Vlad the Impaler: The Vegetarian or Vegan Prince Who Inspired Count Dracula

The fifteenth-century cruel prince who was the model for Count Dracula, the famous fictional bloodthirsty human vampire, was probably a vegetarian. Or vegan. In any case, meat was not on his menu. Scientists who did chemical research on letters from Vlad III from Transylvania, in present-day Romania, recently discovered this.

It was Vlad III who partly inspired writer Bram Stoker in 1897 to write his famous, much-filmed vampire book about Count Dracula. Because Vlad III was also called Vlad Dracula, ‘son of the dragon’, because his father was a knight with a dragon on his coat of arms. Vlad Dracula fought for power in what is now southern Romania around 1456, and is said to have killed tens of thousands of people by impaling them on stakes. That is why he was nicknamed Vlad the Impaler.

Molecular traces

Three 500-year-old letters from this Vlad the Impaler have now been examined for molecular traces. Scientist Gleb Zilberstein found the well-preserved letters in the Romanian city of Sibiu, the magazine said The New Yorker. Using strips of plastic film, he removed hundreds of remains of old protein molecules from the letters, including from the spot where Vlad Dracula signed his signature. About 500 traces of molecules were found in this paleo-proteomic study, 100 of which were very old. Of these, sixteen probably belong to Vlad the Impaler.

Chemical analysis of it, in a university laboratory in Catania, Italy, led to scientific conclusions recently published in the journal Analytical Chemistry.

One of those conclusions is that Vlad III probably had a disease that made him cry tears of blood, hemolacria. And he may have had skin and respiratory conditions.