Gabriel Ronay
The Shadow of the Vampire

Count Dracula has made it to Britain's Hall of Fame. His gruesome countenance, complete with pointed fangs and magnetic gaze, stares at you from millions of Royal Mail stamps, absolute proof of literary success in Britain. Ireland too has honoured Dracula with a festive series of commemorative stamps.
The stamps mark the centennial of the publication of Bram Stoker's eponymous Gothic bestseller. Details of the count's Transylvanian castle and a baleful moon above it are traced in ultra-violet ink in the British stamp, which glows in the dark. The Irish stamps show the Undead in the company of a wolf while sucking blood from the neck of a comely wench. The Victorian vampire has never been more popular.
Since its publication in April 1897, Stoker's bestseller has been translated into more than 50 languages and it has never been out of print. The Royal Mail's venture into the nether world of horror was probably the most restrained in the world-wide celebrations honouring this Irish writer and theatre critic. Fans across the world—from Dublin to New York—organized literary conferences, cultural symposiums and Dracula balls. Facts and fiction became conveniently blurred.
The book acquainted the entire English- speaking world with Count Dracula's attempt to conquer Britain and establish a vampire empire. Generations of readers the world over have accepted Stoker's vampire empire as gospel truth. Many more to come will, no doubt, read the story of the "Transylvanian vampire" and never question its historical accuracy.
Attracted by a baffling -a ending of the ghoul's name in the 1970s, I decided to dig deeper and ascertain whether the vampire Dracula tradition had any basis in fact or was a bogey sprung from the fertile mind of the last true writer of Gothic romances. The feminine -a ending proved to be a red herring, but a critical analysis of historical material has helped to identify the historical role-model of Dracula as Vlad Tepes, or Impaler, a 15th-century ruler of Walachia. He was guilty of incredible cruelties and horrendous deeds, but vampirism was not one of them.
As Mary Shelley said in the foreword of Frankenstein, "everything must have a beginning, to speak the Sanchean phrase, and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos."
Her perceptive words fit perfectly the genesis of the vampire Dracula myth. It was created out of half-digested facts and outlandish folklore traditions by Stoker. But, with an unerring eye for the Victorians' love of horror fiction, Stoker transformed the traditionally cruel Vlad the Fifth, the Impaler, into Dracula the vampire to suit popular tastes. He was helped in this by Vlad the Impaler's use of the family nickname of "dracul", a corruption of "dragon", a high decoration awarded to his father, Vlad III, by Sigismund, King of Hungary and Holy Roman Emperor. The genitive -a ending appended to his name merely denoted his being "the son of Dragon", or Dracula.
There are several extant documents which Vlad the Impaler signed as "Draguly", "Dragwlya" or "Draculia", depending on which of his scribes had penned them. In his letters to his Hungarian feudal lord and in his communications with other Western chancelleries, he always identified himself as Dracula (Dragon-a). As a result, the Hungarians and the Transylvanian Saxons knew him as Dracula, his own countrymen as Vlad the Impaler.
The fact that in Romanian "dracul" is the homonym of the Devil, and that in Romanian folklore the dracul, or devil stories and the vampire myths of the region were never combined together, did not deter Stoker from endowing his fictional hero with new characteristics.
Stoker got most of his historical and ethnographical information from the British Museum Library, but he had to find the right setting for his story of a vampire king rising from his grave. During a chance meeting in London with Ármin Vámbéry, the noted Hungarian orientalist and traveller, Vámbéry drew his attention to Transylvania as a suitably remote and superstition-ridden region of Europe, which could serve as a backdrop for his horror story.
It was an admirable choice. Although Stoker was only vaguely aware of it, the memory of ancient legends and pagan religious practices still survived intact in the 19th century in communities huddled in the Carpathian valleys. Transylvania was a land where the miraculous was held to be as probable as the ordinary, and where the beliefs and superstitions of three peoples —Hungarians, Romanians and Saxons—intermingled.
Reflecting this mixture, Stoker's Count Dracula presents himself to his English lawyer as a noble boyar, a term applicable in the Balkans to the noblemen of old Walachia (now Romania). This would make him a Romanian. But he also claims the title of Count of Beszterce, which would make him a Magyar noble. Historically, this was one of the titles of János Hunyadi, a famous 15th-century Hungarian military commander, who was appointed Prince of Transylvania.
On other occasions the vampire count boasts of his Székely, to wit his Hungarian Transylvanian ancestry.

