Vlad Tepes Dracula. Biography of a Ruler and Legend of a Tyrant

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Bohn
• Subject Area: Medieval History ; Early Modern History
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 289884789

In the historical figure of Vlad III Drăculea (1431-1476), the Romanian culture manifests authoritarian and militaristic tendencies as well as the utopia of an egalitarian society independent of external influences. His violent excesses and his battles against Ottomans and Hungarians made him a symbolic figure of both tyrannical rule and bravery in Latin Europe, Muscovy, and the Middle East. He fell later into oblivion and finally found his way into modernity in a deformed shape through Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula”. From a medieval and early modern perspective, however, the role of the vampire count in cultural studies recedes behind the historiographical significance of the “Impaler”. The research project aims to investigate the knowledge transformation on Vlad as a political actor at the intersection of the “heroic age” of the Ottoman wars and the vassalization of medieval Wallachia. To this end, the reconstructable factual history of his biography is contrasted with the narratives which have experienced a multitude of formations and deformations of historical knowledge about this far-reaching phase of the history of Southeast Europe. The monographic investigation is based on the assumption that the figure uniquely activated the historiographic agendas due to the moral anomalies associated with it and thus brought about a substantial regulation of knowledge. Vlad Drăculea was a provocation to which neither chroniclers nor historians could react in a neutral or at least distanced way, whereby dependencies as well as objectives of the respective historiographies are made visible in a model-like manner and often with little formalisation. The figure of Dracula also shows how misinterpretations or simply historical falsifications were produced in the conflict between conformist and nonconformist knowledge.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Adrian Gheorghe; Privatdozent Dr. Christof Paulus