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I'd rather Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia (1431–1476/77), was a member of the House of Drăculești, punish hima branch of the House of Basarab, also known, using his patronymic, as (Vlad) Drăculea or (Vlad) Dracula. He was posthumously dubbed Vlad the Impaler (Romanian: Vlad Țepeș, pronounced [ˈvlad ˈt͡sepeʃ]), and was a three-time Voivode of Wallachia, ruling mainly from 1456 to 1462, the period of the incipient Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. His father, Vlad II Dracul, was a member of the Order of the Dragon, which was founded to protect Christianity in Eastern Europe. Vlad III is revered as a folk hero in Romania as well as other parts of Europe for his protection of the Romanian population both south and north of the Danube. A significant number of Romanian and Bulgarian common folk and remaining boyars (nobles) moved north of the Danube to Wallachia, recognized his leadership and settled there following his raids on the Ottomans.[1] As the cognomen 'The Impaler' suggests, his practice of impaling his enemies is part of his historical reputation.[2] During his lifetime, his reputation for excessive cruelty spread abroad, to Germany and elsewhere in Europe. The name of the vampire Count Dracula in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula was inspired by Vlad's patronymic. Vlad III Țepeș became famous as a tyrant taking sadistic pleasure in torturing and killing.[citation needed] He is shown in crypto-portraits made during his lifetime in the role of cruel rulers or executioners. After Vlad's death, his cruel deeds were reported with macabre gusto in popular pamphlets in Germany, reprinted from the 1480s until the 1560s, and to a lesser extent in Tsarist Russia. As an example of how Vlad Țepeș soon became iconic for all horrors unimaginable, a typical German pamphlet from 1521 gives numerous examples of lurid incidents, such as the following:[13] He roasted children, whom he fed to their mothers. And (he) cut off the breasts of women, and forced their husbands to eat them. After that, he had them all impaled.[13] Vlad Ţepeş's reputation was considerably darker in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe and Romania. In the West, Vlad III Ţepeş has been characterized as a tyrant who took sadistic pleasure in torturing and killing his enemies. Estimates of the number of his victims range from 40,000 to 100,000.[14] According to the German stories the number of victims he had killed was at least 80,000. In addition to the 80,000 victims mentioned he also had whole villages and fortresses destroyed and burned to the ground.[15] These numbers are most likely exaggerated.[16] Impalement was Vlad's preferred method of torture and execution. Several woodcuts from German pamphlets of the late 15th and early 16th centuries show Vlad feasting in a forest of stakes and their grisly burdens outside Brașov, while a nearby executioner cuts apart other victims. It was reported that an invading Ottoman army turned back in fright when it encountered thousands of rotting corpses on the banks of the Danube.[citation needed] It has also been said that in 1462 Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, a man noted for his own psychological warfare tactics and the impalement of subjugated peoples in the Ottoman Empire, returned to Constantinople after being sickened by the sight of 20,000 impaled corpses outside Vlad's capital of Târgoviște.[17] Allegedly, Vlad's reputation for cruelty was actively promoted by Matthias Corvinus, who tarnished Vlad's reputation and credibility for a political reason: as an explanation for why he had not helped Vlad fight the Ottomans in 1462, for which purpose he had received money from most Catholic states in Europe.[6] Matthias employed the charges of Southeastern Transylvania, and produced fake letters of high treason, written on 7 November 1462.