Michel Beheim's Dracula song as a dark mirror for princes
Michel Beheim’s Dracula song as a dark mirror for princes

Summary/Abstract: Knowledge of Vlad Ţepeş’ reign and military activities reached foreign audiences through various channels during his own lifetime, and each audience was interested in news from Wallachia for various reasons. The work of Romanian scholars has been invaluable in assessing how such news was disseminated and what basis these foreign images of Vlad had in historical fact, from a doctoral dissertation by Gregor Conduratu at the beginning of the twentieth century to Matei Cazacu’s authoritative study of several streams of tradition1. Cazacu in particular examines how in each case the audience projected onto Vlad certain values drawn from their own conceptions about princes, political rule and warfare; in German reports these were only negative values, while in the Russian tradition he was a model prince in his administration of justice and in his relentless foreign policy. From the start we should distinguish between the historical Vlad Tepes and the legendary or literary figure of ‘Dracula’, a name which I shall use only in discussing foreign perceptions of the prince. This article looks in detail at one source of the negative portrayal which has dominated western European images of ‘Dracula’, the song ‘von ainem wutrich der hies Trakle waida von der Walachei’ by the courtier and poet Michel Beheim

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