Vampires Through the Ages

by Brian Righi

  Many of the crimes the countess and her accomplices committed took place at Csejthe Castle, which she used as her base of power. Witnesses to many of the events testified afterwards that the countess maintained a series of inner rooms deep within the fortress that she kept under lock and guard and from which late at night the sounds of screams could be heard. When the bodies of her victims began piling up, disposing of them posed a major problem. At first they were secretly buried in the local cemetery at night, but as the cemetery filled up, Báthory’s accomplices began stacking the bodies in the closets and under the beds of the castle. When her conspirators grew too lazy, they brazenly flung bodies over the battlements to be devoured by wolves.

  As the years passed and the countess’s deeds continued to go unpunished, she grew bold enough to make the one mistake that would bring her under the scrutiny of the royal court. Until now the countess had chosen her victims from the common peasant stock that resided within her holdings. Having depleted that source, she turned to young girls of noble families, whom she lured into her service with promises of advancement through the ranks of society.

  When these girls started disappearing, the ruler of Hungary, King Matthias, began keeping an eye on the countess and her activities. The Hungarian court was after all indebted to the Báthory family for an extraordinary sum of money, which it had previously borrowed to help finance its wars against the Turks. If the countess were to be found guilty of some crime, then not only could the debt be erased but the king might have a claim to her vast estates. With continued complaints filtering in to the king from worried nobles over the mysterious deaths of their daughters, the court ordered the Lord Palatine (a high-level official) Count György Thurzó, coincidentally Báthory’s own cousin, to arrest her in 1610.

  On January 2, 1611, a trial ensued against the countess’s four accomplices, who, after being tortured, confessed their crimes as well as the complicity of the countess herself. The four were quickly found guilty and sentenced to public execution while the countess, who was never officially tried, was sentenced to perpetuis carceribus, or perpetual life imprisonment. The punishment was meted out by bricking her in the tower room of her castle with only a small space to allow food to be passed inside. Three years into her sentence, on August 21, 1614, the countess was found dead of natural causes at the then ripe old age of fifty-four.

  Despite her many protests of innocence there were few who believed her and even fewer who would support her against the crown. While the king failed to seize her lands, in the end he did manage to wipe out the sizable debt he owed. While the final body count was said to number as many as 650 young girls, this figure had one source: an unknown servant girl who based her claims on hearsay. More realistic estimates report that over the course of two decades it was probably closer to fifty. While none of the three hundred witnesses who gave testimony to her crimes actually saw her commit them with their own eyes, the accusations alone were enough to condemn her.

  Indeed, legends of her bloody bathing rituals did not even surface until a hundred years after her death, when a Jesuit priest named László Turóczi collected stories from the villages surrounding Csejthe Castle during the height of the vampire mania that swept Eastern Europe in the 1700s. Though Erzsébet Báthory failed to find the immortality legend claims she sought in the blood of others, she may have finally achieved it in the gruesome legacy she left behind.

  Bluebeard

  … Lord de Rais and his followers, his accomplices, conveyed away a certain number of small children, or other persons, and had them snatched, whom they struck down and killed, to have their blood, heart, liver, or other such parts, to make them a sacrifice to the devil, or to do other sorceries with, on which subject there are numerous complaints.

  —georges bataille, the trial of gilles de rais

  Once upon a time, in the Duchy of Brittany, there lived a wealthy and powerful nobleman known as Bluebeard, because he sported a large blue beard that lent him a rather frightening appearance. One day Bluebeard desired the young daughter of a neighboring lord, and after a period of courtship convinced her to marry him despite his fearsome countenance and the fact that his previous wives had all disappeared mysteriously.

  As soon as the two were wed, they settled down in one of Bluebeard’s many fine castles and lived peacefully until one day he abruptly told his new wife that he must leave on a long journey immediately. Saddling his steed in haste, Bluebeard turned and handed his wife a heavy ring of keys, stating, “On this ring are the keys that unlock every door within this great castle. As my wife you are free to roam about its halls and chambers as you see fit, but the small room deep within the castle’s keep you must never enter, for the day you do you shall feel the wrath of my deadly anger.” Taken aback by the fiery look in her husband’s eyes, the young wife dutifully agreed to his command and waved goodbye as he spurred his horse through the postern gate.

  Days went by, turning into weeks, as the young wife filled her time waiting for her husband to return by exploring the many twisting corridors and lofty staircases of the castle’s interior. In time, however, she grew bored with these and found herself returning again and again to the very door that Bluebeard had forbidden her to enter. Finally one day her curiosity got the best of her, and wondering what great mysteries lay within, she slipped a key inside the door’s worn lock face and heaved it open.

  Adjusting her eyes to the stygian darkness, the young wife gasped in horror at the charnel house she beheld. From floor to ceiling the room was splashed in putrid-smelling blood as the badly mutilated bodies of Bluebeard’s former wives hung from the walls like gruesome trophies. Reeling from the shock of it, the wife slammed the door shut remembering the words her husband spoke to her before leaving: But the small room deep within the castle’s keep you must never enter, for the day you do you shall feel the wrath of my deadly anger.

