How we all know, Vlad's image suffered from a propaganda campaign that started after 1462 and still going on to this day.
What factors made that campaign so effective, and how does the modern historians make the difference between the real Vlad and the fictional one?
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.
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.
[see the continuation in the next comment]
Based on my detailed explanation on the "invention" of Dracula in this thread, here you have a video which covers the main theories and provides some additional explanations and illustrations: