Dracula, Prince of Many Faces Page 4

  One of the more tragic aspects of the Turkish onslaught on Europe was the western powers' reluctance to defend the frontiers of their culture in eastern Europe. This extraordinary failure of moral fortitude was not intelligible in the fifteenth century, since French ruling families had originally consolidated the Polish and Hungarian states; Venetians, Pisans, Genoese, and Spaniards ruled in the eastern Mediterranean and Aegean seas; and countless western adventurers occupied a string of threatened colonies along the disputed eastern coast and on the islands near what are now Yugoslavia and Greece.

  The pretexts for the fifteenth-century failure of the west to respond to successive crusading appeals were no different from those that had awakened such deep emotional response during the heyday of the crusades, in the age of faith. Charles VII, king of France, the oldest daughter of the Catholic church and foremost crusading power, had just emerged from one of the most crucial conflicts in his country's history, the Hundred Years' War. He and his soon-to-be successor, Louis XI, “the Spider King,” who had a predilection for hanging young boys from the branches of trees and placing his enemies in cages to consolidate royal power, had just liberated their country from the English. The French kings were also busy fighting the dukes of Burgundy for supremacy in the French state. The semiroyal dukes of Burgundy were in fact the only rulers within the actual territories of what is now France who for a time remained true to the crusading tradition. Their generous participation in Dracula's father's crusade in 1446 atoned somewhat for the ineffectiveness of their cousins in Paris.

  England was to be no more closely drawn than France into fighting the Muslims; the traditions of Richard the Lionhearted were entirely forgotten. Two rival families there were locked in a desperate struggle for survival, the Wars of the Roses (1455–1485). (The white rose was the symbol of the followers of the Duke of York and the red rose represented the House of Lancaster.) This last of England's feudal wars dragged on throughout Dracula's lifetime. The only Englishmen connected in any way to our plot were individual soldiers of fortune who enrolled as volunteers in various crusading armies. (One of these veterans, John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, later used the impalement technique that he had learned in eastern Europe to kill his Lancastrian enemies. He was executed for his crimes.)

  Medieval Spain, apart from a few northern kingdoms that had survived as independent states, had actually experienced the trauma of Muslim conquest, though the Arabs, unlike the Turks, had their own sophisticated form of civilization, which still survives in the finely sculptured mosques of Córdoba, at that time a center of learning more advanced than Paris and Oxford, particularly in the disciplines of science and mathematics. These free kingdoms had gradually succeeded in liberating the territory in a series of wars, the Reconquista, which had deeply stamped themselves upon the character of the people, particularly in the kingdom of Castile: the inhabitants were fanatically Catholic and intolerant and were prepared for almost any sacrifice in defense of their land. Though they were crusaders at home, the Castilians, once freed of Muslim control, were not equally concerned about the struggle in the east against the Turks. Geography undoubtedly had a great deal to do with this reaction. Like the Portuguese, who, under their navigator king, Henry, looked westward to the sea for expansion—the circumnavigation of Africa, exploration of the Far East—the Castilians were eventually also led to the discovery and conquest of a new continent, under Queen Isabella. She was to become the patron of Christopher Columbus, born ten years before Dracula became prince.

  Of the lands of the future Kingdom of Spain, only Aragon faces eastward. In particular, the Catalans of Barcelona, an important Mediterranean port, were concerned by the Turkish menace, because it threatened ancient commercial routes and their appetite for eastern expansion. Even before Dracula's time, an effective group of military adventurers had been formed, the famous Catalan Company, to defend the Byzantine emperors against all their enemies, though in effect the Catalans fought for themselves. The Aragonese wished, through Balkan crusading, to forge commercial and political contacts with the Aegean, the Adriatic, and the Black Sea. The ambitions of the Aragonese king, Alfonso V, are best exemplified by the decision of his bastard son Ferrante to make Naples—closer to the eastern theater of war—the center of his power. Ferrante managed to perpetuate his rule through the use of terror: having killed most of his political opponents, he had his victims mummified and placed in the royal museum, where they were shown to his guests.

  Fifteenth-century Italy was the headquarters of the Renaissance. Although Niccolò Machiavelli was not born until 1469, the amoral principles he would set out in The Prince (1517) were being applied well ahead of publication. There was certainly little evidence then of Italian patriotism among the warring republics and city-states of northern Italy, and less evidence of crusading spirit, though the straits of Otranto, at the heel of the peninsula, separate Italy from the Balkans by only some thirty miles.

  In the north, the prestigious Medici were more interested in making money by establishing the first international bank in Europe, assuredly another symptom of the modernism of the age. They used the resources of the powerful bank, with its numerous affiliates in various capitals, to finance trade, indulge in the frills of a luxurious life, win political and papal elections, and buy marriage connections with the noblest of families, including blue-blooded royalty. Cosimo, in a sense the founder of the dynasty, became the self-styled sponsor of the classical renaissance. Later, his grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent, destroyed the last vestiges of constitutional government in the north. In other Italian states, political standards had sunk to an abysmal low as the medieval communes had their liberties subverted by tyrannicide. This period in Italy (and elsewhere) was also the age of the ambitious and unscrupulous autocrats sometimes referred to as the condottieri. These men were guided solely by ambition in seeking to acquire political power, by any means possible, even destroying whole rival families in the process.

