Dracula, Prince of Many Faces

by Radu R Florescu

  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 Nachtbülchlein (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 protégé 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 “Kazîglu 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 Wallachian 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.

  The Russian Narrative: “Cruel but Just”

  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 the Great'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 industrial spying. The grand duke was in desperate need of artisans, architects, artists, and professional 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 Braov, the scene of some of Dracula's most spectacular crimes, where he spent several months. He was seeking additional details about Dracula. From Braov he crossed the northern Transylvanian Alps at the Borgo Pass and sojourned at Bistria, 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 Bistria 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 Bistria in the spring of 1484. The ambassador's journey 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 inte
rest to Kuritsyn was Stephen's third wife, Maria Voichia, 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 Akkerman, 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 Akkerman 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 and long impact on Russian political 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 benefit 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 government. 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 international 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 at 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 c
urb 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 left Ivan III with a grave constitutional 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).