Dracula, Prince of Many Faces

by Radu R Florescu

What manner of a creature is Stoker's Dracula, in the end? He certainly has a memorable character beyond his connection with the historical Dracula, the subject of the present biography. Nor does he correspond precisely with the genuine Romanian folkloric concept of the vampire, though Stoker took some of his trappings from his readings of Gerard's book, which includes the antivampire arsenal so often depicted on the stage (including the stake through the heart). For one, in the minds of the Romanian people, the strigoi, though he can take the shape of various evil animals (though not the bat), is neither immortal, nor does he possess the alluring and seductive qualities of Stoker's antihero. In fact, quite the opposite is true: the Romanian folkloric vampire, much in the manner of Max Schreck's characterization in Nosferatu, is a living corpse, essentially unattractive and reeking of blood.

  Stoker's vampire count is indeed a composite creature, in the end the product of Stoker's imagination, his reading, and the result of his life experiences. He cannot be neatly explained away, as so many of his critics have attempted to do with complex a priori psychological clichés, which Stoker himself would have had difficulty in understanding. The personage is indeed the quintessential vision of evil, an anti-father figure of great potency. He is seductive, particularly attractive to women, though the sensual and erotic qualities of Stoker's vampire have been even further amplified by movie scriptwriters since. The count craves immortality and wishes to conquer a decadent and materialistic Victorian England in the first instance, but ultimately he wishes to dominate the world. With this objective in mind, he goes about his task in a systematic, calculating way, much in the manner of his historical counterpart.

  Having stated this, one cannot question that the count's aristocratic Romanian background and the genuine historic trappings with which Bram Stoker chose to clothe him, as well as the precise Transylvanian geography gleaned from Stoker's readings and possibly strengthened by his conversations with Vambery, added to the novel a powerful sense of realism otherwise absent in the older gothic tradition. This undoubtedly contributed to the ultimate success of Dracula.

  CONCLUSION: Who Was the Real Dracula?

  DRACULA is by no means the only controversial personality of history. Many other historical personages such as Henry VIII, Richard III, or Gilles de Rais were destined to suffer similar fates at the hands of posterity. As in the case of Dracula, writers of fiction, sometimes even historians, have preferred to lay emphasis on the villainous aspects of their respective characters. Henry VIII is often described as a flabby, gluttonous, cruel “killer of women.” This, at least, is the popular image generally conveyed. Very much the same is true of Richard III, the Yorkist king of England, who shared much of Dracula's fate as an archetypal villain in the eyes of his Tudor detractors, largely because he is thought to have had murdered his two cousins, Edward VI and his brother Richard, in the Tower of London. Yet, when we penetrate more deeply into the lives of such controversial figures, we are invariably confronted with a serious problem. If Henry VIII was indeed so sanguineous a tyrant, how can we account for the fact that he was successful in achieving almost every major action that he undertook, which included getting rid of his popular first wife, Catherine of Aragon, with whom the public sympathized, and breaking away from Roman Catholic doctrine, in which the untheologically minded English people believed? On the whole, modern history has attempted to rehabilitate such characters that have been excessively reviled. In fact, societies have been formed for their total rehabilitation, against the hostile traditions of the past. Much the same is true of the historical Dracula.

  For most vampire buffs, Dracula is the fiend who comes to haunt us and suck our blood at nighttime. For a few others, he is the aristocratic Transylvanian count from eastern Europe who wishes to conquer England and the rest of the world. For the Romanian nationalist, he represents the immortal hero of the race, ready to rise from his grave in defense of the fatherland at the hour of need, to paraphrase the poet Eminescu. It is the essential immortality of both hero and antihero that provides a trait common to both these extreme images of Dracula and Vlad the Impaler.

  Taking his cue from German fifteenth-century narratives, Bram Stoker simply put the finishing touches to the most permanent fictional vampire horror tale of all times. In this sense the “vampire count” is indeed immortal and will in his various guises live on forever on the large and small silver screens. The tribute we pay to the German-inspired Stoker creation is to concede unabashedly that without the vampirism, the historical personality of Vlad the man would have languished permanently in the shadows of obscurity. Our final compliment is best expressed in the simple statement that without the vampire element, the present book would never have seen the light of day.

