Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
3
In the Shadow
of the Cross
When Christianity first landed on the shores of Italy around 40 CE, the belief in vampires had long existed among the pagan peoples of Europe. Born from the teachings of a small rabble of Jewish missionaries, Christianity spread across the land replacing, incorporating, or conquering all others before it. Initially the fledgling church met with stiff resistance from Roman rulers, who scoffed at its monotheistic doctrine of salvation and were enraged that believers refused to bow before Roman divinity. Almost from the start, persecutions hounded the new faith wherever it cropped up, and accusations of child sacrifice, cannibalism, and blood drinking were commonly leveled against it.
In even the farthest-flung provinces of the Roman Empire, Christians were dragged from their homes and imprisoned or tortured until they denounced their faith. Those who refused faced the threat of public execution in the arena by some of the cruelest methods possible, including crucifixion, burning at the stake, stoning, or within the jaws of a hungry lion. Conditions such as these drove the church underground, and small groups were forced to congregate secretly in the back rooms of homes or in the dark catacombs of the city’s burial grounds.
Eventually the storm of Roman persecutions passed, and Christianity came to outlast even the Caesars themselves. What began as a grassroots movement among the downtrodden and displaced in time gained inroads into the more affluent levels of society as well. In 312 CE, Emperor Constantine I adopted the cross as his standard at the Battle of Milvian Bridge after a vision from God guaranteed him victory should his men fight under the Christian symbol. Following this miraculous victory over a much larger force, Constantine converted to Christianity and went on to become the sole ruler of the Roman Empire. Suddenly the church found itself at the head of a vast kingdom stretching from the misty isles of the Britons to the exotic lands of North Africa and the ancient kingdoms of the East.
Dark Days
At the beginning of the church’s reign, it paid little heed to the issue of vampirism, preferring to view it as the product of backward pagan imaginations to be discouraged with the light of reason whenever possible. In 1054, however, an event occurred that shook Christianity to its very core and ushered in a new age of turmoil and strife that forever changed the face of the church and forced it to confront such beliefs head on. Known by historians as the “Great Schism,” the change came about when the Eastern and Greek section of the church centered in Constantinople formally broke from the Western and Latin section based in Rome. The East, with its inclination towards philosophy and mysticism, became known as the Eastern Orthodox Church, while the West, which was guided by a more legalistic mentality, became known as the Roman Catholic Church.
Of course nothing was cordial about the split, as Pope Leo IX of the Roman branch excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius, who returned the favor with his own excommunication of the pope. Both sides pointed to doctrinal issues such Rome’s claim to universal papal supremacy or changes to the Nicene Creed, but the truth of the matter lay in larger factors that were sweeping the land at the time, affecting not only the church but the very fabric of European society itself.
Europe was entering one of the darkest periods in its history, filled with waves of foreign invaders, internal conflicts, devastating wars, famines, and unstoppable plagues that consigned entire villages to the grave. Weakened by divisions, heresies, and a growing Islamic presence in the east, it’s only natural that cracks should appear within the church. How they reacted to these pressures, however, was a different matter altogether, as the church found itself taking an increasingly harder line against anything that threatened its security and supremacy.
As early as 1184, the Roman Catholic branch reacted by sanctioning a series of inquisitions to stamp out heretics and other enemies of the church, which for the first time included witches and vampires. What was once the superstitious imagining of ignorant pagans was now public enemy number one in the eyes of the church, and even the most learned churchmen found themselves fearing the impenetrable forests and lonely crossroads at night, which they supposed teemed with all manner of vampire and devil. At first the religious tribunals of inquisitors had no more authority than to imprison or fine offenders, but as their power grew so too did their methods of persuasion, and untold numbers of innocent lives were lost at the hands of overzealous inquisitors who tortured and burned in the name of God.
With the church taking a much keener interest in the existence of vampires, it would come to produce some, if not all, of the most reliable research over the next few hundred years on the topic. Not only did church scholars, priests, and monks begin studying vampirism, but they also cast the creatures to fit more accurately within the Christian framework. In 1645 the Roman Catholic scholar and trained physician Leo Allatius penned the first systematic approach to vampires, entitled De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus, which when translated means “On Certain Modern Opinions among the Greeks.”
