Eleanor von Schwarzenberg was born Eleonore Elizabeth Amalia Magdalena on June 20, 1682, in the town of Melnik, in the region then known as Bohemia and now part of the Czech Republic. Her father was Prince Ferdinand August of the House of Lobkowitz, one of the oldest and most respected aristocratic families in the region, whose roots could be traced back to the 14th century. Ferdinand was also the second Duke of Sagan, a title and estate his father had purchased in 1646.
Little documentary evidence survives about Eleanor's early life, which was relatively unremarkable. She likely received the typical education of an aristocratic woman in the late 17th century, with an emphasis on dancing and court etiquette. She would probably have learned some Latin and almost certainly French, which was becoming the common language of European aristocratic courts.
On December 7, 1701, at the age of 19, Eleanor married Adam Franz Carl Eusebius, then heir apparent to the principality of Schwarzenberg, a major principality within the Archduchy of Austria. Adam succeeded as Prince of Schwarzenberg in 1703. Like many aristocratic unions of the early modern period, the marriage was effectively a financial transaction and an alliance. Eleanor's family, though aristocratic, was marrying into a more prestigious one, and Adam's father was to receive a dowry of 20,000 guilders, a huge sum. Three thousand guilders were paid up front, with the rest to follow in installments.
The marriage was fraught with difficulties from the start. When the union was negotiated between their fathers, Adam had been in a relationship with the daughter of the Austrian ambassador to Rome, whom he had married in secret. To allow the marriage to Eleanor to proceed, Adam was forced to quickly annul that secret marriage, poisoning the relationship with his new wife from the beginning.
Eleanor did not become pregnant in the months and years that followed. When a child did come, it was a girl named Maria Anna, born in December 1706. No male heir appeared to preserve the direct line of the Prince of Schwarzenberg.
The relationship grew more complicated when Eleanor's father married Adam's sister, Maria Elizabeth, making Eleanor's father also her brother-in-law. Friction also arose because Ferdinand failed to meet his dowry repayments to Adam. Eleanor suffered a miscarriage during another pregnancy in 1709, and accusations of infidelity arose against her. As a result, the couple spent much of the 1710s estranged and living in separate residences.
Reconciliation eventually came in 1719, when Adam inherited an enormous estate in Bohemia following the death of his aunt. The arguments over Eleanor's dowry suddenly became largely redundant, and tensions between Adam and Eleanor's father had already ended when Ferdinand died in 1715. In 1722, the long-awaited male heir, Joseph Adam, was born. After more than 20 years of a fractured and unhappy marriage, the union finally seemed to be settling down.
Life for the von Schwarzenbergs was relatively peaceful during the 1720s as they raised their young son. Adam rose in the ranks of the Bohemian nobility, finding favor with the Archduke of Austria and Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, who also ruled as King of Bohemia. Adam had already been made chamberlain of the Geheimrat, effectively the emperor's advisory council, in the 1710s, and in 1722 he was appointed to a senior position within the royal household in Vienna. Adam and Eleanor therefore spent much of the 1720s at the imperial capital. Adam was finally made a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece, the senior chivalric order within the Austrian lands.
Given his senior position, it is hardly surprising that Adam was a regular hunting companion of Charles. It is altogether more surprising that this pastime cost Adam his life. On June 10, 1732, Adam joined Charles on a hunting trip at Brandeis near Prague. Later that day, Charles, who suffered from poor vision, shot Adam after mistaking him for a deer, though other accounts claimed Adam simply happened to be in the line of fire. Adam died the following day from his wounds.
Driven by guilt at having killed his longtime friend and advisor, Charles took Eleanor's son Joseph under his wing and bestowed a large pension on Eleanor. She spent her remaining years managing the von Schwarzenberg estate.
In the late 1730s, Eleanor's health began to deteriorate rapidly. It is said she became extremely skinny and weak. As medical interventions were still very primitive, she turned to folk remedies, including the use of narwhal horn, the tusk of an arctic whale referred to as a unicorn horn in early modern Europe and more valuable than gold by weight because of belief in its medicinal properties. We now know the narwhal horn would not have helped cure her condition.
Her condition continued to worsen. She could hardly eat, drink, or sleep, resting only at certain times during the day. Claims surrounding her life state that she was extremely pale and, because of her illness, began to employ various witches, alchemists, and others with strange appearances in hopes of improving her condition.
