by Tony Thorne
Francis Nádasdy was first appointed Master of the King’s Horse and then named Captain of the Field Army of Upper Hungary – the equivalent of a modern general. With his co-commanders Pálffy, Zrínyi and Batthyány, all four of them drawn from the country’s noble elite, Nádasdy led his troops in a series of brilliant campaigns against the Ottomans under Amurad III, who honoured their enemy by nicknaming him the ‘Black Bey of Hungary’. He played a leading part in the battles of Bajcsa and Sissek and the siege of Pápa in 1600, after which he was joined in his soldiering by a fellow-Lutheran aristocrat and patriot whose seat was in Upper Hungary, Lord George Thurzó. For his own side, Francis the ‘War Thunderer’ was and still is a national hero: his strength was said to be more than that of a mere human and the admiring folktales that were told have him dancing at victory celebrations with the corpses of Turks, tossing them in the air and catching them and playing bowls with their severed heads. The official iconography can be seen in the Sárvár castle frescoes which show the glowering bearded champion besieging castles and transfixing dozens of Ottoman foes on the end of his lance.
Francis had covered himself in glory in the service of Hungary and the Empire: his fame as a soldier spread all across Europe and he was honoured and rewarded in Vienna, although he quarrelled with the Habsburgs over ransoms for Turkish prisoners which he thought they had denied him and over the return of the funds which he had loaned to the Imperial Treasury. He was at the same time a man of strong principles and when the Catholic Austrian King conspired to flout Hungarian law and have the Protestant Count Illésházy dispossessed and beheaded, Nádasdy dared to declare his support for Illésházy, in opposition to his comrade-in-arms, the Habsburgs’ catspaw, Thurzó, who had helped to orchestrate the plot. Lord Francis had earlier taken a risky and courageous stand against Elisabeth’s own family when he protested at Prince Sigmund Báthory’s judicial murdering of the Hungarian lords during the purge of the pro-Turkish party in Transylvania in 1594.13
Francis was also a staunch patron of the Lutherans, occupying the Catholic churches on his lands by force and handing them over to worshippers of his own faith. Elisabeth had been brought up in a devoutly Calvinist household whose religious principles had inspired her brother Stephen but seem not to have been infused into the personalities of her nephew and niece, Gábor and Anna, who were raised there. Elisabeth’s deeper thoughts on her faith are lost to us, but in common with most of their peers the couple’s religious beliefs were probably held sincerely and not just factors of social tradition, although piety did not seem anywhere in Europe to enforce kindness or pacifism. The earnest discourse of the Reformation, with its emphasis on humility, redemption and an all-pervading awareness of retribution, can be seen not only in the many published homilies and editing works that were circulating, but in every recorded conversation, every letter and every essay.
The extreme puritanism seen in some western societies was never embraced by the Magyars, nevertheless in the sixteenth century the nobility had welcomed the Reformation, not least because it restricted the power of the Catholic king. Although the church of Rome remained the official faith, it was practised widely only in Croatia. Reformers preached to the people in their own languages and readily took on a role as the champions of the oppressed against the feudal landlords. Disputes between the noble landowning families and the priesthood were commonplace. When the aristocrats and their followers had first converted, the Protestant pastors took full advantage of their status to criticise the excesses of their rulers and to intercede zealously on behalf of the oppressed peasants, but soon the real status quo became clear again; the senior nobility had a monopoly of power in Hungary, and not even the new church would be allowed to interfere with that. The Calvinists and Lutherans excoriated one another, and for a while the Catholic influence was blotted out altogether. The priests continued to agitate, but more circumspectly, speaking out only when they were sure of the patronage of a strong local grandee.
