McNally and Florescu, who were professors at Boston College, wrote a series of revisitations of nineteenth-century horror classics: In Search of Dracula (1972; rev. ed., 1994); Florescu's In Search of Frankenstein (1997); a study of Robert Louis Stevenson's short novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They have a tenacious knack for finding the historical and real-life sources or inspiration for what were once considered total fictional accounts. They, more than any others, must be credited with bringing to the public the awareness that Dracula did indeed exist as a mortal, long before he lived in Bram Stoker's pages. They were responsible for a great deal of scholarly research into the life of the medieval fiend, whom they linked to the film character.

Even Sandman acknowledges a debt of gratitude to the scholars. (For information on Sandman, see his tab in the navigation menu.)

Sadly, the following is a link to Dr. McNally's obituary, which I have quoted in full - without authorization, but with proper credit.

http://www.cesnur.org/2002/dracula/mcnally.htm

by Tom Long ("The Boston Globe, October 5, 2002) Dr. Raymond T. McNally, 71, a colorful Boston College professor who camped it up while discussing the legend of Dracula, died Thursday of complications of cancer in St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Brighton.

Dr. McNally coauthored the 1972 besteller ''In Search of Dracula: The History of Dracula and Vampires '' with Radu Florescu, a Boston College professor. The book, which was updated in 1994, provides a historical foundation for the Transylvanian legend of the ''undead'' count popularized by Irish novelist Bram Stoker in his 1897 novel ''Dracula.''

The duo found that the real Dracula, Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler, though not one of the living dead, was a good deal more bloodthirsty than the legendary count. Tepes ruled parts of Romania in the mid-15th century and had men, women, and children impaled, buried alive, burned, and multilated in other ways. To deter the Turks, who were plotting an invasion, he impaled thousands on wooden stakes and displayed their bodies on the borders.

''We found out that when he would dine amid his impaled victims, he would have the blood gathered in bowls, then he would dip the bread into the bowl and consume it,'' Dr. McNally said in a story published in the Globe in 1994.

Romanian peasants were terrified that the man they nicknamed ''Dracula,'' or ''son of the devil,'' might return from the dead.

''We were the first to link the mythical vampire with the actual historical personality,'' Dr. McNally said in 1979.

According to Dr. McNally, when Tepes was a child, his father gave him to the Turks as a good- faith gesture after promising not to attack them. He later broke the promise and betrayed his son. Dr. McNally was author or coauthor of several other books, including ''A Clutch of Vampires: Things Being Among the Best Vampire Stories from History and Literature,'' and ''Dracula Was a Woman'' about a 16th century Hungarian countess reputed to have tortured and murdered about 600 virgins.

His work was funded in part by three Fulbright research grants. ''I have this vision of some US senator standing up in the US Senate and saying: `What are we doing funding this research on vampires?''' Dr. McNally said in 1987. ''We've funded a lot of other things that were worse than that.'' Dr. McNally was born in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. He graduated from Fordham University and earned a doctorate in Russian and East European history from the Free University of Berlin. He joined the faculty at Boston College in 1958.

''In childhood, I was interested in stories of the imagination, especially in fairy tales and the Grimm fairy tales in particular,'' Dr. McNally said in an 1989 interview. ''While watching a Dracula horror film on the late, late show in 1958, I realized that the film was set in places that are real. I looked at my map and yes, there really was a Transylvania and a Borgo Pass.'' He teamed up with Florescu, who was a specialist on Romanian history.

Dr, McNally said his favorite movie vampire was Max Schreck, who played the decadent, decaying count in ''Nosferatu,'' the 1922 film.

In 1996, Dr. McNally released a CD-ROM called ''Dracula: Truth or Terror,'' which included ''Nosferatu'' as well as an animated miniature version of himself offering commentary on the ''undead.'' Click on the little man and a stake is driven through his heart.

According to McNally, driving a stake through a vampire's heart is often misunderstood. ''A stake through the heart or navel during the daylight is not enough. The idea is to pin the corpse to the earth as double insurance,'' said Dr. McNally, who claimed to have seen the action performed on a suicide victim in Romania in 1969.