Because of this, and because Charles had accidentally killed her husband, he decided to send Eleanor one of his best doctors. The doctor eventually arrived at the Schwarzenberg estate and apparently claimed she looked like a walking corpse and that her room was constantly shaded because sunlight disturbed her. It was subsequently claimed that Eleanor kept caged wolves in the basement of her estate, as she had spent years drinking their milk to improve her fertility, though these rumors appear unfounded.
With the passage of time, Eleanor continued to worsen and was in immense pain. Her screams reportedly became a frequent occurrence at her palace, terrifying all who heard them. After years of suffering, she died at the Palace Schwarzenberg in Vienna on May 5, 1741, at the age of 58.
Following her death, an autopsy confirmed she had what we now know as cervical cancer. She was also suffering from several tumors, one of which was larger than a tennis ball. Before she died, she asked that her heart be buried next to her husband, while her body was buried in the Church of Saint Rita in Cesky Krumlov in the Czech Republic.
At the time, fear of vampires was very much a real thing. Local townspeople began disinterring the bodies of the recently deceased and chopping off their heads, afraid they might be vampires. Some had stakes driven through them and others were burnt.
Legend has it that some locals were convinced the princess had become a vampire and that she was seen walking through nearby towns and cemeteries after her death. Other more far-fetched tales claimed she was seen biting the corpses of the recently deceased and sucking out their blood. For years afterward, stories of vampires continued to circulate in the region, and her name was supposedly considered damned for some time. Eventually these tales faded into myth and the rumors were forgotten.
Due to the strange circumstances surrounding the end of her life, as well as her medical history, it may be possible that some townsfolk actually believed her to be a vampire or in some way related to the occult. Yet there is little concrete evidence from the time to confirm this. The legends surrounding her life are many, and it can be hard to separate fact from fiction. Despite this, in recent years she has been labeled a vampire princess.
In 2007, Eleanor was the subject of a major investigative documentary that premiered on Austrian television, titled "The Vampire Princess." The documentary speculated that Eleanor had engaged in vampirism and was the inspiration for "Dracula," the gothic horror novel written by Irish Victorian novelist Bram Stoker and published in 1897.
The belief that Eleanor might have been the basis for Stoker's magnum opus has some arguments in its favor. Dracula once had an alternative first chapter to the one eventually published. This earlier draft indicates Stoker was inspired not by a man but a woman, and that this woman was a princess of the Austrian state. References in the manuscript version pointed to the region in the modern-day Czech Republic where Eleanor would have lived in the first half of the 18th century.
It was also claimed that Eleanor had earlier been the inspiration for a poem titled "Lenore," written in 1773 and published the following year by German author Gottfried August Burger. This was a gothic ballad that, while not really featuring a typical vampire, had elements of vampirism and is seen as a major early influence on the development of vampire literature. The poem is set in Bohemia around the von Schwarzenberg estate, and the titling of Burger's poem as "Lenore," an abbreviated version of Eleanor, led the documentarians in 2007 to claim Eleanor had been the basis for Burger's work as well as Stoker's over a hundred years later.
Yet these attributions are quite circumstantial, as was the other evidence presented in "The Vampire Princess." For instance, it was claimed that the folk remedies Eleanor used to try to cure her ailments were indicative of a form of occultism, but in pre-modern times such folk remedies were very widely used throughout Europe.
Perhaps the most interesting piece of evidence presented by the documentarians concerned the von Schwarzenberg family crypt in the town of Cesky Krumlov in the south of Bohemia. Both Eleanor and her husband Adam had been buried in the Church of Saint Vitus, but Eleanor's heart was removed and placed in an urn, which was then interred in a small cellar on the left side of the chapel next to Adam's heart. Today a plaque over the cellar reads that the hearts of Adam and his wife Eleanora, princes of Schwarzenberg and dukes of Krumlov, are stored there.
By modern sensibilities this is perhaps a strange case, as modern funerary and burial traditions do not generally involve removing the hearts of the deceased and interring them separately from their bodies. The makers of "The Vampire Princess" were anxious to stress that this was indicative of some form of occultism on Eleanor's part. Yet by the standards of 18th-century central Europe, there was nothing too uncommon about this. Indeed, the Habsburg royal family of Austria had a similar tomb constructed in Vienna in which the hearts of senior members of the family were kept entirely separate from their bodies.
There was therefore little concrete evidence to corroborate the argument that Princess Eleanor von Schwarzenberg engaged in vampirism and was accordingly the inspiration for Bram Stoker's "Dracula." The legends regarding her life, referring to Eleanor as a vampire princess, are fascinating but are likely nothing more than that: legends.