Dracula, Prince of Many Faces Read online

  makes use of all of them in combating the vampire. The stake (made of wood or iron) must be relied on only as a last resort.

  We finally reached the town of “Bistritz” (today Bistria). We found that Harker was correct in his description of its general location “in the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains.” (At the time Transylvania and Bukovina belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while Moldavia was part of the old kingdom of Romania. Today, of course, Stoker's Dracula country is part of the modern Romanian state, though half or Bukovina was ceded to the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. The traveler, at this point, is thus not too far distant from the Soviet-Romanian border.)

  At Bistria Harker was aware of recent tragic events that had left their mark on the city at the time of his visit. “Fifty years ago a series of great fires took place, which made terrible havoc on five separate occasions. At the very beginning of the seventeenth century it [Bistritz] underwent a siege of three weeks and lost 13,000 people, the casualties of war proper being assisted by famine and disease.” All traces of this specific nineteenth-century calamity, which is known only to local historians, have long since disappeared. Superstitious peasants “crossing themselves” and discouraging anyone from proceeding eastward are a thing of the past—if they ever existed. We should note, however, that an abandoned fortress giving off flames of various hues at night is still looked upon as an evil place and avoided by the local people.

  As you proceed toward the Borgo Pass, which in Romanian is known as Prundu Bîrgului (Stoker, in fact, mentions “Borgo Prund”), the description of Jonathan Harker is as authentic today as it must have been at the time. He did not find the region particularly gloomy. Indeed quite the opposite was true: “Before us lay a green sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills, crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses, the blank gable end to the road. There was everywhere a bewildering mass of fruit blossom—apple, plum, pear, cherry; and as we drove by I could see the green grass under the trees spangled with the fallen petals.” At the Borgo Pass Harker finally reaches Count Dracula's castle. He speaks of a “vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky.” The adventures of the Dracula hunters led by Van Helsing at the novel's conclusion are described with the same eye for geographic and topographic detail as is found in the introductory chapters. The meticulous details of these final peregrinations, like those of Harker's first journey into Transylvania, are truly amazing for the period and imply consultation of a very detailed map of the area, not readily available today.

  Given such geographic minutiae, and quite accurate descriptions of the countryside and the ethnic origins of the people, we wondered why Stoker would be any less conscientious in researching a possible historical prototype for his vampire count. Indeed, there is a great deal of evidence, which Stoker hints at by way of his characters, particularly Dr. Van Helsing, that he consulted genuine historical sources about the man, as about all else. Van Helsing makes this point by emphasizing the knowledge that he has gained “from the researches of my friend Arminius of Buda-Pesth,” referring to Arminius Vambery, a notable scholar and orientalist in his own right, who often traveled from Budapest to London. Van Helsing, as Stoker's alter ego, goes scurrying for information to the British Museum, at that time the largest library and source of knowledge in the world. From this research and other historical sources to which we shall refer there emerges a composite picture—admittedly sketchy—of an authentic historical character who bore at least some of the characteristics of the historical Dracula. This living prototype was sufficiently intriguing for Stoker to embark on what might be described as a mini-research, derived from a variety of books available at the time that focused on some of Dracula's more memorable deeds and various aspects of his complex personality. The result of such readings is an adequate physical description of Dracula the vampire, not too far removed from the authentic physical traits of Dracula the man, which we shall later describe. Stoker sees him as “a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache.” He has a waxen face, a high aquiline nose, and parted red lips. He was “clad in black from head to foot”—a description not unlike the dragon cape of the real Dracula. Stoker is aware of Dracula's aristocratic origins: Dracula says, “Here I am noble; I am boyar; the common people know me, and I am master.” The word boyar, borrowed from Slavic lands, in Romanian signifies a member of the landowning nobility. Harker has a “long talk” with Dracula, poses “questions on Transylvanian history,” and notices that “he warmed up to the subject wonderfully.” Dracula explains his enthusiasm for leading figures in Transylvanian history by saying that “to a boyar the pride of his house and name is his own pride.” Occasionally Dracula seems so confident of his fame that he dispenses with titles altogether, simply styling himself “Dracula,” as did the historical personality, who signed correspondence without using any title at the end of his career. Beyond knowing Dracula's noble origins, Stoker is also acquainted with the title voivode, a Slavic word that the Romanians translate as “prince,” by which the historical Dracula was also known; hospodar, was also used frequently as late as the nineteenth century and meant “ruler” or “governor.” It is yet another historically correct denomination used in the novel. Though Stoker is quite right in pointing out that Dracula's ancestry goes back to “wolf country” (the Dacians or ancestors of the Romanians often described themselves as “wolfmen,” and their standard was the head of a wolf with the body of a snake), he is mistaken in considering the count a descendant of the Szeklers who carried the blood of Attila in his veins—but this is an error which we will try to account for at the end of this book.