In this groundbreaking work, Allatius turned his attention to the Greek vampire, or vrykolakas, and transformed it from its previous pagan origins of the walking dead to a more sublimely evil creature enlisted to do the work of the devil. In one of the book’s most often-quoted passages, Allatius writes that “the corpse is entered by a demon which is the source of ruin to unhappy men. For frequently emerging from the tomb in the form of that body and roaming about the city and other inhabited places, especially by night, it betakes itself of any house it fancies, and, after knocking at the door, addresses one of the inmates in a loud tone. If the person answers he is done for: two days after that he dies” (Wright 1987, 38).
One the sources Allatius relied heavily upon as an authority for the work was the dreaded Malleus Maleficarum, or The Witch’s Hammer. Written in Germany in 1486 by the inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, the book was the witch-finder’s bible of its time and laid out the system by which witches existed and the procedures to find them out and convict them. Three conditions were said to be necessary for witchcraft to exist, which he noted were the devil, the witch, and the permission of God. Allatius likewise applied the same formula to the vampire, which the Malleus Maleficarum called succubus, and claimed that for vampires to exist all that was needed was the dead body, the devil, and the permission of God.
Ancient Foes
To the masses of European peasants who depended on the early church for its knowledge and divine protection against all evil creatures, the holy men who made up the church’s ranks were the superheroes of their time. Compared to the damnation and chaos the vampire represented, the church promised salvation and order—a light in a land that seemed to be devoured by darkness. The priest, after all, was the first one you called if you suspected a vampire may be lurking in your neighborhood, for it was he who had the knowledge and authority to fight such monsters. This relationship forever defined the church as the nemesis of the vampire in the traditions that followed, mixing the Christian motifs of crucifixes, holy water, blessed objects, the Eucharist, and sacred ground into the legends of the ancient creature.
For example, in the 1190s the English historian and churchman William of Newburgh drafted a fascinating work entitled Historia rerum Anglicarum, or the History of English Affairs, in which appeared the tale of a revenant plaguing the countryside. The sinister event was said to have occurred in the vicinity of Melrose Abbey, a monastery in the south of Scotland founded by an order of Cistercian monks in 1136. A priest famous for his corrupt and sinful ways, known as the “Hundeprest” because of his love for hunting rather than performing his religious obligations, died one day and was buried in the abbey’s adjacent cemetery. Soon after his demise, his corpse was seen wandering through the cemetery at night. At first the loathsome creature tried to enter the abbey but found it could not cross the holy structure’s entrance on account of the prayers of the monks within.
Forced away, the revenant roamed the countryside making terrible noises until it reached the bedchamber of its former mistress. Night after night it appeared to her until she could take no more and appealed to the monastery’s friars for help. To answer her desperate pleas, four monks set themselves over the priest’s tomb at night armed with whatever weapons they could find. The night was cold, and as midnight approached three of the monks left to warm themselves at a nearby house. No sooner had they passed from view than the revenant appeared to the remaining monk and rushed upon him with a terrible noise. The monk remained firm, however, and struck the creature with a mighty blow from his axe, causing it to retreat once more back into its grave. The next morning, the four monks gathered at the tomb of the priest and found the corpse with a large wound upon its side matching that of the monk’s axe from which fresh blood still flowed, filling the grave. The monks then carried the body some distance from the monastery, where they burned it and scattered the ashes to the wind.
A second account from the same source was reported to William of Newburgh by the archdeacon of Buckinghamshire and other religious men whom he does not name. Accordingly, in the county of Buckinghamshire, northwest of London, a certain man died and was laid in a tomb on the eve of Ascension Day, which is celebrated forty days after Easter and marks Christ’s ascension to heaven. Unexpectedly, on the following night the deceased man appeared in the bedchamber of his wife and nearly smothered her to death with his weight. For three nights these attacks continued until the wife surrounded herself with companions to guard her sleep, who chased the revenant away with loud shouts and other noises.
Denied one victim, it turned its attention to others in the village, who were also forced to keep guards while they slept. Even the village livestock was not safe from its evil mischief. Eventually the creature became bold enough to appear in daylight and assault its victims even while in the midst of groups of people. After some time of this, the inhabitants of the village could take no more and turned to the archdeacon of the county for help, who having no experience in such matters wrote to Bishop Hugh of Lincoln for instructions. The bishop, who was later canonized as a saint, consulted various church scholars of the time and was amazed to learn that such creatures had plagued other parts of Britain over the years and that the only remedy was to burn the revenant’s body. The thought of burning the body seemed sacrilegious to the bishop, however, so he wrote a letter of absolution with his own hand and ordered it placed in the grave of the vampire. When the letter arrived back at the village, the man’s tomb was opened and the letter placed upon its chest, and thereafter he never appeared again.
