Am întrebat in gluma pe r/AskHistorians ce au făcut poveștile despre Vlad Țepeș atât de populare si cum fac diferența intre realitate si ficțiune istoricii moderni, dar spre surprinderea mea am primit un răspuns neașteptat de bun, îl las aici pentru cine este interesat:

Este de la u/CorpusDraculianum

It’s complicated because it is difficult to prove to what extent and on which political levels there was a propaganda campaign based on the “Dracula Stories” and at what moment the texts were turned into literary works without political agendas.

First let’s have a look at who the anonymous authors of the Dracula Stories may have been and then we can discuss the causes for their considerable cultural impact and how we historians can identify the facts. I’m summarizing here the results of my (soon to be published) PhD thesis on the biography and reception of Vlad the Impaler Drăculea (1431-1476) and of the edition project Corpus Draculianum where all surviving sources on Vlad are published.

1. Who were the authors?

A few general assessments: As we know, Vlad the Impaler, who ruled 1448, 1456-1462 and 1476, was an extremely resilient, combative and aggressive voivode (these attributes were very much needed in the crisis of the Wallachian voivodate from 1420 – 1480, being in almost constant danger of being occupied by the Ottomans or attacked by the Hungarians who wanted to control the voivodate, turning it into a buffer region next to their border). His internal enemies (factions of noblemen/boyars) as well as external adversaries (several Hungarian factions, mostly anti-Hunyadi, among them the Transylvanian Saxons) couldn’t get rid of him. Vlad had improved the Wallachian army, now trained for high mobility and fast surprise attacks on the northern side of the Carpathian Mountains, and could strike at any time of the year. He again and again attacked the unfortified country estates and villages of his adversaries, causing huge economic damages; his army, consisting of light cavalry, was however not equipped to cause any damage to the big fortified Saxon cities like Kronstadt/Brașov or Hermannstadt/Sibiu, so he torched the surrounding areas.

By propagandizing these actions and the massacres he committed there as great “victories” at the courts of his overlords in Buda and Constantinople (see his letter to Matthias Corvinus from 11 February 1462 or the Ottoman Chronicles from the Sublime Porte which, in my opinion, recorded some of the voivode’s own propaganda), he advertised himself as being a strong voivode with a stable control over his country and noblemen who provided him with their best troops. Thus he tried to show that he deserved the support of his overlords, countering at the same time the complaints of his adversaries who also went to the courts. Their strategy was to provoke an intervention of the overlords by portraying Vlad as a weak voivode who was slaughtering his noblemen who in reality were of course the foundation of any medieval ruler’s power due to the lack of efficient state institutions (his strong army and annual raids questioned the plausibility of these claims that he would have impaled hundreds (!!) of boyars. The lists of the members of the voivodal councils before and after Vlad prove that actually many of his adversaries survived his rule, they were just thrown out of court).

This was very likely the beginning of the propganda campaign against Vlad and it went on for years, resulting in 1462/63 at the latest in the creation of the text which we basically know as “Stories on the voivode Dracula” in Latin, German and Russian. They portray him as “the worst tyrant” or “tyrant of tyrants” and claim that he spent his reign constantly mutilating or impaling children, women, peasants from Transylvania and Wallachia, noblemen, Turks, Moldovans, Bulgarians, Roma people etc.

Looking at this situation, there are 4 plausible but, due to the fragmentary historical tradition, hypothetical authors of the propaganda stories:

\- The Transylvanian Saxons. They are the suspects no. 1 in the Romanian tradition (see beside the research literature e.g. the movie from 1979). The main argument is that the Dracula Stories are in German so the Saxons must be the authors. However, a linguistical analysis doesn’t show any substantial elements of the Saxon dialect. The texts are of southern German origin. Yes, the author (or authors) indeed knew Transylvania very well (the Saxons are correctly shown as being autonomous within the complicated political structures of the Transylvanian voivodate which was part of the kingdom of Hungary. Foreigners maybe didn’t know this.) but this is no proof: the authors could have used source materials originating from Transylvania. Regarding the fact that the oldest versions of the Dracula Stories are in Latin (see the Commentarii of Piccolomini/Pius II and the chronicle of Thomas Ebendorfer, both from 1463) and the German version is evidenced no earlier than 1466 (the Colmar manuscript), it is actually quite probable that the Stories were originally not written in German but translated from Latin.

