Istria on the Internet - History - Dracula, Prince of Many Faces

The Dracula legend, which has so often been associated with Bram Stoker's Dracula and horror films, did not begin in 1897, when the novel was published, but started when Dracula was alive, then gradually spread throughout the Germanic world, becoming a unique phenomenon that certainly has no parallel in Romanian history and very few in world history of that period. The story of the fifteenth-century "Dracula phenomenon," this legend beyond the grave, is a complicated one that has not as yet been pieced together fully, and it is as fascinating as any other segment of Dracula's life.

Those responsible for starting the legend were hardly gothic authors, but German Catholic monks from Transylvania, refugees who fled the country because of Dracula's brutal attempt to destroy the Catholic institutions and confiscate their wealth within his territories. Like all escapees, they had a story to tell, and, as so often happens in these instances, the story tended to exaggerate their plight.

Altogether four manuscripts, copies of an original perhaps written at the Holy Roman Emperor's court at Wiener Neustadt in 1462, which has unfortunately disappeared, have survived. The oldest manuscript was at one time housed in the library of Austrian Benedictines at the monastery of Lambach; it has since disappeared. Two recent visits to that monastery and an exhaustive examination of the vast collections in their library, along with repeated conversations with the chief archivist, have thus far yielded little information concerning what is yet another mysterious Dracula disappearance. This was due in part to the utter disorganization of this once proud monastery; it had housed hundreds of monks - now it is reduced to a mere eleven. It was fortunate indeed that a German scholar, W. Wattenbach, was able to make a copy of the Lambach manuscript in 1896 - one year before the publication of Stoker's book. The other German manuscripts are now located at the British Museum, the public library in Colmar, France, and the former Benedictine abbey of Saint Gall, the monastic library, in Switzerland, which belongs to the Catholic archbishopric of that city. All these manuscripts are copies of a presumably missing original, transcribed in meticulous and ornate calligraphy in the Low German dialect spoken by the masses (Plattdeutsch or Nierderdeutsch). The manuscripts were clearly meant for the consumption of the monks themselves, since there was no reading public at the time.

The 32 separate segments of the Saint Gall narrative, all very similar in style and composition, initially strike the reader as short horror stories, undoubtedly among the first of their kind. They seem to be designed for an unsophisticated audience. Dracula is portrayed as a demented psychopath, a sadist, a gruesome murderer, a masochist, "one of the worst tyrants of history , far worse than the most depraved emperors of Rome such as Caligula and Nero" who fiddled while Rome burned. The crimes this Dracula allegedly committed included impalement, boiling alive, burning, decapitation, and dismemberment.

With the help of the research kindly placed at our disposal by our colleague and friend Matei Cazacu of the University of Paris, a fellow Dracula hunter of many years standing, and using - with caution - the poem of Michael Beheim as a genuine historical source, we now find it possible to reconstitute the route followed by one of these persecuted monks and describe the precise circumstances of his meeting Frederick III's poet laureate, Michael Beheim, at the emperor's palace in Wiener Neustadt.

Beheim relates that in 1461 Dracula met three barefoot Benedictine monks who had accepted the reforms of Saint Bernard, and as a result had been chased out of their abbey, called "Gorrion," in [...] present-day [Slovenia]. The two co-authors undertook a journey to the Benedictine abbey located in the Slovenian mountains only about thirty miles northwest of Ljubljana, the capital [...]. What had struck Professor Cazacu was the similarity of the name that Beheim cites, Gorrion, and the name of the town where the abbey is located: Gornijgrad. Our visit confirmed the fact that the bishop of Ljubljana, at the time Sigismund of Lamberg, on the pretext that the monks had accepted Saint Bemard's reforms, chased them out of the monastery, and appropriated the imposing edifice for his private use. Even today, the abbey serves the archbishop of Ljubljana as a summer retreat. When the reformed monks were obliged to disperse, most of them sought refuge in Benedictine houses located in neighboring lower Austria, or Styria, just a few miles across the border. However, by a quirk of fate, three of the lay monks crossed the Danube and fled northward towards Wallachia, where they found asylum in a fifteenth-century Franciscan monastery still extant in Tirgovişte, not very far removed from Dracula's palace.

Michael Beheim mentions the names of these monks. They were Brother Hans the Porter, Brother Michael, and Brother Jacob. The lay brothers had just retumed from a journey collecting alms for their abbey from neighboring villages and were undoubtedly proselytizing, a circumstance that offended Dracula, who until his forced conversion was an enemy of the Catholic church. As they returned, we are told, "at a distance about a quarter of a league" (about a mile) from the monastery, the chance encounter took place. Addressing Brother Michael, Dracula invited him to his palace, waming him to hasten "without delay." Michael Beheim relates the subsequent conversation that took place in the lofty throne room: "Dracula asked the monk many questions but mostly he wished (with his twisted sense of humor) to find out from the monk [whether] the many victims for whose death he was responsible and for whose soul presumably the holy man was praying, God had a place reserved for him in paradise. 'In a way,' added the prince, 'could he in the eyes of God be considered a saint, since he had shortened the heavy burdens of so many unfortunate people on this earth?' " What concerned Dracula most was the expiation of his own crimes after death - a concern also implicit in his attention to "good works" (construction of monasteries, gifts to the Holy Mountain of Athos, services for the dead). Obviously intimidated in the presence of the awesome impaler, Brother Michael attempted to assuage Dracula's fears of hellfire. " 'Sire, you can obtain salvation,' replied the monk, 'for God in His Mercy has saved so many people, even when his Divine Mercy was belatedly expressed at the moment of death.' " By such meek, hypocritical words Brother Michael undoubtedly succeeded in saving his own life. But Dracula wished additional reassurance, and he hastily called for the other friar, Hans the Porter, asking him more bluntly this time, "Sire monk, tell it to me straight, what will be my fate after death?" The latter, with the courage of his convictions, was far more forthright in his answers, and reprimanded the prince for his crimes: "Great pain and suffering and pitiful tears will never end for you, since you, demented tyrant, have spilled and spread so much innocent blood. It is even conceivable that the devil himself would not want you. But if he should, you will be confined to hell for eternity." Then, with a pause, Brother Hans added: "I know that I will be put to death by impalement without judgment for the honesty of my words devoid of flattery, but before doing so, give me the privilege of ending my sermon." Annoyed yet fearful, Dracula allowed the friar to proceed, replying: "Speak as you will. I will not cut you off." Then followed what surely must have been one of the most damning soliloquies that Dracula ever allowed anyone to utter in his presence: " 'You are a wicked, shrewd, merciless killer, an oppressor, always eager for more crime, a spiller of blood, a tyrant, and a torturer of poor people! What are the crimes that justify the killing of the pregnant women you have impaled? What have their little children done, some of them three years old, others barely born, whose lives you have snuffed out? You have impaled those who never did any harm to you. Now you bathe in the blood of the innocent babes who do not even know the meaning of evil! You wicked, sly, implacable killer! How dare you accuse those whose delicate and pure blood you have mercilessly spilled. I am amazed at your murderous hatred! What impels you to seek revenge upon them? Give me an immediate answer to these charges." These extraordinary words both amazed and enraged Dracula. However, he contained his anger and replied calmly, reasserting his own Machiavellian political philosophy, particularly as applied to the killing of innocent children, the mention of which had struck a raw nerve. "I will reply willingly and make my answer known to you now. When a farmer wishes to clear the land he must not only cut the weeds that have grown but a1so the roots that lie deep underneath the soil. For should he omit cutting the roots, after one year he has to start anew, in order that the obnoxious plant not grow again. In the same manner, the babes in arm who are here will someday grow up into powerful enemies, should I allow them to grow into manhood. I wish to destroy and uproot them. Should I do otherwise, the young heirs will otherwise easily avenge their fathers on this earth."

