Dracula, Prince of Many Faces Read online

  ALSO BY RADU R. FLORESCU AND RAYMOND T. MCNALLY

  In Search of Dracula: A True History of Dracula and Vampire Legends

  Dracula: A Biography of Vlad the Impaler, 1431–1476

  The Essential Dracula: A Completely Illustrated and

  Annotated Edition of Bram Stoker's Classic Novel

  State Library of Stuttgart

  Painting of Dracula recently discovered by Dr. Virgil Cândea of the Romanian Academy of Social and Political Sciences, secretary of the International Association of Southeast European Studies. The painting was in the possession of Nicolaus Ochsenbach, governor of the castle of Hohen Tübingen. It is presently located in the Library of the State of Würtenberg in Stuttgart, and dates back to the early seventeenth century.

  Copyright

  COPYRIGHT © 1989 BY RADU R. FLORESCU AND RAYMOND T. MCNALLY

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL MEANS, INCLUDING INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER WHO MAY QUOTE BRIEF PASSAGES IN A REVIEW.

  Hachette Book Group

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  New York, NY 10017

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  First eBook Edition: November 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-316-09226-5

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to those undergraduates of Boston College who in the spring semester of 1988 were curious enough to enroll in a course entitled The Life and Times of the Historical Dracula. The co-authors gratefully acknowledge the tough criticism, the invaluable suggestions, and, above all, the enthusiasm expressed in the final examinations—the ultimate satisfaction of the teacher-scholar.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Note on Spelling

  Prologue—From the Fictional to the Factual

  1 The World of the Real Dracula

  2 The Education of a Prince 1431–1448

  3 The Thorny Road to Power

  4 A Machiavellian Ruler at Home

  5 Transylvanian Terror

  6 The Struggle Against Mehmed the Conqueror

  7 Imprisonment and Death

  8 The mystery of the Grave

  9 Dracula's Descendants

  10 Beyond the Grave The Many Faces of Dracula

  11 Stoker's Count Dracula, the Vampire

  Conclusion Who Was the Real Dracula?

  A Brief Annotated Bibliography

  (Illustrations appear following pages 74 and 170.)

  Acknowledgments

  IT would be difficult to acknowledge the names of all those who were responsible for aiding in the preparation of this book. One way of doing it collectively is to acknowledge all those authors who contributed important works on the occasion in 1976 of the five hundredth anniversary of Prince Dracula's death.

  The co-authors would like to pay a tribute to a few scholars, among many to whom we are indebted, who made substantial contributions to this work and helped us resolve some problems connected with the life story of Dracula. We owe special thanks to our fellow Dracula hunter Dr. Matei Cazacu of the Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques and the University of Paris (Sorbonne) for having generously placed at our disposal the research of his most recent monograph on the German and Russian narratives. We warmly thank Dr. Cornelia Bodea, senior research associate at the Nicolae Iorga History Institute in Bucharest (and Fulbright Exchange Professor at Boston College from 1987 to 1989), for her many suggestions concerning Stoker's folkloric and historical research. We gratefully recognize the leading expert on the history of the German Saxons of Transylvania, Dr. Adolph Armbruster, presently associated with the Institute for South East European Research at Munich University, for his help in making vital material available to us, from both his personal collection and that in the Munich State Library; Dr. tefan Andreescu of the Iorga Institute, the author of an insightful biography of the historical Dracula (1976), who helped us locate Castle Königstein, the place of Dracula's arrest in 1462; Dr. Mihai Pop, the former director of the Institute of Folklore in Bucharest, who, with his team, Dr. Constantin Eretescu and Dr. Georgeta Ene, was our chief “anchorman” in researching the Dracula castle epic. The original inspiration for this study and our methods of research we owe to the late Constantin C. Giurescu, the dean of Romanian historians, and to Radu Florescu's uncle, the late George D. Florescu, former director of the Museum of the History of the City of Bucharest, the country's leading genealogist.

