Elizabeth Báthory
gigatos | April 4, 2022
Summary
Countess Erzsébet Báthory of Ecsed (Hungarian: Báthory Erzsébet, ˈbaːtoɾi ˈɛɾʒeːbɛt) (Nyírbátor, Hungary, August 7, 1560 – Čachtice Castle, present-day Trenčín, Slovakia, August 21, 1614), Hispanicized as Elizabeth Bathory, was a Hungarian aristocrat, belonging to one of the most powerful families in Hungary. She has gone down in history for having been accused and convicted of being responsible for a series of crimes motivated by her obsession with beauty that earned her the nickname of the Bloody Countess: she is the greatest murderer in the history of mankind, with 650 deaths. One of her ancestors was Vlad Tepes, ”The Impaler”.
He was born into one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Transylvania: the Erdély. His parents, Counts Anna and George Bathory, were cousins. His maternal grandfather was Stephen Bathory of Somlyó and his maternal uncle was Stephen I Bathory, prince of Transylvania and Polish king between 1575 and 1586. The coat of arms of his family consists of three silver boar”s teeth on a field of gules. Among the rest of the family members are a cardinal and several princes. His childhood was spent in the castle of Csejte and before he was six years old he suffered attacks of what can be considered today epilepsy.
At the age of eleven she was betrothed to her sixteen-year-old cousin Ferenc Nádasdy, count (formerly baron). At the age of twelve she took up residence in her fiancé”s castle and never had a good relationship with her mother-in-law, Ursula. Unlike what was typical at the time, he received a good education and his culture surpassed that of most men of the time. He was exceptional, “he spoke perfect Hungarian, Latin and German, while most Hungarian nobles could neither spell nor write, even the Prince of Transylvania was practically illiterate”.
At the age of fifteen, on May 8, 1575, she married Ferenc Nádasdy, who was then 20 years old. The ceremony took place in great luxury at Varannó Castle (its Slovak name is Vranov nad Toplou) and was attended by more than 4,500 guests, including Emperor Maximilian II, who was unable to attend. It was Ferenc who adopted his wife”s maiden name, much more illustrious than his own. They went to live at Čachtice Castle in the company of his mother-in-law Ursula and other members of the household. The young count was not around much: most of the time he was fighting in one of the many wars in the area (impaling his enemies), which earned him the nickname “Black Knight of Hungary”. There is an epistolary record in which Ferenc and Erzsébet exchanged information on the most appropriate ways to punish their servants, which was normal among Eastern European nobles of the time. The possessions of this Hungarian noble couple were enormous, and tight control over the local population of Hungarian, Romanian and Slovak origin was also required.
Ferenc and Isabella hardly saw each other due to the former”s war activities, so it was not until 1585, ten years after their marriage, that the countess gave birth to her first daughter, Anna, and in the following nine years she also gave birth to Ursula and Catherine. Finally, in 1598, she gave birth to her only son, Pablo.
On January 4, 1604, the Black Knight of Hungary, as Ferenc was known for his fierceness in combat, died of a sudden illness after one of his battles and left Elizabeth, who was 44 years old, a widow. This is when, according to his accusers, his crimes began. To begin with, she dismissed her much-hated mother-in-law from the castle, along with the rest of the Nádasdy family; the servants whom she had protected up to that time were taken to the cellars and there they finally received the punishments that, according to Elizabeth, they deserved.
This left Elizabeth in a peculiar situation: feudal lady of an important Transylvanian county, involved in all the political intrigues of those turbulent times, but without an army to protect her power. Around the same time, her cousin Gábor I Báthory became Prince of Transylvania, with the economic support of the very rich Erzsébet. Gábor (Gabriel) soon got into a war against the Germans for complex political reasons. This put her in danger of being accused of treason by King Matthias II of Hungary. Widowed as she was, she found herself more vulnerable and isolated than ever.
It is around this time that rumors begin to be heard that something very sinister is going on in the castle of Čachtice. Through a local Protestant pastor, stories come that the countess practices witchcraft (explicitly, black magic), and for this she uses the blood of young girls – a very popular accusation at the time, similar to those made against Jews and dissidents. King Matthias II of Hungary orders a cousin of Elisabeth, Count Palatine George Thurzó – an enemy of her – to take the place with his soldiers and to conduct an investigation in the castle. Since the lady of Báthory had no military force of her own, there was no resistance.
According to Count Thurzó”s investigation, numerous tortured girls in various states of exsanguination were found in the castle, and a pile of corpses was found in the surrounding area. In 1612 a trial began in Bitcse (Bytča in Slovak). Elizabeth refused to plead innocent or guilty, and did not appear, invoking her noble rights. Those who did, by force, were her collaborators. John Ujváry, the butler (known as Ficzkó), testified that at least 37 “unmarried women” between the ages of eleven and twenty-six had been murdered in his presence, six of whom he had personally recruited to work in the castle. The prosecution concentrated on the murders of young noblewomen, as those of the handmaids were of no importance. At the sentencing all were found guilty, some of witchcraft, some of murder and the rest of cooperation.
