by Tony Thorne
Only a century ago Ferenc Baumgarten, an antiquarian and essayist who lived in Pest, wrote that as one entered Hungary from Austria the landscape subtly changed and the hills began to resemble reclining camels – the first intimation of the east. According to another writer, Hamvas, Hungary was the place where the five genii loci of Europe converged: the spirit of the northern forests which pervades an area from Scandinavia to Poland also penetrated the Slavonic lands of the former Upper Hungary. South-west and south of Lake Balaton, where a landscape of vine-covered hills and sleepy villages stretches through Croatia towards the Adriatic, there is an almost Mediterranean atmosphere. Far to the east in present-day Romania lay Erdély – Transylvania – which preserved among its strange mix of peoples a sort of post-Byzantine spirit. The towns of Györ and Sopron, where the German language could be heard, and Sárvár, where visitors from the Netherlands and Italy were entertained, represented the spirit of the west, while the Great Plain was where the endless grass-steppes of the Eurasian east spilled over into Europe proper.1
John Paget travelled through the region in 1836. He reported in detail on the topography, the history and the legends of the Waag (Váh) valley, drawing upon the work Erzahlungen, Sagen und Legenden aus Ungarns Vorzeit by Freyherr von Mednyansky, published in 1829.
About two hours from Pistjan [Piešt’ány] (that is, by the road our peasant coachman took us, across the ploughed fields) lies the castle of Csejta [Čachtice], a place so celebrated in the history of the horrible, that we willingly deviated a few miles from our track to visit it. I know not why, but one always feels less incredulous of the marvellous when one has visited the scene of action and made oneself at home in the whereabouts of dark deeds – as though stone walls had not only the ears so often attributed to them, but tongues also to testify to the things they had witnessed. The history of Csejta, however, requires no such aid to prove its credibility; legal documents exist to attest its truth.2
Paget’s Csejta or Csejthe, where the Danube Lowlands meet the Little Carpathian chain, then two or three days’ journey on horseback from the capital Bratislava, is now the small Slovakian town of Čachtice. The highlands, the Lesser Carpathians and the White Carpathians with which they merge here, are not the rugged peaks of vampire fiction but a broken line of tall steep-sided hills covered with woods of conifers and oaks either side of the broad valley (about a mile and a half wide) of the River Váh, which has been likened to the Rhine, but is narrower and more sedate, about the size of the Thames as it approaches London. The countryside is still relatively unpopulated, with long stretches of open field or forest isolating the communities strung along the river. The topography that Elisabeth Báthory knew is still visible and has not yet been effaced by the carparks and hypermarkets which will eventually follow capitalism across the borders.
Nowadays at Hallowe’en in Čachtice, the local people trundle carts full of flowers up the main street, past the late-seventeenth-century manor-house and the old locked church with its defensive stone wall and onion-domed tower, to gather in the newer Catholic cemetery where they place the flowers carefully on their family graves and light small candles which they arrange on the gravel between the individual plots. By dusk the cemetery will be lit with scores of flickering candleflames and the flashlights of families picking their way between the black marble tombstones.
The ruins of a once strong castle still remain on the summit of a hill which can be ascended only on one side; for, like many old Hungarian castles, Csejta is built on a limestone rock, forming an abrupt precipice on three sides . . . The castle, though once strong ... is now fast falling into decay. It is loosely built of unhewn stone, held together by mortar, and crumbles away with every shower and blast.3
One hundred and sixty years after Paget passed through, the late-October weather was mild and misty and away from the town centre, three kilometres along the track that rises gently past the single-storey gypsy houses and through the woods, the open hillside beneath the white stone ruins of Čachtice castle still smelled of herbs, damp grass and leaves and the last wild flowers. There was a benign quietness around the place, no sound carried up from the few houses down in the valley and the surrounding woods muffled any noises made by woodcutters or late-season hikers: ‘About the year 1610, this castle was the residence of Elisabeth Báthori, sister to the King of Poland [sic], and wife of a rich and powerful magnate. Like most ladies of her day, she was surrounded by a troop of young persons, generally the daughters of poor but noble parents, who lived in honourable servitude, in return for which their education was cared for, and their dowry secured.’4
By December the weather in this part of the Lesser Carpathians will be harsher, even in a good year. On the lines of steep hills along the valley of the Váh river, snaking north along the Moravian–Slovak border, there will be snow on the black pines, the air will be still and dry and freezing and there will be ice at the river’s edges. The year 1610 was not a good one. There had been a heavier than usual snowfall and it was exceptionally cold.
