Count Dracula vs Vlad Ţepeş

 

                                         by Elizabeth Miller

 

 

     Perhaps the most widespread misconception in the field of Dracula studies is the notion that Vlad Ţepeş (also known as Dracula) was the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel, published in 1897. Stoker, we are told, made a conscious decision to base his Count Dracula on Vlad, and did extensive research on the fifteenth-century Wallachian voivode. This is just not so. At least, the evidence to support such contentions does not exist. This essay will explore what Bram Stoker actually did know about Vlad, where he found his information, and how much of it he incorporated into his novel.

 

     In Chapter 18 of Dracula, Abraham Van Helsing says this of the Count: “He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land” (18: 246). Very little attention was paid to this until 1972 when Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally’s In Search of Dracula revealed to the world the story of the real Dracula. This was closely followed by McNally’s fortuitous discovery that the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia had acquired Stoker’s working papers for Dracula, which prove conclusively that he did know about the existence of a “Voivode Dracula.” Using the initial findings of Florescu and McNally (some of which the two historians have since revised), many enthusiasts have championed tenuous connections between Count Dracula and Vlad, to the point where it has become increasingly difficult to separate fact from hypothesis.

     It has become commonplace to assume that Stoker was inspired by accounts of Vlad’s atrocities (especially the German narratives of the fifteenth century) and that he deliberately modelled his Dracula on the life and character of Vlad. This has resulted in some fanciful and at times ludicrous statements: that “Dracula was the reshaping of four centuries of folk legends that had accreted around the historical Walachian warlord Prince Vlad Ţepeş” (Dziemianowicz 11); that much of the story of Count Dracula “was drawn . . . from the ghastly doings of  the Hungarian Prince Vlad who was a remote ancestor of Attila the Hun” (Mascetti 274); that the historical Dracula’s abandonment of his Orthodox faith resulted in his becoming subject to punishment by Orthodox priests who “publicly laid the curse of vampirism” on him (Hillyer 17); and  that the “first reported vampires were real historical figures ... Elizabeth of Bathory and Vlad the Impaler” (Brownworth and Redding ix). It is time to put such claims to rest.

     Investigations into possible connections between the Count and the Voivode began before the publication of In Search of Dracula. In 1958, Bacil Kirtley stated that “Unquestionably the historical past that Van Helsing  assigns the fictional vampire Dracula is that of Vlad Tsepesh, Voivod of Wallachia” (14). In 1962, Stoker’s first biographer, Harry Ludlam, asserted that Stoker had “discovered that the Voivode Drakula or Dracula ... had earned for himself the title of ‘the Impaler,’ and that the story of his ferocity and hair-raising cruelty in defiance of the Turks was related at length in two fifteenth-century manuscripts, one of which spoke of him as ‘wampyr’” (113). In 1966, Grigore Nandris connected the vampire Dracula with the historical figure, even claiming that available portraits of Vlad were “adapted by Bram Stoker to suit his literary purposes” (375). Building on these obscure references to a possible connection, Florescu and McNally embarked on their own quest, the results of which were published in In Search of Dracula (1972, rev. 1994). While their historical research was thorough and well documented, the two authors speculated that the author of Dracula knew quite a bit about the historical figure, and that his sources included Arminius Vambéry (a Hungarian professor whom he met on at least two occasions) and various readings found at the British Museum. But is this the case? Exactly what is the connection between the Count and the Voivode? For the answer, we must go to two sources, the reliability of which cannot be questioned: Stoker’s Notes at the Rosenbach Museum, and the novel itself.

     We know from Stoker’s Notes that by March 1890, he had decided to write a vampire novel; in fact, he had already selected a name for his vampire -- Count Wampyr. We are also certain that Stoker found the name “Dracula” (most likely for the first time) in a book that he borrowed from the Whitby Public Library in the summer of 1890, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820) by William Wilkinson. Stoker not only recorded the call number of the book but copied almost verbatim key passages. This is what Wilkinson wrote:

 

Wallachia continued to pay it [tribute] until the year 1444; when Ladislas King of Hungary, preparing to make war against the Turks, engaged the Voivode Dracula to form an alliance with him. The Hungarian troops marched through the principality and were joined by four thousand Wallachians under the command of Dracula’s son. (17)

 

     And later,

 

Their Voivode, also named Dracula, did not remain satisfied with mere prudent measures of defence: with an army he crossed the Danube and attacked the few Turkish troops that were stationed in his neighbourhood; but this attempt, like those of his predecessors, was only attended with momentary success. Mahomet, having turned his arms against him, drove him back to Wallachia, whither he pursued and defeated him. The Voivode escaped into Hungary, and the Sultan caused his brother Bladus to be named in his place. (19)

 

The name “Dracula” appears just three times, two of which more accurately refer to the father (Vlad Dracul). What  attracted Stoker was a footnote attached to the third occurrence: “Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil. The Wallachians were, at that time, as they are at present, used to give this as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous either by courage, cruel actions, or cunning” (19). That Stoker considered this important is evident in that he copied into his own notes “DRACULA in Wallachian language means DEVIL.” The three references to “Dracula” in Wilkinson’s text, along with the footnote, are the only occurrences of the name in all of the sources that we know that Stoker consulted.

     Stoker’s debt to Wilkinson is generally acknowledged, but a number of points are often overlooked: Wilkinson refers only to “Dracula” and “Voivode,” never “Vlad,” never “Vlad ÚepeÕ” or “the Impaler”; furthermore there are no specific references to his infamous atrocities. It is no mere co-incidence that the same paucity of information applies to the text of Dracula. Yet the popular theory is that Stoker knew much more than what he read in Wilkinson; that his major sources were the Hungarian professor Arminius Vambéry, and readings in the British Museum.

     In Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906), Stoker gives a brief account of two meetings with Vambéry (238). There is nothing to indicate that the topic of Dracula ever came up. Stoker does tell us, however, that Henry Irving was present at the first meeting, a meal that followed a performance of the play “The Dead Heart.” Is it not more likely that the dinner conversation focused on the play, and (considering Irving’s overpowering personality) on his performance? As the account of this dinner was written several years after the publication of Dracula, one might  expect Stoker to have mentioned Vambéry’s role (assuming he had one). Stoker notes that the Hungarian was “full of experiences [about a trip to Central Asia] fascinating to hear” (238). Surely a discussion about the atrocities of Vlad the Impaler would have been as fascinating, had it occurred? Also significant is that this meeting took place in April 1890, before Stoker went to Whitby and read Wilkinson’s book. As for the second encounter, Stoker provides even less information. “We saw him again two years later,” records Stoker, “when he was being given a Degree at the Tercentenary of Dublin University.... He soared above all the speakers, making one of the finest speeches I have ever head [sic]” (Reminiscences 238). The only comment about the subject matter of the talk was that Vambéry “spoke loudly against Russian aggression” (238). Nothing about Dracula. But by this time, Stoker’s novel was well underway, and he was already using the name “Dracula” for his vampire.

     The conviction that Stoker gleaned information from the Hungarian seems to be the residue of theories about Stoker’s sources before the discovery of his Notes. As early as 1962, Ludlam was making the claim that “Bram sought the help of Arminius Vambéry in Budapest” and that “Vambéry was able to report that ‘the Impaler’ who had won this name for obvious reasons, was spoken of for centuries after as the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the ‘land beyond the forest’” (100). Florescu and McNally cemented the connection in 1972: “The two men [Stoker and Vambéry] dined together, and during the course of their conversation, Bram was impressed by the professor’s stories about Dracula ‘the impaler’. After Vambéry returned to Budapest, Bram wrote to him, requesting more details about the notorious 15th century prince and the land he lived in” (Search 115). The only fact we have is that they dined together. Stoker makes no reference to Vambéry in his working papers. No documented evidence exists that Vambéry gave Stoker any information about Vlad, or for that matter, about vampires. Yet we keep encountering statements to the contrary. Perhaps the most extreme case of creating fact from fancy is the following:

 

On an evening in April 1890, among his [Stoker’s] guests was a small, balding middle-European named Arminius Vambery.... There he sat between Sir Henry and Bram Stoker and for the rest of the night filled their heads with stories of the superstitions which abounded in his native land. Stories of witches, werewolves and the un-dead....  It was the thought of those un-dead beings that specifically excited his [Stoker’s] interest.... He also wrote to Vambery in Budapest about his idea and found the little Professor more than willing to elaborate on the story he had told over dinner. (Haining, Omnibus 2)

 

     This is sheer nonsense.

 

     Supporters of the Stoker-Vambéry link also go to the novel for textual evidence, claiming that what Vambéry told Stoker is revealed through what Arminius, Van Helsing’s friend, tells Van Helsing. Van Helsing, the argument goes, is Stoker’s alter-ego, and the insertion of Arminius is the author’s tribute to Vambéry, or, as Florescu and McNally speculate, “Stoker’s way of acknowledging his debt” and showing “what information and conclusions the professor had passed on to Stoker” (Search, 1972, 116). But surely the mere inclusion of the name proves no such thing. After all, Dracula contains many names drawn from its author’s friends and acquaintances. The name “Harker,” for example, most likely came from one of the workers at the Lyceum, while “Swales” was taken from a tombstone that Stoker noted in Whitby. Since the authority on Dracula in the novel would need to be foreign, someone acquainted with the Dutch professor Van Helsing, whose name was  better to use than Arminius [Vambéry] whom he had briefly met?

     But let us assume that what Arminius tells Van Helsing is an echo of what Vambéry told Stoker. What exactly does he say?

 

I have asked my friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University, to make his record; and, from all the means that are, he tell me of what he has been. He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land. If it be so, then was he no common man; for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the ‘land beyond the forest’.... The Draculas were, says Arminius, a great and noble race, though now and again were scions who were held by their coevals to have had dealings with the Evil One. They learned his secrets in the Scholomance, amongst the mountains over Lake Hermanstadt, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due. In the records are such words as ‘stregoica’ -- witch, ‘ordog,’ and ‘pokol’ -- Satan and hell; and in one manuscript this very Dracula is spoken of as ‘wampyr,’ which we all understand too well. (18: 246)

 

All of the vital information in this can be traced to Stoker’s own notes and sources: Wilkinson, as we have seen, writes about Dracula and the Turks, as well as the Voivode’s courage and cunning; ‘the land beyond the forest’ was the heading of a chapter in Charles Boner’s book on Transylvania (one of Stoker’s known sources) as well as the title for a book by Emily Gerard, whose article “Transylvanian Superstitions” we know that Stoker read; the information about the Scholomance comes almost verbatim from Gerard’s article; the terms ‘stregoica,’ ‘ordog’ and ‘pokol’ are listed in Stoker’s notes as having come from Magyarland (1881); and ‘wampyr’ was the name that Stoker originally intended to give his Count. Nothing remains to have come from Vambéry.

     Arminius makes a second appearance in the text as Van Helsing reports on Dracula to the band of vampire hunters: “As I learned from the researches of my friend Arminius of Buda-Pesth, he was in life a most wonderful man” (23: 310). While he goes on to comment on his “mighty brain, a learning beyond compare, and a heart that knew no fear and no remorse,” Arminius says nothing about his reputation as “the Impaler,” certainly his most memorable characteristic. While the inclusion of the name of Arminius can be seen as Stoker’s tribute to Vambéry, there is no evidence that the Hungarian provided Stoker with any information about Dracula.

     But what about the “manuscript” in which “this very Dracula is spoken of as ‘wampyr’”? Some scholars have posited the theory that Stoker actually did see such a manuscript. “During his extensive research at the British Museum,” writes Donald Glut, “Stoker uncovered writings pertaining to Vlad the Impaler” (55). Andrew Mackenzie goes further, declaring that “if the historical Dracula had not been presented as such a horrific figure Bram Stoker would never have selected him from the archives of the British Museum as the character who, transformed by his imagination, was to become a symbol of terror” (55). No doubt Stoker did do some research at the British Museum, but there is not a shred of evidence that he did any of it on the historical Dracula. Now, he could have. The material was certainly there. Christopher Frayling lists what would have been available at the time: included is one of the German printed pamphlets about Vlad Ţepeş published in Bamberg in 1491 with a woodcut. Could this be the mysterious document to which Arminius alludes? Frayling goes so far as to suggest that this is an “authentic model for Dracula” and that “Stoker must have seen the pamphlet or a reproduction of it” (421). This is, of course, speculation. Yet for many, it has become fact: Paul Dukes, for example, refers to the “woodcut of Vlad the Impaler ... found by Bram Stoker in his researches in the British Museum in 1890" (45). The caption accompanying the woodcut reads: “A wondrous and frightening story about a great bloodthirsty berserker called Dracula the voevod who inflicted such un-Christian tortures such as with stakes and also dragged men to death along the ground” (Florescu and McNally, Essential Dracula 59). Given the reference to a “bloodthirsty berserker,” the argument goes that Stoker must have seen this. But the logic behind the argument -- Stoker was at the British Museum, the Bamberg pamphlet was at the British Museum, and therefore Stoker saw the pamphlet -- is fallacious. As for the term “berserker,” it is much more likely that Stoker saw it  in Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves (1865), which is on his own list of sources for Dracula We must treat such speculation (including that Stoker had read Munster’s Cosmographia or Richard Knolle's Generall History of the Turks) with caution.