A final tale to help drive the point home can be found in William Ralston’s 1872 Songs of the Russian People, which despite its name is actually a book featuring some of the greatest examples of Slavic mythology, tradition, and folklore ever written. In one passage there is a brief tale about a terrible sinner who died one day and was taken to the local church so that a vigil could be kept over the body in preparation for burial. The sacristan who was to keep the watch and recite the psalms was a clever man and brought along a rooster with him. That night, as the twelfth hour approached, the corpse sprang from the coffin, and with its deadly jaws opened wide, rushed at the man. The sacristan quickly gave the bird a pinch, causing it to crow at that very moment. Thinking dawn had come, the vampire fell to the ground a motionless corpse.
Tales such as these played a role in the lives of the average European peasant that extended beyond mere storytelling. They also reinforced critical stereotypes the church wished to espouse, the most important of which was that the church could explain the existence of the creatures and knew how to dispose of them. Whether through divine prayer, absolution, the cold steel of an axe, or the cunning of the clergyman, the church was asserting its authority over the vampire. In almost every report or fragment of folklore to be found on vampires, one of the first things the frightened villagers do in each case is to enlist the aid of the local priest.
Excommunication
Even though both branches of the church seemed to develop a deep fascination with vampires and vampirism, the topic without a doubt found its most fertile ground in the domains of the Eastern Orthodox Church where pagan traditions still heavily influenced the people. One important circumstance that helped foster the belief in vampires was the church’s doctrine that the fate of a person’s soul was inexorably linked to the condition and care of the body after death. In the Eastern Orthodox Church there were generally five prescribed types of funeral rites that could be performed depending on the deceased’s station in life, which included services for laymen, children, monks, priests, and a special service for those buried during Bright Week, which is the week of Easter.
As discussed in the preceding chapter, funerary rites were closely observed to ensure the safety of the soul during its passage from the body to the afterlife, and any breach in the ritual could have dire consequences not only for the deceased but for the entire village. The process began with the corpse being ceremonially washed and anointed with sacred oils before being put on display in the home for a period of time. After the wake, the deceased was carried to the church, where services were conducted for the repose of the soul. The body was then placed in an anteroom of the church, where priests kept a vigil throughout the night reciting prayers and reading aloud from the Bible. The next morning a procession of mourners bearing crosses, flags, and censers of frankincense escorted the body to its final resting place, where more services were conducted and the coffin was lowered into the ground to be covered by dirt. Traditionally the church buried its dead facing the east towards the rising of the sun and then oriented the grave marker, which was usually a cross, at their feet rather than their head to ensure that the soul could pray facing the cross while it waited to be freed from the body.
After it lay in the ground for a specific period of time, priests and family members returned to the gravesite and carefully exhumed the body to examine it for clues as to the status of the person’s soul in the afterlife. The length of time the body was required to remain in the ground varied from region to region. In some areas the period was as short as twelve months, while in others, such as Romania, children were disinterred after three years, adults after five, and the elderly after seven. In the Orthodox faith the body’s decay was synonymous with the absolution of sins, and the soul could not be free until its former shell had turned to dust. If by some unnatural means the body did not decay, the soul could become trapped within and eventually turn to vampirism for nourishment. If the processes of the body were proceeding naturally and the bones showed to be white, it marked a sure sign that the soul had entered heaven and was now at peace. Once the priests were satisfied that all was well with the deceased, the bones were washed and dressed in fresh linen before receiving a second and final burial.