  That same evening Bluebeard unexpectedly returned from his travels, and after washing the dust from his massive blue beard demanded that his wife return the keys he had left in her safekeeping. Noticing how she trembled before him, Bluebeard’s eyes narrowed into angry slits as he hissed, “So, now you know my secret, do you not, my love?”

  Falling to her knees, the frightened wife cried out, “Please, my lord, I did not mean to disobey your wishes.”

  But Bluebeard’s cold heart would show no pity. As he slowly drew his sword, he exclaimed, “Now, good wife, you will finally join my other wives and make a fine addition to my wall.”

  Before Bluebeard could deliver the deadly blow, however, a loud crash sounded at the chamber door, and in burst the wife’s two brothers with their swords drawn—she having sent word to her family of the danger she was in. In order to save himself, Bluebeard turned to run, but the brothers were quicker and ran him through with their blades, ending his life and saving their sister from the horrifying fate that awaited her in that bloody room deep within the confines of the castle’s keep.

  The bloody tale of Bluebeard was known to exist long before Charles Perrault first published it in his 1697 collection of French folktales entitled Histoires ou contes du temps passé. Some even speculate that it was created as a veiled warning by the peasantry of Brittany to caution children to steer clear of real-life Bluebeards and their castles in a time when accusing the French nobility of any crime could mean the loss of one’s own head.

  Who, then, was this French nobleman who so terrorized the countryside of Brittany to the extent that he was immortalized in the folktales of the French people? While several candidates have been put forward by scholars over the years, many attribute the origin of the tale to one of the country’s greatest knights, Gilles de Rais, who fought his way through the ranks to become Marshal of France.

  He was born in 1404 to Guy de Laval-Montmorency and Marie de Craon at the family’s castle at Machecoul. Both his parents died while Gilles was still very young, and he a
fterwards found himself under the tutelage of his scheming grandfather, Jean de Craon. Left to his own devices as a child, few if any restraints were placed upon him—and while some education was afforded him, most of his time was spent preparing for his introduction to the battlefields of France. During the frequent and violent clashes that later became known as the Hundred Years’ War, Gilles distinguished himself as a courageous and reckless warrior earning many honors upon the field. In 1420, Gilles inherited his father’s estates and increased his fortune by marrying Catherine de Thouars.

  For a French nobleman of the period, however, the only true profession was that of war, and from 1427 to 1435 he served as a commander in the royal army, fighting alongside Joan of Arc against the English and their Burgundian allies. After the siege of Orléans in 1429, Gilles and three other lords were rewarded with the honor of transporting the holy oil of Saint Remy to Notre-Dame de Reims for the coronation of Charles VII as King of France, after which Gilles was named Marshal of France.

  A few years after Joan of Arc was burned at the stake as a witch by her English enemies in 1431, Gilles hung up his spurs and sword and retired to his vast estates, where he quickly squandered his wealth with extravagant displays and costly theatrical productions. Before long these excesses threatened to bankrupt him, and he did the unthinkable for a French nobleman: he began selling off his holdings to pay for his uncontrolled spending. Feeling the pinch, Gilles also looked for alternative solutions to his dwindling funds and several times found himself swindled by charlatans claiming to be magicians who could turn base metals into gold through alchemy. When these failed, Gilles grew more desperate and began experimenting with the occult under the direction of an equally suspicious character named Francesco Prelati, who claimed to be able to raise a demon he called by the name “Baron.” It was this demon, Gilles later testified, that first provided the impetus for his ghastly crimes, as Prelati promised the restoration of his fortune if he would but sacrifice the lives of innocent children to the evil fiend.

  Regardless of whether Gilles truly believed that torturing and murdering children would satisfy the demon Baron or, as is more likely the case, he was simply satisfying his own inner demons, it’s believed that he began his bloody work in the spring of 1432 after the death of his grandfather. Most of the abductions involved local village children whose parents were powerless to complain and occurred deep inside the moated walls of his castle at Machecoul, where even their screams could not be heard. The first documented case concerned a twelve-year-old boy named Jeudon, an apprentice furrier. Gilles’s cousins, Gilles de Sille and Roger de Briqueville, asked the boy to deliver a message to the castle, but when he failed to return the accomplices told inquirers that the boy must have been carried off by bandits.

  Often the crimes followed a ritualistic pattern. They began subtly with a twisted game of cat and mouse that involved dressing the abducted child in fine clothes and setting before him a feast unlike anything he had seen before. As the child ate with relish, Gilles and a small band of confidants riotously feasted and drank a mixture of heated spice wine known as hippocras. Then when the party reached a fever pitch, the child was suddenly taken to a private room where Gilles had him strung up with ropes and strangled while he watched. Many tortures and abuses were committed against his victims before they were finally beheaded with a thick, double-edged blade known as a braquemard. Witnesses to these horrific events later reported that Gilles also stabbed some in the jugular and allowed the warm blood to cover him, which he drank with great excitement. When the men were done with the victim, the body and any traces of the crime were destroyed by fire and the ashes dumped into the castle’s moat.