Dr. McNally often wore a cape when publicizing his Dracula books, and sometimes swept it over his head with his arms outstretched, much like the Hollywood version of the legendary count. ''He was not a scholar who locked himself into an ivory tower,'' Boston College historian Thomas H. O'Connor said yesterday. ''Sometimes his showmanship overshadowed his scholarship, but he was a serious, methodical academic who did much to develop Boston College's history program on Russia and the Middle East.''

Dr. McNally leaves his wife, Carol (Maymon); two sons, Michael of Chalfont, Pa., and Patrick of Newton; three daughters, Katherine of Larchmont, N.Y., Brigitte of Hull and Tara of Holland; a sister, Doris Shell of Cleveland; and several grandchildren.

A funeral Mass will be said at 11 a.m. Monday in St. Ignatius Church in Newton. Burial will be in Newton Cemetery.

Happenstances – events which could be called coincidences in that they seem related, but no causal connection can be found. Sometimes such events seem too amazingly coincidental to accept as truly unrelated, even though we cannot imagine how they could be related. It is my intuition, and my belief, that most such mind-boggling co-occurences do have some causal relationship, and I can only appeal to the 'hidden-hand-behind-the-scenes-of-history' hypothesis. I don't offer any details (I don't know of any details), but I vaguely imagine something like guardian gods, or Gaia or Those Who Wait being the hidden hand in the long task of nurturing humanity forward to its destiny as godlings and beyond. In these pages when I use the word 'happenstance', I mean it is officially and traditionally accepted as a coincidence, but I am not buying into that reality.

I append this anecdote - which, in a way, reveals the ambiguity of my happenstance concept. In 1970 I wrote a monograph on Isidore of Seville - who is said to have been the last man who had an encyclopedic grasp of science, history, etc of the world as his culture knew it. (Admittedly in the 6th and 7th centuries there was less to have to know.) In particular I was interested in his Etymologiae - his study of the origins of words. When I got to his claim that the word 'homo', meaning 'man', came from the word 'humus', meaning 'earth' because God created man from clay, I threw his book across the room in disgust (only once since have I treated a book so disrespectfully). Such a statement can only come from such a defective world-view that there is no way to patch it up. Anyway, it is obvious enough that homo (as in 'homo sapiens') and humus (as in 'exhume') have nothing to do with each other.

A couple of decades later, I was browsing through the Indo-European Roots appendix in the American Heritage Dictionary (yeah, that is my idea of fun), when I came across the headword 'dhghem', meaning 'earth'. The suffixed zero-grade form (dh)ghmon, meaning 'earth dweller', gave rise to Old English 'guma' meaning man, as in bridegroom (I don't know where that 'r' came from), and also the Latin homo, meaning man (hominid, homunculus). Needless to say, it gave rise to Latin humus, meaning earth. I had to whisper an apology to the spirit of Isidore. He got it right - for the wrong reasons - but right nonetheless, homo and humus are related. Now what are the odds of that happenstance? Was something cosmic going on? This is a lesson to me that it might be possible to overread coincidences (which do really occur - occasionally) into happenstances (my meaning of the word).

Occam's razor (also spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham, which basically says "one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything." Modern versions go like: " The simpler the explanation, the better." or "Do not make more hypotheses than necessary to explain something."

See the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_Razor

It is quite convenient for those who intentional deceive that their intended victims should be devoted believers in Occam. The trick lies in defining what is simpler, or what is an extra hypothesis. For instance, I once read a Shadow book (hey, I was just a kid) in which we never met the main villain until the end of the story. Until then the villain was only referred to by name by the villain's underlings, and never by a pronoun. But the police and other characters who had not met the villain, referred to him by pronoun. Of course, such a thing can be a simple happenstance. But I was already used to looking for such negative clues and long before we reached the book's final confrontation scene, I knew the villain was a woman. When I tried to explain my 'reasoning' to my friend, he said, 'A lack of a male pronoun does not logically imply a female pronoun is lacking.' Or something to that effect. He felt that Occam was being violated by the unnecessary introduction of an extra entity (a female person when we already had the villain being referred to as a male person by the police, who had not met the villain). I felt that Occam's razor cut the other way – the extra entity is the need of introducing 'coincidence' to explain the fact that the villain's underlings never referred to him/her with a pronoun.

