Dracula’s real name was Vlad Tepes.

The most famous vampire, Dracula, though familiar to most of us as a character in a novel, is based on stories about an actual historical individual. Dracula’s real name was Vlad Tepes. In A.D. 1431, the same year that Vlad was born, his father (also named Vlad) was made a knight of the Order of the Dragon, a paramilitary organization dedicated to fighting the Turks. In Rumanian, ‘dragon’ is ‘dracul’. So, the father was given the nickname Dracul, and his son was given the nickname Dracula, which means ‘son of Dracul’. Unfortunately, ‘dracul’ also means ‘devil’. Thus, Dracula could mean either ‘son of the dragon’ or ‘son of the devil’.

Vlad Dracul was Prince of Wallachia from 1436-1442 and again from 1443-1447. The small country of Wallachia (which today comprises one-third of Rumania) lies between the lower Danube River and the Carpathian Mountains. Wallachia was nominally a Banates (frontier march) of the Kingdom of Hungary, but it had been essentially an independent country since about 1360.

At the time that Vlad Dracul was prince, Wallachia was in imminent danger of being absorbed by the Turkish Empire then overrunning most of the Balkans. Any leader of Wallachia was stuck in the middle of a power struggle between the Turks and the Hungarians. Both tried to put candidates favorable to their side on the throne, and both sent armies or assassins when they became displeased with the prince’s rule.

In 1444, Vlad Dracul and his two oldest sons, Mircea and Vlad, joined the anti-Turk crusade which led to the disastrous defeat of the Western crusaders at Varna. After the defeat, Vlad Dracul was forced to give up his second son, Vlad, and his youngest son, Radu, as hostages to the Turks. For the next four years, the young Dracula was a Turkish prisoner. While the imprisonment was not always physically harsh, it was an extreme mental ordeal since Dracula was likely to be executed at any moment if the Turks did not like his father’s policies. During those years, Dracula came to view life as fleeting and cheap. In reaction to his imprisonment, he developed a reputation for trickery, cunning, insubordination, and brutality.

By remaining on good terms with the Turkish Sultan, Vlad Dracul angered the protector of Hungary, John Hunyadi. Henchmen of Hunyadi murdered Vlad Dracul and his eldest son Mircea in December of 1447. John Hunyadi then placed his own candidate, Vladislav II, on the throne of Wallachia. Backed by the Turks, Dracula became Prince of Wallachia for two months in 1448. But the Hungarian faction was too strong. Dracula fled to Moldavia, the northernmost Rumanian principality. There, he formed a close friendship and alliance with his cousin Steven.

Politics in Moldavia were as dangerous as in Wallachia. In 1451, Steven’s father, Bogdan, was murdered, and the two cousins fled. Dracula managed to make peace with John Hunyadi and served under Hunyadi in John’s constant fight against the Turks. From 1451-1456, Dracula lived in Transylvania, which is now the third province of Rumania, but which was traditionally a part of the Kingdom of Hungary. Transylvania contained many Hungarians and Germans as well as Romanians.

Vladislav II was having the same kind of problems Dracula’s father once had. In 1456, John Hunyadi decided that Vladislav was favoring the Turks too much. He loaned Dracula the nucleus of an army and sent him to regain the throne of Wallachia. Dracula defeated Vladislav and became Prince of Wallachia again.

Now, Dracula could release all his pentup hatreds. He executed the members of the faction that killed his father. Since he couldn’t be sure exactly who was guilty, he solved the problem by killing 500 suspects, among whom were bound to be the 20 or so men responsible for his father’s death. Dracula raided the Turks, whom he hated with pathological fervor, and also raided the German merchant towns of Transylvania. The Germans had come to Transylvania hundreds of years before as immigrants from Saxony, invited by the Hungarian king to encourage commerce. To many of the Rumanians, the Germans were foreign upstarts, monopolizing trade throughout Transylvania. On St. Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, 1460, nearly 30,000 men, women, and children of German descent were slain on a hill outside the city of Brasov in Transylvania.

But Dracula’s main enemies were the Turks. In 1461-1462, he led a campaign against them in which he made full use of guerilla tactics and terrorism. By Dracula’s own count, his forces slew 23,809 Turks. In fact, Dracula cut off the heads, noses, or ears of the Turks to keep an accurate count, then sent them as presents to neighboring Christian rulers to enlist their aid against the infidel Turks (without success). Dracula’s favorite means of killing his victims was by impaling them on a stake. This practice gave him his second nickname, ‘Tepes’ which means ‘The Impaler’.

By the end of 1462, Vlad Tepes was driven from the throne by his younger brother Radu, who had become a Turkish puppet. When Vlad appealed to Mathias Corvinus, son of John Hunyadi and now King of Hungary, he was imprisoned. Mathias was concentrating on political manoeuvres in Europe, and he needed a quiet border with the Turks.

