Countess Dracula

by Tony Thorne

  By that time Francis had been engaged for two years to Elisabeth, eldest daughter of the Ecsed branch of the Báthory family. As long ago as 1557 Lord Francis Török, the commander of the nearby fortress of Pápa, had approached the Nádasdys of Sárvár and proposed his daughter as a bride for their two-year-old son. For whatever reason this offer was declined, and it is likely that other matches were suggested for the eminently eligible heir, but by 1562 Thomas Nádasdy and George Báthory had discussed the betrothal of their children, and in February 1570 the widowed Ursula Kanizsai concluded a formal agreement with Lord George and Lady Anna Báthory that they would reserve the hand of their daughter Elisabeth for her suitor Francis Nádasdy. The records show that the notary Michael Szássay certified the arrangement whereby the ten-year-old girl’s parents promised to give the fifteen-year-old Francis first option on their daughter until All Saints’ Day, or longer if war or illness intervened. At that stage no dates for the engagement ceremony or marriage were set.

  As for the bride, a document dated New Year’s Eve 1572 confirms Elisabeth as Lord Francis Nádasdy’s bride-to-be and lists her personal possessions from just one of the estates that already belonged to her as follows: 31,000 florins in cash; two gilded silver basins; six large silver platters; six gold and six silver plates; twenty-four gilded silver spoons; twelve silver forks; four gold necklaces; five gold necklaces for maidservants; two gilded silver bowls; two large silver sconces; two gilded silver cocks; one golden carpet set with jewels which had belonged to King Mátyás Corvinus I; thirteen tapestries; six new carpets; one gold pendant set with rubies and sapphires; one gold medallion set with four crystals and one amethyst; six silver belts with attached small golden chains for maidservants; two large rings set with sapphires; several other pieces of jewellery; a portrait of an ancestor, Bartholomew Drágffy, in a gilded frame; and many items of clothing, including a gold-trimmed fur coat with silver hem. It is known that at a later date Elisabeth also possessed the sword of her uncle King Stephen Báthory, a great gilded silver cup decorated with a gold cross, twenty-six diamonds, thirty-eight rubies, nine sapphires, two hundred and sixty-six pearls and a cup decorated with views of the castle of Fülek.6

  Elisabeth and Francis waited four years to marry. This was quite normal, given the age of the couple and the need to uphold the dignity of the families. In the intervening months or years the future bride would be ‘finished’ – instructed in her household duties and the social skills and arts appropriate to her new position, and this would often take place in the household of her mother-in-law, as was the case with Elisabeth.

  The young Elisabeth was sent from Ecsed to Sárvár, the main Nádasdy family seat in western Hungary, where she was placed in the care of Lady Ursula Kanizsai. By all accounts, Elisabeth had already been well tutored in her parents’ court and could read and write Hungarian, Greek, Latin and German as well as any man. This was still an exception in an age when some male aristocrats remained semi-literate all their lives, and most women, including Lady Kanizsai, could not read and write their own language at the time of their marriage. The stories say that Elisabeth was sent to the court of the martinet Ursula to be instructed in the wifely arts, and they describe in detail how a mutual hatred grew up between the two women which helped to feed the bitterness and cruelty that Elisabeth later showed to other, weaker women. We know nothing of the young heiress’s temperament and the later legends that she hated the strict regime of her mother-in-law are groundless; there was certainly no lengthy feud, as Lady Ursula died in 1571 when Elisabeth was only eleven years old, two years before the engagement party and four years before the marriage took place. There is no proof that Elisabeth ever even saw her mother-in-law face to face. We can be fairly sure that Elisabeth was not physically abnormal or in poor health at the time of her betrothal: as the Thurzó correspondence shows, prospective brides were carefully inspected or vetted by third parties, and Francis Nádasdy could have had his pick of the Kingdom’s female suitors.

  Sárvár (the name – ‘mud castle’ – commemorates an earlier fortress on the same site) in the third quarter of the sixteenth century was an ideal place for the cultivation of learning and the civilised virtues. Today the castle lies on the edge of an elegant market town amid meadows and flat countryside luxuriant in summer with reeds, marsh marigolds, willow and deep yellow-topped weeds.