I cannot count how many times I have seen this same sorry application of Occam. I'll just mention that when a friend (a different friend) lent me William Goldman's Marathon Man, I read the first page and told my friend it was going to be interesting to read a novel with a gay anti-hero who was a government hired assassin. My friend stared blankly at me. "Isn't Henry Levy gay?," I asked? "No," said my friend who had read the whole book. Later, as one goes through the book, there are scattered pieces of evidence, cleverly placed, so that it is possible not to realize that Henry Levy is indeed gay (his lover is an assassin gone over to the dark side and working for the Dentist), but whose force is absolute when laid out side by side. I showed them to my friend, who was totally amazed that he had not put it together (he is a very intelligent and aware man – indeed, a highly aware and gay friendly, so that was not the issue). It was simply that being gay is a fnard for him (unless he is hit over the head with it), and for him Occam's razor says, "Ninety percent of the world is straight, and therefore it is more efficient and correct to assume a person is straight unless there is absolute evidence contrariwise. Otherwise one has to add an extra dimension of sexuality, which is a more complex explanation."

For me, Occam's razor says, "If there is the slightest ambiguity about a person's sexuality, it is more efficient and correct to think that person might be gay. Otherwise one has to add an extra dimension of coincidence (from which the ambiguity arises), which is a more complex explanation."

The short version is: be wary of Occam's razor.

Finally, let me say that the 'universal aether' theory of light transmission, ubiquitous in 19th century physics, met its death by Occam's razor. (Michelson-Morley failed to find evidence of its existence, and Einstein made do without it.) Absence of proof is proof of absence. Ipso facto – no aethers. I am not at ease with this silliness. (See the "Ethers Redux" tab in the navigation menu.)

Based on the word "Fnord", taken from the Illuminatus! Trilogy Part II – The Golden Apple by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea (1975). Fnord is a word that we have been brain-washed into not seeing it (possibly, it seems, by our elementary school teachers) but which causes a sense of panic or ill-ease. Fnord is, apparently, not the real word printed to cause these feeling, since if the book contained the real word, we could not see it, and would have feelings of panic.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus%21_Trilogy#Fnord)

The word is sprinkled around in the book (for instance p. 59 of my Dell Book Edition), and it takes a while to put together what its function is.

A fnard, my word I guess, is also something that cannot be seen because we learn to un-see it (frequently as part of the process of learning concepts), but is quite different from a fnord. Examples of fnards are the little imperfections (hairs, lines, holes etc) in movie films, which are so annoying when the film has just started, but which we quickly un-see as the movie progresses. We get pulled into the movie and our mind stops seeing the fnards which violate the movie reality. Similar was the tape hiss on music tapes (in the world before CDs and DVDs) and the millions of tiny snap, crackle and pops when we played a vinyl record. After a while we just stopped hearing these imperfection. But, after the advent of CDs, we could suddenly hear the noise again whenever we tried to go back to the old technologies. There are a million zillion things a day we tune out. Some experiments have been done where an anomalous element is introduced into a scene viewed by an audience – say a clown walking through a basketball court during a game – and a large percentage of the audience has no recollection of seeing the clown when queried afterwards. Or try proofreading your own writing – often your mind sees what you know you meant to write, not what is written.

So a fnard is anything your mind actively tunes out because it doesn't fit the picture.

The 'original source' is the source from which Wepwawet first got his godhood. (See the "Wepwawet" tab in the navigation menu.) This was of course, the blood of the rabid wolf of the Carpathian mountains northwest of the Black Sea – a wolf rabid with WepRabies. (See the tab in the navigation menu called, "The Wer Disease.) But only Wepwawet knew this, and for a long time it was thought by the other gods that the original source was the blessing of a god or a magical fountain. Eventually Anubis realized it had to have been an infusion of the blood of some animal, since this was exactly how he himself made other gods. (See the Anubis tabs in the navigation menu.) Since Wepwawet and Anubis were wolf-gods, Anubis strongly suspected this animal was a wolf, and that the wolf had some sort of rabies, since infusing the godblood into an animal produced rabies-like symptoms and led to a coma. But he had little interest in speculating further since for many centuries he showed no signs of aging or weakening, but indeed, grew stronger with the passage of time.

