Vlad the Impaler: The Real Prince Who Inspired Dracula and Terrified the Ottoman Empire
BIO 360
Jan 2026 · Miguel Angel Muñoz Vara · AI-narrated by Martin (from Google)
headphones
Audiobook
4 hr 1 min
Unabridged
family_home
Eligible
info
text_to_speech
AI-narrated
Want a free 24 min sample? Listen anytime, even offline.
Add
About this audiobook
Before the vampire, there was the prince. Before Bram Stoker transformed him into the undead Count of Transylvania, Vlad Dracula was a flesh-and-blood ruler of Wallachia — a small, beleaguered principality on the front line of the Ottoman advance into Christian Europe. He was the son of a dragon: his father, Vlad II, bore the title Dracul after his induction into the Order of the Dragon, a chivalric fraternity founded to defend Christendom against the Ottoman tide. The son inherited the name Dracula — son of the dragon, or son of the devil, depending on which meaning of the Romanian word you prefer — and went on to make it the most feared name on the Ottoman frontier. This book tells the story of the real Vlad: his childhood in a Wallachian court shadowed by political violence, his years as an Ottoman hostage that hardened him into one of the most formidable adversaries the empire would face, his six-year principal reign of 1456-1462 that combined effective administration with systematic terror, and the extraordinary military campaign of 1462 in which a prince with twenty thousand men came within moments of killing the greatest sultan of the age. It tells the story of the forest of impaled bodies that greeted Mehmed II's army outside Targoviste — a display of calculated psychological warfare that shocked the Ottoman military establishment and redefined the terms of resistance against overwhelming force. And it tells the story of how Vlad became Dracula: how a fifteenth-century Wallachian voivode was transformed, through the alchemy of political propaganda, romantic nationalism, and Victorian literary genius, into the most famous monster in Western fiction. The real Vlad is stranger and more compelling than the fictional Count. This is his story.
Before the vampire, there was the prince. Before Bram Stoker transformed him into the undead Count of Transylvania, Vlad Dracula was a flesh-and-blood ruler of Wallachia — a small, beleaguered principality on the front line of the Ottoman advance into Christian Europe. He was the son of a dragon:...
Discover more
Rate this audiobook
Tell us what you think.
Listening information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can read books purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
