Countess Dracula

by Tony Thorne

  By 1848 the Carpathians had been made the setting for the many vampire romances produced in Paris. The archetype of the undead femme fatale which was embodied in Elisabeth Báthory had also begun to filter into the literature of the west. Although the best-known eighteenth-century revenants of central Europe and the most famous fictional blood-drinker have been male, it is notable that in a recent survey of the most important vampires recorded in folklore, prose and poetry between 1687 and 1913 the list of forty-three (which includes Elisabeth Báthory) contains twenty-three women and three supernatural creatures of unknown gender, and another six female ‘semi-vampires’ are mentioned in the accompanying text.21

  A spectral being which can be found in Hungary is the ‘beautiful lady’, an ambivalent witch/fairy who rarely appears alone, but dances and sings with her companions on lawns and in meadows. The beautiful ladies will entice their victims, then dance them to death. They also live in whirlwinds and steal the milk from the cow’s udder, but they are said to be invisible at high noon and from midnight to dawn, unlike the Slovak fairies – the souls of girls who died while preparing for their weddings, or in childbirth – who, like the Romanian Pripolniza, can only be seen at those times, especially on St George’s day, 23 April, when the earth opens and they dance forth from its crevices and caverns. In central Slovakia the noonday fairies are ugly crones, while further east the Rusalka, or water spirit, also known to the southern Slavs, is more prevalent; she lives in wells, in channels, in rain and dew, and can be recognised by the water dripping from her left eye. These were among the denizens of the faery world in which Elisabeth’s make-believe persona also found a place.

  If old Hungary was a land often visited by the supernatural, its neighbour to the east was a veritable magic cauldron. The nineteenth-century gentlewoman Emily de Laszowska Gérard wrote of Transylvania: ‘It would almost seem as though the whole species of demons, pixies, witches and hobgoblins, driven from the rest of Europe by the hand of science, had taken refuge within this mountain rampart, well aware that here they would find secure lurking-places, whence they might defy their pursuers yet awhile . . .’22

  Old Romanian legends, probably influenced by rumours from the time of the Crusades, recount that the stability of castles and churches was guaranteed by walling up a live victim, preferably a female virgin, in their foundations. Emily Gérard noted that in Transylvania the practice had been replaced by the custom of stealing the shadow of a passer-by and sealing that into the building instead – not such an innocuous alternative, as the unwitting donor would sicken and die within days.

  The connections between the world of magic and virgins and castle foundations, and the links between the real Countess and her counterparts in myth, do not end here. And more elements – the female provinces of herbalism and curing, and the associated concepts of witchcraft, the persecution of women, and myths of femininity and blood, as well as the pastimes of the privileged, both innocent and not so innocent – must be considered before we can displace ourselves into the vanished landscape of the early modern mind.

  Chapter Four

  The Black Bey and the Heiress

  On to the dead gois all Estatis

  Princis, Prelatis, and Potestastis

  Baith rich and pur of all degree

  Timor mortis conturbat me.

  William Dunbar, Lament for the Makers

  The origins of the Báthorys ~ Elisabeth’s childhood ~ criteria of marriageability ~ francis Nádasdy, the golden youth ~ a young lady’s wealth ~ betrothal ceremonies ~ Sárvár castle and court ~ a secret affaire ~ Hungarian weddings ~ potions and charms ~ life on the frontier ~ the Mighty Black Bey ~ the priesthood and ‘an evil woman’

  The Báthory family was an illustrious one, distinguished even among the supremely proud older aristocracy of the Hungarian Kingdom. Their personalities fascinated their contemporaries, and if references to them sometimes make them seem almost more than mortal, this no doubt was how some of the family saw themselves. They had in common a conviction of their inalienable rights and privileges as the foremost among an all-powerful noble caste; they were headstrong and self-willed. In Hungary today it has become an unquestioned truism that the family were all, in the word most often employed, ‘touched’, alternately by greatness or by madness and degeneracy.