One of the fundamental differences between the Eastern and Western branches of the church was the very question of the body’s incorruptibility and how to interpret the phenomenon. For the Roman Catholic, the process was solely in the hands of God, and if a body remained undecayed after resting in the grave for a period of time it was a sign of sainthood, often accompanied by the fragrance of flowers or other pleasant odors. For the Greek Orthodox, however, it meant the body had become fouled by evil and/or that the church had placed a ban of excommunication upon the deceased so the earth would not receive it. Excommunication was a tool used by the priesthood against those who had committed grievous sins against the church and its authority, and it excluded the offender from the community of the church and therefore from God. This power, the Eastern Church insisted, was invested in them from God, as evidenced in the Book of Matthew (16:19) by the passage “And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
For all intents and purposes, excommunication was a punishment worse than death for a Christian and was frequently reserved for unrepentant criminals, heretics, suicides, sorcerers, and as in the case of the Great Schism, political enemies too. Those suffering from this ecclesiastical ban could not enter the kingdom of heaven nor would their body decompose after death unless the sentence was revoked by a pronouncement of absolution over the remains by a priest. In a manuscript discovered in the Church of St. Sophia at Thessalonica, an interesting commentary describes the conditions found in excommunicated bodies and provides insight on how the church interpreted them. Anyone, it says, who had a curse placed upon them or did not fulfill certain obligations to their parents would remain partially undecayed after death. Anyone sanctioned by the church would appear yellow and their fingers would shrivel. A body that appeared white meant that it had been excommunicated by divine law. Finally, a body that appeared black had been excommunicated by a bishop.
Examples of such ecclesiastical curses litter the early histories of the church, including the tale of a man who converted to Christianity from Islam, but because he remained sinful and impious he was excommunicated by the church. After his death he was buried in the Greek Church of St. Peter the Apostle in Naples, where his body remained undecayed for many years. When the Metropolitan Athansius and several other churchmen visited the site, they preformed a solemn absolution over his and several other undecayed bodies held at the church, all of which immediately turned to dust.
Another was a story recounted by the noted seventeenth-century Cambridge historian Sir Paul Rycaut, who claimed to have received it from a preacher named Sofronia in Smyrna, Turkey. According to the tale, there was once a man infamous for his many crimes living in the Despotate of Morea, which at the time was a southern province in the Byzantine Empire. After yet another heinous crime, the man fled authorities to the isle of Milos in the Aegean Sea, where he died in an excommunicated state. Following his burial, the island’s inhabitants began to complain of his apparition returning at night and haunting them in the manner of the bloodthirsty vrykolaka. According to custom, the suspected vampire’s grave was opened and the body within found to be undecayed and full of fresh blood. Initially the islanders wanted to dismember the corpse and boil the parts in wine to dislodge the evil spirit that had taken residence within, but the man’s friends objected and petitioned the church (along with a large sum of money) to grant a reprieve. A letter was then sent to Constantinople begging the Patriarch to grant the deceased an absolution and requesting that the time and date of its performance be written down as proof.
Back on the windswept isle of Milos the coffin had been taken from the grave and filled with grapes, apples, nuts, and other food to sate the fiend’s hunger. Suddenly the coffin began to shake and rattle, to the great fear of those gathered nearby, but when they had built up enough courage to open it they found the body had turned to dust. When the letter of absolution arrived from Constantinople, the people were amazed to discover that the time and date of the absolution and the miracle were the same.
This notion of the church’s authority over both the spiritual and corporal aspects of its subjects’ lives was used in more than just domestic examples and was often heralded as a sign that Christianity was indeed the one true religion. In the eastern approaches to the kingdoms ruled by the Orthodox Church, the presence of Islamic nations meant constant encroachments, skirmishes, and outright warfare. With armies of infidels always at its gates, the church did not hesitate to use the issue of incorruptibility as part of its propaganda campaign against Islamic nations.
In the sixteenth century, the German classical scholar and historian Martin Crusius circulated a report regarding Mehmed II, the Ottoman sultan who conquered Constantinople in 1453. At the time there appeared in the court of Mehmed II a number of men versed in Greek and Arabic literature who were investigating the claims made by the Christian church. After tales of Greek priests halting the decomposition of corpses reached these investigators’ ears, the sultan insisted that the Patriarch Maximus of Constantinople produce evidence of their authenticity. Not wanting to incur his new ruler’s wrath, Maximus hastily convened a council of priests who managed to produce the undecayed body of a woman who had been excommunicated by the previous patriarch for terrible crimes. Once handed over to the sultan’s officers, the body of the woman was placed within a bound coffin marked by the sultan’s seal and guarded by his soldiers. After three days, the priests gathered beside it and chanted a liturgy while the patriarch recited an absolution. Following the service, the coffin was opened and the body within found to be nothing more than dust and bones. The sultan was said to be so amazed by this turn of events that he exclaimed to his officers that such proof could only mean that Christianity was the one true religion.