     One result of all of this is that readers, accepting these hypotheses as fact, begin to look to the novel for corroborating evidence. First there is the assumption that Stoker drew his physical description of Count Dracula from either the woodcut portrait in the Bamberg pamphlet or from a printed account of Vlad’s physical appearance. For some, it is tempting to deduce that Stoker  had access to the following description of Vlad, provided by a fifteenth-century papal legate who had met the voivode:

 

“He was not very tall, but very stocky and strong, with a cold and terrible appearance, a strong aquiline nose, swollen nostrils, a thin and reddish face in which the very long eyelashes framed large wide-open green eyes; the bushy black eyebrows made them appear threatening.” (qtd. in Florescu and McNally, Dracula: Prince 85)

 

However, anyone familiar with nineteenth-century Gothic literature knows that many of the features of Vlad described in the legate’s account (such as the bushy eyebrows and the aquiline nose) had become, by Stoker’s time, common conventions in Gothic fiction. And as for Count Dracula’s “eyebrows almost meeting over the nose,” Stoker records in his notes that this came from Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-wolves.

     Another popular piece of speculation began as early as 1956: that in creating Renfield, Stoker “seems to have adapted the legend” about Vlad’s penchant for impaling mice while he was a prisoner in Hungary (Kirtley 14). Also Nandris connects the tradition about Vlad impaling birds saying it “is developed in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (391). This reappears several years later in Farson’s biography of Stoker and is extended to Renfield:

 

There is a story that he [Vlad] bribed his guards into bringing him small birds which he would mutilate and then impale on sticks in neat rows. If true, this was echoed by Stoker in his powerful characterisation of the lunatic Renfield, who caught flies to feed spiders to feed birds which he devoured himself. (128)

 

Equally far-fetched is the claim that Vlad’s fondness for impaling his victims was Stoker’s inspiration for his method of destroying the vampire -- the use of the wooden stake. According to Glut, “Vlad’s preference for impaling his victims (a method of destroying vampires) . . . further inflamed Stoker's imagination” (56), while the travel guide Eastern Europe on a Shoestring claims that Vlad “inspired the tale of Count Dracula by his habit of impaling his enemies on stakes” (651). This connecting of impalement to the staking of vampires is misleading, and overlooks three facts: that Bram Stoker had planned on writing a vampire novel before he ever came across the name of “Dracula”; that there is no definitive proof that Stoker knew anything about Vlad’s fondness for impalement; and that the staking of vampires was a well-established motif both in folklore and in earlier Gothic fiction long before Dracula.

     Another consequence of the insistence on connecting the two Draculas is the temptation to criticize Stoker for inaccurate “history.” Why, some ask, did he make Dracula a Transylvanian Count rather than a Wallachian Voivode? Why was his castle situated in the Borgo Pass instead of at Poenari? Why is Count Dracula a “boyar,” a member of the nobility which Vlad continuously struggled with? Why does Stoker make Dracula a “Szekely,” descended from Attila the Hun, when the real Dracula was a Wallachian of the Basarab family? There is a very simple answer to these questions: Vlad Ţepeş is Vlad Ţepeş, while Count Dracula is Count Dracula. Considering the preposterous conclusions that the premises behind such questions have generated, a closer look seems warranted.

