Countess Dracula

by Tony Thorne

  It was perhaps the disappearance of the royal court, even more than the territorial losses, that had the most devastating effect on Hungarian society in that period. When Buda fell to the Turks in 1556, the country lost its administrative centre and its cultural and historical heart. The Habsburgs allowed the Hungarians to set up a new capital where the Diet sat at Pozsony, the present-day Bratislava, only a few miles from Vienna. They also maintained a royal court of Hungary as a place for ceremonies, retaining official posts and awarding titles, but all under their patronage. In return for the cosmopolitan culture which the Habsburg court embodied, the Hungarians lost most of their independence. While the alien King ruled from Vienna, it was the native Magyar magnates who were responsible for the functions that the monarch’s court fulfilled elsewhere: the great noble families set up schools, established printing presses and libraries, founded scholarly societies and academies and patronised the various churches. In the rest of Europe governments or parishes had just begun to acknowledge a need to take care of the poor and to set up hospitals to tend to the wounded returning from wars and shelter the veterans who survived. In Hungary this had to be done by the aristocratic families who donated land and left legacies for the first hospitals and themselves cared for the sick on their estates.

  The courts of the great landowning families depended on the concept of familiarity: a network and hierarchy of related aristocrats and gentry down to the poorest tenants and serfs, all owing a particular service to their lord. At the main Thurzó seat of Bytča, there were about fifty members of the close household resident in the castle. Young men of the middle nobility provided armed retainers and other officials and guards were stationed in the town. George Thurzó kept heavy armour and weaponry at the easily defended stronghold of Árva (Orava) where the family would repair in times of danger.17

  Elisabeth Báthory’s court at Čachtice was slightly smaller, with twenty to thirty people working in the manor house and castle and another thirty to forty tending to the fields and vineyards. The records of the estate show that the business of cultivation and husbandry was exceptionally well organised. Nobles sent their daughters to the courts of this most powerful of chatelaines from far away. It was a great honour for a girl to be given a position in her household, even that of a humble seamstress or chambermaid, and all her servants had to come recommended for a particular skill. Some witnesses testifying in the investigations into Elisabeth’s alleged crimes, however, claimed that the Countess had to lure girls into her service, and one witness among the hundreds who were questioned said that the poor families around Čachtice hid their daughters when they heard that the Lady was approaching. In fact, Elisabeth Báthory was related by blood or marriage to nearly all the victims named in the testimonies, which makes it difficult for some modern commentators to imagine that she could wantonly slaughter them. Had the relatives been aware of such cruelty, they say, surely they would not have sent their daughters to be educated at her court. But social tensions in the Hungarian territories had been heightened by the male-female imbalance which the wars had created. Towns and villages were filled with unmarried or widowed women, with the result that a dowry and the chance to acquire a skill or trade were even more desperately sought.

  It was the twenty or so wealthiest families who owned more than a quarter of the land. The hereditary governor (comes) of each county was a member of the senior aristocracy, but the county assemblies were administered by the lesser gentry, who were not usually refined, but rather rough squires addicted to hunting and tippling. Many of these 9,000 families, whose nobility consisted of a coat of arms and exemption from taxes, were impoverished and in debt: the charters conferring the lowest levels of nobility were referred to as ‘dogskin parchments’, the lesser gentry as ‘the mean puttee-wearers’ or the ‘lords of seven plum-trees’.

  Countess Elisabeth Báthory owed allegiance to the crown of Hungary, and that crown was worn in Vienna by an Austrian. The Habsburg family had ruled Austria since 1278 and the Holy Roman Empire since 1438, a rich, ornate, cosmopolitan and complex edifice that was landlocked but diffuse, introverted and quite without any geographical reason for its existence. In 1576 Rudolf II succeeded Ferdinand as ruler of the Empire, having already assumed the crown of Hungary, which the Habsburgs had acquired as a hereditary right by marriage. Much as the Hungarian nobility disliked Rudolf personally and resented being ruled by a foreigner, their sense of realism and their veneration for the Holy Crown of Hungary itself prevented them for the most part from openly defying Vienna.

