A Drop of History 106

Count Dracula: a legend is born
The king who was made a vampire by an agent

In 1896, an English Shakespearean actor, Henry Irving, had the bright idea to incarnate on stage an undead creature, a vampire, who would embody all the horrible characteristics mentioned in the existing myths about such creatures. Henry Irving’s agent, one Bram Stoker, published a book, one year later, with that creature as protagonist. He added some new features that he had heard about or imagined himself, like the absence of a shadow, the lack of a reflection in a mirror, the ability to transform into a wolf or bat at will, the command over animals, the habit of sleeping during the day and going about in the night, and the subsistence on the blood of his victims.

After these properties, Stoker had to find his undead protagonist a name and a place to live, or rather a haunt out of which he would sally by night. Stoker went to the British Museum, searched both travel guides and history textbooks, and found what he was after. Dracula was ready: He lived in his castle in the Carpathians, halfway between Transylvania and Bukovina, and went out every night to terrorise unfortunate peasants and pretty fair maidens.

The book was a huge success instantly upon publication, and Bram Stoker became rich and famous. Count Dracula immediately settled in the place of honour of metaphysical and horror literature. It was not just because of his terrifying characteristics, but his entire image. A lonesome, refined, charming creature, but at the same time diabolical and dangerous, coming from a distant, unknown and mysterious place, Dracula owes his success to his underlying eroticism and his mysterious character, that both completely overturn the entire Western status quo, the entire urban middle-class morality of the times. This keeps happening, in variations, till today.

Additionally, Stoker’s literary inventions, based on folk tales about dealing with all sorts of otherlings, are so imaginative that one cannot help being impressed. Dracula cannot stand garlic, has a fit at the sight of a cross, raves when he comes close to a Bible or an asperger, and holy water gives him blisters. He is nigh-impossible to kill: he has to be stabbed with a blade or a stake through the heart, while his victims do not really die horribly. After his bite they only feel slightly unwell, like post-coital lassitude, and when their human nature dies, they start their own vampiric careers. A process that incorporates passion, pain, ups and downs and mystery; a process that the imaginary Dracula started off in people’s minds.

Imaginary? Not that much. When Bram Stoker wrote his famous novel, he just “stole” an actual historical figure and turned it into a literary myth, the way he wanted. Dracula actually existed. He was Vlad Ţepeş, voivod of Wallachia, who was born in 1431, ruled what is modern Romania and went down in history and legend as Vlad the Impaler. The nickname refers to his harsh, inhuman rule, and his preferred method of execution, which was impalement. He was a son of Vlad Dracul, who had acquired his second name when he was made a knight of the Teutonic Order of the Dragon. Drăculea, or Dracula, means “son of the Dragon”.

Vlad Ţepeş is honoured as a national hero in Romania because he found a bunch of clans and tribes and turned them into a nation and a state. Of course, he had to impale a lot of people to manage that. He wiped out entire towns and villages, slaughtered and impaled Turks galore, exterminated German tradesmen, wherever he found them. He was a cruel ruler, fought ruthlessly against the Turks in 1461, alternately allied himself and warred with all his neighbours, his reputation was enough to spread terror, but Bucharest became a proper state capital. His state knew days of prosperity and its citizens got justice. It is said he mercilessly hunted cunning or lazy women, whom he – naturally – impaled.

That historical figure became an undead vampire, and that is how he established himself in people’s memory. Local legend even mentions that the real Dracula, Vlad Ţepeş, was slain by treachery in battle, buried in secret, and when his grave was opened, years later, there was a horse’s skeleton in it. Thank goodness Stoker did not know that legend too, otherwise the entire world today would be sure that, apart from a bat hanging from the ceiling, Dracula can turn himself into a horse as well. Perhaps a winged one, a Pegasus with long, sharp canines.

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2008, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 47

Prester John’s earthly paradise
The legend of the affluent saint-king that captivated the Middle Ages

When I read Umberto Eco’s novel Baudolino, which takes place during the sacking of Constantinople by the Franks, I felt myself transported into a world of pure fantasy, beyond any kind of logic. The protagonists have left the medieval West and Byzantium and head towards the unknown expanses of the East, seeking the kingdom of Prester John, which was inhabited by surreal beings, incredible in both appearance and thought. The book’s plot amused me and confirmed the author’s orgiastic imagination… until I found out that the eminent scholar had done nothing more than novelistically recreate a legend that had had an overwhelming influence throughout the gloom of the Middle Ages.

Around 1160, Europe – which considered itself to be the centre of the world – saw the publication of an epistle written by the ruler of a distant, unknown empire, who modestly called himself Prester (Presbyter) John. The epistle was addressed to the Pope and the Christian kings, and it described the strange ruler’s kingdom and diverse activities. Of course, the epistle was counterfeit, since there was no Prester John, but it was accepted all over Europe with awe. According to the text, which was written in flawless Latin, Prester John was chief or king of a nomadic tribe of Mongols that lived at the end of the world and his kingdom was an island of Christianity in the middle of an ocean of barbarian lands and people. The kingdom was called Golconda, while its Christian faith was explained in the simplest of ways: it was established by one of the Three Wise Men who had worshipped the newborn Jesus, when he returned to his barbaric faraway homeland.

