by Tony Thorne
‘God help! God help! You little cloud! God help little cloud! God grant, God grant health to Elisabeth Báthory. Send, send me little cloud, ninety cats, I command you, who are the lord of the cats. Command them and gather them wherever they are, whether beyond the mountains, or beyond the waters or the sea, gather those ninety cats and send them away to bite King Matthias’ heart, to bite my lord Palatine’s heart, and let them eat the heart of the red Megyery, and Moses Cziráky’s heart, too, so that Elisabeth Báthory may come to no harm! Holy Trinity do these things!’
According to confessions, this and others similar have been written down and kept by the steward. See, Reverend Sir, how the Devil makes his subjects blind and by what means he leads them astray. Before the steward returned with the bewitching words (she commanded him under penalty of beheading to write down accurately the words of the tenant-farmer’s wife and bring them to her) the Lady had already been led to the castle.12
Cloud-conjuring formulae seem to have been particularly common, perhaps because at certain times it was easy to predict changes in the weather and then claim credit for them. Elisabeth’s incantation is also notable for mixing Christian sentiment with pagan superstition in the manner of Caribbean voodoo or santeria.13
Ponikenus continues: ‘A man whose name was Torkos, and who used to live a mile from Sárvár, gave this advice to her: Choose one black hen, beat it with a white stick, keep its blood and use it against your enemies in this way; if you touch with the blood your enemies or their clothes, they will not harm you . . .’14 He underlines the pernicious prevalence of witchcraft, a Protestant obsession which led his church’s rivals, the Calvinists, to mount wholesale pogroms among the country’s peasantry later in the sixteenth century:
You can judge my Reverend Lord what a sinful soul is within this paragon of evil! But she still places her hopes in the county court, and is still blaming the Lutheran priests for her disaster, just as the local people are saying that the Lutheran priests have caused this scandal.
Yesterday we had much difficulty with her. Reverend Zacharias asked her: ‘Do you believe in Christ who was born and died and rose for you and won the remission of your sins?’
‘Even Peter the Smith [the personification of the simplest rustic] knows that!’ she said. Reverend Zacharias wanted to give her a prayerbook, but she refused to take it: ‘I do not need it.’ Then I asked her: ‘I wished to know, who was it who said to you that I was the cause of your trouble?’ ‘I am not obliged to answer to your question. Now you are furious with me, soon you will have twofold cause to be angry.’ But I said, ‘I am not angry, but I should like to be fair, and make it clear that I am not the cause of your imprisonment.’ Then she said again: ‘I was the patron – like a mother – to your priests, from the smallest to the highest one, I have never done anything against them, neither the slightest not the highest, I have done nothing even against you yourself.’ I asked her to remember me always with good feelings, because I pray always to God for her prosperity and to grant mercy to her for her sins. She answered: ‘Praying to God for the prosperity of others is always praiseworthy behaviour.’
We can picture Elisabeth’s furious sarcasm in the face of the pastor’s pious condescension and nervous bumpkin manners. Then Ponikenus pauses, fearful that his message might be intercepted: ‘We were discussing in this way, but the subject is more fit to speak of in words and not to be written in a letter. But I was writing this because I want the three old women and the young Ficzkó to be questioned, who were carried from her to Bytča, I want them to confess their sins, how much they enjoyed the killing, and what else they have done . . .’ Here is the ostensible reason for the letter: to ensure that the truly guilty individuals will be brought to book.
We heard from those maids who are still living that they were forced to eat their own flesh, which was fried on an open fire. The flesh of other maids was chopped and mashed, as with mushrooms in the preparation of a meal, and was cooked and served to young men who knew not what they were eating. Oh Thyestean banquet! Oh what brutality! I think there were no greater executioners under the sun than they were. But I must hold my feelings, I can write no more of it for the pain of my soul is so great.