  Like many Hungarian noble families of the early modern era, the Báthorys claimed mythical origins for themselves; they included Bathus, the King of the Roman province of Pannonia, Alaric the Goth and Vencellinus among their ancestors, as well as the warrior Vid Báthory, who was perhaps real but whose importance is that, Siegfried- or Beowulf-like, he was said to have slain a dragon with a mace in the Ecsed marshes, providing the family with their coat of arms: three dragon’s teeth surrounded by a dragon biting its own tail. The real origin of the crest is obscure (conjecture that the teeth are wolves’ and reflect the family’s disposition was a conceit of nineteenth- and twentieth-century werewolf enthusiasts), but is much more likely to be a version of the symbols of the Order of St George, a knightly honour bestowed on some of the greatest warrior families – among them Vlad, Count Dracula – at the end of the fourteenth century.

  The Somlyói branch of the family was the princely line, with their seat a small palace in the village of the same name, now in Romania. During Elisabeth’s lifetime four magnates from this dynasty, Christopher, Sigmund, Andrew and Gábor, ruled the Principality of Transylvania, and Stephen became King of Poland. Through marriage, the family was related to the Austrian Habsburg and the Polish Jagiełłon royal lines. The lesser Ecsed branch of the Báthory family had owned their castle, incongruously set in the middle of an expanse of marshland at the place now known as Nagyecsed, near the modern Romanian border, since 1317.

  The blood of Elisabeth Báthory was compounded of a long interbreeding between a few noble clans, her own family reuniting the two branches of the Báthorys; her mother Anna, the sister of King Stephen of Poland, was from the Somlyóis, her father George, the ruler of several counties (and her mother’s third husband), was from the Ecsedys. Countess Anna was a devout Calvinist and a strong character, revered especially by her son. No scandals were ever associated with Count George Báthory, who resigned his official posts in the service of the Habsburgs to marry his ‘Transylvanian’ cousin. But, apart from this, nothing is known of their private lives. Elisabeth was christened with one of the small stock of family names that occurred at least once in every previous generation on her mother’s side; the first names of boys were likewise reused again and again, confusing historians and even more so the literary embellishers of history. Elisabeth’s elder brother, who inherited the Ecsed estates and ruled the surrounding counties, was one of many Stephens, and she had two younger sisters, Klára and Sofia, who have disappeared from history without leaving any traces – not even the usual rumours of madness and wantonness. All that is known is that they survived long enough each to marry a respected middle-ranking nobleman and to die childless.

  Elisabeth had been formed first at Ecsed, a Renaissance court of great splendour in a complex of palaces and fortifications amid meres and quicksands, later at her husband’s equally eminent family seat of Sárvár, also a centre of humanist culture. All the aristocratic courts, particularly those of whoever was the current Lord Palatine, vied to promote learning and literature. Among those who had no intrinsic interest in the cultivation of the mind and spirit it was nonetheless a question of prestige to pose as a patron.

  The story that is being told here will return again and again, as it is bound to, to the barbarism and desperation which permeated European society in Elisabeth Báthory’s lifetime. But the young Countess spent her childhood and the first couple of years of her married life in a brief period of tranquillity for Hungary: not an idyll, but at least a respite from the troubles. Sickness, local disputes and lawlessness did not disappear, but between the Drina Treaty of 1566 and her future husband, Count Francis Nádasdy’s first recorded battle in 1578, the Turk
ish occupiers and their free Hungarian neighbours learned to coexist and began to trade with one another. Even Transylvania was at peace after 1574.

  In 1571 Elisabeth Báthory, at the age of eleven, was promised in marriage. A betrothal at such an early age was commonplace, marriages were not love-matches but dynastic unions for the upper classes of Hungary, contracted principally to ensure that family wealth was concentrated and increased. The first offer of marriage might come from either the girl’s family or the boy’s, and although it was sometimes spontaneous (the Polish Count Dembinsky abruptly offered his stepdaughter to the Hungarian John Kemény while the latter was visiting on a diplomatic mission),1 any attempts to sidestep the strict etiquette of supervised courtship were severely punished.