Hans, who knew his fate was sealed, insisted on having the last word: "You mad tyrant, do you really think you will be able to live eternally? Because of the blood you have spilled on this earth, all wi1l rise before God and His kingdom demanding vengeance. You foolish madman and senseless unhearing tyrant, your whole being belongs to hell!" Dracula then became mad with fury .The monk had pricked him where it hurt most, in his conscience and in his misguided belief that because of his being anointed, God in His mercy would have pity on his soul. He seized the monk with his own bare hands and impaled him on the spot. Forsaking the usual procedure, by which the stake was introduced from the buttocks up, he forced the monk to lie down on the floor, and repeatedly struck him through his head. After Hans quit writhing in pain on the bloodstained floor and expired, Dracula had him hanged by a cord by the feet, head downward. He then hoisted the unfortunate wretch in front of the Franciscan monastery on a high stake. For good measure he impaled his donkey as well.

One can well imagine the effect of this gruesome sight on the remaining monks. They were terrified and abandoned their monastery. Brother Michael and Brother Jacob crossed into Transylvania and then sought refuge, like many of their colleagues from Gorrion, in various Benedictine houses in lower Austria. Since Lambach was the oldest and the most prestigious Benedictine establishment, the two lay brothers sought refuge there first. There they related their unsavory adventures to scribes, and the tales were undoubtedly colored by the anguish of a close escape. It is in this manner that the first Dracula horror story was born, at the end of 1462.

From Lambach, we know that at least Brother Jacob moved to Melk, a far larger abbey, which in fact had been founded by the monks from Lambach. This abbey, the inspiration for Umberto Eco's detective thriller The Name of the Rose, stil1 sits in a commanding position on a hill dominating the Danube and is one of the most palatial Benedictine houses in Europe. It houses more than a hundred monks, who run a most prestigious secondary school. In the fifteenth century , the more elegant and elaborate quarters of the abbey were reserved for the members of the imperial family, which included the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III. His own palace at Wiener Neustadt lay but a few miles away. It was at Melk that Brother Jacob met other Benedictine refugees from Transylvania, whose records can still be found in the archives of the monastery. One who signed himself Johannes de Septem Castris (meaning John of the Seven Fortresses, the German name for Transylvania), was likely another Benedictine, born a year before Dracula. Eventually he became prior of the monastery. Another refugee was a certain Blasius from Bistrita, a township that had been severely attacked both by Dracula and Mihaly Szilagy. Dracula's "horrors" undoubtedly became a conversational highlight among the Romanian and German Catholic monks now attached to this grandiose monastery. Proof of their interest is the fact that the Dracula story was inserted into the history of the abbey, composed by the Romanian prior covering the events of the years 1461 to 1477. Dracula horror tales could have been read to the monks at mealtime, during which the law of silence prevailed, as a break from the habitual reading of the lives of saints.

Michael Beheim, by his name clearly of Bohemian origin, was the son of a simple weaver, bom on September 27, 1416, in Sulzbach, in the German state of Württerhberg. A typical ambitious young man without money, from early youth onward he led a life of travel and adventure. First, he enrolled as a soldier of fortune; he then studied music and even indulged in religious and biblical studies. His main avocation, however, was that of singing poems to the accompaniment of various musical instruments, as a minstrel at the courts of the powerful patrons he served. He also developed a gift for writing historical ballads. Beheim first worked for the powerful Count Ulrich Cilli when the latter accompanied King Ladislas V Habsburg, after the liberation of Belgrade. Following the assassination of the count, which he described in some detail in a tome entitled Ten Poems on the History of Austria and Hungary, he returned with King Ladislas V to Vienna, and served him as a court poet during 1457. It was sometime before the death of Ladislas that Beheim decided to switch his allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, residing at his court in Wiener Neustadt. The poet witnessed the emperor's humiliation when he was besieged in his palace by the Viennese people. Beheim nevertheless remained true to his master and was duly rewarded with the post of poet laureate and imperial page - a risky proposition at a time when the insurgent populace made a habit of assassinating the imperial sycophant. After the emperor's liberation by the Bohemian king George Podebrady, Beheim served various masters in Hungary and Bohemia. He later accompanied the emperor to Wiener Neustadt, and for some years accepted the post of court historian and troubadour. By that time Beheim's skill at writing history in verse had been refined. He had composed, among other works, a fairly accurate description of the Varna crusade, based on the eyewitness account of a volunteer in the Christian arrnies, Hans Mägest. As we have seen, the latter often spoke of the important role played by Dracula' s father and his brother Mircea in that campaign.

Clearly Beheim's appetite had been whetted for work on yet another member of that extraordinary family. Circumstances abetted this choice of subject. It was at Wiener Neustadt that Beheim first met the perambulatory monk Brother Jacob. The monk often went marketing in Wiener Neustadt. the most important center southeast of Melk. Knowing that the monk was a refugee from Wallachia, Beheim deliberately sought out Brother Jacob. The first interview apparently took place at the imperial palace on December 12. 1462. They met many times more at an unnamed monastery within the city. Jacob was acting as an informant, much in the manner of Mägest for the Varna crusade, on the strange life and deeds of Dracula. The interviews took place during the spring and summer of 1463, continuing for roughly four months - enough time for the accumulation of solid notes on Beheim's part. Likely the poem was completed in the winter of 1463.

This poem represents by far the most extensive contemporary account of Dracula's life story. Totaling 1,070 lines, the original manuscript was deposited in the library of the University of Heidelberg. where most of Beheim's other original manuscripts are located. They ended up there because Beheim finished his career in the service of Count Frederick I of Heidelberg. He entitled the poem the Story of a Bloodthirsty Madman Called Dracula of Wallachia and read it to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III during the late winter of 1463, like a good troubadour, accompanying his reading with music. The story of Dracula's cruelties was evidently to the taste of the diseased mind of the emperor, for it was read on several occasions from 1463 to 1465 when the latter was entertaining important guests. There is no question that deliberate distortions were introduced into the German text by Beheim for dramatic effect or for the benefit of the emperor's audience.

We have dwelt on the manner in which this German propaganda was exploited by the chancellery of the Hungarian king Matthias, who needed incriminatory material to justify Dracula's arrest and to avoid the crusade that he had promised to the papal curia. It is likely that the Hungarian chancellery decided to print its own version of the Dracula story, which came close to Brother Jacob's account at Vienna in the same year (1463) - though the actual work has never been found. Its contents, however, were uncritically incorporated in the work of the Viennese professor Thomas Ebendorfer, Chronicorum regum romanorum, one year before his death in 1464. In addition, this very negative view of Dracula was cited by a number of German and Hungarian humanists such as Leonardus Hefft, a notary from Regensburg, John Pannonius, a propagandist and panegyrist of the Hungarian king, and Janos Vitez, bishop of Oradea and later primate of Hungary.The German story, systematically spread by the Hungarian chancellery throughout the various capitals of Europe for propaganda purposes, was thus also disseminated in the guise of university lectures, aimed at a relatively small and sophisticated audience.

