When Peter sought asylum in the territories of the Habsburg emperor Rudolph II, he took his gypsy wife, Irina, with him. They were given a suitable residence in the city of Bolzano, today located in the Italian Tyrol. In less than a year our aging Lothario fell in love again, this time with a seductive Circassian lady called Maria, the lady-in-waiting at his mini-court. The jilted gypsy died of a broken heart, barely twenty-five years of age. She was buried at Bolzano in a small cemetery located near a thirteenth-century Franciscan church in the heart of this picturesque Austro-Italian city. On her tombstone one can still read the Latin inscription written by the repentant husband: “Princess Irina, who followed her husband in exile from Moldavia and converted to his religion. She died in the twenty-fifth year of her life [that is, aged twenty-four]. I, Prince Peter, have erected this tombstone in honor of a much beloved and honest wife. She died in Christ's love and in the belief that she will be resurrected with him at the end of time.” Two years later, this ill-fated descendant also breathed his last, following a lengthy illness — poetic justice, one might say. Not even the good clean air of Zimmerlehen Castle, which had been placed at his and his mistress's disposal by the emperor, could save him from syphilis, a traditional plague of the Draculas. Peter the Lame's body was laid to rest beside that of his gypsy wife, and on his tomb lies the following inscription: “I, Prince Peter, descendant of the royal Corvinus family of Wallachia… who abandoned the throne of my own will, having obtained asylum from the House of Austria, [breathed my last] on July 1, 1594.” These humble words were hardly worthy of his proud Dracula ancestry.
The reader will excuse a brief aside concerning the numerous possessions inherited by Peter the Lame from Dracula himself. One was the original of the Dracula portrait now hanging at Castle Ambras near Innsbruck. On Peter's death, it fell to the local Society of Jesus, who donated it to the archduke of the Tyrol, Ferdinand II, a nephew of Emperor Charles V, protector of Peter the Lame. The archduke had a passion for collecting portraits of moral and physical degenerates, people afflicted with strange diseases or infirmities that made medical history, as well as celebrities of doubtful moral standards. Some freaks of nature, such as giants, dwarves, and wild men, even became permanent fixtures at the archduke's castle, a source of distraction for his guests. Among the portraits in his collection were ones of “the savage Baron of Müncken,” with his family, living like animals in a cage, and Gregor Baci (or Baxi), a Hungarian nobleman who made medical history by surviving for a year with the end portion of a stake piercing his head through the right eye. There was the “Wolfman” from the Canary Island of Tenerife, Petrus Gonsalvus, who had a strange infirmity that covered him with hair from head to toe, late in life. His two pathetic hairy children, a boy and a girl, one blond, the other brunette, were also covered with hair, while his melancholy Dutch wife is depicted beside him with an expression of quiet resignation. What had particularly aroused the curiosity of the medical world — more specifically that of one of the physicians of the period, Dr. Felix Plater of Basel, was the transmission of hirsutism, which had never occurred before. Dracula's portrait thus came to have interesting company.
After the death of Peter the Lame, some boyars attempted to get his son tefni (young Stephen) to assert his rights to the Moldavian throne. Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph, however, resisted that move. Instead, the boy was raised as a Catholic and placed in a Jesuit seminary in Innsbruck. The young boy was seemingly a most obedient student and devout Catholic. He became prefect of a Jesuit congregation at Innsbruck and, had he lived, would have entered the Society of Jesus after termination of the lengthy years of study. Unfortunately, he died of tuberculosis some eight years later, in 1585. He was buried beside his father and mother in the cemetery of Bolzano. A portrait of Peter the Lame and tefni also eventually found a home in the Ambras collection. According to Nicolae Iorga, who saw Stephen's portrait, it is the most beautifully finished portrait of any Romanian prince. However, like many of the crucial souvenirs of Dracula and his period, this portrait has disappeared as mysteriously from the “monster gallery” as the original painting of Dracula. (We are fortunate, however, in having a photograph copy of it made by the great historian.)