  The streets of Sárvár are hot and dusty in summer, and the pungent smell of horses wafts from the riding stables by the castle’s outer wall and hangs on the air just as it has done for more than 300 years. The sight of the intact Sárvár castle comes as a surprise; it is not rough-hewn, severe, austere, as the sixteenth-century woodcuts showed it, but spacious, airy. The Renaissance style which replaced the earlier gothic and became common after the Battle of Mohács was imported from Italy, as were the architects and some masons; the standard form was a quadrangle with turrets at each corner or a star shape. The castle roofs were a striking red, according to contemporary Austrian admirers; the main gate is said to have been designed by Palladio himself; and the outer fortified wall was added by Francis Nádasdy in 1588 following a Turkish raid; his son Paul completed the work in 1615 and celebrated the fact in a plaque proclaiming him as his father’s legitimate heir.

  In Elisabeth’s day the castle stood surrounded by a moat as wide as a river. The town, which then consisted of little more than the castle and its garrison buildings, was an island in the waterlands created by the Rába and Gyöngyös rivers, which join there. In the still heat of the long summers, clouds of insects would torment the men and horses in the stable blocks and liveries; during the hard winters the waterways and meres round about would freeze over for weeks at a time.

  The Sárvár court was a magnet for Protestant humanist scholars during the years that – Thomas Nádasdy and Lady Ursula presided over the household. The succession of priests who served the family included Matthew Dévay Bíró, known as the Hungarian Luther, János Sylvester, the first translator of the New Testament into the Hungarian language, and the religious propagandist Stephen Magyari, who became embroiled in Elisabeth’s controversies. To disseminate religious tracts and books one of the very few printing presses in the Kingdom was set up by the order of Thomas, who played host to visiting intellectuals from the Netherlands, the German Principalities and Italy.

  During the period of their engagement the young couple probably saw little of each other; Francis spent time completing his academic education in Vienna and being trained in military discipline and the techniques of warfare at the garrisons along the Austro-Hungarian border. There would have been a hundred innocent diversions with which Elisabeth could counteract her own boredom, but the tedium which might have afflicted the delicate, intense adolescent heiress has been compensated for by a fictional love affair recounted by her Austrian biographer, von Elsberg.

  The story goes that across the Danube, in the walled town of Trnava where the family of the future groom owned a small mansion, the girl Elisabeth gave herself to Ladislas Bende, a man of fine physique and heroic bearing (the standard attributes then as now). In von Elsberg’s cosmopolitan prose, ‘virginitatem suam geraubt und sie dadurch in perpetuam infamiam gebraucht’ (‘he robbed her of her virginity and thereby consigned her to perpetual shame’).7 Elisabeth conceived immediately and an illegitimate child was born, to be spirited away into Transylvania and never heard of again (until, that is, she reappears in Nižňanský’s later Slovak novel). The family hushed up the scandal as best they could, and propriety dictated that the marriage went ahead despite the bride’s secret transgression.

  The property in Trnava existed and there was indeed a László or Ladislas Bende, although his relations with Elisabeth, if any, are unclear. The story of the love child, embroidered around snippets of real history, is a standard ingredient of melodrama and romance and helps to create the persona of a headstrong and passionately amoral teenager. It was useful, too, to explain why the Countess might have been shunned in he
r adult life (which was not in fact the case), and why she did not reward her new husband with their own child for many years.

  The wedding between Lady Elisabeth Báthory and Lord Francis Nádasdy took place at the small turreted palace of Varanno, now Vranov, known as an island of gaiety in the backward eastern part of the Kingdom, on 8 May 1575: the bride was then fifteen years old and the groom nineteen. A nineteen-page announcement was printed in Vienna8 and the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian himself was invited, but as was usual the Austrian grandees stayed on their side of the border and sent representatives bearing lavish gifts of golden goblets, wine and jewelled ornaments. There were probably around 4,500 guests, not counting the commoners from the surrounding countryside who would be allowed to join in the celebrations with open-air pig- and ox-roasts and wine and bread. Those celebrating inside the castle would be ministered to by fifteen or so wedding stewards and ushers, catered for by around twenty master-chefs and their assistants and serenaded by gypsy bands and Polish or Italian ensembles, as well as Hungarian musicians.

