Michael the Brave as Bram Stoker's Count Dracula

The Significance of Michael the Brave for Bram Stoker: An Ongoing Investigation

How did the life of Michael the Brave (1558-1601) influence Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula?  This Wallachian prince was, as Hans Corneel de Roos has shown, the main historical basis of Count Dracula — when he was still alive.  De Roos’ research has displaced the claim of Raymond T. McNally and Radu R. Florescu that Stoker based his character on Vlad Țepeș.[1]

The 1590s in Eastern Europe have been described as “the time when the fierce sword blows of the crusader Michael were striking against the Turks along the Danube.”[2]  Michael the Brave, later feeling betrayed by his Hungarian allies, the Bathory princes of Transylvania, turned his attention northward and controversially conquered that principality, with the help of the Szeklers.  Making many enemies from Turkey to Central Europe, Prince Michael was assassinated in 1601.  What was it about this man and his era that inspired Bram Stoker’s conception of the ultimate threat to the Victorian way of life?

Interestingly, McNally and Florescu themselves, at one point in Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His Times, note that a certain character mentioned by the count appears to be based on Michael the Brave.  What they do not mention is one important detail it simply takes a careful reading of Stoker’s book to understand.  Namely, that the count was speaking in the third person about himself in life.

In the count’s recollection in the third chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the nostalgic rant that Jonathan Harker calls “the story of his race,” Dracula describes an ancestor of his, whom Stoker did indeed base on Vlad Țepeș.  Stoker, as De Roos has shown, confused Vlad Țepeș, or Vlad Dracula, with his father, Vlad Dracul.  In making this mistake, Stoker appears to have reflected his source, William Wilkinson’s 1820 book Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia with Political Observations Relative to Them.  Stoker, again like his source, knew more about Michael the Brave than Vlad Țepeș.[3] 

This shouldn’t surprise us.  After all, Vlad Țepeș was a late-medieval, pre-Columbian historical figure, while Michael the Brave was a figure from what Anglophone historiography remembers as the Elizabethan era.  Michael the Brave, a relative of Vlad Țepeș and a more successful military strategist, was more often written about in English than his predecessor until the 20th century.  There is reason to suspect that Prince Michael was written about contemporarily in Britain.

In Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in Early Modern England, Anders Ingram writes: “The years of the Ottoman–Hapsburg ‘Long War’ of 1593–1606 brought an unprecedented flood of English publishing on the Turks. A substantial portion of this material either directly describes, or explicitly refers to, the events of this conflict.”  During this time — which was also the age in which the plays of Christopher Marlowe, which likewise display a keen interest in Ottoman Wars, dominated English literature — England’s “contemporary news market was dominated by foreign news, or reports of English involvement on the continent, rather than domestic affairs.”[4]

Michael the Brave was a central figure of the Long War.  Although not mentioned in Ingram’s study, it would be an interesting task to determine whether and to what extent the Wallachian prince was mentioned in any of “the fifty-four items on the topic of the Turks recorded in the years 1591 to 1610,” of which “twenty-two relate either directly to the Long War, the state of Hungary, or Ottoman–Habsburg conflict, while numerous others allude to contemporary events.”[5]  Considering Prince Michael’s outstanding role in the Long War, it would be more surprising to come up empty-handed in this endeavor than to see this question answered in the affirmative.  During the Long War, until his 1601 assassination, he was both an accomplished military commander and a controversial political leader.  What effect did this have on the political dimensions of Stoker’s book?

And political dimensions there are.  Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, in the original novel, is not a very physically attractive figure.  His vampiric habits are depicted as repulsive.  The eroticization of the character, which came with later adaptations of the book, is absent from the 1897 novel.  Nevertheless, there is a certain Romanticism attached to the character — though of a militaristic rather than erotic sort.  “Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonorable peace,” the count laments.  It was a sentiment that was brewing in Europe during the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, in the decades leading up to the First World War.

Why did Stoker choose Michael the Brave as the basis of a character representing the peril posed by aristocratic militarism from Central and Eastern Europe to Victorian values?  And why did Stoker at once romanticize and demonize this perceived danger?  Having established that Vlad Țepeș is more or less a “red herring,” Dracula scholars should now turn to Count Dracula’s correctly identified historical alter ego to look for answers — and probably still more questions.

Romanian version here

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[1] De Roos, Hans Corneel, “Count Dracula’s Address and Lifetime Identity,” collected in Crișan, Marius-Mircea (ed.) Dracula: An International Perspective, pp. 95-118

[2] Iorga, Nicolae, Byzantium After Byzantium, tr. Treptow, Laura, p. 149

[3] De Roos, Hans Corneel, “Bram Stoker's Vampire Trap—Vlad the Impaler and his Nameless Double,” Linköping Electronic Articles in Computer and Information Science 14 (2012), no. 2.

[4] Ingram, Writing the Ottomans, p. 37 

[5] Ibid, p. 37