     Although Stoker’s knowledge of the historical Dracula was scanty, he did know that he was a voivode. His use of the title “count” was in keeping with the Gothic convention of drawing villains from the ranks of the aristocracy. A cursory glance shows a recurrence of villainous Counts: Count Morano in The Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe), Count de Bruno in The Italian (Radcliffe), Count Doni in Ernestus Berchtold (Polidori), Count Cenci in The Cenci (Shelley), Count Montonio in The Fatal Response (Maturin), Lord Byron’s Count Manfred, and Wilkie Collins’ Count Fosco. Vampire Counts in pre-Dracula fiction include Count Azzo von Klatka in “The Mysterious Stranger” and Countess Karnstein in Le Fanu’s “Carmilla.” The frequent occurrence of Counts in Gothic fiction links the temporal power of aristocrats, especially foreign aristocrats, with supernatural powers. As for  references to the Borgo Pass, the “boyars” and the Szeklers, these are bits and pieces from sundry sources that Stoker  mentions in his Notes.

     How much did Bram Stoker know about the historical Dracula? There is no doubt that the material was available. But how meticulous a researcher was Stoker? We know that he read and took notes from a number of books and articles (for a complete list, see Leatherdale, Origins of Dracula 237-39) and that some of this material found its way into his novel almost verbatim. But his research seems to have been haphazard (though at times fortuitous) rather than scholarly. What he used, he used “as is,” errors and confusions included. That his rendering of historical and geographical data is fragmented and at times erroneous can be explained by the fact that Stoker seemed content to combine bits and pieces of information from his sources without any concern for accuracy. After all, Stoker was writing a Gothic novel, not a historical treatise. And he was writing Dracula in his spare time, of which I doubt he had much. He may very well have found more material about the historical Dracula, had he had the time to look for it. But in the absence of any proof to the contrary, I am not convinced that he did. There is no conclusive evidence that he gleaned any information on Vlad from Vambéry, from material at the British Museum, or from anywhere else except that one book he found in Whitby -- by William Wilkinson.

     I have other reasons for taking this position. Let us assume for argument’s sake that he did learn more from Vambéry, that he did conduct research on the historical Dracula beyond Wilkinson. Why, then, is Count Dracula in the novel never referred to as “Vlad” or “the Impaler”? Why are there no references to his atrocities, which would have been grist for the horror writer’s mill? Why is Van Helsing reduced to stating that “He [Dracula] was in life a most wonderful man”? And why are there no references in Stoker’s working notes to his having found any other material? There are only two possible answers: either he knew more and chose not to use it, or else he used what he knew. 

     Was Stoker so sophisticated a novelist that he deliberately suppressed material for artistic purposes? One need only consider how greedily he gobbled up and reproduced a significant amount of rather trivial information. Are we to believe that he knew about Vlad’s bloodthirsty activities but decided to discard such a history for his villainous Count in favor of the meager pickings gleaned from Wilkinson? One could argue that absence can be as important as presence: that Stoker deliberately suppressed information in order to make his character more mysterious; or that Dracula’s silence about his past is a consequence of the fact that the text denies him a narrative voice. Such interpretations are intriguing, but one must bear in mind that there is a difference between interpretation and fact.

     One of the side-effects of the speculation about Stoker’s use of the historical Dracula is an outcry of protest from a number of Romanians who contend that the Irish author has denigrated a leading figure in Romanian history. The best example is Nicolae Stoicescu, who clearly expresses resentment about how the historical figure of Dracula has been appropriated by the West and converted into a popular horror icon: “Whoever knows something about Vlad Ţepeş may smile on reading such nonsense, but this nonsense ascribed to Dracula [the novel] is highly popular and overshadows the true image of the Prince of Walachia.... Those who would like to go on cultivating Dracula the vampire are free to do it without, however, forgetting that he has nothing in common with the Romanian history where the real Vlad Ţepeş whom we know by his deeds holds a place of honour” (178-79).

     Occasionally, such defensive posturing leads to preposterous conclusions. Writing in 1975, Vasile Barsan made the startling declaration that the denigration of the historical Vlad in Stoker’s novel indicates a Hungarian plot. The argument goes as follows: the Hungarian professor Arminius Vambery was Stoker’s source; and Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi, who “never made any secret about his contempt for Romanians” played the role of Dracula on film, which was “chauvinistic propaganda for the ‘return of Transylvania to Mother Hungary’” (50).  There’s more! Peter Haining quotes a Romanian official, Adrian Paunescu, who supposedly complained that the novel Dracula was “political pornography directed against us by our neighbours,” a concerted campaign “by reactionaries of every colour to slander the very idea of being a Rumanian as well as the eternal idea of Rumania” (Scrapbook 17). Similar paranoia is evident in Alexandru Dutu’s remark that Vlad “was transformed into a vampire in the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker, a late reflection of the slanders concocted to destroy him centuries earlier” (242). To claim that Bram Stoker set out to intentionally discredit a Romanian ruler about which he knew so little is without foundation. But such statements illustrate how blind acceptance of a tenuous theory (that Vlad was the inspiration for Count Dracula) can have cultural and political consequences. All the more crucial it is to investigate the exact nature of the connection.

