Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His Times By Radu Flrescu and Raymond T Mcnally

Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His Times

By Radu Flrescu and Raymond T Mcnally

Dr. Raymond Mcnally was born on April 15, 1931, in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. He graduated from Fordham University and earned a doctorate in Russian and East European history from the Free University of Berlin on a Fullbright Scholarship. He then joined the faculty of Boston College, where he came to specialize in teaching horror, especially in linking horror fiction to real life and history (Which is really cool, incidentally. Often the tropes of horror are reflections of the society that creates it. One can make the case that Slasher films are basically Reaganite morality plays.). He was known for wearing black capes and being one of the first western scholars to really push the idea that Count Dracula was based on a real person. He passed away from cancer in 2002. His co-author Radu Flrescu was born on October 23, 1925, in Bucharest, Romania, he fled to London when his father, a pro-Allied diplomat aristocrat defied the Fascist state's recall order and resigned his post in protest over Romania's alliance with Nazi Germany (Good for him! No mercy for fascists or their collaborators! Don’t be a collaborator! Be like Ambassador Flrescu). Radu came to the US to earn his doctorate and stayed, often serving as a bridge between his home in the United States, and his ancestral land of Romania. Among other things, he set up scholarships for gifted Romanian teenagers to study in the Boston area during summer months that continue to this day. He passed away in 2014. Dracula, Prince of Many Faces is actually their third work on this subject and was published in 1989, by the Hachette book group, a US trade publisher, and a division of the third-largest trade and educational book publisher in the world Hachette Livre, which is based in France.

We kick off Fangsgiving by first looking at the actual man who sired the myth. Vlad III, also called Vlad Tepes or Vlad the Impaler, a member of the royal dynasty of the princedom of Wallachia but who was Vlad beyond that dry recitation of fact? He's mainly remembered for displays of (horrifying) brutality (You don’t get called The Impaler by collecting bottlecaps.) but was that it? Was Vlad the Impaler just another savage warlord riding a wave of gore and blood as high as he could before crashing down onto the unyielding cliffs of history? Just what was it that he did, what was he trying to do, why was he trying to do it, and who for? What motivated this man and was he motivated to heights of bloody-handed unfriendliness beyond belief as legend says? That's what this book tries to answer. These are, as I imagine my readers realize, really big and hard questions to answer. It doesn't help that Vlad left us nothing written in his own hand and the written sources from people close to him are nonexistent. We don't even know the full details of his family life or the inner workings of his court. So what we're left with is a mix of third-hand reports, impressions of allies and enemies, and a mountain of Romanian Folklore (And it is a mountainous country, so…). That said, there is a massive amount of third party reports and it seems that everyone alive in the Balkans at the time had some kind of impression of this Prince of what was usually a minor state on the border between the expanding Ottoman Empire and fragmenting edges of the Christian European world. Part of this is the context that Vlad operated in, a world where proto-nationalist (Probably more appropriate to call them proto-national,) feelings were beginning to bubble in many places but nationalism itself hadn't been formulated. Italy and Germany for example were divided into competing princedoms and petty kingdoms. The Kings of France were brawling with the Royal Dukes of Burgundy, England was in the grips of the War of Roses, and out east things were even worse. Meanwhile, imperialist feudal empires like the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire, and to a lesser extent, Hungary were on the rise. While the book itself makes a lot of the conflict of Western Christianity and Eastern Islam the facts on the ground were vastly more muddled. Middle Eastern Muslim powers were happy to make common cause with European Christians if it would weaken the Turks and prevent their own conquests, while various Christian rulers and sects would ally with the Ottomans against one another or for momentary advantage in internal intrigues. (Let’s be honest, the whole damned continent was a munted shitshow. {I struggle to think of a continent that wasn’t at the time})

That's not to say that there wasn't an idea of unified Christian action against the widely seen foreign powers of the Ottoman, the Popes for example would constantly call for it (It being a crusade) and be ignored for the most part. Well not completely, Vlad's father, also called Vlad would fight so hard that he would be granted a Knighthood in the order of the Dragon, giving him the name of Vlad Dracul, which was a word for Dragon at the time (In Romanian). Dracula actually means son of the dragon. Vlad Dracul would try to balance his desire to fight in a unified Christian force with holding power in his nation which meant some level of accommodation with the Ottomans since that was preferred by the native noble class the Boyars. The Boyars, as they called themselves, feared the loss of their wealth and privileges more than they feared the loss of political independence (Aaaah nobility…). There were also colonies of German ruled cities invited by various rulers because the Germans of the time were considered great craftsmen and merchants so they were allowed to make self-ruling settlements across central and eastern Europe. Because of this and the blunt fact that Wallachia is a small nation trapped between growing empires, the Prince was forced to thread a needle of playing Hungarians off of Turks, off of native aristocrats, off of German colonists. Eventually Vlad Dracul... Misstepped.

