Dracula, Prince of Many Faces

by Radu R Florescu

  Dracula continued mopping-up operations along the valley of the Dîmbovia River all the way to Bucharest, his main objective at this point. Stephen Báthory reported to the town officials of Sibiu on November 11, 1476, that the greater part of Wallachia was already in Dracula's hands. He also added, “All the boyars aside from two are with us” and “Even the latter will soon join us.” Báthory's army took Bucharest on November 16, and on November 26, Dracula was reestablished as prince of his land for the third time in his life.

  King Matthias tried to take credit for this momentous achievement, since Dracula was his vassal. In a letter to Pope Sixtus IV, Matthias confirmed the fact that Dracula was again in control of his Wallachia. Venice was also informed and reassured that the return of Dracula signified the resumption of the long-delayed crusade against the Turks in Europe. The elector of Saxony learned of this happy circumstance from the Hungarian king. In a letter to the Venetian senate, Stephen of Moldavia's envoy, Ion amblac, took pains to emphasize the great contribution of his master to this event, since Tcedil;amblac knew that this news would be transmitted to the pope. Pope Sixtus IV was so impressed with the work of Stephen of Moldavia that he bestowed on him the coveted title of “Athlete of Christ” — an honor that had eluded Dracula. Only the great Albanian freedom fighter Skanderbeg had been given that title previously during the fifteenth century.

  According to peasant tradition, within two months of his investiture as prince, Dracula's mangled and headless body was discovered by some monks from the monastery of Snagov in a nearby marsh. They secretly interred his remains in the chapel of Snagov in a crypt facing the altar of the principal chapel. One might say that every moment since Dracula's accession during his brief third reign was dominated by the certainty of death: the odds against survival were simply too great. That no chronicle speaks of a blood bath during these last few months may indicate that the dissident boyars chose to make themselves scarce during that time. The partisans of the Turks were still too close for comfort, and, as a Catholic convert, in the eyes of the Orthodox church, Dracula was a heretic, or at the very least a schismatic. Too many boyars had been deeply implicated in Radu's and Basarab Laiot's reigns to hope for permanent reconciliation and mercy. To the sultan, Dracula was obviously cursed and unacceptable — the enormity of his crimes was simply unforgivable. Even the Transylvanian Saxons, in spite of temporary appeasement, continued to give comfort to Dracula's enemies. The moment that Báthory's main Hungarian contingent and Stephen's force left the country, Dracula was clearly exposed to great dangers, for he had not had time to consolidate his strength and rebuild a force loyal to himself. The fact that he was aware of these dangers is proved by his unwillingness to bring his wife and sons with him to Wallachia, where undoubtedly they too would have been exposed to the threat of assassination. Another indication of his pessimism is the peasant story about “hidden treasures” still related in the Snagov area and collected by Romanian folklorists. Sensing that his end was near and that he might need money for future contingencies, Dracula ordered some peasants to make cast-iron barrels, in which he placed the gold, silver, and precious jewels that he had hidden at his treasury at Snagov. To make certain that no one would find this booty, he ordered the course of a certain river (conceivably the Dîmbovia near Bucharest) diverted by building a dam. Having buried the treasures in the river bed, he ordered his men to give free flow to the river again. All the peasants who partook of this operation were then ordered impaled. Having heard that one of these youths who was aware of the secret had escaped, Dracula had his men capture and kill him. As is the case with so many aspects of the Dracula story, no one knows precisely where these treasures were hidden, if indeed this popular tradition is true. In any event, this represents the last action recorded by the Romanian people before Dracula was killed. Stephen, now his loyal friend, shared this sense of foreboding. He had no great faith in the loyalty of the Wallachians to their newfound master and just for good measure left a small contingent of 200 Moldavian bodyguards to protect him. Perhaps he felt this was one manner of expiating his betrayal of 1462.

  How did Dracula die? The determined vampirists will of course reply that he never died and that his spirit will haunt us perpetually. Romanian historians of the nineteenth century immortalized his spirit; in this sense Dracula lives as the undying hero who in the moment of need will save the Romanian nation from destruction. One cryptic version concerning the scenario of Dracula's death comes from the Russian narrative of Kuritsyn, who alludes to a final battle in which “Dracula's army began to kill [the Turks] and to pursue them without mercy. Then out of joy Dracula ascended a mountain in order to see how his men were killing the Turks. Detaching himself from the army, one of those around him, taking him for a Turk, hit him with a lance. Dracula, seeing that he was being attacked by his own men, immediately killed five of his assassins on the spot with his own sword. However, many arrows pierced him and he died in this manner.”

