It was no idle choice that the red-bearded Irish novelist Bram Stoker in 1896 chose the factual Impaler as the model for his nosferatu,
his "undead" vampire. Although admittedly never having set foot on
Romanian soil, having done most of his research at the London Library,
it is obvious that the infamous Count Dracula emulates his historical
counterpart. Poring over texts such as An Extraordinary and Shocking
History of a Great Berserker Called Prince Dracula, The Historie and
Superstitions of Romantic Romania and Wilkinson's Account of Wallachia and Moldavia,
Stoker chanced upon the tales of Dracula. (It has been suggested by
scholars that such histories would be incomplete without generous space
attributed to the man.) In the tomes he studied, Stoker assuredly read
of the voivode Dracula, whose atrocities trembled the Christian Western World and whose audacity saved it from Allah.
A
few 20th Century authors have denied any connection between the
Romanian prince of fact and the bloodthirsty count of fiction, opining
that Stoker merely used the rhythmical name he discovered in the pages
of old histories. They base their interpretation primarily on two
premises. The first is that Stoker's ghoul resides in a castle in the
Transylvanian Alps and not in Wallachia's foothills, the better part of
some 150 miles. The other is that the vampire is described by Stoker as
being of Szekely blood, from a race of people in the "northern country,"
and not of an older Wallachian stock.
Other writers, however,
recognizing the liberties afforded by literary license, point to the
striking similarities that speak very strongly beyond coincidence. Most
notable are the references to Count Dracula's past as uttered by the
fictional nobleman himself. They paint a history parallel to Vlad
Dracula's.
In the novel, when Jonathan Harker, a British
solicitor, visits Dracula's castle in Transylvania for the purpose of
closing a real estate deal (the vampire is relocating to London to
pursue fresh blood), the count describes the land over which Harker has
just journeyed as "ground fought over for centuries by the Wallachian,
the Saxon and the Turk...enriched by the blood of men, patriots or
invaders."
In a subsequent chapter, Count Dracula relates to
Harker a virtual history of his own royal heritage. "Is it a wonder that
we were a conquering race," he asks, "that we were proud; that when the
Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar or the Turk poured his
thousands on our frontiers we drove them back?...To us, for centuries,
was trusted the guarding of the frontier of Turkeyland; aye, and more
than that, endless duty of the frontier guard."
At one point,
Count Dracula alludes to an "ancestor" who "sold his people to the Turk
and brought the shame of slavery on them!" Vlad Dracula had such a
brother.
There are other tens of references, actually, throughout
the novel that not-too-subtly point to Vlad Dracula as the accurate
source — references to particular military campaigns in which he took
part, contemporaries with whom he acquainted, and places he visited.
In
summary, had Stoker not taken his character from the crimson cloth of
Vlad the Impaler, he then certainly adorned his creation with a cloak
colored amazingly close to the same hue.
Following is the story of
the real Dracula, a man who, whether he would have preferred or not,
became, in another incarnation, a figure whom the World Index has
called, "one of the top ten most recognizable names in the
English-speaking world."
*****
I thank Messrs. Bogdan
Banu and Nemecsek Einar, both Romanian-born and both quite knowledgeable
of the Vlad Tepes days, for their input and clarifications in this
story.
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