  The criteria that senior family members considered before making or accepting an offer of marriage were set out in a letter from Count George Thurzó, Elisabeth Báthory’s later enemy, to his younger cousin Stanislas in 1598. George has been asked to put his views in writing, as well as in an oral message, and says he is flattered to be consulted. He first congratulates Stanislas on his arrangements for his daughter’s wedding to Lord Sigmund Forgách, a young man, he says, who is virtuous and of good family (not surprisingly; George’s stepfather and mentor was a Forgách).

  He then comes to the more testing question of Stanislas’ own marriage, which he has been pondering at length: ‘You could gain much or lose everything, and then better to die than to live,’ he comments, before considering in turn the ladies who have been offered as partners. He counsels against the daughter of the Pole Lubomirski, saying that Polish morals are quite different from Hungarian morals, and that in any case the Poles dislike both the Hungarian people and their sovereign. Becoming a member of the Polish nation would bring the King’s displeasure – and everyone who has taken this path before has regretted it. He clinches this part of his argument by reminding Stanislas that he would have to pay the woman an impossibly high dowry of more than 40,000 florins. As for the daughter of the Austrian Prince of Teschen, this would bring great honour, but the woman ‘does not look nice and is old and sickly’. George had also been offered her as a bride when he was a widower; he refused her then and so he cannot possibly recommend her now.

  He finally comes to the daughter of Squire Listhius, and here he is cautious, saying he has not seen her and cannot comment on her family as Stanislas knows them better. He urges Stanislas to listen to his own heart, but also to listen out for more information about her health and morals: ‘If you choose, choose not only with your eyes, but with your ears as well. Our family obliges you so to do.’2

  George’s ambivalence about the fifteen-year-old Lady Listhius was not resolved when he went with Count Stephen Illésházy to inspect her personally on Stanislas’ behalf. ‘She is no Dido [Queen of Carthage and Aeneas’ lover in Virgil’s Aeneid],’ he wrote to his own wife, ‘but if Stanislas likes her so much that he cannot live without her, what can I do against it? I am quite unsure how the matter should proceed.’ Stanislas did marry Anna-Rosina Listhius and we will meet her name again in much more sinister circumstances.

  Elisabeth Báthory’s husband-to-be was the fifteen-year-old Francis Nádasdy, scion of a fabulously rich family, and probably the most eligible bachelor in Hungary at that time. The marriage was arranged not least so that the Drágffy inheritances of which each child possessed a part could be united.

  The golden youth Francis was the cherished only child of the Palatine, Thomas Nádasdy, the highest official of Royal Hungary after the foreign King, and his wife, Lady Ursula. The Nádasdys traced their lineage back to a quite spurious English ancestor: they had only recently been elevated to the senior aristocracy and Lord Thomas, born in 1498, had enormously increased the family’s wealth by marrying in 1535 the teenage heiress (she was fourteen and he thirty-seven) Ursula Kanizsai, whose family seat was in the south-west on the borders of present-day Croatia and Slovenia. Thomas had inherited an array of feudal privileges, to which he added a cultivated mind formed in his student days in Bologna and Graz. He was respected and admired by his serfs, and the Habsburgs entrusted him with diplomatic missions and military commands and rewarded him richly in return. Although Nádasdy’s loyalties wavered – he defended the capital Buda against the Turks for the Empire, but after the débâcle of Mohács he supported the Magyar Zápolya’s claim against the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand – by mid-century he was one of the most powerful magnates in the Kingdom and back in favour with the Habsburgs, whose cause he re-espoused, not least so that he and Ursula could be allowed to keep their vast tracts of land along the western borders. He was created ban (governor) of the province of Croatia and later elected to the highest office of Count Palatine of Hungary. Thomas was also a loving and affectionate husband who helped his young bride to learn to read and write.