We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many races. Here in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric [Magyar] tribes… found the Huns whose warlike fury had swept the Earth like a living flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood of those old witches who, expelled from Scythia, had mated with the devils in the desert. Fools, fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?

It was the Irish horror-writer's stroke of genius to trace the bloodline of his ogre to the bubbling "Transylvanian whirlpool of races", for the benefit of readers in cold and rational Britain. But Stoker took such liberties with the facts that it required a lengthy exercise in historical and philological detective work to identify without a shadow of doubt the count's 15th-century role-model, the historical Vlad Dracula, the Impaler.
The terrifying cruelties of Vlad Dracula shocked and fascinated Renaissance Europe. Early chapbooks detailed his appalling deeds and he grew into a living legend in his own lifetime. In the last quarter of the 15th century, more Dracula incunabula were printed in Western and Central Europe than copies of the Bible.
Down the centuries, kings, tyrants, churches and ideologies exploited the Vlad Dracula tradition to political ends in societies of very different social and religious structure. In the 16th century, 22 versions of the Dracula story appeared in Russia as Orthodox monastic scribes used his actions to justify Ivan the Terrible's tyrannical rule. In the late 17th and the 18th centuries, the Catholic and Orthodox churches used the vampire myth in their struggle for the souls of the peoples of the Balkans being freed from Turkish rule.
Following the late flowering of the Dracula story in a technologically advanced country such as Britain, the vampire Dracula myth found a new class of aficionados in the 1920s and 30s, when the German practitioners of the horror genre mixed the count's blood lust with Teutonic blood rites. The Übermensch theory and the new Nazi order were based on blood myths and the mystical "life force" of human blood. The convergence of horror fiction and political literature in Nazi Germany lent the Dracula story unexpected political dimensions.
It was the magic of Hollywood that made the greatest contribution to the rapid spread of the Dracula myth. Film- makers astutely mixed blood lust with sex, greatly extending the commercial appeal of Dracula and his ilk. There was little attempt to endow the Dracula films marketed by Hollywood and, later, by Hammer Films of London, with any intellectual content. As they were taken at face value as escapist movies, there was no ideological movement in Britain or the United States to exploit the Dracula myth.
But the US Army's Psychological Warfare Division recognized the hate appeal of the Transylvanian Ogre. During the Second World War, Dracula was linked to the traditionally cruel image of the Hun. Posters urging Americans to fight the Nazi hordes showed a Hun soldier with Dracula fangs dripping with the blood of innocents. Gls fighting in the European theatre were presented by the US Army with free copies of Stoker's Count Dracula.
The triumphant march of the Undead Transylvanian Ogre through the pages of books, cinema screens and the stage on both sides of the Atlantic was not matched by a similar progression in the East after the Second World War. Nonetheless, his impact was keenly felt. In communist Romania, Vlad the Impaler lived on, much as during the ancient regime, as a "harsh but just ruler." Stoker's Count Dracula, however, was proscribed as a capitalist non-person. Vlad Dracula's unspeakable cruelties, the forests of impaled corpses and his delight in the prolonged agony of his innocent victims, had apparently fallen through the sieve of national consciousness.
In the years of Ceausescu's Stalinist dictatorship, he was portrayed as a dispenser of rough justice and the bane of greedy aristocrats, the ruler who brought law and order to a country crying out for justice and order. Stoker's vampire Dracula remained a figment of the decadent West's imagination and the translation of the book stayed proscribed. But as the communist dictatorship reduced Romanians to serfs, dissidents began to draw parallels between Vlad Dracula and Nicolae Ceausescu. The thought police saw to it that such "bourgeois elements" got the just punishment they deserved for offending both Romania's 15th-century hero of the Turkish wars and its great 20th century socialist saviour, or "Conducator" (leader) as Ceausescu styled himself, aping Marshal Antonescu, his fascist predecessor.
With the toppling of Ceausescu's odious dictatorship in 1989, the heirs of the communists—and the re-emerged fascist nationalists—restored Vlad Dracula to his pedestal in Romania's Hall of Fame. Ancient horrors, dressed up as nationalist myths, filled the void left by messianic Marxism. Some Bucharest historians lost no time in taking up the cudgel, shaped appropriately in the form of a stake, in the defence of the country's national hero crudely misrepresented in the West. Four years after the formal disbanding of Ceausescu's com-munist thought police, Mihai Ungheanu, a Dracula apologist, devoted an entire book, tellingly entitled The Falsification of Dracula, to put me in the dock. The corpus delicti was my book, The Dracula Myth.
