Muslims Created Dracula— And I Can Prove It (Sort Of)
Here’s a piece of history that sounds ridiculous until you actually follow the story: Muslims created Dracula. Okay, I’m being deliberately provocative. Muslims obviously did not create vampires, and Bram Stoker—not the Ottoman Empire—wrote Dracula in 1897. But the historical chain that eventually gave us the most famous vampire in Western culture runs straight through the Muslim Ottoman world. And once you know the history, the statement “Muslims created Dracula” becomes a lot less crazy than it sounds. Before Dracula Was a Vampire, Dracula Was a Man Long before Count Dracula was creeping around a Transylvanian castle drinking blood, there was Vlad III of Wallachia , better known as Vlad the Impaler . He lived in the fifteenth century and became infamous for extraordinary violence, particularly impalement. Modern scholarship confirms that collective impalements were a real feature of Vlad's rule and warfare, although the enormous numbers given by some contemporary and later so...