The progressive popularization of the Dracula story, however, was due to the coincidence, in the second half of the fifteenth century, of the invention of the printing press and processes for the cheap production of rag paper. In effect, the idea of writing books for profit was introduced. The first Dracula printing destined for the public at large, undoubtedly copied from the Lambach manuscript, was produced in 1463 in either Vienna or Wiener Neustadt in the form of a news sheet, an early newspaper of sorts. It was published by a certain Ulrich Han, a disciple of Gutenberg, who had founded his German printing press at Mainz.

Following the former prince's rehabilitation and marriage into the Hungarian royal family, the anti-Dracula propaganda campaign had outlived its usefulness; King Matthias lost interest in subsidizing these hostile tracts. However, this change of attitude in no way prevented money-hungry printers from seeing the commercial possibilities in popularizing the original narratives. The continued publication of the sensational tales confirms the fact that the horror genre conformed to the tastes of the fifteenth-century reading public. We suspect that Dracula stories, in fact, became, during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, the first best-sellers on a nonreligious motif - under various catchy and unsavory titles such as The Frightening and Truly Extraordinary Story of a Wicked Blood-drinking Tyrant Called Prince Dracula. Sa1es of each would have been upwards of 300 to 400 books a year. (Bibles, as usual, sold more copies.) In order to prove this point conclusively, bibliophiles and eminent scholars such as our colleague Matei Cazacu, who has a1ready completed a remarkable bibliography of all the German prints, must continue their search among the earliest of them by contacting antiquarians, bibliophiles, or simply private families who are not always aware of the precious relics in their possession.

Besides the lost Vienna print of 1463, no fewer than thirteen different ghastly fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Dracula stories have been discovered in print thus far, all of them in the various German states within the former empire. Two were published in Nuremberg by the printer Mark Ayrer in 1488, followed by another edition by Peter Wagner, and one in Lübeck by a typographer named Bartholomaeus Gothan, all in the same year. The year 1491 saw an edition printed in Bamberg by Hans Sporer; one was issued in 1493 in Leipzig by Martin Landsberg. In 1494. Christoph Schnaitter took his chance with an edition in Augsburg; Ambrosius Huber published one in Nuremberg in that same year. Interest may have been particularly strong in Nuremberg, because the older citizens remembered Dracula' s father, who had journeyed there to be invested in the Dragon Order, or else because of its trade connection with Transylvania. In 1500 there was a publication by Mathias Hupfuff at Strassburg, indicating that there was also interest on the subject in this imperial city far removed from Transylvania. Hamburg, in the sixteenth century, was a Baltic city equally removed from Transylvanian trade, but a Dracula narrative by Des Iegher [Eiger] was printed there in 1502. Augsburg was linked by strong banking and financial interests with the Transylvanian Saxons; Melchior Ramminger published severa1 editions of the story there, and he was evidently successful, since Matheus Francken reprinted the book nine years later. Jobst Gutnecht committed yet another edition to print in Nuremberg in 1521.

The business of collecting Dracula pamphlets, begun by Romanian bibliophiles such as Ion Caradja, was continued more recently in the United States by Abraham Samuel Wolf Rosenbach. He was successful in finding a rather unusual version of the Dracula story, printed in Nuremberg in 1488 with a colored woodcut of the prince on the cover, not very dissimilar from the Ambras portrait. The early printers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were apparently beginning to learn the art of packaging their works with appropriate images or engravings to catch the eye of their readers. Gutenberg himself had shown the way in a book entitled Turkenkalender, urging the Christian world to embark on a crusade, printed in 1462, the year of Dracula's arrest. It had a striking picture on its first page, portraying gruesome Turkish atrocities, meant to encourage his readers to take up the cross. The printers of the Dracula tales, who had begun using on their title pages woodcuts of the prince modeled upon the original Ambras portrait, began, with time, and presumably to enhance sales, to take liberties with this original portrait, distorting the prince's features and throwing his face out of proportion.

The Nuremberg and Augsburg prints of 1520, for instance, lend him a far sterner and more cruel countenance than the prints of the 1480s. In the Leipzig edition of 1493, Dracula, portrayed in a military outfit, looked particularly somber and ferocious.

The image that appeared on the cover of the Nuremberg edition of 1499 and the Strassburg one of 1500 was especially suggestive - it referred to an incident that took place at the foot of Timpa Hill in Braşov. The prince is depicted having a meal; the food is laid out in front of him on a table. Around him are strung innumerable dead or dying impaled victims in a variety of grotesque positions, the poles penetrating either their chests or their buttocks. Beside Dracula are his henchmen, using axes and hacking off the limbs of yet other victims; heads, legs, arms, and memberless torsos are strewn haphazardly around Dracula's chair.

Frontispiece of Dracula pamphlet printed by Ambrosiu Huber in Nuremburg, 1499. The text above the woodcut translates:

"Here begins a very cruel frightening story about a wild bloodthirsty man Prince Dracula. How he impaled people and roasted them and boiled their heads in a kettle and skinned them to pieces like cabbage. He also roasted the children of mothers and they had to eat the children themselves. And many other horrible things are written in this tracts and in the land he ruled." (MC note: Is that a possible tear in Vlad's eye.)

In other Dracula tracts, woodcuts with religious themes appeared alongside the horrible images, either to arouse the reader's indignation or else to induce thoughts of divine retribution. Providing a suitable ending to one Dracula tract was the image of the crucifixion of Christ, with Mary Magdalen and the Blessed Virgin standing by.

The net result of the anti-Dracula propagandistic efforts subsidized by the Hungarian king and the commercialization of the subject by German printers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the blackening of Dracula's reputation following his death. This dreadful image took root mostly in the Germanies. Popular acceptance of it was reflected in the arts. In recent years W. Peters, a German art historian from Saxony, chanced to visit an exhibition of fifteenth-century paintings at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna; he came across one of Saint Andrew in which the saint was crucified in a particularly cruel fashion. Upon examining the witnesses whom the artist had introduced as plausible personalities likely to enjoy the macabre scent, Peters recognized the features and costume of Dracula. The co-authors have visited the famed Cathedral of St. Stephen in Vienna, where, in a small chapel at the rear of the church, a series of paintings depict Christ's Calvary on stations of the cross. In one painting the unknown artist, presumably wishing to include the familiar face of someone who might enjoy the sorrowful Calvary, chose a figure very reminiscent of Dracula as a witness.