Somewhat flatteringly, perhaps, I was accused of being "the brains" behind a world-wide conspiracy to destroy the good name and fine reputation of Vlad Dracula. Among all the "falsifiers of Vlad Dracula", I was singled out as the most dangerous because I had pointed out in my book that "Vlad the Impaler was the prototype of the Romanian head of state." As it happens, Ceausescu was Romania's head of state when the book was published in Britain and the United States.
In mitigation of the lčse-majesté shown in my book to Dracula, it must be pointed out that, actually, I exonerated him of the vile charge of vampirism levelled against him by Bram Stoker. For that the blame must be placed on Elizabeth Báthory, a late 16th-century scion of a famed Hungarian grandee family with castles in the Carpathians.
The pretty chatelaine of Csejthe Castle, the only reliably recorded vampire in the annals of Europe, used the blood of virgin girls as an elixir of youth. The vampire stories were more than simple horror tales in the neighbourhood of the Báthory estates, where the tortured bodies of many maidens were found drained of their lifeblood in the first decade of the 17th century. The roots of ancient blood healing lores were clearly present in Elizabeth Báthory's demented actions, as in those of her spiritual kinswoman, Lucrezia Borgia. But hers manifestly go back to the medieval usage of "miraculous virgin's blood", still not forgotten in the distant, isolated valleys of the Carpathians in her time.
The trails—and eventual official investigations—led to the Countess Báthory. Charges of sadistic serial murder and vampirism, however, were difficult to press against the widow of General Ferenc Nádasdy, hero of the Turkish wars and kinswoman of Gábor Báthori, Prince of Transylvania, and István Báthori, King of Poland. Nevertheless, she was arrested on 29 December, 1610, by Count György Thurzó, the Lord Palatine himself. "This blood-thirsty, blood-sucking godless woman was caught in the act at Csejthe Castle," he reported to King Matthias II and the Hungarian Diet.
Because of her exalted rank, she was not sentenced to death like her accomplices, but confined to her castle on the Lord palatine's orders. She died, defiant and unrepentant, on August 21st, 1614.
The vampire scandal shook Hungary. On royal orders, no mention was made of her crimes and the voluminous evidence of these heinous crimes remained hidden for over a century. But the "Countess Dracula", as she was posthumously nicknamed, is once again haunting Central Europe.
After the healing passage of 382 years, Irma Szádeczky-Kardos, a Hungarian judge, claims nothing less than that the "Tigress of Csejthe" was a victim of a male conspiracy and a Habsburg political frame-up. Highly empathetic with a wronged fellow woman, she has devoted her book, The Truth of Elizabeth Báthory, to proving her innocence.
As befits a graduate of the conspiracy theory school of history, the judge claims to espy male political and religious interest behind the tribulations of the much-maligned Elizabeth Báthory. She attacks with withering fire on a broad front. The investigation, she asserts, was hopelessly inadequate, the investigating magistrates and the judges were corrupt and both the King and the Lord Palatine had ulterior financial and political motives.
To lend weight to her sweeping claims, she applies the legal norms and investigating standards of our times to the first decade of the 17th century in war-torn Hungary. She diligently uses the tools of jurisprudence, ethnography, criminal medicine, epidemiology and psycho-graphology, to name but a few disciplines, but sadly fails to get to the heart of the case. Instead, she contends herself with the statement that "the hounding of Elizabeth Báthory was based on a scenario that was fabricated from start to finish."
The main plank of her twin-track crusade, for a crusade it is, is that the ignorant and biased law officers of the 17th century grievously misunderstood Countess Elizabeth's actions. She concedes that her serving girls were regularly punished, harshly even, "like in other aristocratic households, but that was not torture. Far from wanting to hurt those poor sick girls, Elizabeth Báthory and her staff were merely trying to heal peasant girls who had fallen ill in some epidemic." An early Florence Nightingale, forsooth. Unfortunately for the judge, the burnt, slashed and drained bodies of the countess's victims did not quite reflect contemporary medical practices.
The reports of villagers and the parents of hundreds of missing girls, as well as the confessions of her accomplices and procurers, tell a different story. The testimony of 224 witnesses * from all walks of life cannot simply be ignored. The court rightly heeded it.

