Dracula, Prince of Many Faces Read online

  Over the twenty years that have elapsed since the writing of our first book, both authors have continued and deepened their search into the details of the life of the historical Dracula. This exploration has taken us to a number of libraries and archives in western Europe, the United States, Romania, Yugoslavia, Russia, and Turkey. With the help of two Fulbright Research Exchange Fellowships, we have examined the genuine Dracula archives that are centered in the library of the Romanian Academy and the specialized books and articles at the Nicolae Iorga Historical Institute in Bucharest, as well as the Bruckhental Library at Sibiu and the Braov Archives in Romania. Oddly enough, principal contributions to this book came from research done outside Romania. Visits to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich and consultations at the Nuremberg State Archives were useful in obtaining additional information about the origins of the name Dracula and Dracula's father's investiture in the Dragon Order. We came across a series of some thirty-two Dracula stories in manuscript form, located at the library of the former monastery of Saint Gall, in Switzerland. We followed up this discovery by studying the complete poems of Michael Beheim, a minnesinger of the late fifteenth century, whose works are housed at the Library of Heidelberg University. These poems proved important, because they were based on firsthand information about Dracula given to Beheim by a certain Benedictine monk, referred to as Brother Jacob. In a separate trip to the Soviet Union, we probed into the Dracula story by Fedor Kuritsyn, ambassador during the late fifteenth century from Moscow to the Hungarian court, who learned there about Dracula, since Dracula had lived there for over a decade, barely ten years before Kuritsyn's arrival. The authors also worked on documents in other western and eastern libraries and archives. These included the Vatican Secret Archives in Rome (Archivio Segreto Vaticano), especially the Corsiniano Collection, where we studied the accounts of Niccolò Modrussa, the papal legate to the Hungarian court, who had met Dracula personally and who wrote about him in a manuscript that has only partially been published in our day. We consulted historical documents in the Topkapî archives in Istanbul, especially the works of the Byzantine historian Kritoboulos, and compared the original texts with the standard translations. Study of the chronicle by the Byzantine historian Chalcondyles yielded important information and anecdotes about Dracula's campaign against the Turks. Reading the published reports of representatives from various Italian republics such as Venice, Genoa, Ferrara, Bologna, and Milan was significant in our toning down the negative image of Dracula. In America, at the Rosenbach Foundation Library in Philadelphia, we discovered the notes Bram Stoker used for the composition of his novel. Those provided additional evidence that the novelist framed his story within a solid historical and geographical context.

  Where the actual documents or narratives failed, the co-authors studied the oral traditions preserved by the Romanian people in those regions where Dracula's name is best known, as in the villages surrounding his famous castle. Even allowing for the rich variety of documents in a number of different languages, the extraordinary coincidence of the Dracula sources, whether in terms of theme or basic plot, proves beyond doubt that they are rooted in historical fact.

  Beyond the search in archives and the gathering of Romanian folklore at first hand, we engaged in extensive fieldwork with the help of local historians, those natives who are usually the best informed. In this endeavor, a few episodes stand out. Following in the footsteps of Brother Jacob, who had met Dracula, we were able to trace the changes his original atrocity story underwent in the course of his peregrinations from one Benedictine abbey to another. We located the grim and desolate fortress of Egrigöz in Asia Minor, where Dracula was imprisoned as a child. We found the tomb of one of Dracula's descendants, who had brought Dracula's portrait to the west. We visited Bistria in northeastern Transylvania and discovered the remnants of a small fort at the Borgo Pass. We climbed to the fortress of Belgrade to experience its strategic location as a bastion of Eastern Orthodox Christendom. We located Königstein Castle along the road from Braov to Cîmpulung on the ancient border between Transylvania and Wallachia, where the historical Dracula was taken prisoner in 1462.