Vlad Tepes was still a valuable political asset. Eventually, he converted from the Orthodox to the Roman Catholic religion and married one of Mathias’ sisters. When Stephen (the Great) of Moldavia, a remarkable cousin of Vlad who managed to hold the throne for nearly 50 years, supported Dracula’s claim to Wallachia, the time was ripe for Vlad’s return. The official commander of the expedition was Stephen Bathory, Prince of Transylvania (soon to be elected King of Poland). The army was made up of Hungarians, Wallachians, Transylvanians, and Moldavians. In 1476, they defeated the Turks and set Dracula once more on the throne of Wallachia.

But Dracula had alienated too many factions among his subjects. Before he could consolidate his reign, his enemies united against him, and Dracula was slain on a hilltop outside Bucharest. His third reign had lasted barely two months.

In his own day, Dracula was notorious. Numerous writers, especially Germans sympathetic to their Transylvanian cousins, wrote about him as the ‘Blood Monster’. Bram Stoker knew some of the stories about Dracula and made them the basis for his main character in the novel of the same name. Dracula was certainly bloodthirsty with a pathological cruelty. He firmly believed in the effects of terror to intimidate his subjects and defeat his enemies. Even his favored means of torture, the stake, made him a natural candidate for the vampire legend that grew around him.

At the same time, Dracula managed to maintain some shreds of personal honor. It was his boast that a person could walk across Wallachia with a bag of gold and be completely safe from bandits (who feared his wrath too much to operate in the country). There were many cases in which Dracula personally rewarded faithful service. No one questioned Dracula’s personal courage or his prowess as a warrior. He was even something of a patriot.

So, the main character of the novel Dracula is no mere one-sided personality. He is evil, certainly, and terrifying, cruel, and merciless - yet he retains a hint of honor, his courage is undaunted, and he is still human enough to fall in love, in his own twisted way.

Countess Elizabeth Bathory

Elizabeth (Erzsebet) Bathory has often been described as “Countess Dracula.” The Bathory family was an old and illustrious one—one of the oldest in Transylvania in fact. The family traced its descendency from Vid Bathory, a legendary and mighty warrior who had allegedly slain a dragon with a mace in what is now eastern Romania. This may have created the motif for the Romanian Christian knight Iorgi—also said to have killed a dragon— who later became St. George, patron saint of England. They were also related by what looks to have been incestuous marriages amongst various other members of similar clans. Her mother, Anna Bathory, was the sister of King Stephen of Poland, and her father Iorgi (George—her mother’s third husband) was the ruler of several countries. However, instances of inbreeding had led to rumours of madness and monstrous births in former years.

Elizabeth Bathory was born into this troubled lineage in 1560. Her mother was a devout Calvinist and an exceptionally strong character, and her father, George, was a hard-working man who had held several administrative posts under the Hapsburgs. She had at least one elder brother, one of the many Stephens (a popular name among the male Bathorys) and two younger sisters, Klara and Sofia, who disappeared from history without trace.

In 1571 at age 11, Elizabeth was promised in marriage to the fifteen year old Count Ferenc (Francis) Nadasdy, fabulously wealthy and reckoned to be one of the most eligible bachelors in Hungary at that time. Such young betrothals were not uncommon and were usually for political reasons rather than any sort of romantic notions. In order to acquire the notable family name, Francis changed his own to that of Bathory, giving him the tradition of that family, as well as its notoriety.

Francis and Elizabeth waited four years to marry, finally doing so on 8th May 1575. Elizabeth was sent from the Bathory castle and into the care of her mother-in-law, the formidable Lady Ursula Kasnizsai. Whilst she was at the court of Lady Nadasdy, plagues and epidemics raged through Eastern Europe, carrying away the poor and wretched in the villages of Hungary. The tides of illnesses and disease, however, simply lapped around the walls of the castle at Savarin, keeping everyone there confined. Elizabeth found herself increasingly under the control of her severe and dominant mother-in-law. It was around this time that she was, according to legend, visited by a “black stranger,” perhaps a forest demon to whom she is said to have given herself. What actually might have transpired is that she had an affair with one (or more) of the servants, leading to the supposition that she may very well have been sexually promiscuous.

When her mother-in-law died, Elizabeth joined her husband at the remote Csejthe Castle. By this time, the Muslim Turks were making advances and (as they had done in Vlad III’s time) the Christian forces were trying to limit their expansion. Count Francis was now a solider in the Hungarian army and had distinguished himself in battle becoming known as “The Black Hero of Hungary.” He was consequently away fighting against Turkish incursions for much of his time, leaving his wife alone in the gloomy fortress.