Since the voluntary confessions of János Ficzkó, Dorottya Szentes, Ilona Jó and Kata Beniczky, as well as those under torture, together with the evidence provided by witnesses under oath, patently proved their guilt, a guilt suprassing all evil and cruelty, namely murder, wholesale butcherings and most horrendous and assorted tortures, these grave crimes must be punished with the harshest penalty provided for by the law.**

Indeed, no amount of PC reinterpretation can alter the horrendous fate of the innocent victims of the Tigress of Csejthe. When Ficzkó, her manservant, made his confession *** under oath on the way the virgins were murdered, he knew that nothing could save his life but, by telling the truth, he may save his soul.

They were murdered in the following manner: Anna Darvulia, of Sárvár, bound their arms behind their backs with rope, until their hands turned a deathly hue. The girls would then be beaten for so long that the soles of their feet and the skin on their hands hung in shreds. They were beaten without interruption until each one had taken 500 blows from the Mistress's women. They had learnt the art from Darvulia.
It happened that the noses and lips of girls were burned with an iron by her ladyship. The countess also stuck her own fingers into the mouths of the girls and ripped their mouths and tortured them in this way. If the girls had not finished their sewing by 10 pm, they were immediately tortured. In one day, they were taken away like lambs for torturing even 10 times.

This was not exactly "regular punishment like in other aristocratic households", as claimed by the author. Nor would have been the use of the "iron maiden," the mechanical torture instrument, found in her dungeons.
The countess's torture and murder sessions became more frequent and the bathing in virgins' blood began after the death of her husband. As her servant, Ficzkó, testified, "already during the lifetime of the lord, she began to torture this way, but she did not finish them off because his lordship would have taken her to task for that. But after Darvulia came to the house, the serial killing of girls began." The trial depositions and the mass of shatteringly convincing statements of a wide variety of witnesses reveal the names of the procurers of virgins and the horrendous, ritual way they were murdered. Any objective, unbiased reading of the damning material will give the lie to Szádeczky-Kardos's "discovery" of trumped up, political charges.
Even her own absurdly justified tally of Elizabeth's victims, a total of 12 girls between 1592 and 1610, would have resulted in a guilty verdict in any court of law worth its name. But the facts cannot be wished away. The lists provided by her accomplices speak for themselves.
Nevertheless, it is wroth quoting Ficzkó on the problems posed by the ever increasing number of murder victims.