  Looking at the realities of the heroic personality, though, we are equally unable to dismiss from our minds the portrait of Dracula created by the Romanian people, which again enjoys great vogue today, particularly since the celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of his death. Romania is certainly not the only nation to have mythologized semiobscure figures unearthed from its past. Each country needs heroes of the stamp of the undying German Frederick Barbarossa, or the saintly patriot of France, Joan of Arc. This very strong image of Vlad epe (The Impaler) the hero has prompted every schoolteacher in Romania to explain away his crimes and idealize his actions, not only to encourage pupils to pass their exams, but because a nation still threatened by foreign domination needs the weight of its mythical heroes to survive. Idealizing national symbols is hardly a sinful practice, particularly among those states that cannot afford the luxury of historical impartiality because they are still threatened with extinction.

  The two separate and extreme portraits of Vlad, the villain and the hero, therefore deserve both mention and recognition, and in that sense they are equally real. Nonetheless, the two faces of Dracula have contributed to a serious historical problem that is detrimental to the historian's quest for truth. It is the historian's duty to attempt to reconcile the many images of Dracula drawn by contemporaries and other chroniclers.

  We must honestly acknowledge the paucity of sources for a detailed biography of Dracula. Detailed biography is possible for some of his fifteenth-century contemporaries, such as Charles VII, Ludovico Sforza, Emperor Frederick III, or even Matthias Corvinus. But lack of historical documentation is more characteristic of fifteenth-century eastern Europe and Russia because of the massive destruction of records and the absence of court chroniclers. We have very little knowledge of the personal life of Vlad, of his family relationships, of his mistresses and his wife, and of the more intimate character of his court. Such lacunae make the task of the historian all the more challenging. To compensate for the small number of primary sources, we have used the reports of foreign diplomats, sources drawn from personal narratives, folklore, portrait analyses, study of coins, archaeological investigation, and genealogical research.

  Most tantalizing are, of course, the contemporary anecdotal accounts that provide the material for a substantial portion of our presentation of the historical Dracula. They can certainly not be dismissed as pure fiction, as some have suggested, for a variety of reasons: they are solidly based on identifiable eyewitness accounts, detailed in their knowledge and nomenclature of a given geographic area, precise about the names and dates. They have all the ingredients of a purely factual document in spite of the distortions to which they are often prone. One should further stress that each narrator provides only the details of the plot with which he is most intimately connected: for instance, Beheim focuses his attention on Transylvania, because his informant, Brother Jacob, was familiar with this area. Kuritsyn, the Russian envoy, relates the story of Dracula's career in exile, and informs us of his family, with which he was best acquainted. By way of contrast, the Turkish chronicles as well as the Byzantine writers focus their attention on Dracula's military campaign, which they either witnessed or heard about. In point of fact, the documentation referring to Dracula's campaign against Mehmed
in 1462, because of the abundance of eyewitness accounts on both sides, represents one of the most comprehensive sources for the study of a major campaign fought during the fifteenth century. Nothwithstanding the differences of opinion expressed by various writers on many aspects of Dracula's life, there exists a remarkable coincidence of facts and themes among narrators, official court historians, and diplomats. This concord expressed in many languages (Italian, Latin, Russian, German, et cetera), could hardly have been the result of some cleverly concocted plot to be explained away by those who enjoy conspiratorial theories of history.

  Most convincing is the fact that the oral Romanian tradition, in spite of its attempt to rationalize Dracula's crimes, coincides to a large extent with German, Greek, Turkish, Slavic, and even South Balkan narratives — also composed at the time when the Balkan language did not exist in written form. Though folklore has to be used with caution where no other documentation exists, it is a legitimate tool of study, particularly for events occurring within a span of two hundred years or less, when the recorded tales of Dracula were first noted by the chroniclers (for example, the construction of Castle Dracula). In spite of the subsequent distortions, why distrust the songs and poems of the people and place exaggerated reliance on official historians or memorialists, who almost invariably praise the masters in whose pay they were? The panegyrist who lies in order to preserve a favorable image of his master is hardly a fifteenth-century phenomenon. What is most fascinating in connection with Dracula is the fact that though assuredly greater princes ruled in Romania, he is one of the few who are remembered reverently in the collective conscience of the people, engendering a rich folklore that has not as yet been fully studied. On the whole, we have tended to give most credence to those events that are recorded by a wide variety of different sources, as opposed to those facts mentioned in only a single narrative.