At around seven o’clock in the frozen evening of 29 December 1610, a detachment of soldiers, some on foot and some on horseback, led by a group of mounted gentlemen muffled in fur-trimmed cloaks and feathered hats of bear or wolf skin, advanced as quietly as they could in the darkness up the slight incline of the wide village square towards the church on the hillock at the top. One party had already left the road leading into the village to follow one of the forest paths up to the castle which they knew stood hidden by trees on the hilltop above them. Behind a series of stone walls just next to the church on the high ground there were lights showing at the windows of the manor-house. Outside, one or two watchmen stamped their feet on the cold stones of the courtyard and tugged on the leashes of the great white native dogs, placid Komondors or savage Kuvasz, both bigger and more powerful than giant mastiffs, that guarded the house.
Inside the manor, attendants were serving the evening meal to the lady of the house and a small group of companions seated around the long dining table. The gentlewomen of the court usually ate beside their mistress, together with noble guests, while the senior servants, stewards and bailiffs were allowed to dine in the same hall at a separate table. Although the decoration of the walls and floors of the place was simple by the standards of France or Italy – some Flemish tapestries, Turkish carpets, several large polished wooden chests with ornate Asiatic metalwork locks – the plates and goblets on the table were all of silver and the food was rich. The smell of the highly spiced dishes mingled with the acrid perfume of the wood fires and candlesmoke. Set into thick white walls above the diners were brightly coloured tiles and gothic angels in stone.5
Perhaps the guards were quietly surrounded and ordered to keep silent at the point of a sword, or perhaps they had already been tipped off to stand aside. Whatever the case, the soldiers burst open the heavy wooden doors and irrupted into the building, rushing down corridors into all the halls, chambers and annexes of the great house and hustling the astonished servants together. The gentlemen then made their way inside to confront those who had been interrupted in the middle of their meal. In the meantime, in the little houses around the square, there would have been panic. The country was no longer at war and this region was far from the Turkish front-line, but attacks by armed bands of brigands were common, and there had been rumours of uprisings in the air for some months. The soldiers probably went from house to house to reassure the people huddled inside that they had nothing to fear: the intruder in their midst was the Lord Palatine, the Habsburg Emperor’s representative, the Viceroy of Hungary himself, Count George Thurzó.
The words that passed in that climactic moment between two autocrats – Count Thurzó, black-eyed, black-bearded and glowering, and the imperious, pale fifty-year-old woman dressed in satin, lace and velvet who was seated at the head of the table – were not recorded. She knew well the features of the man who confronted her, and she would have recognised several of his companions; the fac
es belonged to attendants she had last seen in the company of her own daughters’ husbands and her young son’s tutor. Peering nervously over their shoulders were some she knew much better, for only moments before they had been rushing to carry out her commands there in her own home. Once the building had been secured, a handful of the Lady’s retainers were hustled away to be questioned and the woman herself was taken out of the house under armed escort. The official records state that she was removed instantly up to the high castle, but at the turn of the twentieth century the local people were still pointing out to visitors one of the long low barn-like houses belonging to the wealthier villagers in which, they said, the proud Countess had been confined for the night.6
The servants who had been singled out were bundled out of sight, but perhaps not quite out of earshot of their fellow domestics and, shut somewhere in the extensive cellars or the outbuildings, were put to torture by their captors. While the rest of the household held its breath, the soldiers took torches, lit bonfires and began digging in the frozen earth of the manor grounds. A strong guard was posted around Čachtice while the leaders of the raiding party rode to spend the night in the nearest suitable lodgings in the little town of Vág Újhely (today Nové Mesto nad Váhom) close by.