The long-winded epistle, which circulated in various versions all over Europe, had everything that the people of the time needed to dream of and believe. Prester John was the purest of all people and his kingdom was a kind of earthly paradise, not only spiritual, but also material. He was an affluent, mighty and hospitable saint. His wealth was inestimable. He lived in a palace of ebony and crystal, with a roof of precious stones and pillars of gold. Down Golconda’s rivers, together with the crystal clear waters, flowed piles of diamonds, silver, gold and pepper. Prester John had dozens of kings as vassals, he ruled the Three Indias, and the patriarch of São Tomé with the bishops of Samarkand and Susa sat at his table. His subjects were various strange beings, such as pygmies, sciapods, unicorns, centaurs, and creatures with a single eye on their sternum. The slopes around the palace teemed with basilisks (serpents with human heads that killed with their virulent breath), men living in absolute darkness and women with goat feet.

The legend was believed instantly in the West and overwhelmed not just the common people but also the ruling political and religious circles. For two centuries everyone accepted the existence of Prester John, and cartographers placed his kingdom somewhere near the end of the world. He was considered a potential ally against the infidels, certain to attack the Turks from the rear sometime, after the West had charged from the front with the Crusades. His kingdom became a sort of mythical destination for the Western European, while the Byzantines scoffed at the whole notion. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of explorers and men of the cloth disappeared in the vast expanses of the East, seeking the earthly paradise, guided by various maps that stated the most incredible things. Many were sure that the Danube went underground at some point, passed beneath Prester John’s kingdom, and resurfaced as the Euphrates. Others searched between the Aral Sea and Lake Baikal, where rumours affirmed that Prester John had campaigned, in order to destroy a Turkish kingdom.

At the end of the 14th century, popes, who granted rights of ownership of the African coast to the Portuguese explorers, signed edicts that clearly declared that ownership extended “to the borders of Prester John’s kingdom”. The legend had become reality by papal bull, at a time when papal infallibility was beyond questioning. Europe forgot about Prester John when Africa was circumnavigated and America discovered, both within fifty years. The whole world was known, and Golconda’s fabled wealth was finally discovered in the spice trade with the Indies, the razed golden temples of the Mayans and the Incas, and the slave trade with Africa. The quest for godly purity and innocence was abandoned before the sirens of the rising New World, and Prester John passed into oblivion. Perhaps he is better off there… what place could such a pure ruler have in our days?

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2002, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2007, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 38

The right to be lazy
Karl Marx’s son-in-law flouts work

In 1883, from the Sainte-Pélagie, where he was a political prisoner, Paul Lafargue published in L’Egalité a series of curious pieces under the collective title “The Right to Be Lazy”. The book of the same title, which was published shortly afterwards, raised an incredible uproar and embarrassed terribly both leftists and rightists in France and in the rest of Europe, as Lafargue used remarkable arguments to support a singular view: that man does not need to work; that work is slavery; that it exhausts physically and spiritually, without being necessary.

Mind you, The Right to Be Lazy is not the monologue of a disreputable good-for-nothing wishing to live off others’ toil. Paul Lafargue was a very weighty personage. A physician himself, the son of coffee plantation owners in Chile, he was a stellar member of the Communist Party of the time and secretary for the Comintern sector responsible for the Iberian peninsula. But communists, as a matter of ideology, are not against work. On the contrary, they insist that the working class will change the world; consequently, the proletariat’s labour is sacrosanct. However, Lafargue, throughout his life, kept perturbing his comrades by maintaining that proletarians should leave the factories where they worked and enjoy leisure and love instead. In fact, he provided evidence that a “free” worker of the time in France worked more than the convicts in labour camps or the slaves in the Antilles, with almost the same wages and quality of life.

Naturally, leftists through the ages have a habit of ostracising from their ranks anyone who deviates from their ideological orthodoxy. But they had a little problem with Monsieur Lafargue. The theorist of idleness was married to Laura Marx, Karl Marx’s daughter. The couple’s best man had been Friedrich Engels. Who would dare oust the son-in-law and close friend of, respectively, the founder and co-founder of the international communist movement? Consequently, they tolerated him, patching the holes he opened himself. He would convince party members to leave their posts and, when he was gone, the “instructors” would try to persuade them to return to the factories, where the revolution was to start.

But Paul Lafargue’s grand crescendo was his own death, which was doubly embarrassing to his comrades. On 28 November 1911, he committed suicide with cyanide, together with his wife, at the age of seventy. In the note he left behind he explained that he was taking his own life before old age deprived him of the joys for which he had fought all his life. What a wretched example for the generations to come and the proletarians of all nations! Man should not only idle his life away, but also kill himself as soon as youth is past. To think that Lafargue claimed that without having visited a single business of our times…

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2002, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2007, All Rights Reserved