Monte Cristo with a mask

Everything I've read indicates Batman was indeed inspired by Zorro.

Zorro originally appeared in a pulp magazine, in a serial called "The Curse of Capistrano" (written by Johnston McCulley) in 1919. The creator of Batman, Bob Kane, was greatly inspired by the character. He has been quoted thus;

"Zorro's use of a mask to conceal his identity as Don Diego gave me the idea of giving Batman a secret identity... Bruce Wayne would be a man of means who puts on a facade of being effete. Zorro rode a black horse called Toronado and would enter a cave and exit from a grandfather clock in the living room. The bat-cave was inspired by this cave in Zorro. I didn't want Batman to be a superhero with super powers.... So I made Batman an ordinary human being; he is just an athlete who has the physical prowess of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. [who starred in the silent film "The Mark of Zorro"], who was my all-time favorite hero in the movies." (From Robert and Katharine Morsberger's Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of "The Mark of Zorro," page XI.)

Kane was so enthralled with the Zorro character that when he was a child in the Bronx, he and his friends called themselves "The Crusading Zorros" and wore black masks. The Batman story itself begins with Bruce Wayne seeing his parents brutally murdered after they had attended a showing of "The Mark of Zorro."

The most probable inspiration for Zorro was the novel "The Scarlet Pimpernel;" this seems to be the general conclusion in the articles I have read.

The film, "Mask of Zorro," is similar to "Monte Cristo," but it is not the original story and the whole "hero loses everything and seeks revenge but in the process heals himself and those he loves" plot-line is commonly used in film, theatre, and literature.

Actually, Bob Kane has always been outward in saying that Zorro was his inspiration for Batman. I believe Mark of Zorro was even the film the Wayne family went to see when Bruce's parents were killed in the streets of Gotham.