Some time the following day, the penultimate day of the year, Count Thurzó ordered the members of the Lady’s household and her guests to come together, assembled his own entourage and summoned people from the village and the nearby hamlets. Only the lady of the house herself was missing. In front of the estate managers, bookkeepers, watchmen, shepherds and scullery-maids he arranged an exhibition, a macabre tableau consisting of the naked, well-preserved corpse of a young woman, still showing traces of the soil from which she had been exhumed and of lacerations and bruising on her blue–white skin. There were other blemishes which might have been burns, and the marks of ropes were visible on her wrists. Also there on display before them was another girl who was still alive but suffering from grievous injuries; deep suppurating wounds to her back and buttocks were pointed out to the onlookers.
Thurzó addressed his audience and informed them that he had surprised the Countess Elisabeth Báthory, Lady Nádasdy, in the very act of murder. He knew, he thundered, that the innocent maidservant who had died at her hands was only one of many, and that the butchery which they could now see with their own eyes had been practised for years. Yet more victims had been found in the house awaiting torture, he told them, and in his capacity as the highest legal authority in the Kingdom of Hungary, he, the Lord Palatine, had decided then and there to pass sentence on the perpetrator of these outrages against the female sex. He had put her ‘between stones’ and she would remain imprisoned in her own castle above the village in perpetuity.
The Palatine’s claim – that he had stumbled on the Countess at the very moment of dispatching a helpless servant-girl – became a staple of the legend of Elisabeth Báthory, turned into a set-piece by a succession of chroniclers.7 In the inter-war years of our own century, the Czechoslovak journalist Jožo Nižňanský imagined for his readers the scene as Count Thurzó forced his way into Elisabeth’s secret inner chamber:
The Palatine turned the handle and swiftly opened the door. He was stopped motionless in his tracks. The first sight to greet him was Elisabeth Báthory herself, her face and arms with rolled-up sleeves were covered in blood. Bloodstains darkened her clothing. Her outrageous screeching against a background of demonic laughter curdled his blood. Dóra and Helena stood beside her, all three guffawing as if demented.8
The guards who escorted their noble prisoner from the village to the castle would have been careful to treat her with the courtesy which her rank demanded. She could not be manhandled. While the condemned woman was being allowed to walk unmolested into her detention, her assistants were undergoing the same cruelties that she and they stood accused of. The excruciating agonies that those servants experienced were no less keenly felt than they would be today, but for inhabitants of modern Europe physical suffering has become something exceptional, unexpected, and not the horribly familiar companion of everyday existence that it was for Countess Báthory’s contemporaries.
Unless it is understood that a culture of cruelty – not violence, but deliberate cruelty – was endemic in the era that has come to be known as the early modern, the Báthory story cannot be unravelled. The celebration of this culture was something common to all of Europe at that time and its practice had been embedded in Hungarian life, almost institutionalised, since the atrocities suffered by the peasantry in the early sixteenth century. Treacherous, rapacious nobles brutalised their own countrymen for short-term advantage and ignored the long-term effects on the prosperity and vitality of the whole nation. Many of the poor of Hungary became quite indifferent to the threat from the invading Turks and were disinclined to take up arms to defend their feudal masters’ privileges.