Cannibal feasts were a staple of the horror-folklore of the time, and were probably based on historical fact. As well as the roasting of the rebel Dózsa on an iron throne, anyone living in Hungary at that time would probably have heard of the Tatar Khan’s treatment of envoys from Hungary that was reported by Edward Barton, the English ambassador to Constantinople in 1593:
This Prince of the Tartars is sayd lately to have taken sixe Hungarish spyes, whom calling before him, he commanded presently three of them to be rosted in the presence of their fellowes, and calling his captaines about him caused them all to eat part of the said rosted spyes . . . and cutting off the noses and ears of the other three spyes, had them returne and report what they had seene . . .14
The Vicar of Čachtice’s thoughts turned to his own vulnerability:
However I have too many enemies, therefore I have to ask your protection my Reverend Lord, pray for me to our Lord and please ask his Lordship [Thurzó] to take me under his protection, because I am afraid that Lord Homonnay or the son of the lady or her daughters will attack me. Although I am sure that Elisabeth Báthory was already killing maidens ten years ago, because in the time of my predecessor, Andrew Berthoni, maids were buried in the church at night, which is well known by the inhabitants of Čachtice. Even Stephen Magyari, who died eight years ago, warned the lady in his speech publicly, and this is also well known in her court among the servants who are still living. I have spoken the truth.
Rejoice in our Lord
Čachtice, the first day of January 1611.
Jan Ponikenus, priest and senior
At the end of his letter Ponikenus has not managed to unburden himself of all that he has to express. Before the message is sent, he takes up his pen again:
P.S.
The paper was not able to hold all that I wished to let you know, although I do not wish to abuse your patience, but you must be aware of the following: in the last days of December, when I returned from the castle and sent home my priestly brothers from Lešete and Vrbové, I was thinking upon my sermon. Then I took supper, after it I prayed with my servants, and then I went back to my study. Shortly my wife came to me and we were discussing these horrible matters. Suddenly I heard cats mewing on the upper floor, I can explain it clearly in my own language . . . [here Ponikenus switches to Slovak]15 . . . so that voice was not a normal miaow, I went after the voice and ordered my servant, ‘Jano, if you see any cat, just beat it!’ But we found no cat. My servant said: ‘There are mice in the storeroom.’ I checked the said place, but there was no cat in there. But when I was descending the staircase, straightaway six cats and dogs were biting my legs. ‘Get you to hell!’ I shouted and they disappeared so soon that my servant did not see them. See, my Reverend, this was a game of the Devil.
The presence that had terrified him was presumably that of the ninety cats and their canine allies. It is not clear whether Ponikenus could see them, or merely felt their teeth, but the Protestant clergy firmly believed that evil was tangible – Luther himself saw the Devil sitting on a wall and mocking him.
On Christmas Eve Majorosné was bathing the lady using several herbs, and as I heard, they wanted to bake bread using that water. They wanted to bake that bread for their enemies.
So the devil was caught in his own trap. You will hear other things from others, but pray God with me to help us against our enemies. God be with us!
The said Majorosné, as I have heard, has withered.
Ponikenus himself says that the purpose of this hasty communication is to ‘investigate well those servants taken to Bytča’: singling them out and taking for granted their guilt, as he does here, must have helped to seal their fate, as well as making Erzsi Majorosné’s death inevitable. (His closing words, the reference to that woman’s ‘with
ering’, are obscure, but suggest some form of divine retribution: ‘wasting away’ was a common description applied all over Europe to the victims both of sorcery and of God’s punishment of it.) But his letter concentrates rather on the sins of their mistress and indicts her for mass-murder, sorcery and high treason – three separate capital charges. It is no wonder that Ponikenus appeals to the Palatine for protection.
The wealth of incidental detail is fascinating, but no guarantee of veracity: it has been shown that the barbarities the priest ascribes to Elisabeth have their parallels in contemporary folklore, and the novelty – so far-fetched to the post-Enlightenment way of thinking – of shape-shifting was a magic technique that most of his parishioners and many of his fellow-clergymen would have believed in.