  The real history of Dracula's final moments is more complex than the above account. It can be reconstituted with the help of a few foreign observers as well as the letters of Prince Stephen the Great to the king of Hungary. Perhaps one of Dracula's greatest mistakes following his victories at Rucr, Tîrgovite, and Bucharest was his failure to seize and kill Basarab III Laiot as he had other Romanian rivals such as Dan III and Vladislav II. Laiot˘a's survival was a source of great danger, as the former prince was busy rallying the support of various Turkish frontier commanders on the Danube to organize the inevitable counterattack. Dracula, during his third reign, as noted, maintained his court at Bucharest, which was perilously exposed to a rapid attack from the south. According to most reliable sources, the final encounter took place near the monastery of Snagov in the last days of December 1476. Dracula was attacked by Basarab Laiot and a Turkish contingent of 4,000 men, twice the number of his own defenders, which included Stephen's bodyguard of 200 Moldavians. It is entirely conceivable that Dracula disguised himself as a Turk, a practice he often resorted to in order to confuse his opponents. The Austrian chronicler Jacob Unrest helps to clarify the situation by confirming the fact that Dracula was killed by a hired assassin who came from the Turkish camp. He carefully explains the circumstances: “Dracula was killed with great cunning, because the Turks wished to avenge the enmity which he had borne against them for so long and also the great damages inflicted upon them. They hired a Turk [to act] as one of his servants with the mission of killing him while he served him. The Turk was apparently instructed to attack Dracula from the back. He was then to cut off his head and bring it back on horseback to the sultan.” Dracula's head was later exposed on a high stake at Constantinople for the populace to witness that the great “Kazîglu” (the Impaler) was finally dead — a fact confirmed by the Hungarian chronicler Bonfini. Dracula and his small bodyguard of Moldavians must have fought like lions in this last encounter. We know that all but ten of Stephen's Moldavian bodyguards perished at the side of their master.

  News of Dracula's death struck the conscience of Europe: one month after the event, Stephen, who had established his headquarters at Hîrlau in Moldavia, had news of a battle near the Danube, but no details. He wrote about his concern to the citizens of Braov on January 5, 1477. Stephen finally had confirmation of Dracula's death three weeks later. His surviving ten veterans, who had taken several weeks to travel back to Suceava, relayed the sad news to their master. Stephen then informed King Matthias of Dracula's death, which was acknowledged in Buda during February, the month when information concerning that tragic event spread to the Italian capitals and western Europe. Leonardo Botta, the envoy of the duke of Milan at Venice, was the first diplomat to inform the doge Ludovico Moro and the Venetian senate that the Turks had conquered Wallachia and that Dracula had been assassinated. At the court of the Holy Roman Emperor in Wiener Neustadt, Dracula's death was dismissed in a very terse statement: “The captain named by King Matthias, Dracula, together with 4,000 men, was butchered by the Turks
.” There was no official reaction from the emperor, who had never been Dracula's friend.

  Death came to Dracula in a little clearing of the Vlasia forest in the marshes near Bucharest. Again, according to local tradition, pious monks from the Snagov monastery, seeing the headless and bloodstained body of the Impaler exposed to the birds of prey, decided to bury his remains on the island monastery of Snagov, which, as we will see, perhaps more than any other structure bears the imprint of Dracula's tortured personality. They placed the body in a crypt at the foot of the main altar with the customary inscriptions regarding his three successive periods of rule. Judging from the date of birth given, 1431, he was only forty-five years old at the time of his death.

  Only in distant Holy Russia were there some feelings of indignation, not because Dracula had died but because, in becoming a Catholic, he had betrayed his Orthodox religion. As the Russian narrative put it: “Dracula loved the sweetness of the earthly world much more than the eternal world, and he abandoned Orthodoxy and thereby forsook the truth and the light and accepted darkness, ending his life in heresy.” Since abandonment of the true Orthodox religion, in the eyes of many believers of that church often entails some form of punishment — in the eyes of the superstitious — he would never be able to rest in peace in his grave, though the progressive vampirization of this prince is a far more complex story, to which we will now turn.

