FROM WALLACHIA TO WHITBY

Stoker’s vampire was originally Count Wamyr (which inflicts his leading character with a rather obvious label) but he changed this to Dracula after reading about the 15th-century Wallachian warlord Vlad III Dracula, a voivode (Prince rather than Count) of the house of Basarab. Stoker found the reference in William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, a book he borr­owed from Whitby public library while on holiday there. Using this name was a stroke of genius. Now so familiar as to be virtually generic, in 1897 its deceptively mellifluous syllables must have sounded alluringly foreign and fraught with unimaginable meaning. In fact it’s a diminutive, almost a nickname. Vlad II, caught up in the struggle to repel Turkish invasions whose threat was religious as well as territorial, joined the Order of the Dragon, a religio-military alliance dedicated to preserving Christendom in the face of such a danger. Dragon is “Dracul”, so he became known as Vlad Dracul and his son as Vlad III Dracula, son of the Dragon. But the latter had another, decidedly unofficial nickname – Vlad Tepes or “the Impaler”, derived from his unpleasant habit of condemning enemies (could be Turks, but could be anyone who annoyed him) to a slow, agonising death impaled on wooden stakes. He exhibited a taste for torture and mutilation that, if contemporary sources are to be believed, went far beyond the legitimate display of power and right into the area of psychopathic gratification on a grand scale (sometimes thousands of victims at a time). Reasons can be suggested – living under circumstances where political ambition practic­ally guaranteed a short life and a nasty end, he spent his boyhood as hostage to the Turkish Sultan, far from home and subject to ill treatment at the hands of this father’s enemies. Tales of the atrocities he would subsequently inflict, however, look like exaggerations, part of a German propaganda campaign to show him as irrational, violent and treacherous. Wilkinson’s book doesn’t mention them, or use the term “Impaler”. Stoker could have researched further and found (possibly in the British Museum) the German pamphlets that tell the whole shocking story, or he might have heard about it from Arminius Vambery, a Hungarian historian he is known to have met. However, there’s no evidence in the notes or the novel that he knew of Vlad’s darker side. What he takes from history are the name and a very brief account of Dracula’s pre-death military career. He’s not telling the story of Vlad Tepes, but to the determined literary detective, the conn­ection must go deeper. Since the history of Vlad III was popularised for a Western audience in the 1973 book In Search Of Dracula by Radu Florescu and Raymond T McNally, the portrait of the Wallachian (not Transylvanian) prince, with his Hapsburg jaw, long dark hair and moustache and distinctive red hat has joined the reference points for the vampire of Stoker’s novel, giving him another dimension of apparent reality.