  Beyond accuracy, there is unqualified admiration on Stoker's part, expressed through the words of Van Helsing, for many of Dracula's character traits and for his truly exceptional preparation for rule. Van Helsing speaks of his “mighty brain,” his study of “new tongues,” a “learning beyond compare,” in politics, law, finance, and science, even of “the occult” which “the Draculas” learned at Sibiu “over lake Hermanstadt” (at a place where young Students known as olomonari in Romania were introduced to the science of alchemy). Harker is struck by the count's hospitality (“Welcome to my house”), a traditional character trait of the Romanian people, particularly vis-à-vis foreigners. He agrees with Van Helsing that the count “was in life a most wonderful man” with “a mighty brain” and an “iron resolution.” Van Helsing categorizes Dracula's various roles as a “soldier, statesman, and alchemist.” But he accurately stresses his capacities as a warrior and leader of men, “a heart that knew no fear and no remorse.”

  Through Van Helsing, Stoker is most explicit about the historical roots of his fictional count. Van Helsing thinks he can identify Dracula the vampire's historical prototype: “He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his Name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land [meaning the Danube]. If it be so, then was he no common man; for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the ‘land beyond the forest.’ ” Dracula speaks of “one of my race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his ground.” Stoker is not quite as charitable when referring to Dracula's brother Radu the Handsome: “Woe was it that his own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them!” All of the above are essentially correct references to events directly or indirectly connected with the authentic Dracula, and Stoker makes many other such allusions. In the novel, for instance, he cites the fact that the Hungarians experienced a defeat at the hands of the Turks, “the shame of Cassova,” drawing the reader's attention to the second battle of Kosovo Polje in 1448, as a result of which Dracula began his brief first
reign with Turkish help. Stoker also displays acquaintance with the events leading to the defeat of the Hungarian army at Mohácz in 1526, a prophecy the historical Dracula clearly made because the Hungarian king was unwilling to come to his help in 1462. Toward the end of the novel the Dracula hunters testify that Dracula as a last resort relies on being defended by gypsies, a fact not entirely removed from historical truth. Stoker even discovered an indirect descendant of Dracula's important enough to be mentioned twice in the text: “… was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race who in a later age again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkey-land; who, when he was beaten back, came again and again, and again, though he had to come alone from the bloody field where his troops were being slaughtered, since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph?” Possibly the author was referring to Michael the Brave, the prince who first achieved the unity of all the Romanian lands, an indirect descendant of one of Dracula's half-brothers, Vlad the Monk. Thus Dracula, irrespective of his obvious vampire characteristics, is hardly the by-product of a nightmare or an overwrought imagination of an author obsessed with the occult. Though admittedly a composite character, he is in part the product of serious readings on Stoker's part that we shall analyze in detail. Stoker was, in any case, sufficiently inspired by his research to give a historical dimension to his famous count, which added an important element to his personality. Prince, statesman, war leader, endowed with a cunning, mighty brain, a resolute politician, a linguist… Dracula the man sounds enticing enough, even in the novel. In one final document allegedly discovered by Arminius Vambery, Dracula is also referred to as a “ ‘wampyr,’ which we all understand too well,” which in essence means blood-drinker. Given a tantalizing character such as this, whose creation required extensive research by the novelist, we are ready to take up Stoker's cues and embark upon the life history of the real Dracula, a fifteenth-century ruler remembered by Romania's first nineteenth-century scientific historian, A. D. Xenopol, as “one of the most fascinating personalities of history.” Indeed the fictional vampire pales by comparison.

