THE WAR BETWEEN FRANKENSTEIN AND DRACULA

[Frankenstein's Monster]

THE WAR BETWEEN FRANKENSTEIN AND DRACULA
As two of the more fascinating characters in literature, Frankenstein and Dracula have sent chills up the spine of readers for nearly two hundred years.

Legends abound about both of them and many stories tie them together as either allies or enemies, but are any of these tales true?

Unraveling fact from fiction promises to be a long and tortuous journey, so let us start with what we know to be historically accurate.

There was, and still exists a Frankenstein family and their castle, near Darmstadt Germany, although much of it has been rebuilt in recent years. The family’s participation in the Crusades is well documented and historically accurate.

Knight Arbogast Von Frankenstein is the earliest known person to use the surname and is credited with building the original castle.

There was a real-life Vlad the Impaler (Dracula) although which member of the Dracul family he was remains uncertain. History recounts the horrific and sadistic actions of this man and there is little reason to doubt his character. The family castle also remains today near Bran, in the immediate vicinity of Braşov, and today is a national monument and landmark in Romania.

Over time, the changing political landscape of Europe in general and the specific regions known as Transylvania, Hungary  Austria, Germany, Italy and France, have shifted, been renamed and changed political alliance numerous times. This makes identifying specific areas very difficult.

For instance, the Romanian culture is entirely different from that known as the "Transylvanian culture", which is in reality a regional diversity of the West-oriented Hungarian culture.

Bearing in mind that in the centuries immediately preceding the Frankenstein and Dracul dynasties, much of western and southern Europe was under the control of the Roman Empire, there is a good deal of confusion as to who was in charge at any given time. In the period surrounding the fall of the Roman Empire, various sections came under siege by the Mongols, the Turks and others.

In order to try to make sense of all this, let us take one item at a time and compare it to whatever historical fact we can uncover.

[Frankenstein's Monster]

Modern day historian and news correspondent Gabriel Ronay, author of The Dracula Myth, claims his research has revealed that the bloody family history of the von Frankenstein clan links the Rhine castle with Vlad Dracula's Bran Castle in Transylvania.
Ronay says, "In the wake of Hungary's devastation by the Mongol hordes in 1241, its kings invited German colonists from the Rhineland to repopulate their empty Transylvanian province. This included several kinsmen of the von Frankenstein clan.

It is historical fact that in the thirteenth century a castle was erected for the Baron von Frankenstein and his knights near the site of a Roman quarry in the vicinity of what is now Darmstadt, Germany, but was part of Hungary at the time.

For nearly one thousand years, Constantinople had stood as the protecting outpost of Christianity and blocked Islam’s access to Europe. With the fall of Constantinople in 1453, all of Christendom was suddenly threatened by the armed might of the Ottoman Turks.

King Sigismund of Hungary, who became the Holy Roman Emperor in 1410, founded a secret fraternal order of knights called the Order of the Dragon to uphold Christianity and defend the Empire.
Its emblem was a dragon, wings extended, hanging on a cross.

Vlad III’s father (Vlad II) was admitted to the Order around 1431 because of his bravery in fighting the Turks.
From 1431, onward Vlad II wore the emblem of the order and later, as ruler of Wallachia, his coinage bore the dragon symbol.
(insert coinage image here)

The word for dragon in Romanian is "drac" and "ul" is the definitive article. Vlad III’s father thus came to be known as "Vlad Dracul," or "Vlad the dragon." In Romanian, the ending "ulea" means "the son of". Under this interpretation, Vlad III thus became Vlad Dracula, or "the son of the dragon" and it is this man with whom we are concerned.

Things went reasonably well for a while with the Frankenstein’s defending Christianity on behalf of the Hungarians and Vlad doing likewise, but as is so often the case monetary interests overrode religious zeal.

Vlad Dracula began extorting taxes from the rich Saxon merchants of Transylvania which made von Frankenstein, a Teutonic Knight and the lord of Bran manor, his chief adversary.
Here, legend enters and some researchers claim that ultimately, Vlad Dracula defeated the Saxon army and proceeded to put von Frankenstein to a lingering death on a sharp wooden stake.

This would seem to be borne out by a report in The Sunday Herald, on Oct 30, 2005, by Jenifer Johnston that the remains of Frank Baron von Frankenstein were discovered in a collapsed crypt in St Mary's Evangelical church in the Romanian town of Sibiu, where he was buried following his execution by Vlad Dracula the Impaler in the 15th century.

[Frankenstein's Monster]

Confusing the issue is the story of Sir George Frankenstein who, according to legend, in the sixteenth century sacrificed his life in combat with a dragon. Carvings in the crypt where he is believed to be buried depict him slaying a dragon under his feet. The dragon's tail, nevertheless, pierced the knight's armor, killing him.

The mention of his fight with the dragon (Vlad Dracula?) and the knight being pierced (impaled?) makes one wonder if one legend may have overlapped another.

