Although Vlad Dracula was well known by his people and his enemies during his lifetime, his presence in the early historical record is spotty. As previously stated, stories of Vlad Dracula’s displays of power were published in Germany and Russia in the late fifteenth century, and there is evidence that approximately a dozen different pamphlets circulated through the mid-sixteenth century. These publications were negative in tone, as both the Germans and the Russians would have been politically invested in highlighting the voivode’s most despicable actions. These pamphlets were highly sensational, as suggested by the most famous title, “The Frightening and Truly Extraordinary Story of a Wicked Blood-Drinking Tyrant Called Prince Dracula.” Although some of the facts included were true, Vlad Dracula was never known to drink the blood of his victims. The details in these pamphlets were highly exaggerated and painted a heavily biased picture against Vlad Dracula that one would expect from his enemies. By contrast, Romanian oral narratives circulating in the vicinity of Vlad Dracula’s homeland were mostly positive in their descriptions of the voivode, but these narratives received less circulation because they were not available in print. As a result, the negative narratives dominated Vlad Dracula’s depiction throughout Europe following his death.
Although Vlad Dracula garnered significant attention during the hundred years that immediately followed his death, the sensational narratives that circulated throughout Europe eventually stopped being produced. Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, virtually no one knew about Vlad Dracula. Of course, the published material was available to anyone who wished to research the history of the area and the Wallachian campaign against the Ottoman Turks, but this information was not available to the public at large. Vlad Dracula’s most notable appearance in print prior to Stoker’s novel is an entry in William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of
Wallachia and Moldavia (published in 1820), which Stoker would later use in his own research. Nevertheless, Dracula would not become a household name throughout Europe (much less the world) until the publication of Stoker’s novel in 1897, and, even then, information about the historical Vlad Dracula would not become readily available until the twentieth century, when he was resurrected by literary scholars and historians in search of source material for Stoker’s novel.
It is safe to say that the historical Vlad Dracula was resurrected in print during the twentieth century because of the long-lived popularity of Stoker’s novel. However, Vlad Dracula’s newfound fame after Stoker’s Dracula has come at a hefty price. Because Stoker’s novel and its film adaptations have reintroduced Vlad Dracula to the world, his history has become almost inextricable from vampire lore in the modern imagination. This pairing has unfortunately led to the popularization of erroneous information that is repeated over and over in Dracula studies, regardless of whether they are produced by scholars or fans. These errors are so pervasive in contemporary scholarship that they should receive attention in all work published on Dracula—the man or the myth—until the record is permanently corrected.
The first misconception of many vampire aficionados is that impalement, staking, and beheading in vampire mythology is a direct result of Vlad the Impaler’s preferred method of executing his enemies as well as his death at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. In actuality, this part of what has now become standard vampire lore originated with vampire scares that took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which the coffins of rumored vampires were exhumed for staking or beheading. The earliest vampire stories do not put forth a standard method for killing the creatures of the night. It just so happens that a wooden stake through the heart and beheading are very efficient methods of dispatching of any being, whether living, dead, or undead. In the same vein, individuals accused of witchcraft were usually burned alive, and this is the most likely source for the introduction of this execution method in vampire lore.
The most important error that is consistently repeated in discussions of Dracula is that the medieval voivode was the main source of inspiration behind Stoker’s novel. Since the 1970s, almost any guide to the popular history of Dracula suggests that Vlad the Impaler’s gruesome executions and high body count were so extraordinary that they prompted Stoker to write a novel that would immortalize the medieval prince. However, although Vlad Dracula was certainly responsible for many deaths, he was not the only ruler during the Middle Ages known for violent executions. As Constantin Rezachevici explains, “Cruel punishment was a characteristic of the Middle Ages and, partially, of the Modern Epoch in central and western Europe, meant not so much as a punitive measure, but as intimidation” (12). More importantly, because pre-twentieth-century accounts of these executions are limited to the pamphlets published during the Middle Ages, it is unlikely that Stoker even knew of the historical Vlad Dracula’s exploits, although his notes for Dracula do in fact prove that he came across the historical figure while researching Eastern Europe for the sensational novel that he began planning in 1890.