It has been suggested that Ponikenus’ letter was actually composed in three separate stages, an idea supported by changes in the handwriting and by the fact that he gives two different consecutive accounts of his visit to the imprisoned Countess, and that the accusations he makes against Elisabeth increase both in gravity and in sensationalism as the letter progresses. It may be that the priest began to compose the letter spontaneously, fearful of the repercussions of his feud with the most powerful noblewoman of the locality. When he heard that Countess Báthory had been arrested, he paused before restarting the letter in a distinctly different style and with a shift in focus. According to this interpretation, the penultimate part of the letter may even have been dictated directly to Ponikenus by Thurzó or one of his agents, expressly so that it could be introduced in evidence if needed. In his postscript Ponikenus launches into the realms of the supernatural with his story of being attacked by phantom cats; this outburst of superstitious paranoia was not likely, in the formal setting of the court, to help the credibility of the case against Elisabeth, and was never referred to again, even when Ponikenus gave evidence orally later the same year.16
The world that Countess Báthory and her parish priests inhabited was one in which people of all classes sought desperately to make sense of the bewildering series of torments that fate was subjecting them to, and also to exercise a little more control over their lives than their static society (with the hugger-mugger intimacy of village life and the cramping proximities of the servants’ quarters) normally allowed. The many examples of magic help to illuminate the mind of the age and of those who aided the Blood Countess and those who condemned her.
Until the oppressions of the Counter-Reformation took hold, and the tensions in society heightened to intolerable levels, superstition was quite respectable and not by any means limited to the poor. At the end of the seventeenth century Count Francis Esterházy, the military commander of Csesznek and head of the county of Fejér, compiled a small handbook of magic cures. His recipe against toothache prescribes the reciting of an incantation on the first Friday after the new moon. (The words must be said standing at the door and looking at the moon, just as Majorosné did when reciting her new spell for Elisabeth.) Esterházy adds the standard ‘probatum est’ (it has been tried and proven).17 Like Esterházy and like Elisabeth, George Thurzó, the Count Palatine, also made use of formulaic cures which combined piety and superstition. In a letter he says he is upset to hear of his daughter’s illness and tells his wife that he has written a plea for a cure on a piece of paper to be attached to the girl’s neck ‘when the fever is upon her again’, while saying three ‘Our Fathers’.18
People of all social stations were constantly on the lookout for portents in nature that would mirror and confirm the chaos that regularly overwhelmed their human realities. This habit, and the forms that these portents typically took, were not exclusive to Hungary, but life for Hungarians must have seemed particularly precarious, with attacks by marauding Hajdúks, unpaid foreign mercenaries and local brigands a daily possibility, the ever-present likelihood of war and the threat of the Turks finally overwhelming the nation always in the back of the mind. Battles in the sky, when the clouds parted, the sky turning red and phantom armies clashing with fireballs and thunder, were regularly seen and entered in the ‘miracle books’ that each town compiled.
If portents did not actually occur, they were imagined into existence. It was commonly believed that Elisabeth’s uncle, Prince Sigmund Báthory, had been born with bloody hands, signifying his warlike nature, and that when he was being bathed by his nurse in a basin, he turned into a fish and slithered out of her grasp, neatly anticipating the fact that he moved his seat of power many times during his political career.