  As on past occasions, our search was a collaborative, interdisciplinary effort, which involved specialists from a wide variety of fields. Folklorists helped us gather Dracula narratives. Historians of art drew our attention to a number of new Dracula paintings, including one that may be a depiction of Dracula's father, recently discovered in the course of repairs to Dracula's homestead. Specialists in numismatics have discovered relevant old coins, including one showing Halley's comet on one side and Dracula's insignia on the other. Genealogical research has uncovered a Hungarian branch of the Dracula family in eastern Transylvania. Archaeologists aided us in probing into the remains of churches and castles associated with Dracula. All this work was facilitated by the research and publication program initiated by the Romanian government on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of Dracula's death in 1976.

  Note on Spelling

  SPELLINGS and variations of personal and geographical place names, when dealing with a multitude of languages, many of them unfamiliar to the English reader, always present somewhat of a problem. For the spelling of most of the well-known names, whether places, surnames, first names, et cetera, we have relied on Webster's New Geographical Dictionary (1984) and Webster's New Biographical Dictionary (1983). Most of the well-known historical figures as well as the internationally known place names are given in the way they are known best, usually with the Christian name anglicized. Thus we shall use Bucharest (rather than Bucureti) and John Hunyadi (rather than the Hungarian Hunyadi János or Romanian lancu de Hunedoara), to give two extreme instances. In the case of Transylvanian place names that have Romanian, German, and Hungarian equivalents, we shall use the modern Romanian form, except in the case of quotations, where the old German form will be substituted. To avoid confusion, all other place names will be given in their current forms. Christian names will be given in the form presently in use in each country, thus John in English, Jean in French, Johann in German, János in Hungarian, Ion in Romanian, Jan in Polish, et cetera. All diacritical and other accents will be used in the various eastern European languages, using the most recent forms. The Romanian , for instance, which transliterates into English in ts sounds, while the is pronounced sh; thus the Impaler epe is pronounced Tsepesh. A special difficulty has been presented by the name Vladislav or Ladislas, which occurs frequently in our book, being the name of at least three major personalities. We shall use Ladislas for the Hungarian king (Ladislas V Posthumus), Ladislas for the Polish Jagiellonian kings Ladislas II and III, and Vladislav for Prince Vladislav II and III of Wallachia.

  PROLOGUE

  From the Fictional to the Factual

  WHEN they first read Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, the two co-authors were not convinced that this famous vampire plot belonged simply to the classical traditions of the Gothic horror romance, traditions of ghosts and rattling chains established in the late eighteenth century by Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, and even John Polidori, with his imaginary vampire, Lord Ruthven, modeled on Lord Byron. Still less did they believe the theory advanced by Stoker's best biographer, Harry Ludlam (A Biography of Dracula, 1962), who informed his readers that the idea behind Dracula came from a nightmare caused by “a too generous helping of dressed crab at supper one night,” a nightmare in which Stoker envisaged “a ghoul rising from the grave to go about its ghastly business.” Nightmares, after all, have always been favorite literary devices, used by Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson, among many others, to camouflage all traces of borrowings from prior readings connected with their subjects. The claim of dream inspiration was meant to highlight the creative genius and originality of the author. For different reasons that will be explained in this book, many of our Romanian colleagues supported this explanation of the novel's genesis: Dracula was the product of the wild imagination of the author; the only thing the vampire shared with
any historical prototype was the name. The reading public, on the whole, had endorsed these assessments.

  Even a cursory glance at the novel reveals a significant difference from other gothic novels: Dracula mentions specific geographic locations, in both eastern Europe and in England, such as Whitby and sites in the greater London area. Most readers, however, believed that Transylvania, where the count's castle is located, was a “Ruritania,” a “Never-Never-Land.”

  The story is first told through the diary and notes of an English solictor's clerk, Jonathan Harker, who is journeying from the west to the mysterious east, symbolized by northeastern Transylvania. He is going to complete a real estate transaction with a certain Count Dracula. Following a series of melodramatic encounters with Dracula at the count's castle on the Borgo Pass, during which the purchase of a property at Carfax Abbey near London is completed, Dracula sets out on his famous quest to vampirize England. He leaves Harker, who escapes from the count's castle and recovers slowly from his trauma in a hospital bed in Budapest, where he eventually marries his fiancée, Mina (Wilhelmina) Murray. In the meantime, the count travels, accompanied by seven boxes of his native Transylvanian soil, by boat from the Bulgarian port of Varna to Whitby in northern England. Shortly after landing, the count, who has already vampirized the whole crew of the boat in which he traveled, claims his first victim on English soil, Lucy Westenra, Mina Murray's best friend. Dracula then takes up residence at Carfax Abbey, hiding his boxes of Transylvanian soil at various locations along the Thames.