Since the Dracula stories were best-sellers in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Germany, it was but natural that they should find their way into popular literature and history from the sixteenth century onward. Although Dracula did not figure in major works, his story was. inserted in anonymous German novelettes such as Fortunatus (Augsburg, 1509), Valentin Schumann's Nachtbüchlein (1599) and in the satiric poem Flöhaz, Weiber Traz, by Johann Fischart (1573), in which Dracula is briefly dismissed as embodying the spirit of evil. In Hungary, Dracula's negative image also lived on, in minor compositions such as a poem printed by Gaspar of Heltai in Cluj in 1574. In this instance the author's purpose was to praise Hunyadi and defame both Dracul and Dracula, as Hunyadi's enemies. A poem that made similar reference to Dracula was written in 1560 by Matthias Nagybánki, a priest from upper Hungary , and printed in 1574 at Debrecen. Dracula was portrayed as a villain also in a play by Adam Horváth, published in 1787 at Györ, first performed at Buda on July 15. 1790, and rewritten as a drama in three acts at Pest in 1792. An obscure Hungarian writer, Miklós Jesiku. wrote a novel, published in 1863, that takes place at the time of Dracul, in which Dracul and Dracula are confused and Dracul is thus the criminal. Finally, the Calvinist priest Ferencz Kóos published in 1890 a work in which Dracula was depicted as a villain. Like the Germans, Hungarian authors have played up the image of a basically evil Dracula.

Reinforcing the view that Dracula was an enemy of humanity were, of course, Turkish historians, who as panegyrists of Sultan Mehmed II were paid to denigrate the character of the Impaler. Their anger was heightened by the fact that Dracula at one time had been the friend and the protege of the sultan and had betrayed this sacred trust, inflicting enormous losses, cruelties, and humiliation on his erstwhile protector. He was, in fact, the only European ruler responsible for inflicting a crushing defeat on Mehmed, and this defeat compelled the sultan to abandon the conquest of Wallachia in a shameful manner. Dracula's Turkish detractors coined the most damaging epithet of all by referring to Dracula as "Kaziglu Bey." "The Impaler Prince." The same negative standpoint was taken up by the historians. such as Michael Critobulos, among those Greeks who had made their peace with the sultan: Critobulos was richly rewarded as a result with the gift of the governorship of the island of Imbros.

Among the most respectable sixteenth-century historians who helped perpetuate the portrait of Dracula the villain was Sebastian Münster, a German scholar of some academic integrity who wrote a famous history entitled Cosmographia universalis (Description of the World) first published in Latin in 1544, in German during his lifetime, and then reprinted many times in a variety of languages, including English (1552). The work enjoyed a unique success as a kind of reference work on eastern Europe. Unfortunately, there was a temptation to repeat distortions, as he had become famous. It was in this manner that the negative image of Dracula gained a wide degree of acceptance in most of the German and Austrian universities and centers of learning. It would be a thankless task to enumerate the names of prominent historians who accepted this view. One who drew wide readership simply because he wrote the first scholarly history of the Romanian lands in German (A History of Moldavia and Wallachia, published at Halle in 1804) was Johann Christian Engel. In his work Dracula remained a ruthless and relentless tyrant and psychopath, a portrait that he had inherited from Münster and the fifteenth-century humanist Pannonius. Engel's viewpoint was in turn taken up by two of the foremost German scholars of the nineteenth century, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall and Leopold von Ranke, and even a few Romanian historians educated in Germany. And when William Wilkinson, appointed English consul in Bucharest in the early nineteenth century, began looking for sources to help him compose one of the first surveys of Moldavian and Wal1achian history in English, he must have used the works of these German precursors.

Gradually, however, a more positive view of Dracula also came to be expressed by some scholars. Among the first was the Polish Romantic historian Adam Mickiewicz, who lectured at the prestigious Collège de France in Paris. founded by Francis I. In a lesson devoted to Slavic literature in the 1840s, Mickiewicz astounded his students by paying unqualified tribute to Dracula "as the ideal of a despot." Perhaps because of his Slavic origins, the Polish scholar had become familiar with the Russian Dracula narrative, to which we shall now turn.

We have noted that German and Turkish writings about Dracula aimed in essence to blacken Dracula's reputation in the eyes of posterity. Other authors, while admitting his crimes, saw Dracula as a just ruler. The latter line of thinking, which was never publicized in the west, was the approach of a remarkable Russian diplomat, in a sense the founder of the modern Russian diplomatic system, Fedor Kuritsyn, whose reports we have often cited. Kuritsyn was sent by his master, the grand duke of Moscow, Ivan III, with a large retinue on a mission to the west in the year 1482. Its avowed aim, rather like Peter theGreat's famous embassy of 1689, was to "open the windows" that closed Russia to the west. In Ivan III's mind, Buda represented the gateway to Europe, where the impact of the Italian Renaissance, with its scientific inventiveness and humanistic revolution, had been fully felt. In current parlance, the Russian ambassador's mission could be labeled industria1 spying. The grand duke was in desperate need of artisans, architects, artists, and professiona1 people to help modernize Russia. For diplomatic purposes. Ivan also wished to sign a treaty of alliance with the Hungarian king against the Poles, Russia's Tatar overlords, and rival city-states such as Novgorod, which were threatening the duchy of Moscow.

Kuritsyn reached Buda in the early portion of 1482 and stayed until the beginning of 1483, spending almost a year in Hungary. In the course of his stay he met King Matthias, Bonfini the court historian, and countless officials, diplomats, merchants, and bankers. Among the many courtiers to whom he was introduced at the royal palace were Dracula's Hungarian wife and his three children, Vlad, Mihnea (the eldest son of a different marriage), and an unnamed third, who habitually resided with the bishop of Oradea in Transylvania. In the retinue of these Dracula family members there were a number of boyars who had remained loyal to their former master. It was fortunate for Kuritsyn that in his delegation there was a Transylvanian, Martinco, familiar with the Hungarian and Romanian languages, who probably acted as an interpreter. In the course of such conversations Kuritsyn's attention was drawn to the German narratives that were still circulating at court. Kuritsyn was intrigued to the point of absorption by what he heard and read about this remarkable Prince Dracula, who had died only six years earlier.

When the moment for his next diplomatic mission came, Kuritsyn made a point of making a detour to Braşov, the scene of some of Dracula's most spectacular crimes, where he spent several months. He was seeking additiona1 details about Dracula. From Braşov he crossed the northem Transylvanian Alps at the Borgo Pass and sojourned at Bistrita, the bailiwick of the Hunyadis, where, near his castle, Dracula's memory was also enshrined. Here Kuritsyn was introduced by a special letter of recommendation by King Matthias to the mayor in February 1483. His lengthy stay in Bistrita gave him ample time to collect additional details provided by the Saxon citizenry,.who had little fondness for the prince. Kuritsyn finally reached Suceava, the capital of Stephen the Great's Moldavia, only a day's distance from Bistrita in the spring of 1484. The ambassador's joumey to Moldavia was intended to solidify the final details of a treaty of alliance with Stephen the Great, which had been signed at Moscow a few months earlier, following the celebration of a marriage between Princess Elena, daughter of Steven's second wife Evdochia of Kiev (Ivan's cousin), and Ivan's eldest son, the future heir to the throne, yet another young Ivan. Still obsessed with the Dracula story and knowing that ten surviving veterans in Stephen's army had actually witnessed the last days of the Impaler near Bucharest, Kuritsyn took the opportunity of questioning them, as well as Stephen himself, who had known Dracula since boyhood. Another person of great interest to Kuritsyn was Stephen's third wife, Maria Voichita, the daughter of Radu the Handsome (who had inherited her father's good looks).