Another kind of folk superstition common to all cultures was a fear of the dead, most keenly felt when it was believed that the deceased retained a physical appetite and the means to satisfy it. If Countess Báthory is known at all in the anglophone countries, it is usually in the context of vampire literature, a fact that is not surprising in that the vampire myth has been especially identified with her native lands – but the connection does not stand up to scrutiny any more than the tenuous links with the Romanian Dracula. In Elisabeth’s lifetime, between 1560 and 1614, the vampire craze in central and eastern Europe had not yet begun, but stories of ghostly revenants were common. In 1600 in the north of Hungary there was a local epidemic in which at least 2,500 died. Once the epidemic had subsided, strange phenomena disturbed the people of the region. Schoolchildren and their tutors fled when a phantom hunt was heard in a schoolhouse, reappearing the following night even after guards (‘including educated persons’) had been posted. More disturbingly the dead victims of the epidemic started to reappear in their villages, causing doors to creak and slam, moving furniture, moaning and touching their surviving loved ones with cold hands.19
One particular returnee from the dead was Gasparek of Lublo, who reappeared in his village looking just as he had before his funeral. This ghost indecently assaulted the maidens working in the fields and tried to lie with his widow in her bed at night. He continued to torment and annoy his neighbours until his body was exhumed and burned, after which he was never seen again, but his name served as a nickname for the foolish or mischievous until the 1980s. Peter Plogojowitz, the Serbian vampire whose exploits triggered the eighteenth century’s fascination with the blood-drinking undead was part of the same widespread tradition, in which those who managed to live through epidemics were then plagued by the reappearance of their loved ones.20 Modern rationalism explains this as shock, grief and guilt at surviving an inexplicable bereavement preventing the living from coming to terms with what had happened to their community – something too awful for the therapeutic effects of prayer to efface. The exhaustion, lassitude or even prostration that followed these traumas were similar to the effects of bloodletting, and was put down to the vampiric activities of ghosts or zombies.
Long before the now familiar regalia of fangs, batwings and silver crucifixes had accreted to the vampire, there was a rich body of folk-legend surrounding a slightly different creature. The common attribute is blood-drinking, but the original vampire was a malevolent soul – a witch, a suicide or simply someone tainted by evil or ill luck – who would escape from the grave to prey upon humans and their animals. The word itself has been known in English only since 1732, but is much older in the regions of its origins. Cognates, including the Serbian vampir and úpir in Czech and Russian, are found in all the Slavonic languages and seem to be based on the root pi, to drink.
Hungary’s vampire-craze, which coincided with lesser epidemics in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, lasted from the end of the seventeenth century through a further eighty-odd years. Probably initiated by rumours from Istria and the Balkans coinciding with waves of hysteria among the common people, who were suffering intolerable social stresses, it was fuelled by the inquisitions launched by the Calvinists and Catholics and by the attentions of officials of the Austrian Empire and German-speaking scholars, prompted by genuine concern but also by suspicion of heresy, immorality and subversion among their Slav and Magyar subjects.
Distinguished writers such as the sceptic Cal
met in his Treatise on the Vampires of Hungary’, Karl Ferdinand von Schertz in his Magia Posthuma and Guiseppe Davanzati in Dissertazione sopra i vampiri analysed the phenomenon, as did the Imperial bureaucrats and bailiffs who were sent to investigate the outbreaks of vampirism in situ. The published works became bestsellers and the names of the most notorious undead – Jure Grando of Carniola, Peter Plogojowitz of Kisilova, Arnold Paole of Medvegia, as well as the aforementioned Gasparek of Lublo – became familiar throughout the continent. (Although it is significant that Father Túróczi’s tales of Countess Báthory’s blood-bathing coincided with the first vampire reports and an upsurge in witch-trials elsewhere, Nitra county where Čachtice is situated actually recorded fewer persecutions of witches than most other parts of Hungary.)
Local people would often report the sound of chewing coming from the coffins of their deceased neighbours: when graves were opened, the corpses of suspected vampires were often found to be perfectly preserved even months after their deaths. Blood – or what appeared to be blood – might be seen around the mouth and on the fingernails, and the flesh might be rosy and firm. Once again there are explanations. Where local conditions or intense cold do not actually preserve a body, the effects of decomposition can mimic preservation. The actions of bacteria can reinflate the body, liquefy the blood and cause reddish secretions to seep from the orifices. Surface skin can peel to reveal healthy-looking pigments beneath or there may be ‘rubefaction’ from internal chemical changes which can even heat up the corpse to a lifelike temperature. When exhumations revealed a lustrous, well-fed cadaver, the standard procedure was to cut off the head, drive a stake through the heart and then burn the remains, scattering the ashes as widely as possible.