  Such atrocities might have gone unpunished if Gilles’s own greed and arrogance had not gotten the better of him. On May 15, 1440, he and a small band of armed followers kidnapped a local cleric during a dispute over property Gilles had sold to the clergyman’s brother and now intended to take back by force. The incident prompted an investigation by the Bishop of Nantes, who in the process uncovered shocking evidence of Gilles’s darker crimes. In short order, Gilles and two close servants, Henriet and Poitou, were arrested and charged with unspeakable crimes ranging from witchcraft to murder. During the trial that followed, Gilles did little to exonerate himself in the eyes of the court but to the contrary exhibited a number of bizarre behaviors, including attempts at bribing the court and delusions that he was a Carmelite monk. In the end, however, Gilles finally admitted to the charges against him in all the graphic details he could muster for the court scribes who took his confession. He was condemned to die by the hangman’s noose.

  At nine o’clock on October 26, 1440, Gilles and his co-defendants were led to their place of execution on the Île de Nantes, where in a crowded meadow he addressed onlookers with contrition and remorse, even extolling Henriet and Poitou to die bravely and think of salvation. Gilles was then hung by the neck until dead, after which the body was carried away to an unknown resting place. His co-defendants also faced the rope, and afterwards, like many of their young victims, were burned to ashes and scattered to the wind.

  It’s difficult to truly account for the number of children who fell into the clutches of the bloodthirsty Gilles de Rais, since he carefully disposed of the bodies. Most of his victims, both boys and girls, ranged in age between six and eighteen, and while some historians claim the final body count is somewhere between eighty and two hundred, others have estimated it could be as high as six hundred.

  Although Gilles de Rais achieved many triumphs on the battlefield in defense of his country, it will be his crimes history remembers most. Several years after his execution, his daughter Marie erected a stone memorial at the place of his execution, which over generations became strangely regarded as a holy altar until it was destroyed by Jacobins during the French Revolution. Now all that remains of Gilles de Rais are horror stories told to children to keep them awake at night.

  [contents]

  Count Dracula: Without me, Transylvania will be as exciting as Bucharest … on a Monday night.

  —Love at First Bite

  6

  A Star Is Born

  The concept of a supernatural creature that preyed upon the blood of humans left an indelible mark on the accounts that survived the rise and fall of early civilizations. From the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh sprang vengeful ghosts and demons; in the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita, blood-drinking gods battled one another atop fields of corpses; and from the weathered scrolls of the Greeks, seductive lamia led unwary young men to their end. Regardless of which dark shape the vampire took, such tales continued to trickle down through the stream of human consciousness as a literary theme to explain some of humanity’s deepest fears.

  Nevertheless, for much of the vampire’s history it remained a secondary character when compared to the shining gods and heroes that populated the vast majority of early mythologies. Ironically, the theme didn’t step forward as a distinct literary device of its own until the Age of Enlightenment dawned across Europe in the 1700s, when many great thinkers were turning away from the mysticism and superstition of the past in favor of science and reason. Sparked by extraordinary reports of vampirism in Eastern Europe, such as the cases of Arnod Paole and Peter Plogojowitz, churchmen, scientists, and political leaders alike wrote and debated prolifically on the subject, lending credibility to vampires far beyond their folkloric roots.

  For the next one hundred years, intellectual works were circulated to the public in the form of pamphlets, treatises, and books at an ever-increasing pace. In 1732, for example, as many as fourteen works on vampirism appeared in German-speaking lands alone, while each day newspapers across Europe reported new outbreaks. With this rise in media attention, or because of it, reports poured in at an alarming rate, with cases popping up in Prussia in 1710, 1721, and 1750; in Hungary from 1725 to 1730; in Bulgaria in 1775; in Wallachia in 1756; and in Russia in 1772. In eac
h case, newspapers vied with one another in the race to see who could capture the most graphic details or report the highest body count, lending to each new story a greater element of sensationalism. Yet as much as readers feared the very mention of the word vampire, they were equally enthralled by it and hungered for more.

  Literary Vampires

  One of the earliest appearances of a vampire in a fictional work of literature was in a short poem published by the German writer Heinrich August Ossenfelder in 1748, entitled “Der Vampir.” In the poem a man threatens to drink the blood of a young Christian maiden if she spurns his attentions, and by doing so acts as a metaphor for those forces menacing the Christian church during that period. Other works followed, including, in 1797, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem “The Bride of Corinth,” which explored similar themes sans the blood drinking, as well as Robert Southey’s 1801 Thalaba the Destroyer, which is the first piece of English fiction to mention vampires. The theme wouldn’t truly come into its own though until 1813, when the British poet Lord Byron published a poem entitled “The Giaour,” describing a corpse-like revenant that prowls abandoned tombs at night in search of blood. A portion of the poem reads:

  But first, on earth as Vampire sent,

  Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent:

  Then ghastly haunt thy native place,