Stoker’s Dracula contains only two explicit references to the historical Vlad Dracula and one implied reference. The first reference comes from Harker’s perspective, who notices Count Dracula’s regal tone. He describes his Transylvanian host’s peculiar rhetorical style:
In his speaking of things and people, and especially of battles, he spoke as if he had been present at them all. . . . Whenever he spoke of his house he always said “we,” and spoke almost in the plural, like a king speaking. I wish I could put down all he said exactly as he said it, for to me it was most fascinating. It seemed to have in it a whole history of the country. (Dracula, ch. 3, 33)4
Harker knows nothing about the historical Vlad Dracula. As such, Stoker uses the first reference as a way to foreshadow the few historical details that he includes in his novel.
The novel’s second reference to the historical Dracula comes in a lengthy, prideful speech delivered by the count himself, abridged as follows:
“Who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed! Woe was it that his own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them! Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race who in a later age again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkey-land; who, when he was beaten back, came again, and again, and again, though he had to come alone from the bloody field where his troops were being slaughtered, since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph?” (Dracula, ch. 3, 34-35)
Here, the count proudly relates the history of his family, which is an embellished overview of Vlad Dracula’s history. Throughout his speech, he never names a particular member of the Dracul family. Instead he speaks about all of them as if they were one and the same. The nineteenth-century reader might infer that Harker’s host is all of the Draculas mentioned above; this would certainly fit with the immortal mystique Stoker strives for in the narrative. Today’s reader who is familiar with the history of the Dracul family knows that this passage coincides with the life of Vlad III Dracula. Note that the count describes himself in heroic terms; he even scoffs at the idea that Dracula was a selfish leader.
The novel’s final reference to the historical Dracula comes from Abraham Van Helsing, who finally figures out the mystery of Dracula’s identity:
“I have asked my friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University, to make his record; and, from all the means that are, he tell me of what he has been.
He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkeyland. If it be so, then was he no common man; for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the ‘land beyond the forest.’” (Dracula, ch. 18, 212)
Note that there is no reference to the violent execution method that Vlad Dracula is best known for today. This lack of information corroborates scholar Elizabeth Miller’s insistence that Stoker likely knew very little about Vlad Dracula’s exploits.
While it is obvious that Stoker borrowed both Vlad Dracula’s name and some details of his life for the novel, claims that the history of Vlad the Impaler inspired Stoker to write his now-classic vampire novel are known to be widely exaggerated. In fact, as Elizabeth Miller and Robert Eighteen-Bisang have demonstrated in their edition of Stoker’s notes for Dracula, the villain was originally named Count Wampyr. Stoker changed the name to Count Dracula after he came across the name in supplementary research that he conducted after he had already completed significant work on the novel. The inspiration for the novel came from the popularity of the vampire in nineteenth-century sensation fiction and plays (discussed in the next section of this chapter); the historical Dracula merely provided details that would make the sensational story more believable to Stoker’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century readers.
Miller, who is arguably the world’s most knowledgeable Dracula scholar, has made debunking this false information a priority in her academic career. She has published several books and dozens of articles that prove beyond a doubt that theories of Stoker’s reliance on the history of Vlad Dracula are based on conjecture, not facts. The source of the confusion apparently comes from research conducted and published by Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally beginning in the 1970s and subsequently published in a series of four major works that are frequently cited in all Dracula studies, bibliographies, and fan guides: In Search of Dracula (1972), Dracula: A Biography of Vlad the Impaler, 1431-1476 (1973), The Essential “Dracula”: A Completely Illustrated and Annotated Edition of Bram Stoker’s Classic Novel (1979), and Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and Times (1989). Although these works have perpetuated the false idea that Stoker’s fictional vampire was mostly inspired by the historical Vlad Dracula, they are nonetheless extremely important works of scholarship that have made strong contributions to understandings of the novel and historical research about the medieval Wallachian voivode. The conflation of the two figures may be an unfortunate side effect, but there is no doubt that we would not know as much about the historical Vlad Dracula without Florescu’s and McNally’s contributions to the field.
Fortunately, not all scholarly attempts to provide a comprehensive and accurate history of Vlad Dracula have failed to separate the fictional vampire from the historical ruler. The best work to date has been published by Kurt
Treptow, the following book-length projects: Dracula: Essays on the Life and Times of Vlad Tepes (1991) and Vlad III Dracula: The Life and Times of the Historical Dracula (2000). A historian by training, Treptow is uninterested in the myth of Dracula introduced by Stoker and perpetuated by popular culture. His biography of the medieval prince includes no references to the nineteenth-century novels or the later films. As such, he is one of the few scholars who, along with Miller, do not fall into the historical vampire trap of Dracula studies.5
World History