  Rudolf was obsessive, introspective and morose at the best of times, and seems to have lapsed into deep melancholia for months on end. Until recently it has been usual to dismiss him as a weak ruler, a mythomaniac and a decadent, whose failing sanity eventually left him incapable of government. After rejections by Maria de Medici and the Spanish Infanta, the unfortunate Emperor did not marry, and, although he fathered children by his mistress, Barbara Strada, lurid rumours accused him of sodomy and paedophilia and ascribed his physical and mental peculiarities to the onset of tertiary syphilis. Rudolf may be seen more sympathetically as a failed mystic, who dreamed of reversing the Reformation and uniting Christian Europe under the divinely sanctioned control of his family. Protestantism was forbidden in Vienna after 1598 and he enraged the proud Hungarians by persecuting the Lutherans and Calvinists who made up a majority of their senior nobility. His own eccentric religious ideas led him to abandon all acts of worship and he was said to be terrified by the sight of the sacramental host, leading gossips to surmise that he had been the victim of an evil spell cast by his chamberlain, Makovsky. It was murmured that Rudolf himself practised alchemy and cabbalistic magic.

  As a patron of science and the arts Rudolf excelled in inverse proportion to his failings as a politician and soldier. He detested the rituals of the Vienna court and the half-civilised pastimes of its inhabitants, and in 1582 he moved his seat to the ancient and beautiful Bohemian capital of Prague, which he determined to transform into a model of refinement that would outshine even the Renaissance centres of Italy. The mathematician Johannes Kepler and the astronomer Tycho Brahe were welcomed to the court of the now reclusive Emperor in Hradčany castle, as were the English magus, Dr Dee, and a host of artists, sculptors, jewellers and musicians.

  Although Rudolf was, to put it charitably, an indifferent politician, he excelled as a patron, actively intervening in artistic projects, as when he directed the painter Roclant Savery to draw rare species for his still-lifes, which are some of the earliest produced in Europe. It was the bizarre constructs of the Milanese Archimboldo which are the most characteristic of Rudolf’s tastes. Combining inanimate objects to produce portraits – a cook made of pots and pans, the Emperor as Vetumnus, god of the seasons, made of flowers and fruits. It is an aesthetic of novelty bordering on surrealism, but there is something airless and inconsequential about it.18

  As the war against the Turks wore on, it became clear that the isolated Rudolf had become a liability to the house of Habsburg, and his brother the Archduke Matthias began to rally support for a palace coup. The actual events that toppled Rudolf were not the discreet decisions taken in family councils that Habsburg propaganda described, but rather a prolonged and undignified jockeying for power involving rival shows of military strength and threats of civil war. The result was a fortunately bloodless victory for Matthias, who, with George Thurzó’s help, made peace with the Magyar nobles in 1606, took the crown of Hungary in 1608 and became emperor in 1611.

  This, then, was the backdrop against which Elisabeth Báthory, blessed with a degree of privilege and wealth second only to the King, conducted her affairs and was eventually judged and condemned. The Empire was a wider reality to which the Hungarian aristocrats had access, and yet was one from which they could withdraw when they wished, to listen to their plaintive songs tinged with memories of the east, and reflect in the pauses between battles on the mystique of their Magyar heritage of pride and apartness
.

  All along the Váh valley as it winds north-east, the ruins of a string of feudal castles cling to the peaks on the river’s edge. Not far north of Čachtice is the civic centre of Trenčín, then a free town and centre of trade, where a spectacular fortress begun by the Roman general Marcus Aurelius still towers intact over the plague column, the hangman’s house and the many churches in the streets below. Further along the riverside road – another hard day’s ride for a traveller on horseback – lies George Thurzó’s former fiefdom of Bytča, today a market town of 12,000 people. On a damp winter’s day in the late 1990s, Bytča is a rather sullen place, its many featureless factories apparently deserted and the streets empty of all but a handful of expressionless passers-by. There is a market square of burghers’ houses, once prosperous but now with shabby façades, and near by a crumbling synagogue, quite abandoned and ignored, on the edge of a small stream which links the moat of Bytča’s castle to the river. The turreted castle too is grey and somewhat forlorn, but is undergoing a leisurely restoration to the splendid white-walled, red-roofed landmark, rising from the water-meadows and dwarfing the little settlement outside its walls, that is shown in the sixteenth-century woodcut panoramas.

