The Covid-19 pandemic has forced the temporary closure across the globe of countless museums, historical landmarks, and heritages sites, but not Bran Castle in Romania. Faced with low vaccination rates in the country, the regional government turned the fortress--supposedly the homeplace of Bram Stoker’s literary figure of Count Dracula--into a vaccination centre at weekends throughout May 2021, hoping that the site’s vampiric allure would attract local citizens to have their jab. As an extra incentive, any Romanians receiving their vaccine were offered free entry into an exhibition where they could marvel at no fewer than fifty-two apparently medieval torture instruments. The focus of Gabriele Annas and Christof Paulus in their latest work underlines how the allure surrounding the historical figure upon whom Stoker based his character, a certain Vlad III Ţepeş, voivode of Wallachia in the mid-fifteenth century, enjoys a long pedigree indeed. In this thoroughly researched and skilfully presented volume, the authors provide a critical edition of the so-called “German Reports” (Deutschen Berichten), a collection of anecdotes and tales probably authored in the 1460s for a Germanophone audience detailing the violent and brutal reigns of Vlad III. The “German Reports” proved popular and were printed as early as 1488 in Nuremberg and Lübeck, becoming a veritable bestseller by the standards of the time and shaping perceptions of Vlad III and his later literary counterpart, Count Dracula, ever since.

The edition of “German Reports” runs to around twenty-five pages in print (192-218) divided into 43 sections and is accompanied with a thorough historical commentary (219-54) that the present reviewer found of great use, helpfully providing background to some of the events described in the edition, clearing up the chronology, and clarifying some of the terminology and phrasing. A clear summary of each section of the “German Reports” (on 182-88) and the detailed indices also make the text easy to navigate for the non-specialist approaching the piece for the first time. Filled with gruesome and macabre acts, the text itself is not for the faint-hearted. Among many other insights, a quick perusal reveals why Vlad III enjoyed the epithet of “the Impaler”: the ruler was said to have robbed and impaled 600 merchants in one instance alone, and, in another, 500 lords and nobles who did not give satisfactory answers to his questions. Mass impalings went alongside smaller, more restrained affairs. To take one example, Vlad impaled a Franciscan who did not meet his liking and, for good measure, the friar’s unfortunate donkey too. But to judge from the “German Reports,” Vlad III was nothing if not inventive, using fire and water to execute his victims too. The text reports that Vlad III invited all the poor in his lands to a meal, burning the hall in which they were dining down to the ground, killing no fewer than 400 people. In between burning churches, murdering children, and striking deals with the Ottoman Sultan, Vlad III also boiled his enemies alive and drowned them in the river, or simply had them “cut down like grass.” As one can imagine, Vlad III’s executions soon clocked up, with the final chapters of the “German Reports” underlining how the aristocrat had killed so many people that one was incapable of counting the sheer number of casualties. Even if you did count them all, as the text goes on to explain, one wouldn’t believe such a figure. The next section, nevertheless, gave it a stab, estimating that Vlad III killed no fewer than 92,268 people, not including (of course!) all the others he had killed who were not recorded in the text. Not for nothing did Vlad III earn comparisons with well-known historical villains, with the “German Reports” comparing him with tyrannical Roman emperors of old, such as Nero and Diocletian.

The rest of the volume provides important background about the historical figure of Vlad III, the spread and then printing of the “German Reports” detailing his gruesome activities, and the reception history of the text in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The accessible and clear account of Vlad III’s life (across 11-25) is particularly welcome, given that his reigns as Voivode of Wallachia were punctuated by interregna, imprisonment, and spells of exile, and further complicated by changes in political allegiance between the Hungarian and Ottoman courts and religious confession. Just why the “German Reports” were initially compiled and circulated also invites discussion. Perhaps, as Annas and Paulus speculate, building upon the ideas of Matei Cazacu (41-3), the “German Reports” served as Hungarian propaganda to justify the imprisonment of Vlad III by their king, Matthias Corvinus. In conducting their research and analysis, Annas and Paulus draw upon scholarly literature in German, Italian, French, and Romanian. A harsh critic would suggest that the historiographic net could have been cast even wider, for recent work published in Hungarian and Russian by authors such as Ágnes Salgó and M.P. Odesskij merits inclusion, but the secondary literature relating to Vlad III is vast, as Annas and Paulus note (26), and their efforts to synthesise as much scholarly work as they have should be commended.

Both Annas and Paulus display considerable knowledge of individual manuscripts, highlighting the subtle differences in content and dialect in no fewer than seven versions of the “German Reports” across an informative chapter (144-82) focused on the transmission history of the text. The analysis here opens a window onto how different compilers could imbue the text with their own emphases through rewriting or rephrasing select passages and by placing the text amidst other historical and legal materials in the same manuscript, highlighting the utility of close palaeographical and codicological study. One version of the “German Reports,” for example, now preserved in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, was copied and entered alongside contemporary documents regarding the Turkish threat and the anti-Ottoman crusade plans of Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor, aired at the imperial assemblies of 1454 and 1471, amidst other correspondence regarding the Emperor’s peacekeeping and marriage negotiations. As Annas and Paulus go onto argue (on 168), the compiler of the text probably interpreted the “German Reports” within the broader context of imperial politics and the burgeoning Turkish threat in south-eastern Europe, against the background of on-going tension between imperial and Hungarian factions that stifled attempts to initiate a decisive anti-Ottoman crusade.

Source editions are always welcome, especially editions as thoroughly researched and accessibly presented as Annas and Paulus’ “German Reports.” Their careful editing and analysis makes available and places in its context an important and fascinating source. It will be enjoyed by a broad swathe of late medieval and early modern historians with interests in Central Europe, chronicle writing and print culture, military history and warfare, the history of emotions, and European perceptions of the Ottoman Empire and their allies, not to mention anyone interested in gory tales of execution, murder, and double-dealing.