All of Elizabeth”s followers, except the witches, were beheaded and their corpses burned; this was the fate of her collaborator Ficzkó. The witches Dorothea, Helena and Piroska had their fingers torn off with red-hot tongs “for having soaked them in the blood of Christians” and were burned alive. A local bourgeois woman accused of cooperation was also executed. Katryna, who at fourteen was the youngest of Elizabeth”s assistants, was spared at the express request of a survivor, although she received a hundred lashes to the body.
But the law prevented Isabella, a noblewoman, from being prosecuted. She was locked up in her castle. After bringing her into her chambers, the masons sealed doors and windows, leaving only a small hole for food to pass through. Finally, King Matthias II of Hungary called for her head because of the young aristocrats who had supposedly died at her hands, but her cousin convinced him to delay the execution of the sentence for life. So she was sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement. This sentence also implied the confiscation of all her property, which Matias had been seeking for some time.
On July 31, 1614, the 55-year-old Elizabeth dictated her last will and testament to two priests of the cathedral of the archbishopric of Esztergom. She ordered that what remained of the family possessions be divided among her children.
On August 21, 1614, one of the jailers saw her lying face down on the floor. Countess Elizabeth Bathory was dead after spending four long years locked up, without even seeing the sunlight. They intended to bury her in the church of Čachtice, but the local inhabitants decided that it was an aberration for the “Infamous Lady” to be buried in the village, and moreover on sacred ground. Finally, and as she was “one of the last descendants of the Ecsed line of the Báthory family” she was taken to be buried in the Báthory family crypt in the village of Ecsed, in northeastern Hungary, the place of origin of the powerful family. The location of her body is unknown today. All her documents were sealed for more than a century, and it was forbidden to speak of her throughout the country.
Two years later, Elizabeth”s daughters and son were finally accused of treason for their mother”s support of the war against the Germans; Anna Báthory, a cousin of the countess, was tortured for this in 1618, when she was 24 years old, but survived. Eventually most of the Báthory-Nádasdy family fled to Poland; some returned after 1640. A grandson would be executed in 1671 for opposing the German emperor.
The Hungarian National Archives holds a wealth of documentation about her, particularly personal letters and trial records. However, her mythical diaries, as well as her original portrait, are unaccounted for.
According to legend, Erzsébet Báthory (Isabel, in English), was a cruel serial killer obsessed with beauty, who used the blood of her young maids and wards to keep herself young at a time when a 44-year-old woman was dangerously approaching old age. Legend has it that Elizabeth saw a decrepit old woman passing through a village and mocked her, and the old woman, at her mockery, cursed her, telling her that the noblewoman would also grow old and look like her someday.
According to the testimony of Count Palatine George Thurzó (cousin and enemy of the Countess, appointed general investigator by the King), when his host arrived at the castle on December 30, 1610, he found no opposition, nor anyone to receive them. The first thing they saw was a servant girl in the stocks in the courtyard, in an agonizing state due to a beating that had fractured all her hip bones. This was common practice and did not attract their attention, but on gaining access to the interior they found a girl bleeding to death in the hall, and another who was still alive although her body had been pierced. In the dungeon they found a dozen still breathing, some of whom had been punctured and cut several times over the past few weeks. From beneath the castle they exhumed the bodies of 50 more girls. And Isabel”s diary counted their victims day by day, in minute detail, until a total of 612 young women were tortured and murdered over six years. Everywhere there were tons of ash and sawdust, used to dry the blood that was poured so lavishly in that place. Because of this, the whole castle was covered with dark stains and gave off a faint smell of putrefaction. It was said that while her husband was away, she had sexual relations with servants of both sexes, and it was rumored that when she had carnal access to girls it was not uncommon for her to bite them savagely.
It all began in 1604, shortly after her husband”s death. One of her teenage maids gave her an unintentional hair-pulling while she was combing her hair, which attracted a strong slap from the countess that made the maid bleed from the nose (which up to this point would have been fortunate, since the normal thing among the Slav nobility of the time would have been to take her out to the courtyard to receive a hundred canings for that carelessness). But when the blood splashed on Elizabeth”s skin, it seemed to her that where she had fallen the wrinkles disappeared and her skin regained its youthful freshness. The Countess, fascinated, thought she had found the solution to old age, and that she could always remain beautiful and young in this way. After consulting her witches and alchemists, and with the help of the butler Thorko and the corpulent Dorottya, they stripped the girl naked, slit her throat and filled a basin with her blood. Elizabeth bathed in the blood, or at least smeared it all over her body to regain her youth.
