/jp/ - Otaku Culture

The most famous person in these lines is certainly Prince Vlad the Impaler of Wallachia. In legend and horror, one might almost say romance, this cruel man has grown into the paradigmatic vampire, Count Dracula, though his home has been slightly relocated, from Wallachia to Transylvania and the Carpathian Mountains (between Transylvania and Moldavia). Until recently, I was under the impression that Prince Vlad Dracul (1436-1442, 1443, 1447) was Vlad the Impaler. However, a Romanian correspondent has pointed out that Prince Vlad the Impaler was not Vlad Dracul but instead Prince Vlad T,epesh (1448, 1456-1462, 1476, also "Vlad Draculea"), his son. This seems to be the case, and I have corrected the table accordingly. This correspondent also pointed out the interesting career of Iancu de Hunedoara (János Hunyadi) as Prince of Transylvania and Regent of Hungary, for which links have been installed.

The title of these rulers was Voivode, a word that we even find in Bram Stoker (Dracula, Penguin Books, 1897, 1993, p.309). This term no longer appears in convenient Romanian or Hungarian dictionaries, for any of its meanings (c.f. NTC's Romanian and English Dictonary, Andreí Bantas, NTC Publishing Group, 1995; Hippocrene Concise Dictionary, Hungarian, Hungarian-English, English-Hungarian, Géza Takács, Hippocrene Books, 1996; or Hippocrene Standard Dictionary, English-Hungarian Dictionary, T. Magay & L. Kiss, Hippocrene Books, 1995). Those meanings began with "duke" or "prince" and ultimately declined to merely "governor," which would have been appropriate to Wallachia or Moldavia under the Turks. This word is actually of Slavic origin, and is thus discussed under Eastern Europe.