  The papacy, which controlled Rome and the central neck of the Italian peninsula as a temporal power, was in difficulties that greatly weakened its natural role in any crusade and siphoned off the prestige it had gained by having led the crusading movement in the past. At the time, the church was still recovering from the most dangerous crisis in its history, when two popes, one in Rome, the other at Avignon, vied for supremacy. The great church council summoned at Basel in 1431, the year of Dracula's birth, to resolve this conflict was followed by the danger compounded when the Holy Roman Emperor attempted to substitute “government by cardinals” for the rule of a single pope. This far more serious threat was resisted with alacrity by the Venetian pope Eugenius IV and his chief spokesman, Giuliano Cardinal Cesarini, both of whom were to be closely connected with Balkan crusading in the 1440s.

  In essence, papal energies were aimed at diverting attention from the problems within the Roman church by working at healing the schism between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, which had divided the two churches since 1054. Reunion, in fact, was to be the precondition for a joint eastern and western crusade against the Turks. A historic agreement was reached, at least on paper, at the Council of Florence in 1439, helped by the presence of the emperor of Constantinople, John VIII. However, many of the Orthodox bishops, notably the Russians and the Romanians, refused to append their signatures to the final document. Eugenius's successor, Pope Nicholas V, finally reasserted the authority of Saint Peter by compelling the resignation of all rival popes, thereby ending the internal danger to the papacy. He made less progress, however, in implementing the reunion between the two churches. And, rather than go crusading, this splendid figure, who made Rome the headquarters of the Renaissance, preferred to collect Greek and Latin manuscripts, founded the Vatican Library, patronized dangerous critics such as the humanist Lorenzo Valla, and reconstructed St. Peter's Church in the style of a Roman basilica. As a man of peace he showed little concern, even for the fate of Constantinople, which fell to the Turks under his pontific
ate. However, guilt for this neglect ultimately shortened his life.

  It was the pontificate (1458–1464) of Enea Silvio de' Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, that most closely coincided with Dracula's reign. Piccolomini began his career as a libertine not devoid of literary talent and changed his ways only when he became a priest in 1446. He was enough of a medievalist to understand the threat inherent in the Ottoman expansion. From 1459 onward the pope repeatedly appealed to the Christian powers to join in a common crusade, and he raised the monies to subsidize such a concerted movement. Indeed, Pius II, a thorough “Europeanist,” saw the Ottoman menace not merely as a danger for eastern Europe but for Christianity itself. Dracula alone responded to his call.

  The Republic of Venice faced the Balkans from its lagoon on the Adriatic; its chief commercial rival, Genoa, was located on the Mediterranean gulf bearing its name. Genoa held colonies along the Black Sea and the Crimea, and Pera, a suburb of Constantinople, lay under its control. Thwarted in the Italies, Venice also was compelled to turn to eastern conquest for commercial expansion in the Levant. The Venetians were a Balkan power by virtue of having annexed a string of cities along the Adriatic coast, of which Ragusa (now the Yugoslav resort town of Dubrovnik) was the queen city. With their fleet in absolute control of eastern Mediterranean waters, the Venetians also secured, by purchase or otherwise, a number of colonies on the tip of the Greek peninsula, including Athens, Salonika, and many islands in the Aegean Sea. In essence, Venice controlled most of the southern and western tier of the Balkan peninsula, and its merchants made the Venetian ducat legal tender throughout the Balkans. Yet the ruling senate was reluctant to challenge the Turks, relying on diplomacy to keep the republic out of war. However, as Turkish expansion began to threaten their bases, some of the republic's diplomats began to show interest in Dracula's determination to resist the Turks—though Venice joined the crusade only in 1464, when it was already too late to save the prince.

  Though it was more immediately threatened by the Turks, the Holy Roman Empire, as well as the surviving powers of northern central and eastern Europe, was no more ready to defend its threatened autonomy, with very few exceptions. To take an example of relative apathy in the face of the Turkish menace in northeastern Europe, Ivan III (the Great), geographically distant from Dracula's country, sent occasional merchant-men into Turkish waters and patronized Renaissance artists and architects, having them build many of the imposing monuments in the Kremlin. He intended no crusading, but merely wished to deepen his knowledge of the Western world when he finally decided to establish an embassy at the court of the Hungarian king, Matthias. The mission was led by Fedor Kuritsyn, who at the end of his service wrote a fascinating political tract based on Dracula's life.