  Guests would compete in the finery they and their servants could display at such an occasion; in 1559 Lady Anna Thurzó had to extort two pounds’ weight of gold from her estate manager to pay for her attendance at the nuptials of Lord Christopher Országh, then the owner of the castle of Čachtice. A typical aristocratic wedding might cost more than the whole estate of a member of the minor gentry: in 1603 George Thurzó spent over one thousand florins on supplies from Vienna for the feasting at the wedding of his daughter Susannah, which Countess Báthory attended. The shopping list comprised 200 pounds of pepper, 50 pounds of ginger, 25 pounds of cloves, 4 pounds of nutmegs, 4 pounds of saffron, 1,000 lemons, 500 oranges, 253 pounds of honey. Other ingredients for the standard three days of feasting could be requisitioned from the surrounding demesnes. Thurzó demanded 36 oxen, 118 calves, 103 sheep, 58 lambs, 119 pigs, 33 deer, 185 rabbits, 526 hens, 381 capons, 785 chickens, 420 geese, 130 small birds (probably starlings and sparrows), 5,333 eggs, 70 galóca fish, 1,600 trout, 240 small fish, crayfish ‘without number’, 200 menyhal fish, 238 cubic feet of oats and 35 wagons of hay.9

  The groom, his friends, familiars and guests would traditionally travel together in procession to the place of the nuptials where the bride-to-be was waiting. Certain rites had to be observed at each stage of the proceedings: two members of the groom’s entourage would ride ahead to pay their respects to the bride’s family on the groom’s behalf and, before returning, the two messengers (whose title translates as ‘heralds of happiness’) would take wine and dance three times with their hosts. The bride’s wedding steward would then send a group of prize horses and a ring to the approaching party, and young men from both retinues would pause at a suitable site en route to race against one another for the ring. Given the Hungarians’ cult of horsemanship, the races were in earnest and the winning of the ring an important public honour.

  Only when the races were over did the groom’s party continue on their way. When all the guests had assembled, the groom would send an envoy on horseback to deliver gifts to the bride and her family and to any representatives of the King, neighbouring rulers and the church who had agreed to attend. The humbler female guests would receive rich clothing, the men fine weapons, while the betrothed couple would exchange jewelled ornaments, sumptuous tapestries, carpets and robes which would take pride of place in their family treasury. For the young Elisabeth her husband’s wedding gift included the manor of Čachtice with its seventeen neighbouring hamlets, a holding that Ursula Kanizsai had acquired in April 1569.

  As the company moved to the appointed venue, a castle hall, a temporary pavilion or a specially constructed ‘wedding house’ annexe, there were cannon and musket salutes and serenading by musicians. Before the ceremony proper there was one final formality, a lighthearted test of the groom’s sincerity. The best man stepped forward to hail the bride’s family and called forth the bride herself, but instead the bridesmaids would emerge one by one to confront the young man and he would have to identify his wife-to-be from among them. Once the real bride had been chosen, the marriage ceremony itself could be enacted according to the religion of the couple.10

  Post-wedding feasts in sixteenth-century Hungary were much as they are today, with toasts to the couple’s future health and happiness between the many courses of the banquet, followed by dances – to Hungarian, Polish and Italian music, but all unrestrained and exuberantly Magyar in execution. Visitors from the west, used to a sedate, courtly ambience, were fascinated by the frenetic play of primary colours, the fierce brio of the social rituals, all set to urgent, haunting music.

  During the succession of wedding balls, the bride was obliged to partner every one of the guests, even the bishops and cardinals who had attended and who would not touch her hand but held the other end of a ribbon or kerchief as they wheeled about. The dancing would continue long into the evening and at the end of the first day of carousing the young couple would be escorted to their chamber by young nobles carrying flaming torches to light their way. It was usual for marriage festivities to last at least three days, allowing ample time between the many changes of costume, the elaborate and gargantuan meals and the dances and games, for the younger guests to take stock of the personal charms and social prospects of their fellows, while the older lords and ladies withdrew into secret corners to gossip and conspire.