When the other gods began to age, Anubis, in his pride (for though he was a deeply good being, he was a proud one), saw them as essentially flawed in a way he was not. That is, he thought of himself (and Osiris) as inherently more perfect beings. So he still did not turn his mind to this issue of the original source. It was only when Osiris himself began to age, that Anubis realized the truth – that he had lived so long and survived so pristinely only because his godblood had come directly from Wepwawet, who must have received it directly from a god animal. Then Anubis began to think where this animal might live.

He knew that Wepwawet had left Egypt a human and returned a god, but he did not know how long he had been gone, nor in what direction he had parted. By 1400 BCE, much more was known about the world than had been known in the days of Wepwawet's youth. Anubis conscripted the armies of Egypt to aid in his quest, but he was looking for a land where other immortal wolf-gods dwelt. It had not occurred to him that Wepwawet would have been the first human in all history to become a god. Nor was it strange to him that the other gods chose to remain hidden, for this was precisely the way of Wepwawet himself.

The armies and Anubis failed in the quest, and the idea slowly came to Anubis that he had to pass into the West, which he did sometime between about 1350 and 1250 BCE. When the reed boats he had built took him to a new and unknown continent, he was full of hope. After taming the natives to his will and establishing a priesthood and gods based on the wer-jaguar, he sent them forth looking for the original source – a wolf, of a man-wolf.

Interestingly, there is a vague possibility that the phrases 'Fountain of Youth' and 'Original Source or Fount' may be related. Of course, to most of us the Fountain of Youth is associated with Juan Ponce de León and his alleged search for it in Florida in the early 1500s. He is supposed to have learned of it from the Arawak Indians of the Antilles, who told him to look northward to find it. These Arawak tales may be last reflexes of the stories of the search by the wer-jaguars (themselves clearly nearly immortal godlings) as they worked their way northwards from Mexico on the quest of Anubis. It would be interesting to know if they reach as far as Florida. If so, they would not have been the only frustrated seekers of immortality in that state.

The Black Sea has been, in its own way, as key to the history of the Old World as has the Mediterranean. It is surround by six countries and a diverse geography. Turkey in the south boasts the city of Constantinople (Istanbul), which for one thousand years dominated any commerce that wished to pass down from the north along the great rivers (Danube, Dnieper, Dniester and the Don) through the Black Sea and on through the Bosporus straits into the Aegean and the Mediterranean.

On the west are Bulgaria and Romania with its Carpathian Mountains, the eastern wing of the great Central Mountain System of Europe, which run a thousand miles along the borders of Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia and northern Hungary. They are low and tame compared with the Alps, mostly under 2,500 meters and do not have glaciers. But they have splendid forestation and wild life – not to mention being the home of limitless myths of vampires.

To the north and west lie the Ukraine, Russia and Georgia and the great steppes.

Somewhere around the shoreline of the Black Sea is the likely homeland of the original speakers of what is called Proto-Indo-European, the mother of the languages of perhaps three billion of today's people. The exact location is not terribly important for us, because of the easy mobility around the shore or over the Black Sea itself. It has also been a rewarding homeland for wolves, which can travel from the steppes to the Carpathians unhindered. Here also was a fertile breeding ground for rabies, and, without doubt, the nursery for the mutant strain of rabies called Wepwawet's rabies. Here, somewhat inland, on the northern west shore in or around the land now called Romania, was the homeland since time immemorial for the family of Vlad Dracula, called Vlad the Impaler. (See his tab in the navigation menu.) And here with certainty was the haunts for at least the last ten thousand years of Aarrgh, for no other place offered the confluence of elements he needed to carry out his dual breeding programs of virus (in the wolf host) and human bloodline tailored to host Aarrgh himself in due time. (See the "Aarrgh" tab in the navigation menu.)

Also called WepRabies or Wepvirus.

This is the mutant strain of rabies, responsible for all wer phenomenon from vampires to werewolves to wer-jaguars. Its native host is the wolf, but was only naturally found in the area around the Black Sea, although it is thought that there are now no wild wolves harboring the virus, as Dracula made a dedicated effort to destroy them (or perhaps keeping some in kennels).