Having spent over a year in the Moldavian capital, Kuritsyn's delegation left Suceava for Moscow by way of what was then Akkerrnan, early in 1485, apparently unaware that the Turks had just captured that important fortress on the Danube delta a few months earlier, in August 1484. The whole embassy, its baggage, servants, and retinue, as well as numerous priceless gifts Kuritsyn had received for the grand duke from both Matthias and Stephen, were seized by a band of marauding Turkish irregular forces. A high ransom was demanded for Kuritsyn's liberation. He and his suite were detained at Akkerrnan from 1485 to 1486. The whole Russian party was eventually freed, through the mediation of the khan of the Tatars, Mengli Giray, a vassal of the Turks, who wished to ingratiate himself with his increasingly powerful Muscovy neighbor to the north. Kuritsyn finally reached Moscow with the drafts of the Hungarian and Moldavian alliances before September 1486.

Kuritsyn's lengthy stay on the Danube had given him ample time to study the notes he had gleaned from all Dracula sources during his stays in Hungary, Transylvania, and Moldavia. He finally put his account to paper, under a simple title bereft of any partiality. He called his report The Story of Prince Dracula (Povest' o Drakule), much in the manner of a diplomat writing a dispatch. Kuritsyn's original report has thus far never been found. But at the end of the existing copy researched by Professor McNally at the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library in Leningrad there is a brief note written by the scribe who transcribed the original, first in 1486 and later in 1490. The scribe simply signed himself "I, the sinner Eufrosin." Eufrosin was evidently a monk attached to Kuritsyn's service, who had likely accompanied him during his mission to the west. His diplomatic capacities are further attested to by the fact that he later became abbot of the Saint Cyril Monastery of the Lake, which served as the official repository of foreign correspondence (a kind of state archive) for fifteenth-century Russia. Unlike his master Kuritsyn, who had no great fondness for the power of the Orthodox Church, Eufrosin described himself simply as a "sinner." The note he inserted at the end of the manuscript was equally discordant. Eufrosin felt compelled to condemn Dracula for "preferring the pleasures of this world" as evidenced by his conversion to Roman Catholicism and said Dracula thereby deserved the punishment of hellfire.

Scholars have, so far, found no fewer than twenty different copies of this document, some of them dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Though not printed until the nineteenth century, the Russian Dracula narrative had a deep an long impact on Russian politicaI theory.

Why was Kuritsyn so fascinated with the subject of Dracula? We can immediately discard motives of political propaganda (the Hungarian incentive), or making money (the objective of the German printers); Kuritsyn's report, which was never published in his lifetime, served as an internal document for the exclusive benefìt of the grand duke Ivan III and his successors, to enrich the political education of the Russian head of state, much in the manner of Machiavelli's Prince. From this viewpoint, Dracula, far from being an irrational killer, provided an example of an effective ruler, who threatened torture and death to advance the principles of justice and good govemment. The boyars, rival candidates to the throne, competing independent townships, the Orthodox church, and the alien Roman Catholic church constituted so many threats that had to be repressed by terror. Kuritsyn's account taught that the principal objective of the despot must be to create a new nobility, faithful bureaucrats, and an army loyal to himself alone.

As one of the founders of the Russian state department, Kuritsyn was also anxious to teach the grand duke, by way of Dracula's example, concern for good diplomatic etiquette at his court in Moscow. He stressed the need for selecting brilliant and intelligent men who must not only be taught the rudiments of protocol, but who must also learn to weigh their words in the presence of a great leader. Kuritsyn was very conscious of the fact that Russia was still a second-rate power, not accepted as an equal within the European community of nations. Westerners still poked fun at the unusual attire of occasional official delegations from Moscow, and at intemational conferences, the representative of the grand duke usually came last in terms of precedence. Dracula's insistence on the need for a great prince to be respected by other powers thus struck close to home. The grand duke of Moscow had barely recovered from the abject humiliation of having to kneel in front of the Tatar khan with gifts of precious fur, as a token of submission. Taking his cue from Dracula's practice of nailing the hats on the heads of haughty ambassadors, Ivan III of Moscow now began to punish disrespectful Tatar representatives with equal severity.

Dracula's vendetta against the Catholic church and its numerous religious orders, which he considered as "papal enclaves" that subverted his own supremacy, also provided a suitable model for the ruler of the Russian state, who saw himself equally threatened by the Catholic priests and monks working in the interests of the Catholic Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. Though the Turks did not as yet directly threaten Russian power because of Moscow's remoteness from the shores of the Black Sea. Dracula's crusade against the infidel, on which Kuritsyn laid a good deal of stress, provided a good precedent for liberating Holy Russia from the Muslim Tatar yoke. Since the Tatars occupied the Crimea, a successful liberation of that territory held incalculable potential for future Russian expansionism.

Kuritsyn and his brother Ivan Volk may also have been influenced by their study of Dracula's relationship with his own church, where he attempted to subordinate the all-powerful bishops and abbots to the will of the prince (which was not as yet the case in the duchy of Moscow). The two Kuritsyn brothers tried to implement this particular lesson in a tantalizing underhand manner aimed at obtaining long-term results. They claimed that they had become converted to an obscure sect started by a Jew from Novgorod, who wished to convert the Russian people to principal tenets of the Jewish religion. Their adherents denied the divinity of Christ, rejected the Trinity, and revived the ritualism and iconoclasm of Orthodoxy, though they advised against circumcision for fear of being discovered by the Orthodox authorities. Rather than theological controversy, Kuritsyn's interest focused on the Judaizers' revolt against the overwhelming political power and ecclesiastical privileges of the Russian Orthodox church. In order to gain adherents, the Judaizers began to criticize the many abuses practiced by the upper ecclesiastic hierarchy, the duplicitous and immoral lives of individual bishops and abbots; they denounced the monasteries that cared little for the pious works for which they initially had been intended. The secretary of state soon recognized that in an Orthodox country that was not theologically minded, the social and political aspects of the Judaizers' protest were far more significant than its religious appeal. The head of the Russian Orthodox church, together with his bishops and abbots, constituted a state within a state, which competed with the authority of the grand prince. As such the church was most alarmed at Kuritsyn's conversion to the Judaizers' point of view, which promised to undermine their own authority. On the other hand, now the head of Russia's foreign office, Kuritsyn sensed that he might use the Judaizers as a tool to convince his master, a despot by temperament, to curb the power of the Russian church, thereby gaining power himself.

In this respect, the Russian foreign minister managed quite deftly, gaining allies within the small circle of Ivan's immediate family. Having befriended Stephen the Great of Moldavia during his stay at Suceava in 1484, and as a partisan of the Moldavian alliance, what more natural than that Kuritsyn should approach Stephen's daughter Elena "the Moldavian" as she was dubbed in Moscow, Ivan's daughter-in-law, who had just given birth to a son, Dmitri, who was next to her husband in the line of succession? Making use of the enormous prestige that he had gained al her father's court, Kuritsyn pointed out to Elena the overwhelming advantages that conversions to the Judaizers' point of view would entail both for her husband Ivan and their son Dmitri in order to curb the power of the Russian hierarchy. Kuritsyn was eventually successful in converting Elena to his views.