It was now that Elizabeth fell under various influences. The servants at Csejthe, for the most part, were local people, steeped in local lore and legend. The area seemed to have been superstitious and filled with old tales and practices, many of which stretched back across the centuries. Certain servants appear to have initiated Elizabeth into rather unsavoury practices. Elizabeth may well have been attracted to lesbianism (she had an aunt who was renowned throughout Hungary in this respect) and this may have played a prominent role in some of the occurrences at Csejthe. An old servant woman named Darvula—locally regarded as a witch—together with a maid named Dorottya Szentes, seem to have played a major part in the terrible acts that were to make Elizabeth Bathory’s name a by-word for evil and depravation. To these may be added the name Janos (or Johannes) Ujvary, who is described as Elizabeth’s majordomo. There seems little doubt that many of these “practices,” whilst reeking of dark witchcraft, also contained sexual elements.

In 1600, Count Francis was killed in battle against the Turks and it was now that the real period of Elizabeth’s atrocities began. She was now mistress of Csejthe and a formidable power in the locality. Since the death of her husband, she was also under the protection of her kinsman, King Matthias of Hungary, which gave her added status. However, the depravity of her life was beginning to tell on her physically—she appeared to be growing old and haggard much more swiftly than she would have liked. It is here that legend takes over. According to one popular tale, a young maidservant was brushing the Countess’s hair when she accidentally pulled it. Angered, Elizabeth struck her across the face, so sharply that she drew blood. Later, looking at the area on which the girl’s blood had fallen, the Countess imagined that the skin seemed younger and fresher than the skin around it. She consulted with the witch Darvula and learned that it was imagined in the countryside that the blood of a virgin, accompanied by certain abominable rites, had youth-giving properties. This set Elizabeth off on a bloody and murderous trail. Together with her accomplices, she began to recruit young local girls from the villages round about, ostensibly to work as servants at Csethje, but in reality to be murdered within the castle walls. Each day, the Countess would bathe in their blood in the belief that it returned at least some of her youthful looks. There were accounts of her actually drinking the blood as a restorative medicine.

Most of the girls whom Elizabeth and her cohorts murdered came from the Slovak population of Hungary—girls who were often considered of the “lower order” in society. For a while, the authorities did not overly worry about the disappearance of the girls. The official story was that they had contracted illness and died. For a number of years—roughly between 1601 and 1611—the Countess murdered innumerable servant girls with impunity and without any official enquiry. Many people, particularly in the locality, either knew or suspected what was going on within the castle but none dared voice it. Once a Lutheran pastor spoke out against her, claiming that there was a great and horrific evil going on in Csethje, including cannibal feasts and blood-drinking orgies, and although initially his words fell on largely deaf ears, some people started to pay attention. A legend says that one of the girls who the Countess was about to kill managed to escape and raised the alarm in the surrounding countryside, although this is not extremely likely. What is more likely is that the rumours surrounding the Countess continued to grow until they reached the ears of the Hungarian king, Matthias Corvenus, who had no other option but to investigate. Together with the provincial governor, Count Gryorgi Thurzo, the King invaded Csejthe early in 1611, and within the walls the two men discovered evidence of horrors almost beyond imagining.

In 1611, a series of trials conducted by the King himself were set up and the servants, Darvula and Dorottya Szentes, along with Janos Ujvary, were all found guilty of witchcraft and murder, and were executed. Elizabeth herself was not found guilty of any crime—indeed her noble rank saved her from criminal proceedings—but she was commanded to remain in Csejthe at the pleasure of the Hungarian king. To this end, stonemasons were brought in and Elizabeth was walled up in the apartments where she had committed the majority of her atrocities. Only a small aperture was left through which food could be passed into her. All the windows of that section of the castle were also bricked up, leaving her alone in the darkness. There she was to remain until she died.

On 31st July 1614, Elizabeth (then reputedly age fifty-four) dictated her last will and testament to two priests from the Estergom bishopric. What remained of her family holdings were to be divided between her children, with her son Paul and his descendants receiving the main portion. Shortly afterwards, two of her guards decided that they would try to look at her through the aperture through which she was fed—she was supposedly still the most beautiful woman in all of Hungary. When they looked through, however, they saw only the body of the Countess, lying face down on the floor. The bloody Countess was dead in her lonely, lightless world.

The records concerning Elizabeth Bathory were sealed for one hundred years and her name was forbidden to be mentioned throughout Hungary. The name “Csejthe” became a swear word in the Hungarian tongue and the Slovaks within the borders of the country referred to the Countess obliquely as “the Hungarian whore.” The shadow of Elizabeth Bathory fell darkly across her lands for many centuries after her death.

Although there is no real evidence that Bram Stoker used the idea of the “Countess Dracula” in his vampire novel, there is no reason why he should not have known about her. In fact, she may well have served as the template for another Irish writer’s vampiric tale. This was Carmilla written by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, originally published in 1871 in the magazine The Dark Blue. In this tale, a vampiric older girl subtly and evilly influences the impressionable mind of her younger companion. There are, of course, undertones of lesbianism and bloodlust in the story that provide a tangible link with the “Blood Countess.” In her own way, Elizabeth Bathory was as influential to the vampire myth as Vlad Tepes.

