The historical Dracula resides somewhere in the mists of superstition circling a forest of legend. Vlad's title was Voivode of the kingdom was Wallachia, a borderland between the Christian and Islamic worlds. King Sigismund of Hungary formed the secret order of the dragon to uphold Christianity and to defend against the Ottomans. The emblem of the martial society was a dragon, with its wings extended hanging on a cross. Vlad's father, Vlad 'Dracul'(the Dragon), was admitted because of his gallantry. Vlad the II was called to a meeting with the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Instead of simply accepting the Voivode's submission, the Ottomans seized the Wallachian ruler and his two sons. While the monarch was to taste freedom, his sons faced captivity in the lands of the foreign conqueror. In 1442 Vlad II refused to support Turkish moves into Transylvania. The Varna Crusade is launched and fails against the Turks, and Vlad II supports fellow Christians in the endeavor. In revenge, the Sultan assassinates Vlad II, and 'Dracula' takes the throne. Once, when the Turks tried to invade, they were frightened by a forest of impaled on the shore of the Danube. In 1461, Mohammad II, the conqueror of Constantinople, was sickened by such a sight of twenty thousand corpses. This large group of executed people was known as the Forest of Impaled). Vlad often would arrange the impalement of his victims in geometric shapes, usually around cities. Social rank dictated the length of the impalement stake. He also had other methods of torture: mutilation of sexual organs, burning someone alive and driving nails into the head. He mostly killed local nobles, known as Boyars and also slaughtered merchants. He enslaved some of these Boyars and forced them to work on one of his castles. When their clothes turned to rags, he forced them to continue working naked. The older Boyar class was destroyed. Impalement through the genitals was reserved for maidens who lost their virginity Vlad killed an unfaithful wife like this and then had her skinned. In one famous story, King Vlad called together the poor of his realm and feasted them. When the night had passed, he asked them whether they would like to be without a care in the world. When they answered yes, he had them boarded inside the building and burned it down. These stories would form the legend of Dracula; told by his Saxon enemies, retold in oral folklore, and eventually translated into Russia, where some would be attributed to Ivan the Terrible. Vlad died a violent death, with his own head impaled on a stake by the Ottomans.