From the death of young Stephen, the Romanian line continued in the person of Mihnea, the only son of Alexandru II and Catherine, born in 1559. Following his father's assassination in 1577, Mihnea precariously maintained himself on the throne up to 1583, when, barely eighteen years of age, he was toppled by a boyar plot. His wealthy mother's family, the Salvarezi, finally made sufficient gifts to various officials of the sultan to purchase back the throne for a period of time. However, one year after the death of his powerful mother, Catherine, the Turks deposed Mihnea for a second time. He returned to the Turkish capital and, in a desperate attempt to curry favor, adopted Islam, together with his eldest son. This is why the second Mihnea became know in Romanian history as “the Islamized.” He died in Istanbul and was buried in an unmarked grave in 1601.
His only surviving son was an interesting character named Radu Mihnea, born in 1585 or 1586 in Istanbul. After completing his studies in the Turkish capital, Radu Mihnea became prince of Wallachia at a very important time in Romanian history: following the union of the three principalities, Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania, under Michael the Brave (1593–1601). With interruptions, Radu Mihnea ruled no fewer than four times in Wallachia and twice in Moldavia, a remarkable success during this early period. The reason for his success, by way of contrast to his cruel or weak predecessors, was that this representative of the Dracula family was a splendid worldly Renaissance-style prince and a patron of the arts, having been brought up by the monks of Iveron at the holy mountain of Athos, in Greece. When Radu Mihnea died in 1626 at Hîrlu in Moldavia, his body was carried triumphantly to Bucharest, and he was interred at the Church of Prince Radu, begun by Alexandru II and finally completed under Radu Mihnea's own rule. Because of his loyalty to his educators, the monastery was placed under the protection of Greek monks from Mount Athos.
Radu Mihnea's only legitimate wife was Arghira Bartholomeo Minetti, an Italo-Greek, by whom he had five children, three boys and two girls, who must be considered the last surviving direct Romanian descendants of Dracula. The eldest boy, another Alexandru, was nicknamed “the Cocoon” (Coconul), because of the tender age when he assumed the throne. Alexandru Coconul ruled on two occasions: first in Wallachia from 1623 to 1627, then in Moldavia from 1629 to 1630. Two years before his death, Radu Mihnea, the boy's father, had arranged for what appeared to be a brilliant match: the bride-to-be was Ruxandra Scarlat Beglitzi, daughter of a wealthy Greco-Italian “prince maker” at Istanbul. Then, while the bridal party was traveling through Bulgaria on their way to Bucharest, Ruxandra, who was reputedly one of the most beautiful women in Istanbul, contracted the dreaded smallpox, which disfigured her for life with horrible facial scars. During the wedding ceremony she covered her pockmarked face with a veil to hide her shame. However, Alexandru soon discovered her terrible secret. For political purposes and because of the need of the Beglitzi money, Alexandru kept her hidden at court for a time. He eventually repudiated her, and she returned in disgrace to Istanbul. He never married again, nor did he have any children. After losing the throne for the second time on April 28, 1630, Alexandru the Cocoon fled to Istanbul, where two years later there disappeared from the world stage the last Romanian male descendant of the Dracula family, heirless, penniless, unpraised, and unsung, in essence a minion of the Turkish masters. We possess no details of any kind on the fate of the Cocoon's two brothers. They are certainly lost to Romanian history.
Meanwhile, Dracula's Hungarian lineage carried on the name. According to new finds gleaned by a prominent Romanian heraldist, Dan Cernovodeanu, Dracula's eldest son by his Hungarian wife, Vlad, educated at the Hungarian court, though claimant to the Wallachian throne, never actually ruled. We know little about Vlad beyond the fact that he had a son called Ladislas, whose wife, a Transylvanian lady, h
ad properties in the area of Sinteti, in the Banat region of southwestern Transylvania; the name of the property was thus added to his title. As befitted a member of the Corvinus family, Ladislas Dracula was appointed administrator of Castle Hunedoara, originally built by John Hunyadi's father. His two sons, yet another Ladislas Dracula, and John, were born in that castle.
