The Tyrant and the Saint
For a century and a half between the 1460s and the middle of the sixteenth century, Vlad Țepeș (alias Dracula, 1431?-1476), the voivode of a small south-eastern European country, Wallachia, was the star of contemporary European mass media. By 1560, seven manuscript copies and thirteen printed leaflets were published with stories about the deeds of the voivode. In addition, between 1460 and 1470, no less than five crypto-portraits were made of him, which were featured in some of the printed works as well. The exceptional press history was a result of the actions of Matthias, King of Hungary (1443-1490), who in the autumn of 1462 arrested the voivode and held him in captivity (in house arrest) in Buda and Visegrád for more than ten years.
The first item in Vlad/Dracula’s literary career is the epigram (De captivitate Dragule waiwode Transalpini) by the Hungarian humanist poet Janus Pannonius (1434-1472), written in December 1462. The poem is a typical representative of occasional poetry: Janus rejoices that the tyrant is now wearing a chain, and everyone is looking forward to seeing Matthias return to Buda in the winter. After that, the centres of the Dracula propaganda were Vienna, and later the German market towns (Nuremberg, Lübeck, Bamberg, Leipzig).
Thomas Ebendorfer (1388-1464), professor of theology at the University of Vienna, inserted short narratives about Dracula into his work on the history of the Roman Empire (Chronica regum Romanorum), in the section containing the records of major and minor events in 1460-1462. The relevant passages in Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s (Pope Pius II’s, 1405-1464) Commentarii rerum memorabilium, que temporibus suis contingerunt should be considered an equally early version of the stories.
Piccolomini died on August 14, 1464. He was working on Comentarii until his death, but it was only printed in 1584. The most elaborate version of the Dracula stories (Von ainem Wurtich der hiess Trakle Waida von der Walachei) was produced by Michael Beheim, also written in the summer-autumn of 1463. At that time, Beheim was in the service of Emperor Frederick III (1415-1493) and resided in Wiener Neustadt.
All the four mentioned works were born after the arrest of voivode Vlad. However, certain records suggest that the first versions of the Dracula stories were composed even before the voivode was detained. Ebendorfer’s, Piccolomini’s, and Beheim’s respective texts conclude with Matthias taking the voivode captive. Piccolomini also reveals that Matthias arrested Vlad because he wanted to betray the Hungarian king to the Turks. A German version of the Dracula stories (Uan eyneme bösen tyrannen ghenomet Dracole w[a]yda), which does not include the episode of the arrest of the voivode, has survived in the Abbey of Sankt-Gallen.
The codex containing this version of the Dracula stories is a collection of texts dated between 1450 and 1550. The volume was compiled in 1573 by a monk named Mauritius. It is reasonable to assume that the Sankt-Gallen version was written before November 1462 (when Matthias arrested Dracula), since it is unlikely that such an important event as Dracula’s arrest would not have been mentioned by the author/copyist, had he known about it. Therefore, the Sankt Gallen copy retained the oldest version of the Dracula stories currently known.
The study examines how, by imitating and rewriting contemporary literary topoi, the authors created the image of the voivode as the cruel tyrant, and the persecutor of Christians. By comparing the German and Russian versions of the Dracula tales we tried to prove that the Russian author also incorporated also the political ideology of his era in the Russian Dracula stories. The final conclusion of the study is that the carnivalesque, grotesque humour of the Middle Ages degrades and ridicules torture and cruelty. If one reads the Dracula stories not from a twenty-first century, but from a fifteenth-century perspective, then the figure of the voivode is, if not clearly positive, but by no means entirely negative, rather ambivalent.
The study was carried within the framework of the grant MTA–BTK Lendület "Momentum" Humanist Canons and Identities Research Group.