In 1514 the peasants of Hungary (then still an independent kingdom) were ordered to gather together to assemble a mighty army to fight the Turks. When the country’s leaders saw what they had created – a vast and discontented horde intent on homicide and plunder – they panicked, dissolved the army and tried so send them back to their homes. Told by the man appointed to lead them, the squire George Dózsa, that their lords were afraid to fight and were abandoning the country to the infidel, the soldiers rose en masse for the first and last time against their feudal oppressors. The nation’s crises were usually decided in the east, and it was in Temesvár (Timişoara in Romania today) that the peasant revolt was crushed. As the writer Pálóczy-Horrăth imagined it in 1944:
Our lords prepared a spectacular end for the King of the Peasants. While they had an iron throne and crown made for Dózsa, his imprisoned footsoldiers were not given anything to eat for two weeks. Many perished. But some were still alive, half-mad with hunger when, on July 20 1514, our nobles instructed the gypsy executioners to make a big fire under the iron throne until it was white-hot. They had the white-hot iron crown for the Peasant King ready also. Then they placed our leader on the white-hot iron throne, put the white-hot iron crown on his head and forced his soldiers to eat his roasted flesh.9
In the same year that Dózsa’s revolt was suppressed, a noble expert in law, Stephen Werböczy, drew up a legal code known as the Tripartitum, which enshrined and confirmed the privileges of the nobility and decreed perpetual serfdom for the peasant populace. The feudal system which it consolidated remained in force in Hungary until 1848. The new code chose to see the peasants’ affrontery as a sin against the divinely ordained right to rule. It declared: ‘The memory and punishment of their treachery must be visited on their descendants, so that all mankind should know what a sin it is to rise against the lords. Therefore in this country all the peasants have lost their liberty by which they may move wherever they will. They are placed under eternal servitude to their landlords.’10
Both the higher nobility and the lesser gentry were exempt from all taxes and their absolute power as landlords was guaranteed by force. Serfs were tied to their masters’ lands, paid in cash or kind according to the whim of the lord in question, forced to pay tithes, give fifty days’ unpaid labour in every year and forbidden to own firearms. They could be judged and condemned even to death by their landlords according to the mediaeval pallos jog – the right of the sword – which in theory remained in force until well into the eighteenth century. Refusal to serve was viewed as an act of sedition and the poor were made to sign declarations of obedience whereby they forfeited their right to travel.
The privileges which the aristocrats were to enjoy were set out clearly in the codex, but exactly what their obligations were towards their fellow-citizens, and how they would be punished if they transgressed was not made explicit, even in the case of the murder of a servant by their master – or mistress. Social rank counted above all other considerations in all circumstances: even an act of rebellion against the legitimate ruler was treated quite differently when the rebels were of nobl
e blood. When John Zápolya defeated the forces of two rival barons, Balassi and Majláth, who were trying to unseat him in Transylvania, he ceremonially returned their swords to them and pardoned them both, together with all their followers, who were allowed to rejoin their families unharmed.
The pleasures that the citizens of Hungary enjoyed during those years of the early sixteenth century must have been all the more intense for being so few and so fleeting; peasants and soldiers sleeping in the fields in the long soporific summer afternoons, dancing arm in arm to pipes and viols outside the itinerant wine-seller’s tent, while in their strongholds the great families feasted, prayed, arranged their children’s marriages and drilled their private armies. No sooner had the national trauma of the Dózsa revolt begun to dissipate than dynastic power struggles and the looming threat of occupation by the Turkish empire combined to throw the Kingdom into turmoil once again.
The name of the small riverside settlement in the south where the most devastating defeat in Hungary’s history took place has entered the language as a byword for disaster: it is a staple of modern black humour that a man whose whole family has been wiped out in an accident can be consoled by the set phrase, ‘Don’t forget, we lost even more at Mohács.’ Ulaśzló’s successor, the young King Lajos or Louis II, had not been on his throne long before the Grand Turk, Suleyman, known as the Magnificent, mounted a massive offensive, breaking out of the Balkans and overwhelming the Serbs, who were holding the frontier of Christian Europe, and pushing inexorably towards Vienna. The unpopular King first staged a spectacle for his subjects in his capital; a model of the coffin of the Prophet Mohammed was put on display, suspended as if by Islamic magic ‘between heaven and earth’, before being set ablaze in front of an exultant crowd. Then, surrounded by foreign counsellors and accompanied by his bishops, the Magyar nobles and mercenary commanders, the King led an ill-disciplined collection of 27,000 quarrelsome and dispirited troops, cumbersome heavy cavalry in the vanguard, out into the field to stop the Ottoman advance. He confronted the Turks at Mohács in the south of the kingdom in August 1526, but a pitched battle turned into an ignominious rout and Louis and 20,000 troops, including many leading churchmen and 500 of Hungary’s nobles, died as they fled the battlefield in panic. The Turks sacked the capital of Buda and left a landscape scattered with corpses and burned-out towns and villages before regrouping.11