  CHAPTER 8

  The mystery of the Grave

  STRANGE is the fate of the Dracula epic. The legend was born in Transylvania; it spread westward to the German lands and then eastward toward Russia. The heroic moments took place on the Danube; the dramatic ones at Castle Dracula and in Hungary. What makes the bloodstained history of Snagov, the place of death, unique is the fact that, unlike castles, essentially edifices built for war, it was a monastery — admittedly at one time a fortified monastery, but nevertheless a place of worship. According to the old Romanian chronicles, the monastery of Snagov was rebuilt by Dracula; the chronicles are very precise on this point, and most of the older Romanian historians have accepted this as fact. Just as we discussed the development of a “castle epic,” there also exists a “Snagov saga,” equally vivid and still alive in the minds of the peasants in the villages surrounding the lake. In the superstitious imaginations of these people, the terrible figure of the Impaler still dominates the little church. Dracula has succeeded in stamping his whole personality profoundly upon the bricks and stones of the only surviving chapel on the island, which he allegedly built and in which, according to tradition, he lies buried.

  As popular folklore would have it and archaeological excavation on the island has confirmed, the monastery of Snagov originally occupied an area immeasurably larger than that occupied by the church one can see today. The original monastic complex must have extended to the full length of the island. It was evidently fortified. The original walls, which reached to the edge of the lake, were for added protection, for it was known that in a time of peril both princes and boyars stored their treasures at Snagov. In addition to three chapels, which included the Chapel of the Annunciation, by far the largest (built by Vladislav II in 1453), the monastery contained cloisters for the monks, residences, dependencies for the boyars and their servants, a small princely palace, probably a prison, the treasury, and a mint (coins have been found on the island). Snagov, in fact, like many medieval fortresses, was a little town in itself, naturally limited by the size of the island.

  The original monastery of Snagov is much older; its foundation can be traced back to the fourteenth century. What is of interest to us is the extent of Dracula's contribution to the monastery. Here, as in the case of his castle, Dracula was partly responsible for the structure's completion. Snagov is certainly not the first ecclesiastical edifice in Romania founded by one prince and completed by another, and, as very often happens in the erection of larger buildings, the name that history associates with it is not that of the founder, but of the person who completed it.

  Many of the popular folkloric traditions in the Snagov area are clearly fictitious: one popular ballad relates that Dracula had a vision from God telling him to establish a place of prayer near the scene of his father's assassination at Blteni. Other stories are more specific and may contain an element of truth. One ballad relates that Dracula's contribution was the completion of another church on the island monastery, added just to compete with his enemy Vladislav II, who was responsible for the construction of the Chapel of the Annunciation. As noted above, it is far more likely that it was Dracula who converted Snagov from a poorly defended monastery into an island fortress. Given his morbid concern with having a “refuge,” he could find no better natural fortification than the island surrounded by the dense Vlasia forest; the island commanded a view and was protected on all sides by water. Even in winter, when the lake is frozen, a cannon shot from the island could break up the ice and thus drown any incoming enemy. The fortress-monastery was seized by pro-Radu boyars following the collapse of Dracula's campaign in 1462. At that time, the monastery had been taken over by some of Dracula's boyars, who had hidden their treasures in the vault of the church. According to the peasant stories, the monks, fearful for their lives, threw some of these treasures, some of which belonged to Dracula, into the lake to avoid tempting the Turks, and these ill-gotten riches remain at the bottom of Snagov Lake. It is likely that Radu and his partisans also used the monastery to store their treasure, where it was comparatively secure, when he became prince.