  CHAPTER 1

  The World of the Real Dracula

  The Crusade against the Turks

  THE real Dracula, who ruled the territories that now constitute Romania, was born in 1431, the year that Joan of Arc was burned as a witch at the stake in Rouen, France. He died in 1476, two years before Spain was united as a kingdom under the rule of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. He was very much the by-product of the Europe of his day—the Renaissance, essentially a period of transition. Though the Renaissance helped usher in the modern age, with its accent on nationalism and secularism that is still very characteristic of our epoch, the old medieval structures of feudalism and the all-pervasive authority of the church had not as yet, in Dracula's time, entirely broken down.

  Europe, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Black Sea and the Baltic coast, represented during this period much more of a single civilization, connected by solid dynastic and cultural ties, than the contemporary world, or even Europe, does today. The notion of an east and west division, which still permeates our college courses in “western civilization” and our current “iron curtain” way of thinking, dividing western democracies from the eastern European socialist states, would have made little sense to a contemporary of Dracula. There are those who tend to reduce European history to a clash of forces between the west, with its legacy of high culture inherited from Greece and Rome, and the despotism of Asia. Since time immemorial, that conflict had been waged on the borderlands of this common European civilization against various destructive alien nomad forces coming from Asia. In Dracula's day, the latest and most crucial manifestation of this conflict was represented by the Ottoman Turks, who initially set foot on European soil in the middle of the fourteenth century.

  The designation Ottoman is derived from Othman, one of their early leaders. The Ottomans had been converted to the fundamentalist teachings of Islam by Turkoman tribes of Asia Minor whom they subjugated. Our image of the Turks may still be largely colored by nineteenth-century attitudes formed when individual sultans, attempting to stave off the inevitable symptoms of internal decay of their empire, massacred Greeks, Armenians, and Bulgarians on a massive scale. These subjugated peoples were subverting the Ottoman Empire, in the process of attempting to form nation states of their own. This oversimplified negative image of the Turks ought not to be applied without serious qualifications to Turkish rule in Dracula's time.

  In fact, quite the reverse was true: the two great sultans of the Dracula era, Murad II (1421–1451) and, more directly, Mehmed II (1451–1481), in whose company our young prince was brought up, were, like their predecessors, splendid, worldly, and cultured personalities who patronized Italian artists and married the daughters of Balkan and Byzantine rulers. They were also farsighted politicians who taught Europe the lessons of religious toleration, by granting asylum to Jews and members of other minorities at a time when these minorities were being persecuted by the Roman Catholic church.

  The Turks first crossed the Dardanelles Straits, which separate Europe from Asia, in 1353, summoned by the emperors of Byzantium to resist pressures from the Balkan states, particularly the Serbian kings, who had their eye on the imperial title. To strengthen their bonds with the Turks, several Byzantine emperors actually gave their daughters in marriage to sultans. Once having set foot on European soil, however, the Turks were not easily dislodged. Initially they turned on Bulgaria, which had at one time been a most powerful Balkan state. Bulgaria was partially defeated in 1371. Northern Serbia offered greater resistance, but on June 15, 1389, Sultan Murad I's son Bayezid, “the Lightning,” destroyed the armies of the Serbian prince Lazar at the first battle of Kosovo Polje (the Field of Black Birds). This decisive defeat opened up the rest of Bulgaria, Albania, and most of the Balkan peninsula to Turkish penetration. All that was left of Serbia was a semiautonomous state under the rule of George Brankovi, who bore the Byzantine title of despot. Brankovi survived on sufferance, because he had given his daughter Mara as wife to another sultan, Murad II. For safekeeping, he handed his capital, Belgrade, to the Hungarians in 1420.