  The castle was built in the Renaissance style by the Milanese Giovanni Kilian for Count George Thurzó’s father. In 1601 the famous wedding palace, decorated with frescoes of abundant fruits and fabulous animals, which still stands, was erected by George Thurzó just outside the castle proper, which at that time contained a school, a library and archive, a pharmacy and a prison. The Bytča estate was a centre of prosperity, enlightenment and entertainment for the aristocracy and their retainers, and was renowned for the lavish marriage feasts that the Thurzós regularly staged. For the peasants who lived in the surrounding countryside the court could be a source of largesse when the great families gathered there; at other times it was the fearful place from which unquestioned and absolute power was exercised.

  On 27 December 1610 the young wife of the Count Palatine of Hungary sent a private message from Bytča to her husband, whom she had left behind two days’ ride south of Čachtice in the capital, Bratislava. The note, which survives, from Elisabeth Czobor to her husband George Thurzó, is fragmentary and mysterious, in part because it was at the heart of a secret conspiracy, in part because the writer was an ingénue who had been taught the alphabet by her husband, but who knew nothing of written style and committed her unpunctuated thoughts to paper just as they occurred to her:

  My dearest, beautiful spirit . . .

  As you bade me, I have also sent my estate manager and the old woman. They say that she [or ‘he’ – there is no gender in Hungarian] still says, but whether it is true or not only God knows. Those who do not obey the [first] commandment and act against it, then it is very likely that after this will do so easily [or ‘after that would act contrary to the others, too’], and it is possible that those persons will bear false witness against their fellows. That one who is in the castle, they say that she says that with her hand she beat them, and if she feels herself to be involved and had she known for certain, would have been investigated thoroughly as your lordship ordered.

  I am going to attend to these things as well as I am able. My beautiful beloved spirit and my lord.19

  This insight into the unedited thoughts of one of those who was intimately involved in the Báthory case is unique. The impression that emerges from Lady Czobor’s letter is of a rather garrulous, childlike woman (the terms of endearment are saccharine; the handwriting shows a mounting excitement as the note progresses) who is anxious to please her husband and to show herself as a clever adviser. Although she seems to be involved in the Palatine’s secret plans, we cannot know whether she was really playing an important role or whether her husband is indulging her. We do know that George confided in his wife, which means that, whether she was interfering, gossiping or had performed a vital part in the preparations for Elisabeth Báthory’s entrapment, her letter is a precious clue. If we could decode its text, we might know once and for all whether Countess Báthory was a monster or herself a victim, but the words are all ambiguous.

  ‘I have sent . . . the old woman’ – who is this that Lady Czobor has dispatched in the company of a senior servant, and where? A spy sent to infiltrate the Báthory court, an informant who will reveal the Countess’s secrets, or a guide to lead the raiders to their victim? Next, ‘whether it is true or not only God knows’ – there seems still to be doubt in the minds of the accusers forty-eight hours before the soldiers moved in; ‘it is possible that those persons will bear false witness’ – will they lie to their judges about their own actions, or lie to implicate an innocent? ‘That one who is in the castle’ – can we be sure who is being referred to, the mistress or one of her trusted aides? ‘She says that with her hand she beat them’ – are the two ‘shes’ one and the same, or is the first the informer and the second the accused?

  On 30 December George Thurzó replied to Elisabeth Czobor, who was awaiting his news:

  My dear love ... I have arrested Madam Nádasdy and they are taking her to the castle. Those who were torturing and killing the innocent ones, those wicked females, with a young lad who was the assistant in all these cruelties, I have sent to Bytča. And now with great care and security, they must be held in close captivity until God speeds me to the place and a court may be convened. The women may be held in the town, but the young boy placed in captivity in the castle. When our people went into the Csejthe manor, then they discovered a dead girl at that house and another one with wounds and dying from torture, and also there was a woman who had been tortured and was covered with wounds and another [or others] who was imprisoned who that damned woman was keeping for torture. I am waiting for that accursed woman to be taken up to the castle, and that they put her into her place. I have written in great haste on the Thirtieth day of December from Vág Újhely.