  From these sources, there is no escape from the conclusion that we are dealing with a cruel artist in crime, who, though he principally used impalement for disposing of his enemies, also employed a great many other techniques, such as death by fire, by boiling, skinning people alive, and sawing off their limbs, without distinction of sex, nationality, or age. We certainly challenge the staggering statistic provided by the papal legate, the bishop of Erlau, of Dracula's having caused 100,000 deaths, at the time when the total population of his land numbered merely 500,000. If true, the statistic would qualify Dracula, in terms of numbers alone, as one of the greatest butchers of all times. We discount this particular figure on the simple grounds that wholesale statistics of this kind are almost invariably false and that no other reference confirms that number. In other instances, as in the case of the 20,000 boyars slain within the courtyard of Tîrgovite at the beginning of the reign, a very simple measurement of the foundations of the palace courtyard, which could at most hold a few hundred people, helped us reject that particular figure. Mass murders at the castle of the Arge, which housed a garrison of not much over a hundred men, are equally inconceivable.

  Having dismissed the figures, one could still suggest that Dracula's crimes may have exceeded those of the other Renaissance tyrants, at least in terms of numbers. However, did he kill for the pleasure of killing, as his detractors have attested when comparing him with the most depraved emperors of Imperial Rome? Was there the kind of morbid enjoyment at the sight of his victims writhing in pain, more familiarly associated with the crimes of Ivan the Terrible of Russia or Gilles de Rais, the prototype of the notorious Bluebeard? Was he, in a word, the psychopath that the German narratives suggest, who destroyed lives without rationality? Was he a sadist? These are questions we have at least the right to pose, even in the absence of more pertinent documents concerning Dracula's psychological makeup.

  The problem of Dracula's cruelties, irrespective of statistics, is heightened by the methods by which he imposed death, and by his reputed presence at the moment of execution, implying pleasure at the sight of blood. In addition, the use of various forms of psychological torture mentioned in the narrative is revealing.

  In no sense can such crimes be lightly explained away (though Romanian historians have tried to do so). One line of possible defense already sufficiently alluded to is the low standards of political ethics prevailing in fifteenth-century Europe, even before the days of Machiavelli. Further, we must take into account that Dracula's whole life must be viewed across prison bars — he actually spent almost twice as many years in jail as he did on the throne, and during any one of these moments his own life was threatened. This fact assuredly provides the historian with a pertinent clue as to why Dracula held life in such low esteem. One may add to these explanations that as a child he had virtually no family existence. When a young boy, he was sent off to a distant alien court as a hostage, knowing that his father was pursuing policies incompatible with promises made; he witnessed the sexual abuse of his younger brother, Radu, and the blinding of other hostages. Later in life, he learned that his father had been assassinated; his elder brother was buried alive; he witnessed the assassination of his uncle Prince Bogdan (the father of Stephen the Great); faced mass defection of the boyars and conspiracies by members of his family, including his cousin Stephen. Finally, the Hungarian king Matthias, upon whom he had placed his trust, betrayed him. Factors such as these are, however, insufficient by themselves for the twentieth-century historian to give Dracula absolution.

  The problem of the sanity of historical characters, particularly for that early period, is a most difficult one to resolve, this in spite of the progress of psychohistory or even psychological analysis of historical personalities. Bereft of the science and training of the psychologist, the historian is naturally limited by the exigencies of his trade: the written document, in this instance, is of little help for detailed psychoanalysis of Dracula's personality. Those few psychoanalysts who have hazarded Freudian or other explanations of Dracula have not been particularly convincing. For lack of real historical knowledge, these “scientists” tend to fit the facts to suit their individual theories. One nineteenth-century Romanian historian, B. P. Hadeu, made use of phrenology or the study of physiognomy to determine character traits in dissecting Dracula's personality.