Vlad Tepes was a victim of such a misstep, he and his brother Radu the Handsome ended up hostages to the Ottoman Empire. While they were treated like princes, they were still hostages and Vlad was often in trouble for striking out at his captors (Keep in mind as well that being a prince in the Ottoman Empire was rather lethal generally.{generally being a low-level merchant was the safest thing to be in the Ottoman Empire. Dear readers if you find yourselves there, sell tea and cotton and stay the hell out of politics}). Meanwhile, his father ended up leading a small army attacking the Ottoman Empire, which basically daring the Ottomans to kill his son (Not a man full of Positive Dad Affirmations, that one.{He would write letters to other Christian rulers demanding more troops and wailing about how he had given up two sons to fight for Christianity so clearly you could cough up some damn spearmen}). Vlad was 11 years old when he was taken by the Ottomans so he would have been in his early teens at best when he found out that his own father was willing to risk his life as a political move. Meanwhile, he's getting whipped for talking back to his tutors or giving an Ottoman Prince too much of a dirty look. He also saw other boy hostages murdered for their father's actions or blinded, or otherwise mutilated. Vlad does manage to get out of this cage but only after his Father and Eldest Brother have been murdered by German merchants is he released and only if he agrees to lead a part of the Ottoman Army. His Eldest Brother by the way is murdered by being buried alive (Oof. That is not a fun way to go. Welcome to the late medieval period everyone!). This doesn't excuse Vlad's actions but it certainly suggests that this kind of brutality was all he really knew when it came to politics (This is Eastern Europe. It’s all anyone knew. Hell the western Europeans were not that much better.{my argument is even by his time and place’s standards he had a brutal early life}). I mean this is the kind of story that laughs at stuff like Game of Thrones and calls it cute.

Vlad would rule his nation three times and never for very long, his reigns ended almost every time with the native Boygar class allying with foreign invaders. Including defecting from him to choosing Radu the Handsome who was openly promising to submit to the Ottomans (No wonder he was brutal. Jesus. Traitorous nobles everywhere! This is why you kill them all and institute a worker-s.. I mean...). In what marks the book as a product of its time, Radu is reported as possibly being in a sexual relationship with Sultan Mehmed but it's used as a slur against him. I'm going to let my editor discuss why that's bad as I think he would do a better job than I would (This is the problem with Gays in History. Our contributions to history are erased on the one hand, or used as a slur on the other by the very historians doing the work! Like, how many of you know that James Buchanan was gay? Like, there is no doubt about it, we have his letters, and everyone at the time knew he was basically married to William Rufus King. Or perhaps that the German guy who trained the continental army during the American revolution - Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben - was openly gay and got kicked out of Europe for it? The list is very expansive, but the historians are just like “Oh my, we can never know for sure…” or “James Buchanan was a lifelong bachelor.”. On the other side, we get cases like this, where it isn’t just their contemporary enemies that use homosexuality as a slur or insult, but the historians themselves. Erased or demonized, it’s our lot in academic history evidently.) Each time Vlad did come to power, he pursued the same program, that of a creation of a centralized strong state with a mass army and leadership based on a free peasant class (Woooo! I know it was basically a man-at-arms junta, but down with the Aristocrats! {This was more of a dictatorship}). Now he did this by engaging in a rule of terror, he founded villages, gave land for farms (Land Reform! {he has given you land comrades, so if he finds you lazy, he will boil you alive}), and founded monasteries but he also murdered savagely anyone he suspected of crimes or even laziness. He built a real-life Castle Dracula but used enslaved Boygars and their families to do it. He strengthened the education system by setting up orders of Orthodox monks but did it by burning out Catholic churches which he considered to be Hungarian beachheads in his realm and he also conducted a brutal policy of stripping away the economic rights and monopolies of the German colonies... By sacking the cities when they gave him lip or the least resistance (That was pretty standard at the time, to be fair.{He sacked a town over a letter of protest!} Pretty standard at the time!). A good pop culture comparison would be Dr. Doom, fully intent on modernizing and strengthening his nation, no matter how many of his countrymen he has to put into the ground to do it. When the Ottomans decided they had enough of him, he responded by invading Ottoman held Bulgaria and burning every possible staging area possible. When the Ottoman army shows up, they have to carry all their own supplies, slowing them down even more, as Vlad constantly attacks any isolated part of the army he can get to. When forced to retreat, Vlad scorches the earth to a level that will not be seen until it's practiced by the Russians (All glory to the Soviet Union! Evacuate everything of value that you can and burn the rest! Yes, that means moving entire factories! [I kid, though sometimes such tactics are necessary.]{Vlad did so badly that there was a strip of his country without food or unpoisoned water sources that would take 6 days to cross} Okay that is a bit much.). Vlad actually thwarts the invasion not through military strength but by fear, according to the stories. First by engaging a massive night attack that almost kills Mehmed and mauls the Janissary corps and then when the Ottomans approach his capital they find what is described as an entire forest of Turkish soldiers set on stakes. At this point, the invading army decides... “Fuck Wallachia, I want to go home and hide under my blankie.” This wasn't enough to keep him in power as the Boygars threw him out soon after but I’ve got to admit it's something that grips my imagination and goes a long way to explaining how Vlad would not just carve a position in history but end up with no less than five feuding traditions about him even after the Ottomans finally killed him. Or that's what the Ottomans kept telling themselves. Now I'm not even close to covering everything here but it should give you a sense of just what we're dealing with.

