Prince who inspired Dracula ‘cried blood’ – 08/19/2023 – Science

Despite his current fame as a vampire, Dracula also had to deal with 15th century bureaucracy, even signing tax receipts. Thanks to the paperwork, Italian researchers managed to obtain remnants of ancient proteins that would be derived from his body, with clues about his state of health and about the environment that surrounded him.

It is true that the discoveries, described in the specialized journal Analytical Chemistry, do not exactly refer to the terrifying character popularized by the Irish writer Bram Stoker in his 1897 novel. 1477), prince of Wallachia (a region in present-day Romania) whose cruelty was one of the inspirations for Stoker’s villain.

This is because the nobleman was also known as Vlad Tepes (“the Impaler”), due to the custom of having his captured enemies transpassed with stakes, leaving them hanging on them. The main victims of the procedure would have been soldiers from the Ottoman Empire, based in Turkey, which had dominated part of Eastern Europe at the time. The epithet “Dracula” (Draculea, in Romanian) was inherited from his father, who belonged to a group of knights known as the Order of the Dragon (“dracul”, in his native language).

In the work, coordinated by Vincenzo Cunsolo, from the Department of Chemical Sciences at the University of Catania, in Sicily, the team focused on three letters signed by Vlad and written (in Latin) between 1457 and 1475. Two of them have spent the last five centuries in storage in the archives of the city of Sibiu, where they had been addressed.

One of these letters from Sibiu, addressed to the “illustrious master Thomas Altemberger” (head of the city’s government), confirms that Vlad received a payment of 200 Hungarian guilders from the subject (since, at the time, the Wallachian prince was a subordinate of the king of Sibiu). Hungary) as taxes.

What the Italian team did was, in the first place, try to obtain samples of molecules of biological origin from the letter paper in the least invasive way possible. To do so, they covered the manuscripts with very thin EVA films, a polymer widely used in industry for different purposes (such as carpets in children’s play areas, for example). The EVA films thus helped to “fish” the molecules.

As, however, there were many possibilities of contamination of the material since Dracula handled the paper, Cunsolo and his colleagues also used an extremely sensitive molecular “balance” to evaluate the exact composition of the substances obtained by the method. It turns out that, over the centuries, organic molecules undergo recognizable changes in their structure.

This allowed the team to separate fragments of really ancient proteins from those derived from more recent contamination. According to the Italian researchers, the protein pieces present in the paper suggest, for example, that Vlad Tepes may have suffered from inflammatory processes in the respiratory tract or skin.

And the presence of fragments of blood proteins could corroborate another rumor that circulated about him at the time: that Dracula suffered from hemolacria —that is, there would be a certain amount of blood in the prince’s tears, a dysfunction that can have several causes, such as tumors. or hypertension.

This data corresponds to the 16 proteins of human origin identified in the letters, but the researchers also found traces of organic molecules derived from other living beings. There are, for example, signs of the presence of bubonic plague bacteria — a common problem in 15th-century Europe. products, even with its power.

The team did not examine the possibility that a secretary had written the missives in Dracula’s place, which could weaken the study’s conclusions.