The following paragraphs are taken from Sandman's comments in Saragossa – The Vampire Legacy.
"Wepwawet's strain differs from common rabies in several respects. For one thing, it usually passes from blood to blood, saliva being a very rare route of infection. (It can also be passed from mother to child via the blood tie in the womb.) The incubation period is normally shorter – one to two weeks. Also, it is much less deadly than common rabies. A person may carry the virus in weakened form without symptoms, and it is not uncommon for an infected person to survive the coma. A pre-scientific peasant, seeing a person rise up from the coma of a disease he knew to be fatal, or especially observing a victim dig himself from his shallow grave, would naturally spread the story of the living dead.

The most important difference, however, is the degree to which Wepwawet's strain brings with it snippets or strands of the DNA of the previous host – normally a wolf. This is the vector by which wolf DNA is introduced into a human. If much of the wolf genome tags along, this results in the new human host having two, more or less, complete genomes – human and wolf."

With the mutant strain the coma comes on in a matter of days, lasts a week or so and is followed by months more after that until the change."

The root meaning of 'wer' is 'man', so that werewolf means manwolf or wolfman. (I know you usually see it spelled 'werewolf'. Both spellings are correct.)

'Wer' can be combined with the name of any animal to mean a human/animal combination – wer-jaguar; wer-bear; even wer-crocodile. Wer-bat is, of course, just another name for what we usually call a vampire – a human/bat combination.

The word 'wer' can be used by itself to mean a person who is a wer-animal of some sort, or it can mean the wer-animal phenomenon in general. We can write, for instance, 'a master wer' to mean a master werewolf, or a master vampire etc. Or we can write, 'It is almost impossible for wer to spread by accident. The wer virus is not very contagious. Wer must be intentionally inflicted by the sharing of blood, and then carefully nursed to fruition.'

All the wer-animals represent the same phenomenon – a human into whose chromosomes a second genome – an animal's genetic blueprint – has intruded via a viral vector. The virus comes from a mutant strain of rabies called Wepwawet rabies, or simply Wep-rabies (See the navigation tab "The Wer Disease"). The natural host for this virus is the wolf. The wolf which carries this virus is in no way special except that it carries the virus (and therefore has the usual rabies issues, including a heightened killing impulse). This wolf is called a wepwolf (for Wepwawet wolf). This wolf is NOT a werewolf. It is only when the genes from this wolf are transferred, via the virus it hosts, into a human that the human becomes a werewolf.

The word 'wer' does not refer to the animal species which contributes its genome (wolf, bat, jaguar etc). This animal species is referred to as a totem animal (or in the case of the wolf, as a Wepwolf). Wer refers to the combination of the animal genes with human genes.

See also the the navigation bar tab, "The Wer Disease".

http://www.emedicine.com/derm/topic145.htm

"Background: Erythropoietic porphyria (EP) is a rare inborn error of porphyrin-heme synthesis inherited that is as an autosomal recessive trait. The inheritance of 2 mutant alleles for the gene encoding the enzyme uroporphyrinogen III synthase leads to accumulation of porphyrins of the isomer I type that are biologically useless but cause cutaneous photosensitivity characterized by blisters, erosions, and scarring of light-exposed skin.

Clinical manifestations can range from mild to severe. Chronic damage of skin, cartilage, and bones can cause mutilation. Hypertrichosis, erythrodontia, and reddish-colored urine are often present. Hemolytic anemia can be mild or severe, with resultant splenomegaly and osseous fragility.

EP is reported in diverse populations. The total number of cases reported worldwide is less than 200.

The teeth have a reddish color."

Note: 'hypertrichosis' means an excessive hairiness (as in werewolf syndrome), and the 'erythrodontia' means red teeth (from blood seeping into the teeth). The same thing happens to the eyes, and the nails of the hands and feet.

The disease is severely aggravated by (potentiates with) interaction with the wepvirus. That is to say, the apoptosis reflex, which is normally turned off, is magnified, and the skin blisters, boils, and necroses. Ears, lips, the nose, fingers etc. can all quickly fall off, and the damage will continue to spread for hours after the sunlight is removed. Death could be expected from a full body exposure for as little as ten minutes.

I have photos of what can happen to people who don't have the virus. (See photo at left; I don't know the status of the copyright on this photo and would be very happy to give the appropriate credit, if I knew it.) The hands are extremely burnt and parts of the fingers have fallen off. It is much, much worse for the heirs of Quetzalcoatl, including Dracula and all his wer-children.