  Dracula was probably not insane — in the sense in which an Ivan the Terrible was. Most of his crimes had a certain rational purpose. Through his “terror tactics” he saved the Wallachian nation from Turkish conquest in 1462. The persecution of Catholic monks deterred defection from Orthodoxy, at a time of Hungarian proselytism. The struggle with the Dneti was a matter of survival, as crucial as the Wars of the Roses in England. Even Dracula's attack on the German Transylvanian merchants can be justified upon the grounds that he was encouraging the birth of a native middle class. Granted this intrinsic rationality, Dracula, like many tyrants of history who were the victims of adverse circumstances during their youth, may have been prone to temporary bouts of mental derangement, depressions that could lead to paranoia, induced by distrust of humankind. Our sources are explicit in revealing that Dracula sought solace and refuge in isolated castles or monasteries infinitely preferable to the hustle and bustle of his capital, Tîrgovise. Like Ivan the Terrible, he liked to roam around the countryside, usually accompanied by very few others, to seek his inner peace in the natural beauty of the rural Wallachian regions.

  With reference to Dracula's unusual relationship to his legitimate and illegitimate wives, we cannot, as noted, completely rule out impotency at an early period in life. The problem was presumably resolved with the birth of the three children that Dracula fathered by two different women. The problem of sexual inadequacy has been raised by some psychologists, who have speculated on the symbolism of the stake penetrating the buttocks of his victims as a substitute of genuine sexual satisfaction. However, Dracula's attitude toward women was not very different from that prevailing at the courts of other eastern European sovereigns, which includes the Sultan's court. Though they did have certain legal rights, women in fifteenth-century easte
rn Europe were looked upon as sex objects by those in a position of power. Marriage was not particularly significant. All that mattered was that an heir be provided from “the royal bone.”

  As counterpoint to his cruelty, we highlight the personal courage that Dracula allegedly displayed in battle. There are indeed some instances — the famous night attack in the summer of 1462 is one—in which Dracula risked his own life, as was attested to by his Turkish detractors.

  Ultimately, we must see Dracula in many guises; the ecclesiast, the statesman, and the soldier. Following the fall of Constantinople, he, like many of his successors considered himself the only truly independent patron and defender of Eastern Orthodoxy, centuries before Russia assumed this traditional mantle. As a statesman, though very much like the characteristic condottiere who wished to acquire power for its intrinsic sake, Dracula, perhaps like Joan of Arc, had a vague notion of the spiritual unity of the Romanian people from all three provinces: Wallachia, Transylvania, and Moldavia. This idea was most eloquently expressed on the eve of his last reign, when volunteers from the three provinces united in the common pursuit of national goals in the face of the common Turkish danger. Beyond his country, however, was the much broader concept of a fatherland of European civilization that had to be defended from an alien creed. This mission he inherited from his mentor Hunyadi and the crusaders of old.

  Failing to rally the powers of Europe in defense of the borderlands of European civilization, he was compelled, given the slender means placed at his disposal by a nation in arms, to carry out this task himself as a member of the Dragon Order. In that crucial conflict, Dracula can hardly be included among the great tacticians of war such as Napoleon or Alexander the Great. Nevertheless, making use of a mixture of truly extraordinary tactics, unusually well suited to the terrain of his country, he was able to repel an army three times the size of his own and inflict upon Mehmed the Conqueror one of the greatest humiliations of the latter's lifetime. It was essentially this military action, exploited by the diplomacy of Dracula's brother Radu, that saved his country from the onus and humiliation of being reduced to the status of a Turkish province. It also gained for Europe an invaluable breathing spell to marshal its defenses against the common danger. It is in that sense only that the backhanded compliment of Sultan Mehmed II must be understood: here was a man fully capable of conquering the universe — coincidentally, this challenge was almost identical to the goal attributed to Stoker's Vampire count!