  We recognize the contribution of detailed information on various points, which we incorporated into our text, from the following scholars: Dr. Nicolae Stoicescu of the Iorga Institute, the author of the first modern Romanian scholarly monograph on Dracula (1976); Dr. Radu Constantinescu of the Romanian State Archives for his invaluable research at the History Museum at Bucharest on the German Saxon code of laws; Dr. Octavian Iliescu, an eminent numismatist, who placed at our disposal the original Dracula coin bearing the effigy of Halley's comet; Dr. Dan Cernovodeanu, now in Paris, well-known heraldist, for his discovery of Dracula's Hungarian descendants, a study more recently completed by Dr. Paul Binder of the Iorga Institute; Dr. Pavel Chihaia, who teaches French in a Munich gymnasium, for his study on the evolution of the dragon symbol in Romanian iconography; Dr. Virgil Cândea of the Academy of Social and Political Sciences in Bucharest for his discovery of a new sixteenth-century portrait of Dracula, which he generously made available to us; Radu tefan Ciobanu, a high-school teacher in Bucharest, for his insights into Dracula's youth and the quaint folkloric anecdotes he has gathered.

  In our research we utilized many libraries and archives that deserve recognition. We are most grateful to Dr. lancu Bidian, director of the Romanian Library and Research Institute at Freiburg-im-Breisgau, the richest resource on Romanian history in the west, and to his able assistant, Irina Nasta, for their time and especially for making an exception to their lending rules by sending rare materials to us across the Atlantic. Dr. tefan tefnescu and his senior research associate at the Iorga Institute, Dr. Paul Cernovodeanu, were responsible for sending countless materials for our benefit from their rich collection. Dr. Mihai Ionescu, associate director of the Institute of Military History (Bucharest), was our link to the excellent resources of the Institute, particularly useful for questions of tactics, uniforms, and weaponry. Freiherr von Adrian-Weiburg, chief archivist at the Nuremberg Archives, provided invaluable bibliographic guides on the Order of the Dragon. P. Gottfried Glasner, chief librarian of the Lambach Benedictine Library in upper Austria, made two separate attempts to locate the original Lambach Dracula manuscript. Dr. Wilfred Kowavich, chief archivist at the Benedictine Abbey of Melk in lower Austria, supplied transcripts concerning the Romanian prior who mentioned Dracula in his chronicle. P. Ochsenbein, the librarian of the library at Saint Gall, offered informative remarks on the original Dracula manuscript in his collection. Dr. C. Göllner, distinguished scholar from Sibiu, placed some important materials of the Transylvanian Museum at Gundelsheim at our disposal—this being the most important museum in the west on the Transylvanian Saxons and housed in the ancient Teutonic fortress of Horneck in Bavaria. Güngör Dilmen, Filiz Caman, and Ghengis Köseolu of the Topkapî Palace Archives in Istanbul made available original Greek and Turkish sources. Professor Charles “Ted” Ahearn, our colleague at Boston College in the Classics Department, translated some Latin texts for us.

  We are also indebted to the Heidelberg University Library for the original photostat of Michael Beheim's poem on Dracula, as well as the poem on the Var
na crusade. The curator of the Philip H. and A. S. W. Rosenbach Foundation Library, Leslie Morris, allowed us a second look at the folkloric and historical titles Stoker used in the composition of Dracula. We were given permission by the Vatican to use and microfilm the unabridged report to Pope Pius II from the papal legate Niccolò Modrussa, in the Corsiniano Collection of the Vatican Secret Archives.

  With regard to the photographs, reproductions, and artwork, we are indebted to Alexandra Altman for her acumen in pointing out the surviving fifteenth-century portions of the old fortress of Belgrade and for a visit to the Military History Museum at Belgrade. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna gave us permission to reproduce both the Dracula portrait and those of some contemporaries, located for the most part at the Ambras Castle Museum in Innsbruck. Baroness Ileana Franchetti (Radu Florescu's niece) obtained permission to photograph the paintings of Pope Pius II located at the Cathedral in Siena. Lodging at her castle in the Dolomites afforded us the opportunity to visit the tomb of one of Dracula's Romanian descendants, at Bolzano, a few miles away. Hélène Maumy-Florescu (Florescu's daughter-in-law), a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, drafted the two maps.

