack our lands and rape our women. The Turks as well in their initial invasion, plus making many of us slaves, including Vlad Dracula (Dracula in old slavic/ Romanian is "son of the dragon") and his brother Radu the Handsome. If you were enslaved by the people that brutally murdered your father would treat them kindly once you became prince? Probably not would be my guess. The Hungarians west that occupied Transylvania which is on the western side of the country over the carpathian mountains were even more brutal than Vlad Tepes ever was. For instance they'd literally tie people up by hands and by their feet, the hand horses pull them apart, literally tearing them to shreds, and often for petty things too, like when a Hungarian garrison commander wanted the daughter of the village elder abd they refused, they'd do that to him , and probably the girl too at times. Another method used by the Hungarians as well as the Saxons was to tie people to spoked wooden or stone wheels and roll them down a mountainside. My point is, I don't understand why Dracula gets singled out when this was a very turbulent and excessively violent time period where such things we'd today consider atrocities, back then was just an average Tuesday. You can't judge history through a modern lense. You have to examine the circumstances and environment they found themselves in and that made them what they were. It would be equally unfair if I said Robert E Lee was a barbaric monster when in reality he was probably just a normal army Colonel, stuck between a rock and a hard place during a turbulent and uncertain time.

@Eastern Rebel I wasn't making a moral judgment on Dracula or Romanians. I know it was a different time with different standards. I'm just taken aback by the brutality of that era in general.

@@chidoman1595 Oh yeah it absolutely was. In truth not that much has changed, we just pretend it is has, but in times of true crisis, we are still the same humans that all our ancestors were, perhaps worse. All it it takes is for the right conditions to present themselves and you will see everything that makes us think we're so sophisticated and "Civilized" vanish seemingly overnight, and all it takes is a set of circumstances that causes a switch to flip inside you. We are still Animals at our core

Shrikes are psychos birds man. Not only they impale insects on the barbs of various plants, they make stashes of impaled corpses and use the said stashes to attract female shrikes.

Yeah... I feel like if Vlad was born and ruled today, he'd end up doing things VERY differently to how he did them way back when. But you can't fault him for trying his damnedest to secure his nation and protect his people with the only means he had at his disposal.

Lu Bu

It was wrong for them to do that so by God Almighty may that be changed in Jesus name

Funny enough, Raven himself made a warmonger legend, and her origin and personality is very similar to Vlad Dracula. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-dniTGugHmmo.htmlfeature=shared

I'll have to look over the full playlist, but the one at that point is called "Monster of God."

@@RavenKnightYT thank you very much God bless you and would you ever think there would be a animation of Vlad Dracula versus The Count Dracula what type of death battle do you think it would be something in a few minutes or a full-on series???

Probably because of his false reputation.

@@RavenKnightYT Didn't the pope like him though?

​@@skeletonnoise6178 on what i heard the story of his conversion to catholicism are contested. Also his cousin(Ștefan the Great and Holy,"Ș"="sh" noise) got sainthood (in the orthodox faith,by the Romanian Patriarch) in the 90' if i am not wrong.

@@alexandrub8786 As long as he saw Jesus of Nazerth as the son of God and the messiah. I would say he's a christan, rather stupid of us to divide are selves

@@skeletonnoise6178 pretty sure that the founding myth of Wallachia and Moldova were,"the king commands to convert to catholicism or you will lose you lands dirty orthos" and them going south of the carpathians or overthrowing the March of Moldova. It is kinda hard to ignore the religious division in the area when that was a big part of the area.

Is this meant to be sarcastic??

​@@brotherlorcalthetheloyalis4928tbf, nero likely got framed for the fire stuff.

@@brotherlorcalthetheloyalis4928 😛

@@funbro99 that part….yeh probably

@@brotherlorcalthetheloyalis4928 and im pretty sure romania praises vlad as a hero, sorta how french praise napoleon. Every nation has their own heroes thats a villian to another's nation

Yes, Raymond Ibrahim was the major source I drew from. Did I not add him as a primary source in the Works Cited? I never once claimed his work as my own. I even refused to monetize the video because I wanted to make sure that I did not profit from his (and other peoples) work. I actually did look at some of the sources he cited in his bibliography. I quoted them because, like him, I wanted to ensure that those authors and researchers got credit as well. So I did give credit. You’ll find I NEVER said that all this research was my own. This was a video essay compiling sources from far better than me.

@@RavenKnightYT Okay, fair enough. I'm a college professor with lots of experience in historical research and writing, and it's just my pet peeve when students read one secondary history book, and then rely entirely on that one book for their accounts, including by using and quoting the exact sources in that one book. But then, they cite the same primary sources that that one book cites, as if they did their own research from scratch, when in fact they never even consulted those primary sources. In watching your otherwise fine video, it became clear to me that it was entirely based on Ibrahim's account, which I recently read and liked, as even the primary sources you quote are the same ones quoted in Ibrahim's, implying you didn't actually consult those books and find quotes on your own, but rather used the quotes Ibrahim found. Anyway, like I said, it's just a pet peeve of mine -- one that I see all the time when grading.

Interesting. You accuse me of oversimplification due to this one line...and yet your comment is also an oversimplification. You lost your shit over a single line that, quite frankly, isn't entirely inaccurate. I looked up the Battle of Vaslui, and yes, Hungary, Romania, and Poland were allied against the Ottomans for that battle. That doesn't detract from my point in the slightest as I specifically said "Hungary, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia." While these nations did often forge alliances temporarily or for show, they were often turned against one another again thanks to Ottoman interference. In THIS instance though, the alliance was only hindered by Dracula's assassination. The trials and suffering were not mostly Wallachians, and I don't recall ever saying otherwise. If I did, I'll need to see the time stamp to make doubly sure about the context of why I said it. I like how you put the word "essay" in quotes as if you're discrediting the video, and you tell me to rename the video to something else.........but you enjoyed parts 1-4. So...I should rename it? Odd...seeing as none of your criticisms have to do with the historical information on Dracula, so why should I rename it? And it's not a good "essay," which is also odd since you liked over half of what I had to say, so why are you discrediting it? Your actions present you as an overly angry individual. You simplified the crux of this video down to a single line that I said which you think I should not have said so loosely. Now who's oversimplifying? You could have easily just said "Hey man, in this part, there were other moments where the nations allied themselves such as the Battle of Vasuli." I would have been grateful for the information. Your over the top and over dramatic reaction now only makes me see you as petty, emotional, and rather irritating.