However, we know that the Transylvanian Saxons often used Latin even in internal correspondences. They could have composed and spread the text in Transylvania and given it as a complaint to king Matthias Corvinus, Vlad’s overlord, thus protesting against Vlad’s pillaging of their estates and villages. But the complaint-theory is problematic: the Saxons were until late 1462 among the enemies of the Hunyadi family of Matthias Corvinus. They very likely perceived Vlad’s massacres among their peasants as retribution or proxy war by the Hunyadis. Therefore a complaint was useless; the king knew very well what was done to the Saxons, and anyway he didn’t need to be informed about what was going on in Transylvania, his family’s home region. But let’s look at Corvinus and the Hungarian court as suspects.

\- The Hungarian court of Matthias Corvinus was until late 1462 Vlad’s ally. The voivode had supported the Hunyadi family since about 1453/54 and kept the alliance even when the ,civil war’ with the party of king Ladislaus Postumus broke out in 1457. It seems that the Hunyadis promised Vlad to marry a woman from their family to further strenghten their bond. After they got to the throne with Matthias Corvinus, they finally fulfilled their promise in 1462 and Vlad became the first Wallachian voivode to marry into the Hungarian royal family. This was a considerable success for him and the Hunyadis themselves made this alliance widely known which also turned the Ottomans against their vassal Vlad, causing their invasion of Wallachia in the same year. Regarding this connection, it seems quite unlikely that the Hunyadis would have demonized Vlad on such a level as do the Dracula Stories. They would have badly damaged their own reputation.

The reason why Vlad was imprisoned in late 1462 were not his massacres against the Transylvanian Saxons but the fact that, after losing his throne to his pro-Ottoman brother Radu the Handsome, he disregarded Matthias’ order to retreat to Hungary and tried to provoke a war between Hungary and the Ottoman Empire by attacking Radu. Matthias, who very likely had been quite satisfied with Vlad’s defensive performance against the Ottoman invasion – no Ottoman soldier reached Hungarian territory –, needed to take him out of politics but he also wanted his vassal to stay in the political reserve as a potential pro-Hungarian substitute for Radu. The accusation of high treason – Matthias sent to the European courts and to the Pope an alleged letter from Vlad to Mehmed the Conqueror where the voivode promised to support the sultan’s conquest of Hungary – was enough to ruin Vlad’s political stance among the Christian powers (Venice, the Holy See etc.). He simply didn’t need the Dracula Stories which – by the way – were totally improper for the diplomatical communication of this time. Especially the Italians, who were the most important sponsors of Hungary, had a very developed diplomatic culture which wouldn’t accept such materials as valid arguments for political decisions.

It is therefore not very likely that the Hungarian court had composed and spread the Dracula Stories. At most it would be plausible that one of the humanists at the Hungarian Court had sent the text over his semi-official channels of communication to his contacts in Germany and Italy. A suspect is of course the Hungarian chancellor and humanist János Vitez, but we’ll probably never know.

\- The third plausible but also hypothetical scenario is that there was a writer who collected information about Vlad the Impaler and then composed the basic text of the Dracula Stories. It is ouf course possible that the scenarios 1 and 2 were separately or both preceding, meaning that the writer received a text written by the Saxons which was further edited and spread by the Hungarian court. German historian Christof Paulus discusses in his monography “Geschichte und Geschichten” (2020) that maybe an ecclesiastical writer composed the text and sent it through his southern German networks to his contacts in several monasteries where it was copied and finally reached in the 1480s and 1490s the German printers in Nürnberg, Bamberg, Augsburg etc. who vastly popularized the Dracula Stories. This entire scenario of course implies a mostly apolitical stance of the writers, editors and printers who did not have a closer relationship with Wallachia or Transylvania/Hungary but were merely literary or commercially interested in the topic.

\- The fourth scenario was developed by me during research for my PhD: the origins of the Dracula Stories could be based on proclamations of the Wallachian opposition to Vlad. There were several different groups of anti-Vlad exiles in Transylvania but also (very likely) in Moldova and the Ottoman Empire and there also was an opposition in Wallachia itself. This geographically divided opposition could grow for years because there were very few occasions when Vlad missed making enemies. His brutal and repeated raids against the Wallachian opposition’s fiefs and estates in Hungary and in the Ottoman Empire surely strengthened the resolve to use all available means to get rid of Vlad, so the communication by texts – which saw a considerable rise in these decades – became more and more important.

The most likely genre which may have been used to circulate the anti-Vlad propaganda were the proclamations, from which we have a few contemporary examples about other personalities and conflicts (e.g. from Stephen the Great or Basarab the Young). Addressed to the political public of certain communities in the form of open letters, they had a certain broader impact and therefore could influence the targeted decision-makers. An example are the Latin and Slavonic letters from Dan the Pretender to the Saxons in Brașov where he describes Vlad’s massacres and asks for political and military support in order to fight him. Such proclamations could have been merged into a single text which was to be further spread, as discussed above, by political actors or by writers. That would also explain to a certain degree why the stories are such a mélange of very different groups of victims: if the Saxons wrote the stories, why are they underrepresented in it? They only make about one fourth of the victims in the episodes.

