In The Beginning

“Almost three centuries have passed since a curious rash of hysterical vampire epidemics at the fringes of the Habsburg Empire first brought this type of oral folklore from the mysterious Balkans and the Transylvanian region into Western consciousness. Although there had previously been no precisely equivalent folklore about the ambulatory dead in the Roman Catholic and Protestant countries of Western Europe, the Inquisition’s prosecutions of people denounced as witches were still fresh in the public memory. In fact it was the possible recrudescence of such intolerable social injustice that prompted Empress Maria Theresa to send a noted scientist to a Slavic region on the north-eastern frontier to learn what these epidemics were all about and then to advise her on how to prevent a new round of witch hunts from emerging.”

From: Slayers and their Vampires – A Cultural History of Killing the Dead by Bruce A McClelland