Another tale highlighting the political and religious tensions between Christianity and Islam at the time concerns a bishop who pronounced the ban of excommunication upon a man who died and remained uncorrupted. The bishop, being deceived by Satan, so the story goes, renounced his faith and converted to Islam. The Patriarch of Constantinople summoned the former bishop and requested that he remove the ban so that the man’s soul might find release. At first he refused, claiming that it was a Christian matter and since he was no longer a Christian he would have nothing to do with the rites of absolution. The patriarch pleaded nevertheless, and the former bishop relented and performed the rites over the corpse of the excommunicated man, which turned to dust as soon as he was finished. Amazed by what he had just witnessed, he immediately fled to the chief magistrate of the district and related the facts as he had witnessed them. Recanting his Islamic conversion, he proclaimed aloud to all that Christianity was the true religion. Although he was warned by his fellow Turks of the consequences should he continue speaking thus, he only grew bolder in his witnessing. Eventually the former bishop was arrested and executed, but all the while he maintained his faith and was said to have died happily.
A Double-Edged Sword
Regardless of its value as a political tool, there were instances in which propagating the belief in vampires also meant taking responsibility for the outcome—and as with any well-sharpened sword, if not used properly the welder could find it cut both ways. In certain isolated incidents, the presence of a suspected vampire in the community was blamed on the local clergy, whose obvious curse, the villagers reasoned, had created the monster. In one story, a bishop was traveling through the Despotate of Morea when he was accosted by highwaymen on a secluded section of road. The robbers quickly relieved the bishop of all his worldly goods and made off, but before too long they began to worry that the man of faith might excommunicate them and therefore doom them to become vampires. Fearing the worst, they reasoned there was only one way to set things right, and so overtaking the bishop once again, they murdered him along the roadway.
A more modern example occurred during the Theriso uprising on the island of Crete in 1905. A native of the municipality of Theriso became gravely ill one day, and it was assumed by many that he was the victim of a curse by the local priest. Friends and relatives of the victim threatened the priest that if he did not remove the curse and the man died that the priest would soon follow. Unfortunately, the man grew worse and died, and true to their word a group gathered before the church, dragged the hapless priest outside, and shot him to death.
Soon after the reports of Arnod Paole and Peter Plogojowitz appeared in newspapers in the early 1700s and the vampire craze reached a fever pitch, the Roman Catholic portion of the church began to lose interest in the topic. The two cases launched a heated debate in the German Lutheran and Catholic universities as to whether vampires truly existed. Cardinal Schtrattembach, the Roman Catholic bishop of Olmütz, turned to Rome for guidance on how the vampire reports flooding in should be handled. Rome then turned the matter over to Archbishop Giuseppe Davanzati, of Trani, Italy, who had spent many years studying the problem and had written an influential work entitled Dissertazione sopra i Vampiri on the subject in 1744.
Davanzati, like many others involved in the German debates, had taken a rather skeptical view of the topic and advised Rome that the reports emanating from Eastern Europe were a mixture of superstitious imaginings and latent pagan customs. While these influences in and of themselves may still be the work of the devil, he reasoned, the church’s true role should be directed towards the poor soul making the claims rather than the vampire itself. The church found this reasoning to be sound, and from thenceforth adopted it as policy.
While vampires and vampirism waned among the churches of the west, they continued to find support with the Orthodox traditions of the east for some time to come. Even today, cloudy visages of its past stain the more obscure rituals of the Eastern church, even if some of the meaning has been lost, and from time to time news reports crop up detailing an incident among some isolated community regarding a belief in vampires. Throughout its long and storied history, the church’s view of vampires has changed according to the age it found itself in, but there is no denying its involvement in the folklore of the creatures.
Yet even as the church encouraged the view that it was the people’s champion against all that was evil in the world, somewhere along the way it discovered a powerful and dangerous tool in its struggle against the vampire. A little bit of fear, it quickly learned, went a long way in controlling the masses, and what better way to fill the coffers and bring in the flock each Sunday then to encourage the notion that vampires indeed existed. On the one hand, the church appeared to offer a solution to the vampire plagues and vowed to fight the creatures at every turn, while on the other hand it breathed new life into it for its own ends. Who knows if the legends of the vampire would even exist today if it hadn’t been for the church? Ironic that what the church sought to destroy, it only ensured for generations to come.