  The co-authors' recent travels to Romania are owed to two awards by the Council on the International Exchange of Scholars (Fulbright Research Fellowship). Our typists, Ellie Waal of Cohasset, Massachusetts, and Karen Potterton of Boston College, deserve a strong note of commendation for putting up with messy and at times nearly indecipherable manuscripts. Above all, this book is a much better one for the patience, diplomacy, and enthusiasm of our editor at Little, Brown, Debra Roth, who in the end helped put it all in proper focus, while making the experience enjoyable, and Glea Humez, our copy editor, whose exceptional knowledge of languages and eye for detail helped resolve many a problem that this polyglot manuscript entailed.

  To our respective families, particularly our wives, Nicole and Carol, we owe a note of apology for having been mostly absent from domestic duties in thought, in work, and in travel. In the end, the co-authors pay a very special tribute to Radu Florescu's son John, for his interest in our work, the many helpful suggestions he made, and his constant words of encouragement. By an odd coincidence, his present employer, the English television personality David Frost, was responsible for introducing the historical Dracula to the American television audience.

  Introduction

  AFTER some twenty years of research and three books about Dracula (both the legendary and the historical figure), the authors feel they owe some words of explanation for their long-term commitments to this subject, as well as their reasons for writing the present book. Both writers have deep and genuine roots to the topic at hand, traced through their forebears. Radu Florescu is the descendant of an old Romanian noble family whose ancestry may be followed back over five hundred years to the times of the real, historical Dracula. One of his ancestors, Vintil Florescu, was Dracula's contemporary and joined the opposition to him by supporting Dracula's brother, Radu the Handsome, who had seized the throne after Dracula's capture by the Hungarian king in the year 1462; Vintil became a member of that prince's council. He later served as a court dignitary under Dracula's half-brother Vlad the Monk, who ruled from 1482 until 1495. As for the co-author of the present book, Raymond McNally, his paternal ancestors came from County Mayo in the West of Ireland, very close to County Sligo, where the mother of Bram Stoker, the author of the novel Dracula, was born. It was an area where Stoker's mother imbibed the well-preserved Gaelic folklore, which she transmitted to her son and which inspired his writings. This common background in Ireland with the author of Dracula may also help to account for McNally's lifelong interest in fairy tales and those stories of the imagination that have a basis in reality. It was Professor McNally's inspiration and flair for research into the historical facts behind legends that led the two authors on their initial search for the historical Dracula. McNally's mother's ancestors came from a German-speaking village near Ljubljana, the present capital of Slovenia. The village is close to the monastery that once housed the Benedictine monk Brother Jacob, author of one of the first authentic fifteenth-century Dracula horror stories. Beyond these personal connections, both authors of the present book are professional historians, who have discovered much new and valuable material since the publication of their previous works on this topic.

  It seems like a lifetime since the two co-authors embarked on their Dracula hunt, which led to the publication of their best-seller In Search of Dracula. By design, that book was a miniature encyclopedic and pictorial pioneer work that included a brief historical sketch of the fifteenth-century Romanian prince who inspired the novel, an examination of the ancient and various vampire beliefs of eastern Europe, the setting of Stoker's novel in its gothic literary tradition, and a short analysis of the better-known Dracula films.

  As a result of our search, several books have been published, in both Europe and America, that attempted to make scholarly a subject hitherto simply dismissed as the product of Stoker's imagination. Reviewers described this quest for genuine sources and prototypes of the Dracula legend as “a minor publishing phenomenon.” Even today, there sometimes appear newspaper articles referring to disclosures pertaining to the true story. Our discovery of the actual location of the real Castle Dracula, described in our first book, perhaps unwarrantedly generated the kind of publicity associated in some sensation-seeking newspapers with Howard Carter's unearthing of Tutankhamen's tomb.

