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Niccolò Machiavelli in his famous work, The Prince, considers Cesare Borgia to be a compelling example for princes to follow if they wish to learn to strengthen their principalities. Although there is no evidence that Machiavelli knew much about the career of the prince of Wallachia, known as Vlad III Dracula, he could also easily have used him as inspiration for his classic work on statecraft. The parallels between the historical Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler, and the Duke of Valentinois are remarkable. While Cesare Borgia served as Machiavelli’s example of a wise Renaissance ruler, Vlad III Dracula served as a similar model for other Renaissance writers.
One such example is the noted Renaissance chronicler, Antonius Bonfinius, an Italian humanist at the court of Matthias Corvinus. He had been invited to come to Budapest in 1485. His chronicle, begun already during the reign of Matthias Corvinus, was completed only after the death of the king in 1490. It was thus formally dedicated to Matthias’ successor, the new Hungarian king, Vladislav II. Bonfinius published his account around 1495, only about eighteen years after Dracula’s death, almost a quarter of a century before Machiavelli published his famous work.
In it, he writes nine stories about Dracula. While the writer attempts to justify the policy of Matthias Corvinus vis-à-vis Vlad the Impaler, i.e. his arrest and imprisonment in 1462, unlike many of the German stories, Bonfinius is not overly harsh concerning Dracula’s cruelties. He describes him as a cruel, but just ruler. Bonfinius fostered the tradition of seeing Dracula as a typical Renaissance despot. While Machiavelli’s The Prince was not published until 1519, Dracula was already portrayed by Bonfinius and other sources as a similar-type example of the Renaissance despot. Dracula’s apparent cruelties are justified, much like Machiavelli justifies the actions of Cesare Borgia, by the desire to secure a strong centralized authority.
Machiavelli discusses the tactics of Cesare Borgia in suppressing the nobles who sowed discord and worked to undermine central authority. Decades earlier, Vlad III Dracula pursued similar policies. The German stories, originally written as political propaganda pieces to undermine Vlad’s authority and to justify Matthias Corvinus’s imprisonment of the prince who boldly confronted Islamic terror, recount how “he asked his boyars to come to his house for a feast. When the feast was over, Dracula went to the oldest of them and asked him how many princes he thought the country had had? And then he asked the others, one by one, the same question. They all said what they knew; one answered fifty, another thirty, but none of them answered that there had been seven of them, so he had them all impaled. There were five hundred of them altogether.” The story reveals the chaotic political situation in Wallachia that had plagued the principality since the death of Dracula’s grandfather Mircea the Old in 1418.
For Machiavelli, the state, embodied in the person of the Prince, is the most important entity. If the prince has to resort to deception, violence or intrigue to maintain his position, then he is fully justified in doing so. The Slavic stories about Dracula, also composed near the end of the fifteenth century, portraying a firm but just ruler to be held as an example for rulers of the time, teach comparable lessons. For Machiavelli, Cesare Borgia is a prince who ultimately lost what he had because of adverse fortune, the same can be said in the case of Vlad the Impaler. Thus, both princes, Dracula and Cesare Borgia, stand as examples of Renaissance era rulers who pursued similar objectives and also suffered similar fates. Although neither succeeded in achieving their ultimate objectives, both men serve as examples of stern but just rulers.
Dracula: Essays on the Life and Times of Vlad the Impaler, a collection of studies by leading scholars from around the world, and Vlad III Dracula: The Life and Times of the Historical Dracula available at HistriaBooks.com and all major book retailers.
