[fable]

Celacena, Docking isn't referring to your message, but to a paragraph by Pennypincher:

1) Location Location Location. They made the Tzimisce to be the heartless rulers of the viovods (sp?) of the "darker lands" like Russia and Transilvania, Romania and what not in times when they were ruled by local lords who, as you pointed out, usualy ruled through terror and fear of "justice".. Which could come at any time for no reason at all.

For what little I've read of it over the years, Vlad certainly didn't rule by terror. He was one of a number of regional lords, a voivode, and spent much of his life in Wallachia repelling invasions by the Turks and Magyars. He did the former under the banner of the Holy Roman Empire, which helped secure him additional advantages he could play against other, nearby rulers who were his rivals. His methods were typical for his period, but no worse than many of the horrific things done in the Italian states, in France, the German states, etc, by their rulers. There's no record that he used impalement on locals. It was a deliberate message to those he deemed invaders. And when Bram Stoker decided he needed a semi-historical character for his Victorian vampire novel, Vlad with his reputation (through German stories) was ready made.

I suspect Stoker chose Romania as his setting for the eminently Victorian reason that it played into contemporary British bigotry and particular foreign stereotypes, but just because it did doesn't mean we have to believe them, ourselves.