Vlad only lived forty-six years but was immortalized in five strains of tradition, the first and simplest being the Turkish one, where he was a complete and utter villain, a traitor, and a schemer. The German one was born from a combination of German merchants who never forgave Vlad his outrages or attempts to constrain their economic dominance and painted him as an utterly deranged psychopath who derived perverted joy from blood and death. This one persisted for centuries. The Hungarian one is more complicated, setting him up as an attack dog that simply slipped his leash one too many times and got put down. What I really found interesting was the Russian one; while the Russians didn't have any interaction with Vlad or the Balkans at the time, they heard quite a bit about it. Their reaction was that Vlad was the perfect model of a prince for an emerging nation surrounded by enemies, arguing that while Vlad was cruel and savage, such things are necessary to pull the nation together and fend off its enemies in its infancy (I mean, the Russians would think that, and they practiced what they preached… Honestly, it’s probably why the USSR turned into a bloodbath.). You can see the profound effect perhaps on Ivan the Terrible, who grew up having Vlad held up as a role model. The Romanian narrative would evolve completely from the peasants, who came to see the Boygars as collaborators with foreign enemies (Which they were.), was that Vlad was a Big Damn Hero and a founding father of Romania. As you can see... History is complicated and I can see how everyone got to where they are. I can't say what my own position on Vlad is, except to hope I'm never in a position where my nation needs such a leader. Which for anyone about to speak up, we don't. Lastly, there's Bram Stoker's Dracula which I think owes a lot more to the German position, fused with elements of Romanian folklore about vampires (And contemporary Victorian fears and cultural taboos.). Ironically there doesn't seem to be a vampiric tradition around Vlad specifically until our Anglo author stumbles into these stories and though fusing them together would be neat. Now to be fair there was a vampire tradition pre-existing in England but Bram grabbed a lot of Romanian elements and the book discusses that in some detail as well.

As a sourcebook, it's pretty good, the authors are devoted to giving you a full look at the world Vlad came from and operated in, reaching back to his grandfather's time to give you a full grounding and being willing to be upfront where source materials are sparse on the ground. So it certainly attempts to answer the questions I posed earlier. On the other hand, it does show it's age in that it gets a little too invested in the East vs West narrative and how it treats possible same-sex relations (Eeeeeh. Yeeaaaah. Though this was the framing for all of these things at the time of writing.). Which are serious failings and means in my mind at least you shouldn't hand this off to new impressionable students but only people who've learned enough to engage the text despite its failings and recognize what those failings are. Because of that, I'm giving Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His Times by Radu Flrescu and Raymond T Mcnally gets a B-

I hope you enjoyed our first installment of Fangsgiving, a month where we look at Dracula, the prime example of fictional vampires. Our ever-wise patrons got to vote on whether or not to have this month in the first place, as well as voted on what books we would look at, as there's a lot of Dracula literature out there. You can join us for as little as a dollar a month! Just come over to https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads and pledge. The vote for November is going up this weekend! Next week our ever-wise patrons have chosen the official prequel to Dracula, Dracul by Dacre Stoker (Bram's great nephew) and J.D. Barker. Until then, stay safe and keep reading!