The execution of Baron von Frankenstein was pretty much the undoing of the Frankenstein family and, disregarding Mary Shelley’s 1818 revival of the family name in her book “Frankenstein” or “The Modern Prometheus”, the family faded from historical prominence.

On the other hand, there is sufficient evidence of the cruelty of Vlad Dracula to lend credence to many of the legends surrounding him.

The historical Dracula is known for his inhuman cruelty. Impalement was Vlad III’s preferred method of torture and execution. Impalement was and is one of the most gruesome ways of dying imaginable, as it was typically slow and painful.

Vlad usually had a horse attached to each of the victim’s legs and a sharpened stake was gradually forced into the body. The end of the stake was usually oiled and care was taken that the stake not be too sharp, else the victim might die too rapidly from shock.
Normally the stake was inserted into the body through the buttocks and was often forced through the body until it emerged from the mouth. However, there were many instances where victims were impaled through other body orifices or through the abdomen or chest. Infants were sometimes impaled on the stake forced through their mother’s chests.

Vlad often had the stakes arranged in various geometric patterns. The most common pattern was a ring of concentric circles in the outskirts of a city that was his target. The height of the spear indicated the rank of the victim. The decaying corpses were often left up for months.

In 1461 Mohammed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, a man not noted for his squeamishness, returned to Constantinople after being sickened by the sight of twenty thousand impaled Turkish prisoners outside of the city of Tirgoviste. This gruesome sight is remembered in history as "the Forest of the Impaled."

Thousands were often impaled at a single time.  In 1459, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, Vlad III had thirty thousand of the merchants and boyars of the Transylvanian city of Brasov impaled.
Ten thousand were impaled in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu in 1460.

One of the most famous woodcuts of the period shows Vlad Dracula feasting amongst a forest of stakes and their grisly burdens outside Brasov while a nearby executioner cuts apart other victims.

[Frankenstein's Monster]

Although impalement was Vlad Dracula’s favorite method of torture, it was by no means his only method. The list of tortures employed by this cruel prince reads like an inventory of hell’s tools: nails in heads, cutting off of limbs, blinding, strangulation, burning, cutting off of noses and ears, mutilation of sexual organs (especially in the case of women), scalping, skinning, exposure to the elements or to wild animals, and burning alive.

No one was immune to Vlad’s attentions. His victims included women and children, peasants and great lords, ambassadors from foreign powers and merchants.

Ironically, Vlad’s atrocities were usually attempts to enforce his own moral code upon his country. He appears to have been particularly concerned with female chastity. Maidens who lost their virginity, adulterous wives and unchaste widows were all targets of Vlad’s cruelty. Such women often had their sexual organs cut out or their breasts cut off, and were often impaled through the **** on red-hot stakes.

One report tells of the execution of an unfaithful wife. Vlad had the woman’s breasts cut off, and then she was skinned and impaled in a square in Tirgoviste with her skin lying on a nearby table.

Vlad also insisted that his people be honest and hard working. Merchants who cheated their customers were likely to find themselves mounted on a stake beside common thieves.

Vlad was ultimately killed and decapitated by unfaithful boyars; his perfumed head sent to the Ottoman Sultan as a gift, and as appeasement. The official burial place of Vlad is the Snagov Monastery, on Lake Snagov, near Bucharest. There is some mystery surrounding the tomb, however. An excavation performed in 1931 reportedly found an empty grave, while some accounts tell of the exhumation of a richly dressed decapitated body.


All of this has little bearing upon the modern day perception of either Mary Shelley’s characterization of the Frankenstein monster or Bram Stoker’s tale of the blood-sucking Dracula, but it interesting to note the historical background of the people these monsters were modeled upon.

It is generally accepted that the Dracul and Frankenstein families fought side-by-side against the Turks to protect Christendom and that they later fought each other over strictly economic and financial issues. Dracula’s victory over the Frankenstein’s has become merely a footnote to the inconceivable atrocities committed by this cruel ruler.

In today’s world, perhaps the fact that much of his brutality was motivated out of a ‘moral’ fervor should give each of us pause.

http://chipandtracy.com/pg/news/view/sj-history-mystery/the-war-between

[Renfield]

Vlad Dracula began extorting taxes from the rich Saxon merchants of Transylvania which made von Frankenstein, a Teutonic Knight and the lord of Bran manor, his chief adversary.
Here, legend enters and some researchers claim that ultimately, Vlad Dracula defeated the Saxon army and proceeded to put von Frankenstein to a lingering death on a sharp wooden stake.

This would seem to be borne out by a report in The Sunday Herald, on Oct 30, 2005, by Jenifer Johnston that the remains of Frank Baron von Frankenstein were discovered in a collapsed crypt in St Mary's Evangelical church in the Romanian town of Sibiu, where he was buried following his execution by Vlad Dracula the Impaler in the 15th century.

I always wondered what happened to the Frankenstein family in Europe, and now I know, Dracula impaled him!