  Your love, who so much loves you

  Count George Thurzó20

  ‘. . . that damned woman . . . that accursed woman . . .’ – is there any doubt about which woman Thurzó is referring to? Lady Czobor’s letter is intimate, cryptic and scarcely penetrable; his reads like a public declaration, which in a way it was. It contained his instructions and his authorisation for her to carry them out in his absence, and she would show it if necessary to his men in the town as a token of her authority.

  When the visiting English gentleman and his companions looked over the scene of Elisabeth Báthory’s arrest and incarceration in 1836, the letters that passed between Count Thurzó and his wife were lying still undiscovered among the unsorted papers of the archives in the depths of the Palatine’s castle. Paget had only the terse narrative of the guidebooks and the legends as his inspiration:

  With this tale fresh in our minds we ascended the long hill, gained the castle, and wandered over its deserted ruins. The shades of evening were just spreading over the valley, the bare grey walls stood up against the red sky, the solemn stillness of evening reigned over the scene, and as two ravens which had made their nest on the castle’s highest towers came towards it, winging their heavy flight, and wheeling once round, each cawing a hoarse welcome to the other, alighted on their favourite turret, I could have fancied them the spirits of the two crones condemned to haunt the scene of their former crimes, while their infernal mistress was cursed by some more wretched doom.21

  Chapter Two

  Ordeals and Confessions

  and the false nurse shall be burnéd,

  on the fire there close by.

  ‘Long Lankyn’, traditional English folk song

  John Ficzkó’s confession ~ techniques of torture ~ the evidence of the accomplices ~ proclamations by the Bytča court ~ thirteen further testimonies ~ the sentencing and the punishment ~ a public burning

  The authorities who had detained Countess Báthory knew who else they were looking for. After being privately tortured and publicly confronted with two of their supposed victims in Čacht
ice, four members of her staff, three elderly women and one young man, were taken under guard to the town of Bytča to be put on trial. The four were examined again immediately after their arrival there and the same set of eleven questions was put to each of them in turn. We should pay especially close attention to the answers they gave since the accused, although they may have had much to hide and good reasons to lie, had been identified as the most intimate companions of their mistress and among the very few people in a position to describe the workings of the private inner court that operated wherever the Countess was in residence.

  The trusted servants whom Thurzó’s henchmen imprisoned and tortured were a former wetnurse, Ilona (Helena) Jó, whose surname (literally ‘good’) is a common one, but might also have referred to her vocation, Dorottya (Dorothy) Szentes, known familiarly as ‘Dorkó’, who oversaw the female servants, and Katalin (Katherine) Benecká or Beniczky, called ‘Kata’, a laundrywoman. Also accused was János (John) Újváry, known to everyone as ‘Ficzkó’, either a manservant or a humbler Johannes Factotum (a jack of all trades or odd-job man), who was the first to be brought before the court.

  The evidence regarding Ficzkó, like the others, is given in the third person in the form ‘he said . . .’, but the third person pronoun ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’ is the same in Hungarian. This leads to great ambiguity in all the accounts given, because it is not always clear which of the protagonists is being referred to. Likewise the word asszony, denoting a married woman, so ‘Mistress’, ‘woman’ or ‘lady’, cannot always be ascribed accurately either to Elisabeth Báthory or to one of her female servants. Strange gaps and illogical links in the text may be due to the inarticulacy of the witness, compounded by editing or even wholesale reconstructing by the scribe. In inquisitorial procedures at that time, the quantity of evidence, so long as it went to support the charges laid, was more important than its quality, so inconsistencies were often not picked up and blatant untruths were sometimes allowed to pass unquestioned. It is implied in the original trial documents that there was at least one other version of the confessions, kept in another place, and the copies that survived in the Thurzó archive in Bytča, in the Erdő’]dy archive in Galgóc and in the National Archives in Budapest differ in significant details.