On the tenth of June, 1732, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI rode out on a hunting expedition near Brandeis, not far from Prague, with his close friend and advisor, Prince Adam Franz Karl Eusebius of Schwarzenberg. The emperor’s eyesight was notoriously poor, and in the chaos of the chase, he mistook the prince for a deer and shot him. Adam died the following day from his wounds. His death left behind a widow, Princess Eleonore von Schwarzenberg, whose life had already been marked by decades of private unhappiness, and whose final years would become the subject of a strange and enduring legend: that she had become a vampire.
Eleonore was born Eleonore Elisabeth Amalia Magdalena on June 20, 1682, in Mělník, a town in the region then known as Bohemia, which today forms part of the Czech Republic. She came from one of the oldest and most respected aristocratic families in the region, the House of Lobkowitz, which traced its lineage back to the fourteenth century. Her father, Prince Ferdinand August, was the second Duke of Sagan, a title and estate purchased by his own father in 1646. Little is documented about Eleonore’s early life, but as a daughter of the high nobility in the late seventeenth century, she would have received the customary education of her class: dancing, court etiquette, some Latin, and almost certainly French, which by then had become the common language of Europe’s aristocratic courts.
At the age of nineteen, on December 7, 1701, Eleonore was married to Adam Franz Karl Eusebius, the heir apparent to the princely House of Schwarzenberg, one of the most prominent noble families within the Archduchy of Austria. Their marriage, like so many aristocratic unions of the early modern period, was essentially a contract. Eleonore’s family paid a substantial dowry, 20,000 guilders, a huge sum, in exchange for the social prestige of marrying into a more powerful house. But the marriage was poisoned from the start.
Before the union was arranged, Adam had secretly married the daughter of the Austrian ambassador to Rome. To proceed with the marriage to Eleonore, he was forced to annul that secret union. Eleonore knew it, and the resentment between husband and wife never fully healed. For years, the couple produced no children at all, and when a daughter, Maria Anna, finally arrived in December 1706, there was still no male heir to secure the Schwarzenberg line.
Matters grew worse. Eleonore’s father married Adam’s sister, making her father also her brother-in-law, an awkward entanglement even by the standards of aristocratic dynasties. Then Ferdinand began failing to make his dowry payments, and when Eleonore miscarried in 1709, accusations of infidelity were raised against her. For most of the 1710s, the couple lived estranged, in separate residences, their marriage a hollow formality.
Reconciliation came only in 1719, after Adam inherited a vast Bohemian estate from his aunt, which made the ongoing arguments over the dowry largely irrelevant. Eleonore’s father had died in 1715, removing another source of friction. Then, in 1722, after more than two decades of a fractured marriage, the long-awaited male heir was born: Joseph Adam. The family’s life finally settled into a calmer rhythm during the 1720s.
Adam, meanwhile, had risen steadily in the ranks of the Bohemian nobility. He had gained the favor of Charles VI, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, serving as a chamberlain on the emperor’s privy council in the 1710s. In 1722, he was given a senior position within the royal household in Vienna, and he and Eleonore spent much of their time at the imperial court. Later, Adam was made a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece, the highest chivalric order in Austrian lands.
He was, unsurprisingly given his position, a regular hunting companion of the emperor. It was this pastime that cost him his life. After Adam’s death, Charles VI, driven by guilt over killing his longtime friend and advisor, took Eleonore’s son under his protection and granted Eleonore a substantial pension. She spent her remaining years managing the Schwarzenberg estates.
But in the late 1730s, her health began to deteriorate rapidly. Accounts describe her as becoming extremely thin and weak, barely able to eat, drink, or sleep, resting only at certain hours of the day. Her skin was reportedly very pale. Medical knowledge at the time was primitive, so Eleonore turned to folk remedies, including the use of narwhal horn, the tusk of an Arctic whale, which in early modern Europe was called a unicorn horn and was valued more than gold by weight because of its supposed medicinal properties.
It would not have helped. As her condition worsened, rumors began to circulate that she employed witches, alchemists, and other strange practitioners in a desperate search for a cure. Charles VI, still mindful of the role he had played in her husband’s death, sent her one of his best physicians. When the doctor arrived at the Schwarzenberg estate, he reportedly said she looked like a walking corpse.
Her room, it was claimed, was perpetually shaded, because sunlight disturbed her. Later legends also asserted that she kept caged wolves in the basement of her estate and had spent years drinking their milk in a futile attempt to improve her fertility, though no credible evidence supports that story. In her final years, Eleonore was in immense pain. Screams were said to have become a frequent occurrence at her palace, terrifying all who heard them.
She died at the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna on May 5, 1741, at the age of fifty-eight. An autopsy revealed that she had suffered from cervical cancer, as well as multiple tumors, one of which was larger than a tennis ball. Before her death, she requested that her heart be buried next to her husband. Her body was interred in the Church of Saint Vitus in Český Krumlov, in the south of modern-day Czech Republic, while her heart was placed in an urn and buried in a small cellar beside Adam’s heart.
Vampire fears were very real in eighteenth-century Europe. In some regions, local townspeople had begun disinterring the bodies of the recently deceased, decapitating them, driving stakes through them, or burning them, out of a genuine fear that the dead might rise. Legend has it that some locals became convinced that Princess Eleonore had become a vampire, claiming she was seen walking through nearby towns and cemeteries after her death. Other, more far-fetched tales said she was seen biting the corpses of the recently deceased and sucking their blood.
For some time, her name was reportedly considered cursed in the region, but eventually the stories faded into myth and were largely forgotten. In 2007, however, those forgotten tales were revived. An Austrian television documentary titled The Vampire Princess aired, speculating that Eleonore had engaged in vampirism and had served as the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the famous Gothic horror novel published in 1897. The documentary pointed to some intriguing circumstantial evidence.
Stoker, it was noted, had an earlier draft of Dracula that indicated he was inspired not by a man but by a woman, a princess of an Austrian state, in a region that corresponded to where Eleonore had lived. It was also claimed that Eleonore had inspired a poem called Lenore, written in 1773 by Gottfried August Bürger. That Gothic ballad, while not featuring a conventional vampire, contained elements of vampirism and is considered an important early influence on vampire literature. It was set in Bohemia, near the Schwarzenberg estates, and the title Lenore, an abbreviated form of Eleonore, led the documentary makers to claim Eleonore was its inspiration.
Yet these attributions remained largely circumstantial. The folk remedies she used were, by pre-modern standards, widely common across Europe and were not evidence of occultism. Even the practice of burying her heart separately from her body, which the documentary presented as suspicious, was not unusual in eighteenth-century Central Europe. The Habsburgs themselves had constructed a tomb in Vienna in which the hearts of senior family members were kept entirely separate from their bodies.
Princess Eleonore von Schwarzenberg died in terrible pain, her life shaped by an unhappy marriage, a long estrangement, and the cruel irony that the emperor who killed her husband had once been her family’s patron. The claim that she became a vampire and inspired Dracula rests on slender evidence. The legends that have attached themselves to her name are fascinating, but they remain exactly that: legends.