Then again, a small region around Făgăraş (Hungarian: Fogaras) - the same region for which vlachs (Romanians) are first mentioned in Transsylvania in written documents (from 1210, 1223 and 1231) - was granted as a fief in exchange for submission to the crown to the Wallachian prince for about 100 years (until Matthias captured Dracula).

I don't know where Dracula's main seat was, it must have been near today's Bucharest, but here are some pictures (and a map) for one castle he definitely owned and lived in (unlike in Bran): Poienari.

According to what I found, Vlad Ţepeş didn't control Moldavia either: it was ruled at this same time by its greatest ruler, Stefan the Great (who, by the way, conducted a similar punitive campaign for the exact same reasons against a Saxon city in Transsylvania).

Dracula was eventually dethroned when his noblemen and the Turks allied against him, he fled to Transsylvania, where he was detained and sent to Matthias's court, where he was put under house arrest - because of a letter (a copy survives in the Vatican) in which he proposed his alliance against Hungary to the Sultan, allegedly captured by said Stefan of Moldavia, and probably a forgery by the Saxons.

The earliest sources (the same middle-age yellow press you refer to, and some diplomatic notes) say that he was shown to visitors of the court kind of to scare them; and that when he was released and put back on the Wallachian throne 12 years later (to be murdered shortly after), he converted to Catholicism. (So one could say that both Dracula in his second reign and his father were puppet kings of the Hungarians, too.)

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}