  In effect, the Turks had advanced their frontier to the Danube, the border of what would eventually be Dracula's land, which at the time represented the frontier of European civilization. Although the Ottoman conquerors were Muslims, they did not force the subjugated people of the Balkans to convert to Islam. In fact, the majority of the subject peoples remained faithful to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Nevertheless, the Christians of the Balkans, reduced to second-class status, resented the domination of an alien creed under a sultan who combined supreme political and religious powers. Many were also outraged by the Turkish system of recruiting the finest among the Christian male children of the Balkans, taking them away from their parents at a tender age, forcibly indoctrinating them in the new religion, and inducting them into the army. These special troops were called janissaries; some of them fought in infantry corps—though technically slaves could rise to the level of their abilities in either military or civil service—and many of them ended up as viziers (prime ministers) to successive sultans. It was, however, the induction of the most gifted youth of the conquered territories that drained the Balkans of the flower of its manhood and at the same time gained for the Turks their military supremacy. This was considered one of the most devilish, and perhaps unique, methods of world conquest among all those yet devised by humankind.

  The east (Turkish) versus west (Christian) confrontation was looked upon by some as a conflict between two systems of values and two cultures, much as the conflict between communism and western democracy is seen today. However, since in frontier areas values were at times hopelessly intermingled, it is best to view the struggle of the Dracula era as arising from the inordinate ambitions of Mehmed II, a conqueror of the stamp of Alexander the Great, who was ready to invoke the spirit of a Holy War to achieve world dominati
on. Dracula, Mehmed's contemporary, educated by the same tutors and holding identical sets of values, perhaps understood the crucial importance of this struggle better than any of his European contemporaries did. Had the surviving free states of eastern and central Europe not been determined to resist these ambitions, it is just conceivable that the Muslim world would have extended from the Bosporus to the Atlantic seaboard.

  It was in the age of Dracula that the notion was introduced of Balkan crusading, the efforts of the lands on the fringes of the Ottoman conquest, the borderlands of Europe, to resist the power of Islam in the name of the cross. It represented a struggle in defense of Europe quite as significant as the Spanish resistance to the Moors, which had preceded it. In many respects it was more significant than the crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, aimed at delivering the holy places in Jerusalem, because the defense of the European continent itself was involved.

  At the gates of Europe stood the skeletal remains of the once mighty Byzantine Empire, with its proud leading city of Constantinople, built by Constantine in the year 330 at the site of Byzantium, a former Greek city-state at the Bosporus. Though heir to imperial Rome and thus often referred to as the East Roman Empire, its spoken language was Greek. The Byzantine church had separated itself from Rome in 1054 because the bishop of Constantinople refused to be subordinate to the bishop of a rival city that had fallen into decadence and barbarism—theological differences were manufactured later to justify the split. Extremely proud of its thousand-year-old history, Constantinople also claimed cultural and political superiority to the “upstart” medieval emperors, who had initially been established by the pope with Charlemagne's coronation in the year 800, and their successors. The empire was still immensely prestigious in the early 1400s, and the city acted as a magnet for powerful would-be conquerors from both the east and the west. They were all the more attracted because the city had lost its reputation for military invincibility since its occupation by Venice in 1204. The Eastern Orthodox emperors of Byzantium had frittered away their strength, fighting Roman Catholic crusaders and their Balkan rivals, specifically Bulgarian and Serbian rulers intent upon securing the imperial crown. When Dracula was born, Constantinople and its European hinterland still survived, like a salamander with an enormous head and an elongated body, that included the holy mountain, Athos, the despotate of Mistra, Thessaloniki, and a few islands in the Aegean Sea.