Subsequent events played admirably into the ambassador's hands. Unexpectedly, young Ivan, the grand duke's son, died in February 1498. This Ieft Ivan III with a grave constitutionaI crisis over who would succeed him. He had recently married the ambitious Sophia Paleologus, a niece of the last emperor of Constantinople; she had given him a son, Basil. The problem was: Who should be his rightful heir? Dmitri, the son of Ivan's deceased son, whose mother was Elena, or the eldest son of his Byzantine wife, Sophia? Faced with the horns of this unprecedented dilemma in Russian history , Ivan III cut the Gordian knot by choosing Dmitri the son of Elena the Moldavian as his heir and co-ruler - a remarkable triumph for Kuritsyn and the Judaizers.

Kuritsyn, the all-powerful foreign minister, and his brother, Ivan "the Wolf," were certainly involved in this plot, for they knew that once Dmitri (then seventeen) was chosen as the official heir, they and Elena could dispose of him as they wished. The success of this "coup" proved that the grand duke himself had been converted to Kuritsyn's and Elena's viewpoint concerning the need to further emasculate the Orthodox church in the interest of centralized government. In addition, Kuritsyn had pointed out to his master the advantages he would derive from the confiscation of the vast landed wealth of the church; he could begin financing the armies and bureaucracies he so badly needed to found a modern Russian state. Most persuasive in Kuritsyn's arguments was the premature formulation of the doctrine of ' 'the divine right of kings" (a theory of government that became fashionable elsewhere only two centuries later).

This view of the "divine" origin of the prince's power was derived from Dracula's view that "anointment," meaning the prince's being touched by the holy relics of some saint, was ordained by God, and thus the ruler was implicitly akin to the Divinity. Therefore God alone could judge his actions. Since Ivan III had every interest in strengthening the power of the central govemment against the Orthodox church, he was easily won over to this view of his own "divinity," against the arguments of Sophia Paleologus, who supported the Orthodox church.

The victory of Dracula's viewpoint was symbolized by the splendid ceremony that took place at the Cathedral of the Assumption in Moscow, when the youth Dmitri, brought up in the traditions of his mother's Judaizing friends, was recognized as Ivan's sole legitimate heir - while Sophia Paleologus and her son Basil were sent away in disgrace into house arrest.

Kuritsyn and Elena, however, had not reckoned on the unusual resiliency and talent for intrigue of her clever rival, the ambitious Sophia. She staged a remarkable comeback, by cleverly insinuating that Elena and Kuritsyn were planning a coup against the aged grand duke, hoping to poison him in order to hasten the rule of the young grandson, Ivan III, who was ill, and suspicious of his daughter-in-law, abruptly changed his mind. He had Elena and Dmitri arrested barely four years after his grandson had been crowned, while Sophia's son Basil, reemerging from his confinement, became heir.

Elena was probably murdered in jail in 1504. Her unfortunate son Dmitri lingered for another five years and died in circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained. Equally mysterious was the end of Kuritsyn and his brother Ivan the Wolf and their Judaizing followers, who suddenly disappeared from the political scene in 1501. They were condemned by the powerful Orthodox hierarchy in a special synod convoked in 1503.

Though the power of the Russian church survived intact until the more radica1 reforms of Peter the Great, Dracula's political philosophy, inherent in Kuritsyn's narrative, continued to hold sway among a number of successive tsars. Particularly strong was its impact upon the deranged mentality of Ivan IV (1533-1589), nicknamed "the Terrible," the grandson of Ivan III. The Dracula narrative was probably read to the young heir to the throne during the impressionable years of childhood. His biographers inform us that one of his chief pleasures was torturing animals, particularly plucking the feathers of birds, eccentricities that match those committed by Dracula, mentioned in Kuritsyn's story. Especially after the poisoning of his beloved wife, Anastasia Romanova, in 1558, Ivan IV prosecuted the old Russian boyars whom he knew to be disloyal to his person with cruelty inspired by pages from the Dracula manuscript. Like Dracula, he chose new elements to serve him, pliable and loya1 to his person. Even his infamous streltsy guard, responsible for his most dastardly crimes, were closely modeled on Dracula's hired armaşi. He taught disrespectful ambassadors the lessons of protocol by nailing their hats onto their heads - the precise method used by the Wallachian prince. Dracula's standards for diplomatic protocol found their way into the Chronicle of Kazan, drafted upon the tsar's orders. Ivan made frequent use of impalement in killing boyars and other political enemies - a method of imposing death rarely used in Russia before his time and obviously inspired by Dracula. Ivan showed Dracula's intolerance for idle priests and monks who did not live up to the moral standards of the church; he subjected them to punishments that included impalement. Contemporaries observed that he, like Dracula, enjoyed seeing men twist in pain before they died in a variety of grotesque postures.

Though the Dracula narrative continued to serve as an internal court document for some time, it lost its appeal over the course of the centuries. It became irrelevant with Russia's progressive emergence on the European stage as a major power in the era of Peter the Great. In the long run, the Russian Dracula narrative acquired the legendary and even mythical aura of the German tales. In the eighteenth century, Kuritsyn's account began to be disseminated in various popular, literary , and even religious writings.

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 Europe 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 17th century.

Contrary to the gruesome Dracula depicted in the German and Turkish writings and, in contrast to the "cruel but just" characterization of the prince exploited by successive Russian rulers, a much kinder picture of the Wallachian ruler has emerged in Romania. Over the course of time, his heroic traits prevailed. This process has reached the point where some western readers accustomed to the vampirization of Dracula and Romanians who have witnessed his gradual deification believed for a while that they were dealing with two different personalities. This wide gulf was accentuated by the use of different names: "Dracula" in the west and, "Vlad the Impaler" in Romania. Most confused by this double identity are tourists visiting the various sites associated with Dracula's name. To the inquisitive visitor asking for additional information concerning Dracula, the response of the national tourist-office guide is invariably "Oh, you mean Vlad the Impaler!"

The sources for the Romanian story must be sought in oral folklore, since Romanian did not exist as a written language until the sixteenth century - only Church Slavonic, the language of the liturgy, was in use at Dracula's court. The original authors of the Romanian Dracula narratives, mostly peasants, came from those regions of Transylvania and Wallachia associated with places where Dracula had sojourned, where he fought, and where he prayed. As noted, the majority of the population in Transylvania spoke the Romanian language. Living among the German Saxons, they were familiar with their anecdotes and included many of them in their own sagas. In regions of mixed ethnic origins, such as Bulgaria and Serbia, similar accounts of Dracula's exploits have recently been collected by folklorists.

The manner in which these Dracula ballads began was in essence no different from the beginning of oral traditions of any people: bards, minstrels, poets, drawn from the peasant class, would convert these stories to verse and compose songs, often accompanied by the music of rough wooden musical instruments like the bagpipe or Pan pipes, on festive occasions such as Easter or on the feast days of certain saints. There was a tendency to give the ballad a local flavor, connecting it with a familiar piace or landmark. Dates of succession of princes and precise locations are rarely mentioned in the collective memory of the people. As tales are repeated from generation to generation, embellishments are naturally introduced with the passing of time. However, from the viewpoint of our research, these oral traditions of the Romanian people have provided an invaluable source to close the many gaps in our study of Dracula where documents were missing.