  Other peasant narratives make mention of Dracula's crimes on the island. Apparently Dracula's intention had been to transform the island monastery into a prison and establish a torture chamber for political foes. In a tiny cell, the prince would invite his intended victims to kneel and pray to a small ikon of the Blessed Virgin. While the prisoners were praying, a secret trapdoor controlled by Dracula would open, sending them deep into a ditch below, where a number of pales stood erect waiting to pierce the bodies of the unsuspecting penitents. The discovery of several decapitated skeletons, with each skull placed alongside the pierced body, lends further credence to the theory that the monastery was used as a place of punishment in Dracula's time. Yet another story relates how a great storm blew up on the lake on the day of Dracula's interment, a storm that tore the Chapel of Annunciation from its very foundations and blew it into the lake. To this day, the peasants in neighboring villages say that whenever the waters of Snagov become unduly agitated, one can hear the muffled noises from the bell of the chapel's steeple tolling at the bottom of the lake. Only the heavy, beautifully carved oak door of the chapel—one of the most beautiful legacies of fifteenth-century Romanian sculpture—which tore itself loose from its hinges, was seen, according to legend, floating down to the village of Turbai. There the archaeologist and novelist Alexandru Odobescu found it, when he was visiting a convent. The nuns had apparently used it for their own chapel. When he read the inscription on the door, he was amazed to find it was dated 1453, during the reign of Prince Vladislav II, Dracula's predecessor. The carved door is now located at the Bucharest Art Museum.

  Many of the immediate members of Dracula's family were in some way connected with Snagov. We have already mentioned Radu's role there in 1462. Perhaps simply for reason of filial piety, Dracula's son Mihnea repaired the monastery after the extensive damage done to it by the Turks during the campaign of 1462 and endowed it with additional land. Vlad the Monk, Dracula's half-brother and political enemy, for a time became abbot of the monastery. He is listed only by his religious name, Abbot Pahomie. Vlad the Monk's second wife, Maria, took the veil and lived at Snagov as a widow, with her sons, assuming the same religious name, Eupraxia, as the Monk's mother. One of her sons, Vlad V, or Vldu, spent all his early years at the monastery before becoming prince in 1510, reigning until 1512. The son of Vlad V, yet another Vlad, known to history as Vlad VII, “the Drowned,” briefly ruled between 1530 and 1532, and owned his nickname to his drowning in the lake.

  A great d
eal of violence has occurred at Snagov since Dracula's time, wrought both by man and by the elements of nature. Storms of great intensity have occurred on the lake, doing inestimable damage to the buildings on the island. During the winter, the place is heavily snowed under. The peasants say that when the waters freeze over and the cold, merciless criv from the Romanian steppes blows hard, the wind scoops the snow from the lake and hits the island with such violence that it can bury the whole place several feet deep. The present abbot told the authors that in preparation for winter, food has to be stored, since the island becomes completely isolated from the mainland. Like other places in the vicinity of Romania's capital, Snagov has felt the tremors of earthquakes. The monastery, however, has suffered far more from the violence of men. Only a small portion of this brutal history is enshrined in the inscription on the walls and the cold stone tombs of the existing church.

  Dracula carried the mystery of his life to his grave. In his death, as on so many occasions during his turbulent lifetime, Dracula left many enigmas. Among a number of puzzles, one of the most perplexing is the precise location of Dracula's tomb within the monastery of Snagov, if indeed he lies there, as popular tradition would have it. During the year 1931–1932 the archaeologist Dinu Rosetti and the genealogist George Florescu were officially assigned by the Romanian Commission on Historic Monuments to dig around the monastery and elsewhere on the island and to make certain investigations at the site of the princely stone just by the altar, where Dracula's decapitated body was supposed to have been laid to rest. Many interesting finds were made, which were publicized in a monograph edited by the Bucharest History Museum, directed by Dinu Rosetti, entitled Diggings at Snagov. Among these were archaeological remains that indicated that the island monastery was a very ancient historical settlement. The quantity and variety of coins that were dug up also confirm the use of Snagov as a treasury and mint since earliest times. One of the most interesting of the Florescu-Rosetti discoveries, however, centered upon the place where, in the eyes of the people, Dracula lay buried, in front of the altar of the church. Popular legend offers various reasons for choosing the altar site as the location of Dracula's grave, quite apart from its preeminent position. It is claimed that the monks purposely had Dracula's remains placed at the foot of the altar — contrary to usage. They say the tombstone rests in a north-south direction so that the priest and the monks could read the Gospel and say prayers for the permanent repose of his troubled soul while standing above the tomb. The constant trampling of the clerics' feet while officiating at the lengthy Orthodox liturgy may have helped erase all inscriptions. Among the many graves in the monastery, this particular tombstone, though not of princely proportions, was more ambitious than most. When the stone was removed, however, to the utter amazement of the researchers, there was not even a casket beneath it. Dracula's presumed tombstone covered a huge empty grave-pit containing the bones of various animals, some ceramics, and other archaeological finds dating back to the Iron Age.