Beside the ones referred to in Pozsony already, five bodies were later tossed into a pit, two into the water canal in the Csejthe garden, one of which was dragged out by the dogs, two were brought at night to Lesticze and buried in the church; these had been brought down from the castle where they had been murdered. The old women hid and buried the dead girls. Here at Csejthe, I myself helped to bury four, two at Lesticze, one at Keresztúr and one at Sárvár. The others at other places were buried with chant.

The Reverend Ponikenusz of Csejthe, who was the first to alert the country to the evil goings on in the castle, refused to bury the ever increasing number of dead girls and denounced the countess's wicked deeds from the pulpit. Following his predecessor's advice, he also investigated the ancient crypt, with the tomb of Count Kristóf Országh, under the castle church. He found nine deal boxes stuffed full with the remains of murdered girls. "The stench from the putrefying bodies is unbearable," he remarked in his report to his ecclesiastic superior, the Very Reverend Élias Lányi.
Szádeczky-Kardos's final claim that "the arrest of Elizabeth in flagrante delicto in her torture chamber at Csejthe was contrived and her guilt remains unproven" is nothing but whimsy. Her whitewash does not wash. The blood of innocent girls spilt by the crazed chatelaine of Csejthe is showing through. Undaunted by the overwhelming evidence of Elizabeth's guilt, she persists with her attempts to clear the good name of the "wronged countess", condemned, in her view, to eternal damnation by a male conspiracy. "Elizabeth Báthory was innocent," she avers. "She was neither wicked, nor a sadist and she was certainly not guilty. She was a victim, the victim of a show trial motivated by political interest as well as personal gain."
A letter written by the countess's son-in-law, Count Miklós Zrínyi, the legendary hero of the Turkish war, to the Lord Palatine proves conclusively that there is not a grain of truth in this.
After thanking Count Thurzó for his "kinsman-like goodwill", Zrínyi wrote

I have received and understood your Highness's letter, as well as the copies of His Majesty's letter to your Highness and reply to it. And although I am suffering with a heavy heart the bitter condition in which my mother [in-law] finds herself at present, nevertheless I wish, if comparing her terrible, hair-raising and frightful acts to the present punishment meted out by your Highness, to choose the lesser of two evils. That is that your Highness did decree the saving of our honour and the elimination of the disgrace facing us, rather than letting come to pass what His Majesty outlined in his letter. For if that were to pass it would be better for all of us to die and, together with her kith and kin and their children, crumble to dust. We would rather choose that than hear the punishment passed [in court] for her terrible and ugly crimes.

When she is next due for day-release from Hell, the Countess Dracula will find, I suppose, the apologia of Szádeczky-Kardos amusing, especially the bit about her having been the victim of a male political conspiracy.
The rulers who once used Dracula's deeds to justify their absolutism have long since gone, together with their once mighty empires. The Russian despots and Nazi Übermenschen, who made the myth an important strand in the cultural weave of their societies, have been obliterated. The crusading Churches which found the scare engendered by the vampire myth useful in their dogmatic sparring, are now at peace. Only Dracula the Undead lives on, secure in the knowledge that he and his ilk will go on thrilling many more generations to come. Bram Stoker must bear a fair share of responsibility for Dracula's triumph.

*: National Archives, Budapest, vide Thurzó, f.28.2.19

**: Ibid: The Diet hearing of Gáspár Bajáky, castellan of Bicse, representing the complaints of 40 villagers who had testified under oath, December 1610; as well the trial report dated January 2, 1611.

***: His confession was taken by Castellan Bajáky and Gáspár Kardos, a public notary, and recorded by the scribe Dániel Eördögh, vol. cit. National Archieves, Budapest.

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Gabriel Ronay,
author, broadcaster and journalist, left Hungary in 1956 and was until recently on the staff of The Times of London. Among his books is The Lost King of England—The East European Adventures of Edward the Exile, published by Bowdell