  The baby Francis was doted upon, especially as he was born when his parents had almost given up hope of an heir. The couple had, very unusually for that time, a relationship based on real and mutual tenderness, as their letters to one another show, but for many years Ursula could not conceive. Her husband was almost always away from home attending to affairs of state on behalf of his master, the King, or supervising the Nádasdy-Kanizsai inheritance, which included vast estates spread across western and northern Hungary, and the south Transylvanian castle of Fogaras, which had belonged to the historical Dracula.

  Several techniques of contraception were used at the time, but there seems no reason why the couple should not have sought an early birth: the many other cases of temporary infertility among the nobility, including that of Elisabeth herself, may have been due to unbalanced diet or ill-health, or, as later writers suggested, to the depleted gene pool within which the great families intermarried. Whatever the reason, in January 1555, just as the Palatine and his lady, now thirty-four years old, were about to adopt a male child, Ursula discovered to her surprise that she was pregnant.

  The fabulously wealthy Nádasdy family were able not only to employ their own private doctor, but to buy the services of one of the very best, Caspar Szegedi Körös, known as Praximus, who supervised Countess Kanizsai all through her pregnancy. As was customary, the family also called in a traditional healer, a German midwife, to assist at the delivery, and without her the lady and her child who was born on 7 October might not have survived. His valet, Antal Sárkány reassured the father, ‘the baby is now in fine fettle, he resembles you, his nose is quite big; he certainly will not be cursed with a snub-nose . . .’3

  It seems that Lord Thomas did not see his son in the flesh until some time in the following year: Sárkány wrote to tell him of the christening, which took place on 21 October. In the new year Sárkány reported: ‘The little lord is in good health, he is nicely plump and sucks his mother’s milk most greedily: nor does he often allow his mother rest, even at night. But it would be a blessing if your lordship could return home for Easter.’

  Although he indulged his son, Thomas also subjected him to the strict regime of discipline and piety that was the norm, writing to his wife on one occasion that she should have a servant administer a spanking to their son every three days without fail.4

  In the legends which have been woven around his wife Elisabeth, Francis has usually been depicted as a dashingly thoughtless man of action or as a heavy-set dullard, but this is not how friends of the family viewed him during his early years. Francis could write in his Hungarian mother tongue at the age of five, and Lord Francis Batthyány wrote to his father complimenting the boy on his handwriting. ‘I know for sure that neither of you, his parents, could write when you were his age,’ he adds. ‘I strongly recommend that you send him to the court and chancellery of His Majesty [the Emperor in Vienna], and after two or three years he will prove to be a great man there.’5 Plans were indeed made to have Francis educated at the royal court, but they were interrupted by the death of Thomas Nádasdy, who succumbed to the plague in Egervár in June 1562 at the advanced (for that time) age
of sixty-four. Lady Ursula, now solely responsible for her son’s upbringing, decided that he should first be taught by Stephen Bythe, the schoolmaster at Sárvár. In 1567 she dispatched Francis to Vienna to continue his education under the protection of the Austrian Archduke Ernest and the tutelage of two Hungarians, Francis Sennyey and Christopher Lörinczfalvy. In common with many boys of his class, Francis was attached to the household of a fellow-countryman, in this case George Bocskai, Secretary of the Hungarian Chancellery, rather than being lodged in his own family’s house in the city. The twelve-year-old lived and studied with Bocskai’s son Stephen, later to become Prince of Transylvania, and the two of them attended the Imperial Court, where they were obliged to serve for three years before becoming members of the King of Hungary’s official entourage. Francis had free access to the private apartments of the Emperor’s own children and would visit them each morning between nine and ten o’clock and again after four in the afternoon.

  At the age of twelve Francis Nádasdy could compose his letters in Latin; at thirteen he was hunting with the Habsburg children, and in the same year he appeared in a theatrical entertainment at the court in the role of a goddess. He also took part in the most important ceremonial events of the court and, when he was seventeen years old, the chronicler Eunonius Urbanus singled him out as the most promising of the young Hungarian nobles in Vienna at that time and predicted a glittering future for him.