As promised the other day, here's the real history of Vlad the Impaler. If you want the juice on Dennis the Menace you'll have to find it yourselves. There's juice enough in this one though, in fact so much juice I'm splitting it into two.
Our Vlad, Vlad Dracul, really was the Vlad that Dracula was based on. Of course, the real story has nothing to do with vampires, sweet transvestites or vicious murdering antelope (that was Vlad the Impala).
He was born in 1431 in Sighisoara, in modern day Romania. Although Sighisoara is just inside Transylvania, Vlad went on to rule the province of Wallachia, to the south. He ruled as a voivod, or pince. You may have heard of the province of Vojvodina, in Serbia. The name simply means Princeland. Incidentally, just to give you an idea of the absolute futility of ethnic state building in that part of the word, this is a map of Vojvodina by ethnic population.
The Danube marks the southern border of Wallachia and Romania. This will be important in our narrative, because the Ottoman Turks had reached the Danube in their long campaign to strengthen their grip on the Balkans (ooh-err). From their starting point in central Turkey they'd spread west, conquering Thrace (eastern Greece), Bulgaria and Serbia. This was the period of the battle of Kosovo which the Serbs make such a fuss about, with about as much historical legitimacy as the British claim to Calais.
Throughout the time of Vlad's reign he was at war with the Ottomans, the Hungarians, or rival claimants to his own throne, and this constant state of conflict may have contributed to the harshness of his world view. His father and brother were assassinated when he was sixteen, on the orders of John Hunyadi, ruler of the Empire of Hungary. The assassin (the Assassins! There's a topic you're going to get) peeled the skin off his father's face before he killed him and blinded his brother then buried him alive, so Vlad's life was informed by a sense of the grotesque from early on.
Not that he was all that keen on his old dad, who'd sent him to the Turks as a hostage when he was a boy. The Turks often maltreated him, and he came to hate them, but that didn't stop him accepting their help to seize the Wallachian throne after his father's murder.
Hunyadi pushed the Turks out of Wallachia, and Vlad fled to Moldavia. Then he made a tactical shift, known in our times as a betrayal, and joined with Hunyadi, murderer of his father and brother, to get his country back. Hunyadi gave him the support he needed, then conveniently died of the plague, leaving him in control of an independent Wallachia without owing loyalty to anybody. Which was nice for him, but perhaps less of a pleasure for everybody else.
This really is the story with everything. Treachery, torture and plague, that's proper history for you. And nobody's even been impaled so far. An unfortunate omission, which I promise will soon be rectified.