The dark and sinister figure of the vampire has proved to be one of the most enduring motifs of horror across the centuries. And this most enduring of monsters looks set to continue its haunting of the minds of men and women for many years to come. Look out into the dark! Is there a shape, shrouded in a black cloak lurking there? The vampire might be closer than you think!

Vlad Tepes: Dracula the Legend

In the 15th century, Eastern Europe was in turmoil. Christianity found itself under threat from a rapidly expanding sphere of influence controlled by the Muslim Ottoman Turks. Indeed, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Christendom found itself under almost constant threat from the forces of Mohammed the Conqueror, who sought to extend the Muslim faith throughout all of Eastern Europe. Desperately, Christianity sought some form of response to the steadily growing Ottoman expansion.

The Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund (elected in 1410) created a semisecret organization known as the Order of the Dragon to defend the eastern lands from the advancing Turkish threat. Its emblem was a dragon, clinging to a cross, its wings outstretched. From around 1431, a certain warlord or Voivode (local ruler), Vlad II of Wallachia, was brought into the Order and had the dragon emblazoned on his coinage. The Wallachian name for dragon was “Drac” and he became known locally as Vlad Dracul. Interestingly enough, the word “drac” can also mean “devil” or “evil spirit.”

Wallachia was a tiny territory, but it was important. It had been founded in 1292 by Radu Negru (Radu the Black) but for many years it was dominated by Hungary who laid claim to part of neighbouring Transylvania and Moldavia. It broke free of Hungarian influence in 1330, becoming virtually an independent kingdom. It still, however, maintained strong links with Transylvania, and in fact Vlad II’s wife was a Transylvanian noblewoman. In fact, Sigismund was to make Vlad II military governor of Transylvania in 1431. Wallachia was also strategically important, forming a kind of “buffer” between the Christian states and the expanding Muslim powers. This was why Christendom considered Vlad II’s support so important.

Vlad II, however, was a skilled politician and sought a kind of “middle way” between the two factions. He was in a dangerous position and had no wish to see his country either invaded by the Turks or used as a frontier for a Christian battleground. From time to time, he struck up alliances with both, however as Turkish influence increased, he began to side with them. When the Turks invaded Transylvania in 1442, he remained neutral, greatly angering the Hungarians under their leader John Hunyadi, the White Knight of Hungary. Hunyadi attacked the Turks and drove them out of Transylvania before turning his attention on Vlad II and forcing him to flee his throne. However, Vlad regained it in 1443 with Turkish support, but was forced to hand over two of his sons—Vlad and Radu—as hostages to the Turkish administration. An uneasy peace existed between Wallachia and Hungary with Hunyadi demanding that Vlad II fulfill his obligations as a member of the Order of the Dragon, but Vlad II resisting for fear of inflaming the Turks.

Eventually, Vlad II died in 1448. On hearing of his death, the Turks immediately released his second son Vlad and supported him as Voivode of Wallachia. Hunyadi, fearing Turkish domination of the region immediately placed his own candidate Vladislav II or Vladislav Dan, backed by the Hungarian Army, on the Wallachian throne. However, he angered his Hungarian overlords by adopting slightly pro-Turkish policies and the situation became even more tense.

In 1456, the Hungarians invaded Turkish Serbia. It was a disastrous campaign during which Hunyadi was killed and, in the resulting political confusion, Vlad was prompted to make his bid for the Wallachian monarchy. He ousted Vladislav and had him murdered before taking the throne as Vlad III or Vlad Dracula(Drac-ula—son of the dragon). His reign was a despotic one, during the course of which he stood up to the Turks and systematically began to destroy the old local landowner system that had existed in Wallachia. This may have been because the Hungarian-backed land owners of Tirgoviste had burned his elder brother Mircea to death—Vlad III was to exact a terrible revenge upon them, arresting, torturing, and eventually executing them. His cruelty became legendary.

In 1462, the Turks forced Vlad III to flee the throne by aiding a popular uprising against him, placing his younger brother Radu the Handsome (who had remained in Turkish custody after Vlad had been released) on the Wallachian throne. It is said that Vlad’s wife leapt to her death into a foaming river near his castle at Arges to avoid being captured by Turkish soldiers. Vlad himself managed to escape and fled to the Hungarian court for safety. Here the Hungarian king, Matthias Corvenus (John Hundyadi’s son), had him imprisoned as a traitor. It is not known how long he was held, but he was released perhaps around 1474 by marrying into one of the Hungarian noble families. He then formed an alliance with Count Stephen Barthory to reinvade Wallachia and get his throne back, which their combined forces did in 1476. By this time, Radu was dead and had been replaced by another Turkish puppet, Basarab the Old. Basarab’s forces were easily defeated and Vlad took the throne once more. However, several months later, Count Bathory’s armies departed for Transylvania leaving Vlad in a rather weak position. Taking advantage of this, a massive Turkish army entered the country and Vlad was forced to take up arms to defend his country with only a skeleton army. He was killed in battle near present-day Bucharest. His decapitated body was recovered from the Turks and was taken inland to be buried at the monastery at Snagov.

