First off...I agree that Vlad was crazy but his actions were not that much different than any other warrior in Eastern Europe of the times. His were just much more ruthless. He was a Crown prince according to a Romanian born member of an organization I belong to who has a Masters in History. It wasn't uncommon to drink the blood of the vanquish to take on their power. It was old superstitions.
As for the Warlock...no its a word that really comes from Scotland and is someone who betrays the coven...a liar-betrayer and can be a man or woman. A witch is a witch is a witch.
At the time Transylvania was in Hungary and both Hungary and Romania claim him.
Here is some other information.
I had permission to print this from the author in our ezine.
Excerpts from an article written by the foremost authority on Stoker, Elizabeth Miller:
Stoker’s original intention was to use Styria (in Austria) as Count Dracula’s homeland, but as a result of his research, he made the change to Transylvania. One of his chief sources was “Transylvanian Superstitions” published in July 1885 in The Nineteenth Century and written by Emily Gerard, the Scottish wife of a Hungarian cavalryman. “Nowhere else,” Gerard writes, “does this crooked plant of delusion flourish as persistently and in such bewildering variety.” In Dracula, Jonathan Harker notes with a similar smugness, “I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool.” Gerard’s article also provided Stoker with some of the folklore surrounding Dracula and his castle: St. George’s Day, “the eve of which is still frequently kept by occult meetings taking place at night in lonely caverns or within ruined walls”; hidden treasures and “the light they give forth, described as a bluish flame”; and the wolf that “continues to haunt the Transylvanian forests.” Also from Gerard came the term “nosferatu,” as well as the use of garlic and the wooden stake.
But is there any actual connection between Transylvania and vampires? To begin with, the word “vampire” is not of Romanian origin. The Oxford English Dictionary says it is Slavic, akin to the Serb “vampir” and Russian “upyr.” The Romanian word “strigoi” (sometimes loosely translated as “vampire”) is used more often for “ghost,” “witch,” “wizard” or “reanimated dead.” The territories that now comprise Romania are mentioned only briefly in early accounts of vampires; Hungary, Poland, Moravia, Silesia and Serbia appear more frequently. During the nineteenth century, the connections became somewhat more pronounced. Joseph Ennemoser referred in The History of Magic (1854) to Wallachia as the land “where the blood sucking vampire hovered the longest, a superstition of the most revolting kind.”
There is a widespread tendency among Romanians to deny the existence of vampire figures in their folk beliefs. This is due, in part, to a problem with semantics. To the modern Romanian, the word “vampire” refers to a supernatural figure that originates in Western culture and may be extended to describe bloodthirsty murderers. During the Communist regime (up to 1989), vampire fiction (including Dracula) was banned in Romania, as representative of the “decadent” West. In addition, there was a determination to counteract the notion that Romania is the home of the vampire and that the world’s most notorious vampire (Dracula) bears the nickname of one of Romania’s national heroes. This has created a significant dilemma for Romanian tourism officials who are eager to capitalize on Dracula as a drawing card for foreign visitors, but who face strong opposition at home to presenting Stoker’s Count as a Romanian icon. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the current dispute in Romania over the proposed Dracula theme park.
Miller, who sees herself as a literary detective, has been asked to edit his scrawly notes on tombstone headings, England's Whitby dialect (where part of the book takes place), plot and characters. Originally, Dracula was going to be from Steria, Austria, but then Stoker read Emily Gerard (1885/1888) on the folklore of Transylvania (now in Romania, but in Hungary then), which sounded more exotic than Styria, Austria, Miller surmises. Gerard also wrote that the vampires were called "nosferatu," but subsequent research shows no such word exists. "It must've been a word misheard," Miller said. Possibly it was nosopharos -- bearer of plague; nesapherat -- suffering; or nekeratu -- evil one.