Between 1604 and 1610, Elizabeth”s agents set about providing her with young boys between the ages of 9 and 16 for her bloody rituals. In an attempt to keep up appearances, she would have convinced the local Protestant pastor to give her victims respectable Christian burials. When the numbers began to rise, he began to express his doubts: too many girls were dying of “mysterious and unknown causes,” so she threatened him to keep quiet and began to secretly bury the bleeding bodies. This is, at least, the version of this pastor, who was the one who “officially” denounced her to King Matthias II of Hungary through the clerical curia.
Later, at the time when Gábor”s mistakes put her in a delicate political situation, she took the habit of burning the genitals of some servants with candles, coals and red-hot irons for pure amusement. She also generalized her practice of drinking the blood directly by biting the cheeks, shoulders or breasts. For these private matters he relied on the physical strength of Dorottya Szentes, who, although elderly, was still quite capable of immobilizing any young man in the required position. This happened while she was in Vienna.
In 1609 Elizabeth, because of the lack of maids in the area as a result of so many crimes that already made the humble people distrustful, made the mistake that would end her: using her contacts, she began to take girls and adolescents from good families to educate them and keep her company. Some of them soon began to die of the same mysterious causes, which was not uncommon in those days, with their very high infant and child mortality rates, but at the Čachtice “boarding school” the number of deaths was too high. Now the victims were daughters of the minor aristocracy, so their deaths were considered important. The witch Anna Darvulia would have warned him never to take nobles, but this old woman had passed away some time before. It was her friend Erszi Majorova, the widow of a rich farmer who lived in nearby Milova, who convinced the countess that nothing would happen.
Towards the end, many bodies were hidden in dangerously insane places, such as nearby fields, grain silos, the river that ran under the castle, the kitchen vegetable garden…. Finally, one of the victims managed to escape before she was killed and informed the religious authorities. This was something that had happened several times in the past, with maidservants; for example, in the autumn of 1609:
“…A twelve-year-old girl named Pola somehow managed to escape from the castle and sought help in a nearby village. But Dorka and Helena learned where she was from the bailiffs, and taking her by surprise at the town hall, they took her back to Čachtice Castle by force, hidden in a flour cart. Dressed only in a long white robe, Countess Erzsébet welcomed her back home with kindness, but flares of fury shot from her eyes; the poor thing could not even imagine what awaited her. With the help of Piroska, Ficzko and Helena ripped off the twelve-year-old”s clothes and put her in a kind of cage. This particular cage was built like a sphere, too narrow to sit in and too low to stand. Inside, it was lined with thumb-sized blades. Once the girl was inside, they roughly lifted the cage with the help of a pulley. Pola tried to avoid cutting herself on the blades, but Ficzko manipulated the ropes in such a way that the cage swung from side to side, while from below Piroska jabbed her with a long spike so that she writhed in pain. A witness stated that Piroska and Ficzko indulged in carnal intercourse during the night, lying on the ropes, to derive unhealthy pleasure from the torment that with every movement the wretched woman suffered. The torment ended the next day, when Pola”s flesh was torn to pieces on the floor.”
This description has its resemblance to another torture device used by Bathory, called the “iron maiden”, which was a kind of sarcophagus that reflected the silhouette of a woman and had sharp spikes inside. This contraption was opened to introduce the victim and then enclose her so that the spikes were embedded in her body.
It is impossible to know, today, what really happened. From a psychiatric point of view, Isabel Báthory would be an anomaly out of the common pattern of all known serial killers. In Eastern Europe at the time it was common to cruelly punish servants and wards, and to execute even petty criminals in the most gruesome ways. Perhaps she was sadistic, and consequently applied herself especially when imposing discipline, or even forced her servants to take part in more or less extreme sadomasochistic practices, nothing new for the nobility of her time, whose impunity and legal power allowed them to treat the servants as they wished. It is very likely that to all this was added a smear campaign due to her support for Gábor I Báthory in the war against the Germans, propaganda of this style to destabilize the power of a nobleman was not out of the ordinary at the time and was quite common in that geographical area. Or perhaps she was really a serial torturer and murderer protected by her status, which was only lost when for lack of new victims among the plebs she resorted to the daughters who were part of the minor nobility.
The case of the Countess of Bathory has inspired numerous stories from the 18th century to the present day. The most common reason for this was that the countess bathed in the blood of her victims to preserve her youth. This legend first appeared in an engraving in the 1729 book Tragica Historia by the Jesuit scholar László Turóczi, which is also the first written account of Báthory”s history. Her legend reappeared in 1817, when eyewitness accounts that appeared decades earlier, in 1765, were published. These did not include any mention of the blood baths. In his book Hungary and Transylvania, published in 1850, John Paget describes the supposed origin of the Countess”s bloody baths, although his version appears to be a fictitious account from the oral tradition of the area. It is difficult to know to what extent these events are true. Sadistic pleasure is considered the most plausible motive for Erzsébet Báthory”s crimes.
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