There is little doubt that Vlad III was a cruel man, but he may have been not so different from many other rulers around him. Some of his methods of torture and execution may seem extremely barbaric to us today, but we must remember that Vlad was forced to maintain a strict and authoritarian rule to protect his country from the forces that surged around it—namely Hungarian and Turk. Nevertheless, some of his methods appear to be quite unique as well as being incredibly draconian and brutal. For example, one of his favourite methods of torture and death was to place Turkish prisoners on the top of high stakes and let the forces of gravity pull them down as the point of the stake disembowelled them. This earned him the nickname “Vlad Tepes” (pronounced Tep-esh) or “Vlad the Impaler.” A number of grizzly anecdotes are told about him as well. The most common tale is how he received three Turkish ambassadors at his court, each one of them wearing a fez. In accordance with their own custom, they did not remove their headgear when they entered his presence. Vlad took this as a sign of disrespect and instructed that the fezs be nailed to their foreheads. In a similar anecdote, a Saxon merchant was caught either cheating or stealing from a poor man. Vlad had him placed against a wooden door and had a bag of gold nailed to his hand. The merchant’s eyes were then gauged out so that he could not see his wealth.

Aware of the vast armies of beggars and diseased persons that traversed his territory demanding alms, Vlad devised a novel way of alleviating the problem. He invited many of the beggars and invalids to a great banquet held in a barn and when they were inside, he had all the doors locked and the building set alight, burning those inside to death. In this way he solved the country’s destitute problem “at a stroke.” However, it should be noted that although he appears as an often cruel and barbaric man, there is no record of Vlad III actually drinking human blood. Nevertheless, from our own 21st century point of view, he seems to have been a horrific despot.

Vlad Tepes is celebrated and remembered in his native Wallachia as a good prince, a defender of his country (now part of Romania) against foreign invaders—the Turks and the Saxons. He is fondly remembered as a friend of the poor and a champion of the common man—a ruler who protected his subjects, (through the laws that he enacted), from scheming foreign merchants and vicious Turkish interlopers. In this respect, he is regarded as a national hero.

The legends surrounding this admittedly bloodthirsty Wallachian warlord must have attracted Bram Stoker when he came to write his novel. Although not familiar with the area itself, he had heard some of its legends through friends who had connections with that part of the world. In 19th century England, Romania was a remote and exotic land—perhaps something like Tibet appeared during the 1950s and 1960s. Transylvania—the land beyond the forest—had a mysterious ring to it, and where better to set a story of horror and mystery than in the mist-shrouded forests that swathed the lower slopes of the Carpathian Mountains? Stoker may also have been aware of the tales and legends concerning vampires that had emerged from Hungary during the 1700s and this may have influenced his decision to set his novel—its content perhaps influenced by Irish and American elements—in the Transylvania/ Moldavia areas. And although we have no evidence that he knew anything about her, another person from the same region may have coloured his perspective. This was the nightmarish Countess Elizabeth Bathory.

The Shadows of Eastern Europe

Among the living, Saxons, Szeklers, Vlachs and Romanians re-enact their hatred with each passing generation. The Cainites’ clans echo that racial contempt. This is the realm where the Tremere betrayed Saulot and the Salubri. Here, the Tzimisce devolved from their spiritual past into a race of inhuman predators. Hidden in the night, the Ventrue Eastern Lords dreamt of creating an empire that would tame the wilderness.

The legend continues. Over the course of the next few centuries, hordes of Mongols and Turks will threaten Europe, armies of peasants will rise up against their oppressors, and Lambach of Clan Tzimisce and Vladimir Dracul of Wallachia will sire a villain whose bestial ways will become legendary. As the tides of time wear at Transylvania, the Cainites create their legacy of shame.

In the 12th century, the Cainites of Hungary divided the voivodate of Transylvania into seven domains. From the Hungarian Cainites’ point of view, the Arpad Ventrue were fully entitled to rule over all seven realms. Using mortal history to support their goals, they espoused that the fierce Arpad warriors whose descendants formed the Hungarian nobility were the first race to civilize the Transylvanian lands of eastern Hungary. Noblemen supported Szekler tribesmen as the overlords of the voivodate, and enterprising Ventrue secured power on the fringes of Eastern Europe.

Transylvanian Cainites, however, were fiercely aware that the voivodate of Transylvania had always struggled for its freedom. To their way of thinking, the East had to be kept free from the turmoil of Western politics. Mortal rulers who showed reverence for the Catholic Church in Rome had no claim to govern peasants who practiced the Eastern Orthodox religion from Byzantium. According to their history, the original settlers of Roman Dacia were the ancestors of the Transylvanian serfs and peasants. This was their land, and the Vlachs would do anything to keep it.