  This lack of moral fiber was particularly evident in the case of the Germanies—the Holy Roman Empire, which, unlike Russia on its easternmost fringes, was more dangerously threatened by the Turkish conquest. Including bishoprics, free cities, and larger and smaller princely states, there were over three hundred “Germanies” in Dracula's time, inhabited by people of various ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. The only common denominators within this amorphous, multilingual state (which, according to Voltaire, was “neither holy, nor Roman,” and which was by no means exclusively Germanic in character) were the emperor and the waning influence of the Catholic church. Unlike other western states, where the principle of primogeniture was well established, Holy Roman Emperors were elected by a special committee composed of the heads of three archbishoprics and four principalities. The tendency of these electors was to try to select weak candidates who were unlikely to interfere with the power of the feudal states. The election of Sigismund, the son of Charles IV, emperor of Luxemburg, crowned German emperor in 1411, was an exception, and he was destined to make at least one major attempt at crusading. This may have been because in 1387, before his election, he had already succeeded to the throne of Hungary (in essence an eastern European power), having taken as his wife Mary, the daughter of the last French king of Hungary and Poland, Louis the Great. Thus there was established between Hungary and the Holy Roman Empire a dynastic link that was to last until the end of World War I. In addition, on the death of Sigismund's half-brother Wenceslas in 1419, Sigismund became king of Bohemia as well.

  When Sigismund died in 1437, his three kingdoms were eventually transferred to Albert of Habsburg, the ruler of the tiny Austrian duchy, who had married Sigismund's daughter Elizabeth. Never elected emperor, Albert II ruled for only two years. His son Ladislas, born after the death of his father (hence his sobriquet Posthumus), became the heir to Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary, though he could not effectively rule until he should come of age. Vienna, the seat of Ladislas's government, was located, like Buda, on the Danube and thus dangerously exposed to Turkish attack. But with Albert's passing, the real arbiter of the eastern European situation, and the leader of the anti-Ottoman crusade, became John Hunyadi, viceroy of Hungary and governor general (voivode) of Transylvania. He was also for a time the political and military mentor of Dracula.

  The imperial title was next bestowed upon the Habsburg Frederick III (1440–1493), the last Holy Roman Emperor to be crowned in Rome (1452, though he had been king of Germany, as Frederick IV, since Albert's death), who showed little taste for crusading. He was more interested in maintaining the illusion that as duke of Austria he, rather than Hunyadi's son and successor, Matthias, was the legitimate king of Hungary, since the crown of St. Stephen, which alone conferred legitimacy, was kept safely hidden in the vaults of his palace at Wiener Neustadt. (The symbolic holy crown, topped by a heavy golden cross and bedecked with precious jewels, was originally given by Pope Sylvester II to the first king of Hungary, St. Stephen, in the year 1000, to commemorate Hungary's entry into the Christian community of states through the king's conversion to Catholicism.) In order to while away the long wintry nights at his desolate court at Wiener Neustadt, Frederick engaged the services of one Michael Beheim, a soldier of fortune and German Meistersinger, who composed a famous poem on the subject of Dracula.

  Poland was now by far the most powerful eastern European state. Its power was achieved in 1384, when the second daughter of Louis the Great of Hungary, Jadwiga (whose older sister, Mary, had been Emperor Sigismund's first wife), then barely ten years old, married the pagan Lithuanian grand duke Jagiello, on the condition that he accept conversion to Catholicism. He took the Christian name Ladislas II. With this union was born a vast confederation of states, which stretched from the Baltic coast across the Ukraine to the Black Sea, sustained by the intensive Catholicism of its people, the courage of its kings, and the chivalry of its nobles. Ladislas III, son of Jagiello, became the spiritual leader of two successive crusades, and perished in battle as a knight, fighting the Turks in the company of Dracula's older brother. His successor, Casimir IV (1447–1492), did not live up to this tradition, in part because of the threat of insurgent German pressures in the Baltic, Crimean Tatars in the Ukraine, and the ambitions of Grand Duke Ivan III of Moscow.

  Thus, in a confrontational world more interested in the acquisition of political power, the accumulation of material wealth, and the elimination of the tired vestiges of the monopoly once exercised by the Roman Catholic church, whether one looked east or west, there were few states indeed ready to rekindle the Crusader spirit. Dracula's country represented one of the few exceptions.

  An Era of Transition

  Though assuredly Italy was the tutor and propagator of classicism, humanism, and scientific inventiveness, it would be erroneous to believe that these movements did not spread to the eastern borderlands of European civilization. At the University of Krakow, established in 1364, the mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus was now in the process of discovering a new universe that centered on the sun; thereby he advanced enormously the science of astronomy. At the University of Prague, founded by Sigismund's father, Charles IV, in 1348, the Renaissance assumed more of a theological and philosophical bent; the lan
guages of instruction included both Czech and German, a concession to the principle of coexistence among peoples. The summer palace of King Matthias I at Visegrád, where Dracula spent many years of house arrest, was rebuilt almost entirely by Italian artisans and architects. Indeed, it was in this summer palace that Dracula's portrait was painted by a court artist, the first color and oil reproduction of a prince of the future Romanian lands.

  As for the invention of the printing press, historians speculate to this day whether Johannes Gutenberg or Fust of Mainz was the actual inventor of the mobile type that made printing on a large scale possible. Regardless, printers at Buda and Krakow knew the art at least five years before William Caxton had opened up his press in England at the end of 1476. In 1463 the first broadside about Dracula was printed in Vienna; it circulated in German initially as political propaganda to justify Dracula's arrest. Later during the fifteenth century Dracula “horror stories” were printed in Leipzig, Augsburg, Stuttgart, Strassburg, Nuremberg, and many other German cities.