Although folklore has to be used with caution by the historian, it can become a legitimate tool. There are perhaps more reasons to trust collective folk wisdom, because people can be more discriminating in what they chose to remember, than the memoirs of statesmen, diplomats, and kings, who often chose to deceive posterity to enhance their reputation. What is worth stressing in connection with the rich folkloric tradition Dracula has generated is the fact that, although several Romanian princes had more distinguished careers and ruled for more extensive periods of time, Dracula, whose total reign lasted barely six years, is remembered most reverently by the people.

'The Dracula Castle Epic" first appeared in an old historical chronicle known by the name of its presumed author, Cantacuzino. Since written sources on Dracula were scanty, the earliest chronicler inserted a popular narrative concerning the construction of Dracula's castle, using the language of the Romanian people in the Slavonic script still cucrent at that time in the seventeenth century. Cantacuzino related the story of the punishment of the citizens of Tirgovişte for burying Dracula's brother Mircea alive. "After the death of Prince Mircea, Prince Vlad, whose name was 'the Impaler,' came to rule. The latter built the monastery of Snagov and the castle of Poenari. He inflicted a severe punishment on the citizens of Tirgovişte, because they committed a great injustice to one of his brothers. For these reasons he sent his retainers, who, striking on Easter Day, apprehended the husbands and their wives, their sons and daughters in their gaudy clothes, and took them to the castle of Poenari, where they toiled until their clothes fell off their backs." This detail is revealed in no historical document of the period. The first traveler to the region who recorded in the Romanian language the story of the construction of the famous castle was the head of the church at the time, Metropolitan Neofit. In the course of a journey he undertook to the source of the Argeş River in 1747, he discovered Dracula' s abandoned fortress. He left us yet another account, gathered from the tales of local peasants, of its construction by boyar slave labor.

One of the earliest nineteenth century collectors of peasant stories who focused on the Dracula legend was Petre Ispirescu. He had little training or background for this formidable job, being an artisan in a Bucharest print shop, with little knowledge of the subject of folklore. Instead of trying to understand the local peasant dialect of the castle region, he used the slang of his native Bucharest suburb to compile a faulty transcription. A far more accurate account of Dracula peasant stories was compiled by C. Radulescu-Codin, who was a native of the Muscel district, in which Dracula's famous castle is located. As a village teacher, he knew the local dialect well. In recent years the Institute of Folklore in Bucharest has made a most commendable effort in organizing research surrounding the castle area, subjecting it to rigorous scientific evaluation. Most notable in this respect was the work done by a group of professional researchers, led by Mihai Pop, at the time director of the Folklore Institute, an internationally recognized authority on the subject, who has worked closely with the two co-authors. By far the best work so far published on the Dracula castle epic is owed to Georgeta Ene, who wrote a dissertation on the subject under the direction of Mihai Pop. She refers to the siege, the suicide of Dracula's wife, and Dracula's escape across the mountains, which are not otherwise documented.

Serious folkloric work at the other sites connected with Dracula' s name, such as Snagov, Tismana, Bucharest, Sibiu, Bistrita, the Danubian battlefields, Tirgsor, Mediaş, even small villages like Ghergheni, and the many Transylvanian townships, has not as yet begun in earnest. A comprehensive survey in villages near Snagov such as was conducted at the castle site might yield important new discoveries to help resolve the problem of his death and entombment. Such a work is all the more essential, since with the current industrialization of Romania, the exodus of young people to the city, and the dying out of old people, it is increasingly difficult to find genuine "storytellers." The problem has been compounded by the Romanian regime's recent decision to destroy village communities in order to make additionaI land available for agriculturaI production. This devastation of the rich cultural legacy of village life in the name of modemization is nothing less than a sacrilege.

The image of Dracula that has emerged from this vast compilation of Romanian folklore is in marked contrast to the two views we have described so far, those of the German and Russian narratives, in spite of the coincidence of many themes. The contrast is greater with reference to the German stories, in which Dracula is depicted as killing and torturing people without rational cause. Closer to the man revealed in Kuritsyn's original report, the "Romanian Dracula" is indeed a law-upholding statesman who is implacable in punishing thieves, liars, idlers, or people who otherwise cheated the state. He was a rational despot attempting to centralize his government by killing unpatriotic anarchical boyars. Dracula's crimes are further justified on a variety of counts. From a peasant point of view, because of his antiboyar stance he acquires the characteristics of a social leveler, a Robin Hood type of character, who plunders the rich in order to help the poor. In justifying his harsh punishment of unfaithful wives, there is a strong mora1 flavor to the stories (not fully in tune with the psyche of the Romanian people, who, like the French, are fond of "wine, women, and song"). Even the burning of the sick and the poor is condoned by the peasants on the grounds that Dracula was getting rid of undesirables and useless mouths to feed in times of war. Above all, his anti-German and anti-Turkish exploits gave a boost to the patriotic ego, in the dawn of the era of nationalism. All in all, the Romanian peasant narratives harnessed a law-and-justice theme to aid in the incarnation of a national hero. The tales were thus a powerfuI source for the Romantic historians of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who sought heroic and just precursors to pave the way for the establishment of an independent Romanian state. The task of transcribing the spoken language of the peasants, which was rough, ungrammatical, and limited in vocabulary , into a written language was difficult in the extreme.

Through a remarkable coincidence, the first fictionaI work in this new Romanian language, written by Ion Budai-Deleanu (1760-1820), was a poem that centered on Dracula. Deleanu gave his work the deceptive title of Ţiganiada (Gypsy Epic). In the poem Dracula leads an army of gypsy slaves in a campaign against the Turks. The manuscript, dormant for almost a century, was finally published in its original form only in 1875. Born not very far away from Hunyadi's castle at Hunedoara, Budai-Deleanu was educated at the College of Santa Barbara in Vienna, which was then experiencing the fuIl bloom of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century; and he completed his doctorate at the University of Erlau in Germany. He then settled at Lvov in Poland, where he finished his remarkable work. He consulted long-forgotten archives, among them narratives about Dracula in German, Slavonic, Latin, and Greek, as well as his native Romanian folklore. Like Homer in his Iliad, Budai-Deleanu sought in Romania's past a hero to be immortalized above all other heroes and found him in the person of Dracula. He refused to use the nickname Dracula, which in his view had been exposed to excessive abuse by his German detractors; Deleanu instead opted for "The Impaler," initially coined by the Turks but adopted by Romanian chroniclers since. In Deleanu's presentation, the Impaler Prince, far from being a villain, appeared as one of Romania's first great national heroes, fighting the Turks, the boyars, and legions of Satan, with a motley army of gypsies and angels, in essence representing the forces of good.

Narrated in a powerful orchestration of words perhaps unequaled until the nineteenth century, this poem, which contained satire, other forms of humor, sarcasm, and also political philosophy, was critical of despotism and absolute monarchy. It was also Voltairean in its distrust of men and revolutionary in its attacks on the boyars and the establishment. In this respect, Dracula was being used for purposes entirely contrary to those of the Slavonic narrative, which aimed at the justification of absolute monarchy.