It was in part in recognition for Dracula's valor and courage as a Christian crusader, and in part due to Ladislas and John's being indirect descendants of the former Hungarian royal family of Corvinus (which became extinct following King Matthias's death in 1490) that the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand I, responded favorably to the petition of Ladislas Dracula and his brother John. On January 20, 1535, they were granted a patent of nobility. The emperor specifically granted this request in Vienna on January 20, “after considering the merits of his [Ladislas Dracula's] ancestors, which were recorded as being neither small nor obscure.” The new coat of arms consisted of a sword covering three wolf teeth on a blood-red crest: the arms of the Báthory family. Was it conceivable that Dracula's eldest legitimate son, Vlad, had married into the Báthory family? The hypothesis of a Dracula-Báthory marriage sounded very implausible when first advanced by the novelist Raymond Rudorff in The Dracula Archive, published in 1972. It simply suited his plot to suggest that the most cruel woman in history, “the Blood Countess,” Elizabeth Báthory, had the blood of Dracula in her veins, and that at some point in time a Báthory-Dracula marriage had been arranged. The merit of the novelist's so-called “intuition” can be ascertained only by further meticulous genealogical research. It should be remembered that Stephen Báthory, a member of that illustrious but eccentric Transylvanian Hungarian family, was Dracula's commander-in-chief during the victorious campaign that led to Dracula's third reign in 1476, also that in the Holy Roman Emperor's patent specific mention was made of “the ancient insignia of his [Ladislas Dracula's] family,” which was in effect the Báthory coat of arms (three wolf teeth).
We know that the two new barons of the empire, Ladislas and John, moved from the Banat to Transylvania proper, shortly after receiving their patent of nobility. They settled in the Mure region, which is basically Szekler country. Ladislas married a Hungarian noblewoman, Anna Vass de Czege, with properties in the Band region of Transylvania, adding yet another title to the family name (Dracula de Band). In due course a son was born, John Dracula de Band. Ladislas's brother, John, also married, undoubtedly a Hungarian, and had a son given the name of George Dracula. Both these heirs were very much involved in the affairs of the Szekler counties and townships, which were not invariably loyal to successive Transylvanian princes appointed by the king of Hungary. Both Draculas opposed the rule of Steven Báthory, who was prince of Transylvania before he became king of Poland, and an enemy of Ivan III of Russia. The Dracula family suffered adverse consequences as a result of their opposition. Since George Dracula did not marry, and John, who married a woman called Anna, had no known descendants, the male Hungarian Dracula line dies out by the end of the sixteenth century. Recent genealogical investigation in the Cluj archives suggests that the female Dracula line continued to survive under the name of Getzi, since a Hungarian landowner, Stephen Getzi or Gyzcy, from St. Gothard, married a female descendant of Dracula. This female Dracula line continued until the seventeenth century. Some of the family had properties in the region of the Borgo Pass, Bram Stoker's location, of course, for the fictitious count's castle.
The only descendant of Dracula's extended family to have achieved international fame was Nicholas Olahus, who perhaps exaggeratedly boasted of his Dracula ancestry, describing himself: “ex sanguini Draculae” (“of the blood of Dracula”). Dracula would undoubtedly have been prouder of him than of any other direct descendant. He ended his career as primate and regent of Hungary, having in the course of his life served as secretary to the last king of free Hungary, Louis II, shortly before the ill-fated battle of Mohácz (1526), acted as principal adviser to Louis's wife, Mary, the sister of the Emperor Charles V, who became regent of the Low Countries and befriended the king of the humanists, the great Erasmus of Rotterdam. In Dracula's sense, the greatest contribution of Olahus to his country of origin was having been the first scholar of world repute who upheld the theory of the ancient origins of the Romanian people, of which he as a descendant of Dracula was justly proud.
CHAPTER 10
Beyond the Grave The Many Faces of Dracula
The German View: A Gruesome Psychopath
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 Ill'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 the northwestern part of presen
t-day Yugoslavia. 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 of the Socialist Yugoslav Republic of Slovenia. 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 Bernard'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 Tîrgovite, 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 returned 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, warning him to hasten “without delay.”
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