July 1, 1937
București, Kingdom of România
Jean-Bernard and I got mildly soused in a friendly pub with a young Romanian scholar named Liv, a boy not more than a couple years older than Huxley. Not only had Liv heard about Vlad Dracula’s war ring, but he knew all sorts of stories about it. Most of them were half-baked (or maybe that was me after several glasses of pălincă), but the most interesting were stories about who owned the ring after Vlad.
According to Liv, the ring has been hidden dozens of times for hundreds of years, but it is always found. Gilles de Rais was the first to acquire it after Vlad. He was a noble French knight and a comrade-in-arms to Joan of Arc. Then he obtained the ring and killed a hundred children.
Then Elizabeth Báthory, the Blood Countess of Hungary, supposedly owned the ring. She’s said to have murdered up to six hundred girls. (The court stopped counting officially at eighty.) The bone ring worn on her thumb was not able to be removed, so her entire thumb was cut off, ring and all, before she was imprisoned in a tower, where she remained until her death.
John Dee, infamous court magician to Queen Elizabeth, also got his hands on it. Dee’s equally infamous assistant, Edward Kelley, said the ring instructed him that the two men should share their property. And wives. But when he said the ring told him to kill, Dee drew the line and sold it, saying it was bedeviled.
And let’s not forget Peter Niers, a German bandit who dabbled in the black arts. He confessed to killing five hundred people before he was executed—broken on the wheel.
Several politicians acquired it. And a pope. Oh, and the son of a Turkish sultan. Actually, it was rumored to have left Europe and crossed into the Ottoman Empire twice. The first time was a few months after Vlad Țepeș was beheaded; the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus sent it to the Turks in exchange for Vlad’s head. The second time, it was secreted away in a mosque for five years in the 1800s before they wanted nothing more to do with it and sent it back to Wallachia.
That’s what I’m most interested in—that second time it returned to Europe.
Where did the Turks send it?