The whole plot of the German stories and of Bram Stoker's famous novel is turned topsy-turvy in Deleanu's work, since the vampires and other evil spirits are Dracula's enemies. Deleanu, in fact, introduced, in written form, the Romanian equivalent for the word vampires: the strigoi, derived from the Latin word strix, meaning a hag or goblin. Vampire, adopted in English and in other western languages, is a word used by the Slavic peoples. In the poem Deleanu had these vampires (strigoi) "fly in the direction of Retezat toward a certain mountain that lies between Wallachia and the Banat," a moonscaped ridge 100 miles distant from the authentic location of Castle Dracula. Deleanu also introduced the female vampire to his readers, creatures "who fly at nightfall when beautiful ladies take their walks, breaking people's bones." Such evil spirits, of which the vampire is but one species, were of course familiar to Deleanu from his knowledge of the superstitions of the Romanian people of Transylvania. (In the course of time, such beliefs became the subject of scholarly investigations by a succession of English and other foreign travelers to Transylvania. Perhaps the most famous among them was the Scottish lady Emily Gerard, whose works were consulted by Bram Stoker in the composition of Dracula.)

When the current of nationalism that had started in Transylvania crossed the mountains into the principality of Wallachia, it was natural that the heroic figure of Dracula should in turn be exploited by Romanian nationalists to give precedence and paternity to the movement for independence. Most of the Romantic historians (G. Lazar, N. Balcescu, I. Eliade Radulescu, Aaron Florian, A. Treboniu Laurian) responsible for organizing the revolution of 1848 (which aimed at securing total freedom from Turkish and Russian domination) took part in romanticizing Dracula's deeds and explaining away his crimes.

Beyond having nationalist motives, the men of the generation of 1848 were interested in presenting Dracula's career in literary rather than historical form. Since it was dangerous to teach Romanian history in the schools at a time when the country was under combined reactionary Russian and Turkish control, plays, poems, and novels with nationalistic themes were an effective, permissible way of reaching a wider audience. For instance, the public was bound to recognize the obvious message contained in Dracula's spectacular anti-Turkish campaign in 1462. Under cover of writing literature, one could successfully overcome the severe Russian censorship.

The Dracula heroic theme is best exemplified by the poets of the period. One of the most prominent figures of the generation of 1848, Dimitrie Bolintineanu (1819-1872), sounded the trumpet call, praising Dracula's military valor. In highly stylized but beautifully versified rhymes, and with a sense for the musical sounds of the Romanian language, Bolintineanu recalled the highlights of Dracula's career in his "Battles of the Romanians." The episode of the nailing of the turbans to the heads of the Turkish envoys is dismissed in the following manner:

The assembly of soldiers
Shout with people:
"Long live the Impaler!"
The terrified boyars jump through the window
While Dracula drives spikes into the Turkish
envoy's heads.

In 1863 Bolintineanu wrote in the same nationalistic vein a historical novel based on Dracula's life.

However, the greatest of all Romanian poets of the late nineteenth century (one of the few whose works have been translated into English) vas undoubtedly Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889), whose life was tragically cut short at the age of thirty-nine. Eminescu represented an isolated voice crying in the wildemess, protesting the amorality of politics, the perfidy of politicians, the faithlessness of diplomats, the crass materialism and iconoclasm of the literary men who took in vain the narne of heroes of the past. Like Hamlet, he felt that times were out of joint. In despair, in a great historic ballad called The Third Letter, he appealed to the giants of old to rise from the dust under which they had been laid to rest in order to regenerate Romanian society and political life. They alone, he said, understood the true meaning of patriotism and had shown genuine love of the fatherland. The poem opens by recalling the manly virtues and military valor of Wallachia's early medieval princes, notably Prince Mircea the Old, Dracula's grandfather, who, when summoned to surrender his country to the great Sultan Bayezid, then at the height of his power, defied him at the Battle of Rovine (1394) with the following proud words:

Eminescu immortalized Vlad with an often quoted stanza. He recalls the great Dracula from the grave to save the Romanian nation and asks him to do away with the Philistines in the land:

You must come, O dread Impaler, confound them to your care.
Split them in two partitions, here the fools, the rascals there;
Shove them into two enclosures from the broad daylight enisle 'em,
Then set fire to the prison and the lunatic asylum.

Only during recent decades in Romania has Dracula made a full comeback even among Socialist historians. Heretofore, Romania's historians had dismissed Dracula in only a sentence or two along the lines of "cruel but heroic and just."

The occasion chosen for this belated awakening of a scholarly interest was the celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of Vlad's death, "Dracula Year," proclaimed in 1976. Panegyrics, commemorative eulogies, discussion panels, lead articles in the press and in scholarly journals (the popular History Magazine dedicated its entire issue of November 1976 to Dracula), radio and television commentaries, and films were devoted to the subject. Even Romania' s president Ceauşescu invoked the memory of Vlad. A special commemorative stamp was issued. Dracula became a nationa1 hero par excellence, one who defended the nation's independence against overwhelming odds - a kind of George Washington of the Romanian people, who had been maligned by his political enemies in the west, from his own period to our times, when he had finally degenerated into a vampire. In the view of some Romanian authors, the progressive vampirization of Dracula by western novelists and movie producers had all been a "Hungarian plot," originally inspired by King Matthias, continued by Vambery, Stoker's Hungarian informant, and given its most masterful stroke by Bela Lugosi, a Hungarian who adapted his name from the town where he was born, Lugoj, in the Banat region of Transylvania (his real name was Bela Ferenc Blasko).

One last factor in the extraordinary Vlad / Dracula dichotomy is Romania's reaction to Stoker's best-selling novel, which has been printed in virtually every European language and many Asian ones. To date, the book has not been translated into Romanian - nor have Lugosi-style vampire films been shown in Bucharest. Even the National Tourist Office, in its legitimate attempt to earn hard currency by encouraging the so-called Dracula Tours, has decided to divide Romania into two segments - the southern and western tiers, Wallachia and southern Transylvania, are "Vlad country," associated with genuine historic sites connected with the Romanian prince: the castle on the Argeş, the monastery of Snagov, the palace of Tirgovişte, et cetera. Beautiful sound-and-light spectacles have been held at such locations at night. Ruins like these are as sacred to the Romanians as the Washington Monument or Plymouth Rock to Americans and the tours are aimed at the serious-minded history buffs. For the vampire hunters - and this includes many Dracula societies that have flourished in the west - the government has created an artificial Disneyland-style vampire scenario centered in Stoker's Borgo Pass region in northeastern Transylvania, where the plot of the famous book was laid. Like Jonathan Harker, Dracula's solicitor's clerk in the novel, a visitor can book a room at the Golden Crown Hotel in Bistrila, which has been rebuilt; there he can enjoy "paprikash chicken" and "Mediasch" wine, which is fermented not far away, and then proceed to the not-so-sinister Borgo Pass in quest of the ruins of an insignificant castle that once belonged to Dracula. This was the concession the Socialist government of Romania was willing to give to what they considered decadent western vampirologists, on the condition that they not fraternize too closely with the local population, many of whom still believe in the dreaded strigoi.