See also Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porphyria
Quotes taken from the Wikipedia article:
"The erythropoietic porphyrias primarily affect the skin, causing photosensitivity (photodermatitis), blisters, necrosis of the skin and gums, itching, and swelling, and increased hair growth on areas such as the forehead.
Heme precursors may also accumulate in the teeth and fingernails, giving them a reddish appearance."

Dracula and his hatred of homosexuality, the Turks, and the boyars

At the time of Dracula's father's (Vlad Dracul) reign (from 1436), Wallachia was a vassal state of Hungary (and Vlad, as a member of the Order of the Dragon – whence his name 'Dracul' – was sworn to fight non-Christians) , and concurrently forced to pay tribute to Turkey. In other words, Wallachia was caught between a rock and a hard spot, with warring allegiances to sworn enemies. Handling the situation called for creative politics. Both Hungary and Turkey were king makers in the region, and both had placed their puppet princes on the Wallachian throne at one time or another. In 1442 the Turks invaded Transylvania, and Vlad Dracul attempted to remain neutral, which won him the enmity of the victorious Hungarian, John Hunyadi, who drove Vlad Dracul from his throne, replacing him with a Hungarian puppet (Basarab II). The following year, Turkey helped Vlad dethrone Basarab and re-win the rulership.

In order to demonstrate his loyalty to Turkey, Vlad, in 1443, sent his two younger sons, Dracula and Radu, called the Handsome, (Radu cel Frumos) to Adrianople as hostages of Sultan Murad II, where Dracula was to remain until 1448. Meanwhile new fighting broke out between Hungary and Turkey. Dracul was called upon to fulfill his oath as a member of the Order of the Dragon and as a vassal of Hungary and fight against the Turks; at the same time, he had an oath to keep to the Turks and they had his two sons, who would surely die if Dracul fought against the Ottomans. As a compromise, he sent his eldest son, Mircea, to join Hungary on the ill-fated Varna Crusade. Mircea survived, but he and his father had earned John Hunyadi's hatred. (Hunyadi is traditionally accorded shame for his conduct at the battle.)

In the meantime, Vlad Dracula was suffering greatly in Adrianople, being locked up in an underground dungeon and abused, both by whipping and by sexual rape. It was, of course, from this time, from age about thirteen to seventeen, that Dracula formed his great hatred for both the Turks and homosexuality. It is not to be supposed that Dracula gave his jailers any reasons to treat him well – he was already full of hatred, killing frenzy and malice. He was destined to murder the world (as Nix said in the movie "Lord of Illusions"), not to be somebody's 'boy'. Younger brother (half-brother actually) Radu the Handsome, on the other hand, catching the fancy of the sultan's son was converted to Islam and allowed into the Ottoman royal court. Whether that sexual orientation was a natural inclination for him or a political accommodation, he made his peace with the Turks and enjoyed a comfortable life in their hospitality. The Wikipedia says, "There is evidence supporting the speculation that he had become the lover of the Sultan's heir, the later Mehmed II. According to Chalcocondylas, Mehmed's first attempt to seduce him ended in disaster. Radu cut Mehmed with his sword and then, in fear for his life, ran and climbed up a tree. Mehmed only talked him into coming down by promising not to kill him."

In 1447 Vlad Dracul was assassinated, apparently with the support of John Hunyadi, and Mircea was buried alive by the boyars and merchants of Tirgoviste – thereby adding them permanently to Dracula's hate list. Hunyadi's puppet sat on the Wallachian throne. The Turks released Dracula and helped him briefly seize the Wallachian princedom. But almost immediately Hunyadi reversed the tables, returned Vladislav II to the throne, and Dracula fled to his cousin, the Prince of Moldavia.

The ins and outs of Dracula's princeship are irrelevant at this juncture except to say that he regained the throne only to lose it in 1462 when the Ottomans gave Radu rule of Wallachia, which he kept until 1473. In 1474 Radu traded rulership back and forth with Basarab Laiotaa the old, and finally died of syphilis in 1475 (leaving one daughter, Maria Voichitta). Being bounced from rulership by his gay brother merely intensified Dracula's homophobia.

Romania about 1600