Nonetheless, the Hungarians encouraged settlers from other nations to colonize Transylvania. Saxons from the Holy Roman Empire and other lands of the West helped build a series of cities in Transylvania. Cainite princes helped these cities grow quickly, and the undead rulers of the seven largest realms formed a coterie known as the Council of Ashes.

Since then, holding on to power in Transylvania has been an arduous task. In 1197, only four of the princes still rule, and three of them scheme against the Ventrue of the West. In their bids for power, they also maneuver against each other, echoing the treachery of the Tzimisce who compete with them for control of these dark lands. In the shadows, ambitious Tremere also watch and wait. Anything that breaks the unity of the Fiends affords them an opportunity to destroy their ancient enemies.

This is a dangerous game. Within a few scant decades, hordes of Mongol warriors will arrive from the East. A bestial Gangrel Inconnu traveling in the wake of the Eastern horde will want no less than the destruction of the cities of both the East and West. If eastern Transylvania and western Hungary cannot work together, all that the Cainites have worked to create will be destroyed.

Not far from the city of Bistria — the domain of Count Radu, the Tzimisce prince — Tihuta Pass affords the most promising invasion route for the Mongol horde. Already, Cainites have called for the construction of a castle to help hold off the invaders. They do not realize, however, the role this fortress will play in history.

Skeletons treated for vampirism found in Bulgaria

Restless dead: An archaeologist cleans a skeleton during excavations in Bulgaria, where the remains of two bodies were found pierced with iron rods to keep them from turning into vampires. (AFP)

Bulgarian archaeologists say they have unearthed centuries-old skeletons pinned down through their chests with iron rods -- a practice believed to stop the dead from becoming vampires.
According to Bozhidar Dimitrov, head of the National History Museum in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, two skeletons from the Middle Ages were found in such a state last weekend near the Black Sea town of Sozopol.

He said Tuesday that corpses were regularly treated in such a way before being buried in some parts of Bulgaria, even until the beginning of the last century.

Widespread superstition led to iron rods being hammered through the chest bones and hearts of those who did evil during their lifetimes for fear they would return after death to feast on the blood of the living.

According to Dimitrov, over 100 corpses stabbed to prevent them from becoming vampires have been discovered across Bulgaria over the years.

"I do not know why an ordinary discovery like that [has] became so popular. Perhaps because of the mysteriousness of the word "vampire," he said.

WANDERING VAMPIRES

Gypsies were perhaps the original bohemians. In 1423, King Sigismund of Bohemia gave a band of “outlandysshe” wanderers from “Egypt” the letter of safe conduct—and a name and reputation—that they carried all over Europe.

They had long been blacksmiths, tinkers, knife grinders, and horse traders, as well as dancers, musicians, and fortune-tellers. Black of eye and black of hair, gypsies (or Romani, as they call themselves) entered 15th-century Europe from Asia Minor just ahead of the Ottoman wave. Though they would eventually spread as far as the British Isles and then around the world, they roamed the Balkans and eastern Europe in such numbers that an 18th-century traveler to Transylvania compared them to “locusts” swarming over the land. Their clannish, secretive ways lent them an aura of superstition; they gained a reputation for being a caste apart, masters at harnessing or propitiating occult forces. And despite the widespread belief that they had come from Egypt, their original home was India.

For good reason—they once were enslaved in Romania and were nearly exterminated by the Nazis in World War II—the Romani have remained reclusive and wary. Their kris, or unwritten code, and their ever-changing Romani tongue have been constant bonds shared by widely dispersed bands. At the same time, their wanderings have accentuated the human tendency to diversify, making gypsies a challenge to linguists and anthropologists alike. Additionally, many of their customs are imbued with—perhaps contaminated by—those of the lands in which they sojourned.

The gypsy attitude toward the dead became less diluted than their other beliefs. They recognized two categories of dead people: Suuntsé were “saints” in paradise and need not be feared, whereas mulé died unnaturally, unexpectedly, or prematurely. In the animistic world of the gypsies, however, all death resulted from deliberate evil, so the latter category included just about everyone.

Never mind other people’s ghosts or vampires; gypsies could pass untroubled nights in outsiders’ graveyards. It was the mulo they feared. After a death in a gypsy camp, the tent where the corpse was laid would be carefully guarded so nothing untoward could affect it; meanwhile, the campfires outside were stoked high to scare off any ghosts. Every burial rite was observed to the letter, with the dead man’s possessions—even his money—being destroyed to rob a potential ghost of any reason to pursue its former clan members and to exact its revenge for negligence or theft. The destruction extended even to the departed’s home: The ritual of the burning wagon was once a spectacular gypsy custom.