This hypothesis was so far not at all or only partially considered by the Romanian-dominated research, heavily influenced by national historiography, because it meant that “Romanians“ actually were the inventors of the Dracula Stories which damaged Vlad’s reputation so badly and long-lasting.

2) Why were the Dracula Stories so popular?

Several factors came together: extreme narratives about violence (this always sells!); the new technical possibilities by the printing press; a lack of knowledge about Wallachia and Moldova combined with a growing interest about these eastern realms due to the Ottoman expansion in the 15th and 16th centuries. The middle European public wanted to know who were the military forces to potentially stop the Ottomans, and Vlad (but also Stephen the Great in Moldova) had some resounding successes after the downfall of all other Orthodox realms in Southeastern Europe. Regarding the printing press – the Dracula Stories were printed in southern and northern Germany from 1488 until the 1560s – one of the causes were surely the expressive images of the wood engravings. The texts were short and it seems that their overall narrative of an evil feudal ruler who in the end is arrested and convicted also played a significant role (according to a recently published article by Daniel Ursprung): most readers of the Dracula Stories were probably townspeople whose communities had violent conflicts with local and regional rulers, similar like the Transylvanian Saxons against Vlad.

The printed stories were, obviously, financially quite profitable, and therefore often reprinted until the interest began to fade after 1550.

Nevertheless the stories were not the only branch of the narrative tradition that was highly successful: the positive description of Vlad’s reign by Antonio Bonfini, the Hungarian court’s chronicler in the 1480s and 1490s, was processed and popularized by Sebastian Münster in his Cosmographia with more than 50 editions starting from 1544. It presented Vlad in a positive manner as a harsh but just ruler and thus nuanced the simplistic image of the tyrant from the Dracula Stories.

3) How do historians separate the fiction and facts about Vlad the Impaler?

A very basic problem for the research is that the anti-Vlad literary works of (very likely) propagandistic origin are highly interesting and long reads. On the other side the documentary sources like deeds and letters are much more difficult to collect, understand and analyze. They provide us with historically very important and, compared to the literary works, with much more reliable informations, but they are a very fragmentary tradition. Most historians, and especially the classics from the 19th and 20th centuries who formed our modern image of Vlad, therefore prefer to work with the Dracula Stories and not with the more difficult but much more nuanced documentary sources: an analysis of our project team demonstrated that most diplomatic reports potrayed Vlad in a neutral or positive manner and only very few condemned him. There are of course nuanced reasons also for this kind of judgement – most reports were Italian and the Italians (Venetians, Milanese, Genoese etc.) didn’t care how many Transylvanian peasants or Wallachian traitors Vlad had brutally tortured and impaled but they cared if he had any impact against the Ottoman expansion which threatened Italy and Italian possessions in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Too many historians also neglected contextualizing Vlad’s biography (however, let’s not forget that many Romanian historians could not leave the country during the communist period and therefore had no access to foreign research literature and especially archives like we do. Before and after communist times the lack of funding for archival research and other factors were a problem which prohibited a revision of deficient research results. They simply did not have the necessary sources to further develop their research.). If one tries to analyze the stories isolated from their context, the results are very modest. Knowledge about the basic structures of the voivodate and its elites, about the geopolitical interests and conflicts and also about the modalities of political communication in this region are essential.

I am obviously biased when I discuss my own research but my general strategy to deal with this problem was i.a. 1) to find as many unedited documentary sources as possibile and, based on the resulted new knowledge and perspectives, 2) to fact check the narrative tradition. The result is interesting: the central texts of the anti- as well as of the pro-Vlad traditions are more fictional than factual. That further complicates the actually unanswerable question if Vlad was “good” or “bad”… In the end it is maybe this striking contrast of the sources and of the contemporary and modern reception that make Vlad so incredibly interesting and popular.

So the best advice to get closer to the ,real Dracula’: It is necessary to mostly blank out the Dracula Stories and focus on contexts, documents and also on archaeological findings.

This has been a very long answer but your question made it necessary to get deeper into the complex situation of the origins of the historical Dracula myth.

I will definitely discuss this question on the YouTube channel of the edition project “Corpus Draculianum”: [https://www.youtube.com/c/CorpusDraculianum/featured](https://www.youtube.com/c/CorpusDraculianum/featured)