The Habsburgs by Martyn C. Rady

Author:Martyn C. Rady [Rady, Martyn C.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

19

VAMPIRISM, ENLIGHTENMENT, AND THE REVOLUTION FROM ABOVE

During the first half of the eighteenth century, vampires became a media sensation. Official reports documenting the popular belief in vampires in the part of Serbia recently occupied by the Habsburgs were leaked to news sheets and medical journals. The stories they told of the undead feasting on the living, of exhumed bodies oozing with the blood of victims, and of stakings and beheadings, were luridly reproduced and combined with older tales of shape-shifting and shroud-eating corpses. Voltaire in Paris later noted how ‘between 1730 and 1735 nothing was spoken of more than vampires—how they were hunted down, their hearts torn out, and their bodies burnt. They were like the martyrs of old; the more of them that were burnt, the more they found.’1

Reports of contagion spread from Serbia to Hungary and Transylvania. Unusual deaths or sightings, outbreaks of plague, and the discovery that a corpse had mummified rather than decomposed prompted copycat explanations and exhumations. There were plenty of educated authors who investigated the phenomena and found the evidence for vampirism to be lacking, but they often dressed up their otherwise measured accounts with sensationalist descriptions. Michael Ranft, whose sober treatise on whether corpses munched through their shrouds was first published in 1725, reworked his account a decade later to include a graphic account of the Serbian vampires, which he published in his compendious Treatise on the Chewing and Gnawing of the Dead in Their Graves, in Which Is Revealed the True Nature of the Hungarian Vampires and Bloodsuckers (Ranft thought Serbia to be in Hungary).2

Vampirism was reported in Moravia too. In 1755, with the agreement of the church authorities, the body of a woman was exhumed, decapitated, and burnt on the grounds that her corpse had been attacking villagers at night. This was the fourth time in three decades that the diocese of Olomouc had sanctioned exhumation, including in 1731 the disinterment of seven children, whose bodies had all been burnt. On news of this latest episode, Maria Theresa sent two doctors to investigate, but the terms of their commission left in no doubt what the empress expected of them. As she explained, it would be of ‘great service to mankind’ if their report could wean ‘credulous people’ from their misbelief.3

The doctors’ findings were submitted to Gerhard van Swieten, who made a summary which he subsequently published as a pamphlet. Van Swieten trebled up as Maria Theresa’s court librarian, personal physician, and censor. Thoroughly imbued with the spirit of rationalism, van Swieten rejected the supernatural for the same reason that he refused to wear a wig, since neither might be logically explained. Unsurprisingly, van Swieten found the Moravian case to be the product of error and rumour, akin to the conviction that black cats harboured devils or to the magical potions of conjurors. He wrote that on those occasions when corpses were found undecomposed, natural explanations might be found, most obviously that the weather was cold. Likewise, strange symptoms often proved to be the result of commonplace illnesses.

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