  In bestowing a musical-sounding name upon his fictional vampire count, Bram Stoker added a word to the language of mankind. It evokes the ugly, gaunt, emaciated vampire with pointed ears and long fingernails portrayed by Max Schreck in the 1922 silent classic film Nosferatu; the sophisticated continental-lover type of count, invariably dressed in his tuxedo and black cape, speaking English with a thick Hungarian accent, immortalized by Bela Lugosi in the 1931 Universal movie Dracula; the bloody technicolored six-foot lusty demon with fangs played by Christopher Lee in the 1958 Hammer film Horror of Dracula; and the suave, sexy, velvet-voiced, handsome tempter presented by Frank Langella in the 1978 Universal International picture Dracula. The late poet Ogden Nash paid Dracula the supreme compliment of simply mentioning his name in his Terrible People, knowing that the reader would instantly recognize it.

  Because of the success of our previous book, the historical prototype of this fictional Dracula, a truly extraordinary, flesh-and-blood Romanian ruler of the fifteenth century, began to acquire an identity of his own, propelled to fame partly because of his name's being identical with that of the vampire. Our search for the details of his life story carries the excitement of a genuine discovery. And, in this case, as in others, truth is stranger than fiction. A fortuitous coincidence, the visit of former president Richard Nixon to Bucharest in 1969 (the first visit by an American president to that country), brought two hundred newspaper and media people there just at the time when we began our search; this event resulted in the first newspaper headlines attesting to the authentic historical figure called Dracula and to the existence of the real Castle Dracula. In time, the genuine historical personality acquired dimensions and an identity distinct from that of the vampire. He is remembered best for his unusual method of imposing death—impalement—a fact that is particularly important because it bears an uncanny resemblance to the traditional manner of disposing of vampires by driving stakes through their bodies. The use of the stake may well have helped to establish the separate recognition of the real Impaler by his nickname. This notice was exemplified by a recent Boston radio broadcast in which Daniel Ortega, the strong man of Nicaragua, was referred to as “not as bad as Vlad the Impaler.” There are references now to the historical Dracula in encyclopedias, Reader's Digest, comic strips, and high school and college texts. Historical monuments associated with the real Dracula have become major tourist attractions in Romania. Our book has been used as a guide by the Romanian National Tourist Office.

  The
present book is far more than a response to those who can no longer consult our earlier books. It represents the first comprehensive attempt at putting the life story of Dracula into the broad context of fifteenth-century European history, in the century of the Renaissance, a period of remarkable change. Even a cursory glance at those times may show points of comparison with our contemporary world, which is one reason why historians have often labeled it as marking the beginnings of the modern era. The century is certainly “modern” in terms of the brutality and cruelty of its wars. It also mirrors our century in its ideological confrontation between east and west (Islam vs. Christianity in the fifteenth century), as well as the amorality of politics within and among nations, mass extermination of political enemies, and the anxiety caused by unstoppable plagues, which resembles our own fear of uncontrollable new diseases and nuclear annihilation. Moreover, Dracula's contemporaries, Pope Pius II, the German Holy Roman Emperors Sigismund and Frederick III, Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, the warrior John Hunyadi and his son, Matthias Corvinus the Hungarian king, and George Podbrady, king of Bohemia, were extraordinary personalities by any standards. But whether seen as a new-style Renaissance despot, a pre-Machiavellian patriot, a tactician of war and terror, or even a sadist, Dracula commanded great attention even in his lifetime, amid all the talented people that the 1400s produced. He was certainly one of the most controversial personalities in the history of eastern Europe during that period and the subject of more anecdotes and historical narratives than most of his contemporaries.

  After tracing his extraordinary life, we shall follow the growth of the Dracula legend after his death. Most relevant was the transformation of anti-Dracula propaganda tracts into best-sellers of fifteenth-century German horror literature. In contrast to those legends, the evolution of oral Romanian folklore made Dracula a national hero, a kind of George Washington of Romanian history, while in the emerging Russian state he served as a political mentor. In the end, we shall resolve the problem of the many faces of Dracula and arrive at conclusions of our own.