  Once settled in, the count is finally ready for his horrific undertaking. Stoker compares Dracula's attack on London to a plague that causes instant death—for only a few choice victims attain the nirvana of the vampire's immortality. One can follow the count's deadly activity by means of the eccentric conduct of a patient called Renfield (who eats flies, spiders, et cetera) in a nearby insane asylum; Renfield is increasingly excited at the vampire's approach and clearly under his sway. This behavior, in turn, arouses the attention of Dr. John Seward, the director of that institution.

  Eventually the “Dracula hunters” become organized, to ward off this insidious menace. They include Harker, Dr. Seward, Lucy's suitor, a Texan by the name of Quincey Morris, and lesser characters. They are led by Dr. Abraham Van Helsing from Amsterdam, a distinguished scholar and specialist in rare illnesses. The latter, the real hero of the novel and the character with whom Stoker secretly identifies, is able to convince his colleagues that conventional medicine is of little avail against the vampire and that they must rely on ancient folkloric rites involving herbal medicine, specifically garlic, and the religious ritual of the cross for added protection. Above all, they must find the seven hidden boxes containing the count's native soil, without which, according to genuine folklore, the vampire cannot rest during the day. (Stoker indulges in a lapse concerning this point when he mentions the vampire walking in broad daylight on Piccadilly.) All else failing, they must dispose of this living corpse in the traditional manner reenacted on the screen so many times: by driving a stake through his heart into the soil. Following a number of confrontations between hunted and hunters, Dracula feels sufficiently insecure to decide to flee back to his native castle in Transylvania. There he is finally killed at sundown by the Texan Quincey Morris, who plunges a bowie knife into his heart and puts the world at ease.

  As previously remarked, it is the specific and detailed geographic context that sets this novel apart from earlier gothic novels and gives it its peculiar flavor. In challenging the conventional explanations of the novel's origins, the two co-authors were particularly impressed by the wealth of geographic, topographic, folkloric, historical, and even culinary details contained in the novel, but hardly ever explained. These are particularly evident in the gripping introductory and concluding chapters. Such details convinced the authors to challenge the predominant view of literary critics and historians. To begin with, we believed that Stoker did considerable research on eastern Europe and Romania in particular in preparation for his novel—particularly since he had never traveled to this part of the world.

  Our sleuthing technique, at a century's distance, was to use Bram Stoker's novel as a guide, and to follow in the footsteps of the London lawyer's clerk, Jonathan Harker, as he set out on his extraordinary nineteenth-century journey from London, stopping initially at Munich. Like him, we stayed at the Hotel of the Four Seasons (Vierjahreszeiten Hotel), mentioned by Stoker in a chapter that was originally intended to be the introduction to the novel—but that ultimately appeared instead as a separate story, under the title “Dracula's Guest” (a few editions of the novel do in fact include it). We followed Harker's example and traveled on the express train from Munich to Vienna, which took us only a few hours—less than the “one night” mentioned in Harker's diary. From Vienna we went on to Budapest—which Stoker correctly spells in the old-fashioned way, “Buda-Pesth,” since the two cities sit across each other on the Danube, the old capital being Buda. In Harker's words, the city represents a gateway to eastern Europe, dividing two worlds, though the traveler is hardly conscious today of “traditions of Turkish rule,” mentioned by Harker. The journey from Budapest, Hungary to “Klausenburgh” (Cluj), Transylvania (Stoker chose the anglicized German spelling of Cluj since in his time it was located within the Habsburg Empire), took us about six hours. We were loyal to Harker's selection of “the Hotel Royal,” today called “Continental.” German was no longer as useful a language there as it had been to Harker, since most of the Germans have gradually left Transylvania since World War II. Today the city contains large Romanian and Hungarian populations. Amazingly enough, the fare on the menu a century later was strikingly similar. One can still order “paprika hendl,” chicken spiced with the hot paprika, though it is much more of a national dish for the Hungarians than the Romanians.