Some say the mulo walks abroad by day; others that he moves only at night and must return to his grave by cockcrow. Either way, he can also be active precisely at noon, when nothing casts a shadow—a sort of witching hour in reverse. Not quite a reanimated corpse but not exactly a ghost either, the mulo is something in between—a kind of posthumous double that, though tethered to the grave, can nonetheless wander at will. Though the mulo is greatly feared for his often brutally sexual depredations, he is almost never a bloodsucker. In fact, his adventures are comically folkloric. Many aspects of his legend have been gathered from those of the vampire—the sharpened hawthorn stake, decapitation, and burning, to name just a few of the various methods used to well and truly dispatch him. This makes it likely that, as far as vampires are concerned, the gypsy got more than he gave.

On the other hand, there are those offerings. Yes, the mulo can wander, but he must always return to the grave—there to be propitiated with offerings of food and milk in a rite that might be as old as India. So, too, might be the belief in its universality. Vampirism, to the gypsy, is a principle of nature, as applicable to animals and plants as it is to humans. Pumpkins and melons, to name the two most famous examples, often turn into vampires.

All things, it seems, are full of more than just gods.

Vampires in Hungary

Artwork by Maria Lombide Ezpeleta

Hungary, Bela Lugosi’s native country, has a special place in the history of vampires. Vampire historian Montague Summers opened his discussion of the vampire in Hungary by observing, “Hungary, it may not untruly be said, shares with Greece and Slovakia the reputation of being that particular region of the world which is most terribly in fested by the Vampire and where he is seen at his ugliest and worst.” Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) opened with Jonathan Harker’s trip through Hungary. Harker saw Budapest as the place that marked his leaving the (civilized) West and entering the East. He proceeded through Hungary into northeast Transylvania, then a part of Hungary dominated by the Szekelys, a Hungarian people known for their fighting ability. (Dracula was identified as a Szekely.) In the face of Stoker and Summers, and before Dom Augustin Calmet, Hungarian scholars have argued that the identification of Hungary and vampires was a serious mistake of Western scholars ignorant of Hungarian history. To reach some perspective on this controversy, a brief look at Hungarian history is necessary.

The Emergence of Hungary
The history of modern Hungary began in the late ninth century when the Magyar people occupied the Carpathian Basin. They had moved into the area from the region around the Volga and Kama rivers. They spoke a Finnish- Ugrian language, not Slavic. Their conquest of the land was assisted by Christian allies and, during the tenth century, the Christianization of the Magyars began in earnest. In 1000 C.E., Pope Sylvester crowned István, the first Hungarian king. Later in that century, when the Christians split into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox branches, the Hungarians adhered to the Roman church.

István’s descendants moved into Transylvania gradually but had incorporated the area into Hungary by the end of the thirteenth century. The Hungarian rulers established a system by which only Hungarians controlled the land. A Magyar tribe, the Szekleys were given control of the mountain land in the northeast in return for their serving as a buffer between Hungary and any potential enemies to the east. The Romanian people of Transylvania were at the bottom of the social ladder. Above them were the Germans, who were invited into cities in southern Transylvania. In return for their skills in building the economy, the Germans were given a number of special privileges. By the fourteenth century, many Romanians had left Transylvania for Wallachia, south of the Carpathians, where they created the core of what would become the modern state of Romania. Following the death of the last of István’s descendants to wear the crown of Hungary, it was ruled by foreign kings invited into the country by the nobles. The height of prosperity for the nation came in the late fifteenth century when Matthias Corvinus (1458–1490), a Romanian ethnic and contemporary of Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler, ruled. He built his summer capital at Visegrád one of the most palatial centers in eastern Europe. Hungarian independence ended essentially at the battle of Mohács in 1526, which sealed the Turkish conquest of the land. During the years of Turkish conquest, while Islam was not imposed, Roman Catholic worship was forbidden. The Reformed Church was allowed, however, and remains a relatively strong body to the present. Transylvania existed as a land with an atmosphere of relative religious freedom, and both Calvinist Protestantism and Unitarianism made significant inroads. Unitarianism made significant gains at the end of the sixteenth century following the death of Roman Catholic Cardinal Bathory at the Battle of Selimbar (1599). The Szekelys were excommunicated and as a group turned to Unitarianism.

The Turks dominated the area until 1686 when they were defeated at the battle of Buda. Hungary was absorbed into the Hapsburg empire and Roman Catholicism rebuilt. The Austrian armies would soon push farther south into Serbia, parts of which were absorbed into the Hungarian province.