     All theories about the connections between the Count and the Voivode  (with the exception of the link to Wilkinson) are based on circumstantial evidence, some of which is quite flimsy. I do not dispute that in using the name “Dracula” Stoker appropriated the sobriquet of the fifteenth-century Wallachian voivode. Nor do I deny that he added bits and pieces of obscure historical detail to flesh out a past for his vampire. But I do vehemently challenge the widespread view that Stoker was sufficiently knowledgeable about the historical Dracula (beyond what he read in Wilkinson) to have based his Count on the life and character of Vlad. While it is true that the resurgence of interest in Dracula since the early 1970s is due in no small measure to the theories about such connections, the theories themselves do not withstand the test of close scrutiny.

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

Baring-Gould, Sabine. The Book of Were-Wolves. 1865. New York: Causeway Books, 1973.

Barsan Vasile. “Dracula: A Warped Image of Escapism and Insanity,” in Romanian Sources 1.2 (1975): 44-54.

Boner, Charles. Transylvania: Its People and its Products. London: Longmans, 1865.

Brownworth, Victoria A. and Judith M. Redding. "Introduction." In Victoria A. Brownworth, ed. Night Bites: Vampire Stories by Women. Seattle: Seal, 1996.

Dukes, Paul. “Dracula: Fact, Legend and Fiction.” History Today 32 (July 1982): 44-47.

Dutu, Alexandru. “Portraits of Vlad Ţepeş: Literature, Pictures and Images of the Ideal Man,” in Kurt W. Treptow, ed., Dracula: Essays on the Life and Times of Vlad Ţepeş. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. 239-45.

Dziemianowicz, Stefan. "Introduction." In Robert Weinberg, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. Weird Vampire Tales. New York: Gramercy, 1992.

Eastern Europe on a Shoestring. Hawthorn, Australia: Lonely Planet, 1995.

Farson, Daniel. The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker. New York: St. Martin’s, 1975.

Florescu, Radu and Raymond T. McNally. Dracula: Prince of Many Faces. Boston: Little Brown, 1989.

Florescu, Radu and Raymond T. McNally, eds. The Essential Dracula. New York: Mayflower, 1979.

Frayling, Christopher. Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.

Gerard, Emily. “Transylvanian Superstitions.” The Nineteenth Century (July 1885): 128-44.

Glut, Donald. The Dracula Book. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975.

 

Haining, Peter. The Dracula Scrapbook. Stanford: Longmeadow  Press, 1987.

Haining, Peter, ed. The Vampire Omnibus. London: Artus, 1995.

Hillyer, Vincent. Vampires. Los Banos, CA: Loose Change, 1988.

Kirtley, Bacil.  “Dracula the Monastic Chronicles and Slavic Folklore.” Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics. Ed. Margaret L. Carter. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1988. 11-17.

Leatherdale, Clive. The Origins of Dracula. London: William Kimber, 1987.

Ludlam, Harry.  A Biography of Bram Stoker, Creator of Dracula. 1962. London: New English Library, 1977.

Mackenzie, Andrew. Dracula Country. London: Arthur Barker, 1977.

Mascetti, Manuela Dunn. Vampire: The Complete Guide to the World of the Undead. New York: Viking, 1992.

McNally & Florescu. In Search of Dracula. New York: Greenwich, 1972. Rev. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

Nandris, Grigore. “The Historical Dracula: The Theme of his Legend in the Western and Eastern Literatures of Europe.” Comparative Literature Studies 3.4 (1966): 367-96.

Stoicescu, Nicolae. Vlad Ţepeş: Prince of Walachia. Trans Cristina Krikorian. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste Romania, 1978.

Stoker, Bram. “Bram Stoker’s Original Foundation Notes and Data for his Dracula.” Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia. MS.EL3F.5874D.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Constable, 1897.

Stoker, Bram. Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving. 1906. London: William Heinemann, 1907.

Wilkinson, William. An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. London, 1820.