  At Cluj, the largest city, we were in the heart of Transylvania. We noted the general correctness of Stoker's remarks about the ethnic composition of the country: “There are four distinct nationalities: Saxons in the south,… the Wallachs [the Romanians], who are the descendants of the Dacians; Magyars [Hungarians] in the west, and Szekelys in the east and north … who claim to be descended from Attila and the Huns.” Harker is familiar with the historical fact that the Magyars settled the country in the eleventh century and that King Arpad was the founder of the dynasty (of whom the greatest ruler was St. Stephen, crowned by the pope in the year 1000 when Stephen converted to Catholicism). Unaware that he was tackling a most controversial issue of national precedence, Harker notes that when the Hungarians initially invaded this land, they found that Szeklers, the “so-called descendants” of the Huns, had already settled there—a moot point. He is more accurate in remarking that to these same “Szekelys” (Szeklers) was entrusted by the Hungarians “the guarding of the frontier … [the] endless duty of the frontier guard.”

  The following day when we got up, like Stoker's daring Englishman, we found that paprika chicken was readily available at the hotel, though not normally served with breakfast. The “mmlig” that Harker describes as a “sort of porridge of maize flour” is still the national dish of the Romanian peasant (rather like polenta for the Italian). The eggplant “impletata” (umplutur in Romanian), however, though still a good native fare, was impossible to order at this early time of day. (We took Harker's advice and obtained the recipe, which is included in the latest Dracula cookbook published in the United States: The Dracula Cookbook, by Marina Polvay (1978).

  During the day-long ride eastward from Cluj to “Bistritz,” Harker has ample time to peer outside his carriage window and can make out enough of the countryside to describe it. His description, taken by Bram Stoker from the various travel guides of the period, is a far cry from the sinister, stark, and primeval landscape that has delighted movie scenarists and subsequent sensation-seeking writers of vampire tales. Quite the opposite is true and thus recorded by Harker: “the country … was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes w
e saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills … sometimes we ran by rivers and streams.” He notices the density of forests: “oak, beech, and pine.” (We were both heading toward Bukovina, which historically is known as beech-tree country.) We also saw the haystacks neatly laid along the hills “held by two or three stakes set in the ground.”

  As we observed the peasant types, we agreed with Harker's view “that the women looked pretty,” even though “very clumsy about the waist,” a characteristic from middle age onward, the result of a rich protein diet and physical labor. Harker admires and accurately describes the native national dress. “They had all full white sleeves of some kind or other, and most of them had big belts with a lot of strips of something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet but of course petticoats under them.” The presence of the Czechs and particularly the Slovaks whom Harker encountered is perfectly plausible at a time when all these lands were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Slovakia a close neighbor controlled by Hungary. The solicitor's clerk notes the fact that the people are both religious and superstitious, which is still the case especially among the older generation. Harker notices “by the roadside … many crosses.” Superstitions of all kinds actually do abound, particularly in this northern, more remote area of the country, where the peasants still believe in a strange dichotomy between the forces of good and the power of evil against which they must protect themselves. They fear the “nosferatu” (necuratul, literally “the unclean one,” meaning in Romanian the devil); Harker mentions Ördög, the Hungarian word for Satan, and pokol (hell), “stregoica” (strigoiac, female vampire, in Romanian), as well as the Slovak word vrolok and the Serbian vlkoslak, “for something that is either were-wolf or vampire.” For some reason Harker chose to limit his remarks to the Romanian female equivalent strigoiac, perhaps because they are said to be more mischievous than their male counterpart. (The more commonly accepted word vampire is Slavic rather than Romanian.) Van Helsing, who uses the word nosferatu in chapter XVIII, is well aware that the peasant has recourse to the powers of the church (the use of holy water, the symbolism of the cross, et cetera) and to various forms of herbal medicine such as garlic, wolfbane, or the petals of wild roses, and