The eighteenth century was characterized by the lengthy rulerships of Karoly III (1711–1740) and Maria Theresa (1740–1780). Hungarian efforts for independence, signaled by the short-lived revolution in 1848, led to the creation in 1867 of Austria-Hungary. Austria-Hungary survived for a half century, but then entered World War I on Germany’s side. In 1919 Austria-Hungary was split into two nations and the large segments of Hungary inhabited by non-Hungarian ethnic minorities were given to Romania, Serbia, and Czechoslovakia. Most importantly, Transylvania was transferred to Romania, a matter of continued tension between the two countries. Hungary was left a smaller but ethnically homogeneous land almost entirely composed of people of Hungarian ethnicity but with a small but measurable number of Gypsies. After the wars, Hungary was ruled by Miklós Horthy, a dictator who brought Hungary into an alliance with Hitler and Germany as World War II began. After the war, in 1948, the country was taken over and ruled by Communists until the changes of the 1990s led to the creation of a democratic state.

The Vampire Epidemics
Following the Austrian conquest of Hungary and regions south, reports of vampires began to filter into western Europe. The most significant of these concerned events during 1725–32, their importance due in large measure to the extensive investigations of the reported incidents carried on by Austrian officials. The cases of Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paul especially became the focus of a lengthy debate in the German universities. Different versions of the incidents identified the locations of the vampire epidemics as Hungary rather than (more properly) a Serbian province of the Austrian province of Hungary. The debate was summarized in two important treatises, the first of which, Dissertazione sopre I Vampiri by Archbishop Giuseppe Davanzati, assumed a skeptical attitude. The second, Dom Augustin Calmet’s Dissertations sur les Apparitiones des Anges des Démons et des Espits, et sur les revenants, et Vampires de Hingrie, de Boheme, de Moravie, et de Silésie, took a much more accepting attitude.

Dom Augustin Calmet

Calmet’s work was soon translated and published in German (1752) and in English (1759) and spread the image of eastern Europe as the home of the vampire. While Calmet featured vampire cases in Silesia (Poland), Bohemia, and Moravia (Czechoslovakia), the “Hungarian” cases of Paul and Plogojowitz were the most spectacular and best documented. The image of Hungary as a land of vampires was reinforced by Stoker and Summers, and later by both Raymond T. McNally and Leonard Wolf, who suggested that the Hungarian word vampir was the source of the English word vampire. That theory has more recently been countered by Katerina Wilson, who argued that the first appearance of the word “vampir” in print in Hungarian postdates the first published use of the term in most Western languages by more than a century (actually by some 50 years). The question remains open, however, in that it is highly possible that someone (for example, a German-speaking person in Hungary in the early eighteenth century) might have picked up the term in conversation and transmitted it to the West.

Meanwhile, Hungarian scholars confronted the issue. As early as 1854, Roman Catholic bishop and scholar Arnold Ipolyi assembled the first broad description of the beliefs of pre-Christian Hungary. In the course of his treatise he emphasized that there was no belief in vampires among the Hungarians. That observation was also made by other scholars, who wrote their articles and treatises in Hungarian destined never to be translated into Western languages. In current times, the case was again presented by Tekla Dömötör, whose book Hungarian Folk Beliefs was translated and published in English in 1982. He asserted, “There is no place in Hungarian folk beliefs for the vampire who rises forth from dead bodies and sucks the blood of the living.” The conclusions of the Hungarian scholars have been reinforced by the observations of Western researchers, who have had to concede that few reports of vampires have come from Hungary. Most also assert, however, that in Hungarians’ interaction with the Gypsies and their Slavic neighbors, such beliefs likely did drift into the rural regions.

Vampirelike Creatures in Hungary
Having denied the existence of the vampire in Hungarian folk culture, the Hungarian scholars from Ipolyi to Dömötör also detailed belief in a vampire-like being, the lidérc. The lidérc was an incubus/succubus figure that took on a number of shapes. It could appear as a woman or a man, an animal, or a shining light. Interestingly, the lidérc did not have the power of transformation, but rather was believed to exist in all its shapes at once. Through its magical powers, it caused the human observer to see one form or another. As an incubus/succubus it attacked victims and killed them by exhaustion. It loved them to death. Defensive measures against the lidérc included the placing of garters on the bedroom doorknob and the use of the ubiquitous garlic. Hungarians also noted a belief in the nora, an invisible being described by those to whom he appeared as small, humanoid, bald, and running on all fours. He was said to jump on his victims and suck on their breasts. Victims included the same type of person who in Slavic cultures was destined for vampirism, namely the immoral and irreverent. As a result of the nora, the breast area swelled. The antidote was to smear garlic on the breasts.

Sources: Calmet, Dom Augustine. The Phantom World. 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1746, 1850. Dömötör, Tekla. Hungarian Folk Beliefs. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982. Kabdebo, Thomas. Hungary. Santa Barbara, CA: Clio Press, 1980. 280 pp. McNally, Raymond T. A Clutch of Vampires. New York: Bell Publishing Company, 1974. 255 pp. Summers, Montague. The Vampire in Europe. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1961. 329 pp. “Vampires in Hungary.” International Vampire 1, 4 (Summer 1991). Wilson, Katherine M. “The History of the Word ‘Vampire.’” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, 4 (October–December 1985): 577–83.