  It has been calculated that sterility and infertility among the Hungarian ruling class, along with a low life-expectancy and the effects of intermarriage and syphilis, meant that every second generation there was a strong risk of a family being left without a male heir of an age to inherit. For more than ten years after their marriage, no children were born to the Nádasdy couple, and in this masculine society it would be the woman who was assumed to be deficient, even if the tension between notions of pious celibacy and the pressing need to procreate, not to mention simple fear of sex and venereal disease, could play havoc with a man’s potency. The cures on offer for women’s infertility were legion, but almost completely ineffectual. From her fellow-aristocrats and her relations Elisabeth would have borrowed or bought the grimoires translated from the French and on sale in Venice, or acquired the Persian and Turkish recipes carried by word-of-mouth through Transylvania. If it was fecundity she desired, then there were simple procedures – watch a cat as it licks its genitals, sprinkle a tortoise with cold water – or more costly ones, such as buying a holy relic or the appropriate magic stone. Emeralds and aquamarines, sharing as they do the colour green, would strengthen the bonds of marriage and guard the owner against infidelity by a spouse or the temptations of a would-be seducer.11

  Perhaps an aphrodisiac was in order, to stimulate a husband who was a lion on the battlefield but a mouse in the bedchamber (or had he already spent his energies with the camp-followers and well-born lady admirers who had managed to have themselves smuggled to the front?). The simplest of the remedies available meant slipping fireflies into his food, or spicing his meals with red grass and mistletoe. If it was the wife whose ardour was feeble, the answer was to mix the powdered heart of a dove, the liver of a sparrow, the womb of a swallow and a hare’s kidney with drops of the husband’s blood. This concoction was to be used with caution as only three thimblefuls could, it was said, madden a woman with desire. There was another source of potions and enchantments near at hand, and nineteenth-century writers, trying to explain how a virtual princess had taken the lowliest peasant women into her confidence, decided that it was during her years of barrenness that Elisabeth had fallen under the influence of the local witches who promised to cure her.

  Elisabeth’s contemporary, the gifted amateur healer Lady Éva Poppelová, was contemptuous of orthodox medicine as practised by men and strongly recommended that women’s ailments, infertility included, were better treated by traditional folk remedies. She went further and warned, probably not without justification, that male surgeons could do more damage than good to a woman’s body.12 Perhaps E
lisabeth stumbled on a charm or a medicine that worked (it may even have been the clumsy attentions of the gynaecologists of Vienna which had caused Elisabeth’s inability to conceive in the first place, and the herbal baths and infusions of the wise-women which restored it), for in 1585 she gave birth to a daughter, Anna, followed by Ursula and Andrew, both of whom died in infancy, another daughter, Kate, and a surviving son and heir, Paul, who was born in 1598.

  The military frontier between the Hungarian and Turkish lands, a second home for Francis Nádasdy, his peers and the men at his command, was made up of a chain of fortresses stretching about a thousand kilometres from the Dalmatian coast to the borders of Transylvania.

  The frontier lands bred a frontier mentality with its own values and customs, shared by both sides in the endless war. Criminals and runaway serfs could get shelter there, among the military outposts where the robot was not enforced and where allegiance was limited to one’s own captain and comrades; booty from raids and ransoms might occasionally enrich the poorly paid, hard-bitten soldiers, but for much of the time it was harsh, unremitting discipline that kept them in check.

  Francis Nádasdy excelled at his military duties and mastered the strategies of war as well as inspiring the men who served under him, who were also awed by his sheer physical strength. For the whole of his adult life, war against the Turk was his vocation and for nineteen years his wife hardly saw him in domestic surroundings at all. (Sárvár itself, well to the west and the north of the war zones, had been raided by the Turks in 1532 and again in 1588, but Elisabeth was well guarded and the walls had been strengthened to withstand a siege.) With no hope of real political and cultural progress or social stability in Hungary, the energies of the men were of necessity devoted to war. The romantic uncertainty of ‘life on the marches’ provided a setting for a cult of heroic chivalry that became the only raison d’être.