The 'first' vampire

Anthony Hogg, in a comment to a recent post, asks: Who was the first vampire? Giure Grando, Peter Plogojowitz, or perhaps the vampires mentioned in Mercure Galant as quoted by Calmet.

As I wrote in an earlier post, there is a museum dedicated to Giure (or: Jure) Grando, commemorating him as the first vampire. As it says here: 'Jure Grando (1656) was the first classical Vampire to be mentioned in documented records.' Still, I would myself refer to Peter Plogojewitz (or however you prefer to spell his name) as the 'first' vampire, because that term is used in Provisor Frombald's report from Kisiljevo.

As for bloodsucking, well, most of these revenants tend to either strangle or by other means affect the living, and blood itself generally first turns up on the corpses that are exhumed, and it is then interpreted as blood drawn from the unfortunate victims of the revenant. But some kind of bloodsucking is actually mentioned in connection with the Mercure Galant article on the Polish Upiertz that Hogg also refers to in his comment. Still, the term 'vampire' is apparently not used, although Calmet claims that the articles 'parlent des oupires, vampires ou revenants'. There appears to be an excerpt from the 1693 issue in question on the web site of this author of a book on vampires, i.e. here, and it actually says that this Demon draws blood from the body of a living person or of cattle.

A Google search, of course, provides a number of other answers like Cain, Lilith, Vlad Tepes, George Bush...

De cruentationibus cadaverum

One of the 18th century texts usually referred to in books on vampires is the natural history of Poland, Historia naturalis curiosa regni Poloniæ, by the Jesuit Gabriel Rzaczynski (1664-1737) published in the Polish city Sandomierz in 1721. Apart from chapters on fossils, minerals and various other natural phenomena, Rzaczynski discusses the incorruptibility, flexibility and mobility of corpses, as well as other phenomena related to cadavers, like the belief that the corpse of a murdered person will start bleeding if it gets into contact with the murderer (‘Cadaver hominis violenter occisi, ad præsentiam occisoris, etiam in Provinciis nostris non semel sanguinem profudisse narratur.’).

Of particular interest here is the part on how malign spirits can appear in corpses and e.g. move its mouth, tongue and eyes. It can even make the corpse rise from the tomb and attack people: ‘etiam notatum est, quòd cadaver ejusmodi è tumulo exurgat, compita, domos obambulet, his & illis se conspiciendum præbeat, ac quosdam etia invadat, & suffocare nitatur’. Such a cadaver is called Upier if the corpse is male, and Upierzyca if female.

The full text of Rzaczynski’s natural history is available online at the Digital Library at Gdansk University of Technology.