Yes, there was a real Dracula, and he was a true prince of darkness. He was Prince Vlad III Dracula, also known as Vlad Tepes, meaning "Vlad the Impaler." The Turks called him Kaziglu Bey, or "the Impaler Prince." He was the prince of Walachia, but, as legend suggests, he was born in Transylvania, which at that time was ruled by Hungary.

Accordng to legend, Walachia was founded in 1290 by a Transylvanian named Radu Negru, or Rudolph the Black. Dracula's grandfather, Prince Mircea the Old, reigned from 1386 to 1418. He fought to keep Walachia independent from the Turks but was forced to pay tribute to them. He and his descendants continued to rule Walachia, but under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire (Turkey).

The throne of Walachia was not necessarily passed from father to son. The prince was elected by the country's boyars, or land-owning nobles. This caused fighting among family members, assassinations, and other unpleasantness. Eventually the royal House of Basarab was split into two factions -- Mircea's descendants, and the descendants of another prince named Dan II. Dan's descendants were called the Danesti.

Mircea had an illegitimate son, Vlad, born around 1390. He grew up in the court of King Sigismund of Hungary, first probably as a hostage and later as a page. Sigismund, who became the Holy Roman Emperor in 1410, founded a secret fraternal order of knights called the Order of the Dragon to uphold Catholicism and fight Turkey. Vlad was admitted to the Order, probably in 1431. The boyars of Walachia started to call him Dracul, meaning "dragon." Vlad's second son would be known as Dracula, or "son of the dragon." Dracul also meant "devil." So some of Dracula's enemies called him "son of the devil."

Sigismund made Vlad the military governor of Transylvania, a post he held from 1431 to 1435. During that time he lived in the town of Sighisoara or Schassburg. You can still visit the citadel there and even the house where Vlad's son Dracula was born. Today there's a restaurant on the second floor. There's also a mural in the house that may depict Vlad Dracul.

Dracula was born in November or December of 1431. His given name was Vlad. He had an older brother, Mircea, and a younger brother, Radu the Handsome. Their mother may have been a Moldavian princess or a Tranyslvanian noble. It is said that she educated Dracula in his early years. Later he was trained for knighthood by an old boyar who had fought the Turks.

Dracula's father was not content to remain a mere governor forever. During his years in Transyvlania, he gathered supporters for his plan to seize Walachia's throne from its current occupant, a Danesti prince named Alexandru I. In late 1436 or early 1437 Vlad Dracul killed Alexandru and became Prince Vlad II.
Vlad was a vassal of Hungary and also had to pay tribute to Hungary's enemy, Turkey. In 1442 Turkey invaded Transylvania. Vlad tried to stay neutral, but Hungary's rulers blamed him and drove him and his family out of Walachia. A Hungarian general, Janos Hunyadi (who may have been the illegitimate son of Emperor Sigismund) made a Danesti named Basarab II the prince of Walachia.

The following year Vlad regained the throne with the help of the sultan of Turkey. In 1444 he sent his two younger sons to Turkey to prove his loyalty. Dracula was about 13. He spent the next four years in Adrianople, Turkey as a hostage.
In 1444 Hungary went to war with Turkey and demanded that Vlad join the crusade. As a member of the Order of the Dragon, Vlad was sworn to obey this summons. But he didn't want to anger the Turks, so he sent his eldest son, Mircea, in his place. The Christian army was demolished at the Battle of Varna, and Vlad and Mircea blamed Janos Hunyadi. alachian city Tirgoviste. There are different stories about how he died - he may have been tortured and burned, or buried alive. Apparently his father died at the same time. Some say that the assassinations were organized by Hunyadi.

Since Vlad and Mircea were dead, and Dracula and Radu were still in Turkey, Hunyadi was able to put a member of the Danesti clan, Vladislav II, on the Walachian throne. The Turks didn't like having a Hungarian puppet in charge of Walachia, so in 1448 they freed Dracula and gave him an army. He was seventeen years old.
It seems that Dracula's little brother Radu chose to remain in Turkey. He had grown up there, and apparently remained loyal to the sultan.

(www.about-dracula.2wex.com/)

The greatest of vampire legends is, however, built around Vlad the Impaler, also known as Vlad Tepes Dracula. The real Dracula was a Christian crusader who ruled Wallachia, now southern Romania, in the 15th century. Tales of the ruler’s cruelty were legion. He had the bodies of his enemies impaled on stakes across the countryside, and legend is he liked to dine among the impaled bodies. And he didn’t discriminate when choosing whom to torture—he burned noblemen alive and when a group of orthodox priests came to his house and didn’t remove their caps, he had the caps nailed to their heads.

Dracula is said to be responsible for the deaths of more than 40,000 people, though he ruled for just six years in an area with a population of only half a million, making him responsible for the largest number of deaths of a single ruler until modern times.

He was believed to be a vampire because of one famous statement. In an act of psychological warfare, a letter saying that Dracula had been captured was sent to Dracula’s wife while Dracula himself was off fighting the Turks. Believing her husband dead, she killed herself. When the church refused her a Christian burial, Dracula denounced the church.

Scribes recorded that Dracula drew a sword, stabbed it into a crucifix and renounced God. He said, “I will live my life for blood because the blood is the life.”

“That line has been interpreted, reinterpreted and misinterpreted,” says Garza. “It’s where we get the notion of Dracula as blood lust. There’s no historical proof that Dracula actually consumed blood. We know he did a lot of bloody things. He killed a lot of people in horrible, gruesome ways. But that he ever drank blood, we don’t know.”

Dracula’s story made its way to the Anglo-Irish writer Stoker through travelogues, and his imaginative novel “Dracula” was published in 1897. It has never gone out of print. The image of the vampire in popular culture grows from it, and it has spawned everything from rock operas to Sesame Street’s Count von Count.

Vampire stories are perhaps more popular in our culture today than they have ever been. This might seem surprising, given that we have autopsies that confirm death, live in a secular society where charges of heresy aren’t possible and are more likely to cruise cyberspace than cemeteries. But vampires tap into the most primary elements of human experience: life, death, blood, hunger, immortality. They are connected to the questions that will always preoccupy us.

“The reason we live out our lives the way we do is that there is supposed to be something after it. Isn’t there? That ‘isn’t there?’ is never really answered for us,” says Garza. “One of the biggest gambles we all take in life is the assumption, or presumption, that something’s coming afterwards. The vampire story allows the option, the possibility, of answering that question for certain. Because if I were a vampire, I wouldn’t worry about the afterlife, because I won’t get there. I’m living it.”

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