In the early 1600s the Catholic Counter-Reformation, backed by Vienna, began to gain ground in Hungary and by the second decade of the new century the number of recusants among the aristocratic families and their serfs was growing in earnest, encouraged above all by the efforts of the noble Protestant turned ardent Catholic propagandist, Cardinal Peter Pázmány. One of Pázmány’s most energetic opponents in the theological battles of the time was Lord Francis Nádasdy’s family priest, the Lutheran Stephen Magyari, who published an important tract, On the Present Troubles Afflicting the Two Nations (the two being Hungary and Transylvania), which provoked Pázmány to produce his even more influential Response. In the meantime, in the smaller world of Sárvár, Magyari was negotiating the dilemma that faced all of the favoured ecclesiasts in his position: he had been sheltered and sponsored by a noble family, but in theory at least he was also answerable to his parishioners who, whether they were themselves of the gentry, or servants, or just humble soldiers or peasants, were living at the mercy of his patron’s whims. From the archives, we know that those whims included the seizing of grazing land, the forcible rededication of churches, and the collecting of punitive taxes. Perhaps there were also other, more sinister reasons for the resentment that was communicated to the priest, reasons that concerned one of the other protégées of the family.
It is known that by the turn of the seventeenth century Elisabeth Báthory had added to her personal entourage the teenage boy, Ficzkó, and, from around 1595, a widow named Anna and known as ‘Delbora’ or ‘Darvulia’. Darvulia is a mystery that has perplexed all those writers on the case who have paused to consider her. In 1610 and 1611 she was posthumously accused both by the senior servants who had known her and by other witnesses of being the most evil of Elisabeth’s confidantes, indeed of being the Lady’s guide and inspiration in her torturing. Even Darvulia’s name, which was a nickname transcribed in several different forms, is mysterious; it is not Hungarian, nor does it seem to be Slovak, unless, as has been suggested, it is a corruption of the words dar (give or gift) and bol (sickness or pain), which can be found in Croatian and Serbian, too, the implication being that she had the gift of curing sickness. Unfortunately, Slovak linguists cannot find a precedent for this ingenious etymology.
According to the evidence, while Anna Darvulia was in charge of the domestic arrangements at the castle in 1602 the pastor Michael Zvonarić wrote to Gregory Pythiraeus (or Piterius), the preacher in Keresztúr near the Austrian border, to inform him that Stephen Magyari, the Sárvár deacon and the family’s personal priest, had been discussing certain matters with him upon which he desired Pythiraeus’ advice. In particular the two of them, with fellow-ecclesiasts, had decided that a decision must be made ‘regarding the admonition of his excellency [Lord Francis Nádasdy] and his wife for their acts of cruelty, and there is a woman about whom everyone knows who the Lady uses as her assistant in that place’. The letter is extant and is preserved in the Lutheran archives in Budapest. It is a key document in the armoury of those who believe in Elisabeth’s guilt, as it is the only confirmed example of an accusation which predates the final investigation. Even then Elisabeth’s defenders have pointed out that the letter may be a reaction to Anna Darvulia’s cruelty, and that Elisabeth and Francis are guilty only of harbouring her. These apologists point to the suggestion in the letter that the cruel woman be deprived of the eucharist and, if she refuses to repent, be excommunicated, as an indication that this was actually a doctrinal feud between Lutherans and Calvinists, in which, they think, Elisabeth sided with her servant and co-religionist against the cabal of local priests.
Magyari did indeed denounce the couple from the pulpit for what he termed the ‘tyrannical cruelty practised in their court by an evil woman’. (The quotation is again from Zvonarić, and there is no ambiguity about the word kegyetlen – ‘cruelty’.) Witnesses, such as Bornemissza and Bödy, who recalled the incident years later said that Elisabeth was reprimanded in the absence of her husband and that she complained in a letter
to Lord Francis that she deeply resented the behaviour of the preacher (this document has also survived, but the text is ambiguous).14 Magyari nevertheless continued to serve the family for another eight years, asking pardon from Lord Nádasdy and later delivering the eulogy at his funeral in which there was no mention of the matter. Zvonarić took over the parish on Stephen Magyari’s death, but strangely when he was called upon to testify against Elisabeth in 1610 he insisted that he had himself reproached her in the meantime, but did not mention Magyari’s denunciation, although it was still being talked about by the people living around Sárvár eight years after the events.15
Chapter Five
At the Court of Lady Nádasdy
O, that it were possible
We might but hold some two days’ conference
With the dead!
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
Two letters from Lady Nádasdy ~ customs and duties ~ the Hungarian table ~ pastimes for noble ladies ~ the death and burial of Count Francis Nádasdy ~ the widow’s correspondence and some purchases ~ love and lust ~ health, healing and wise women ~ pictures of the past
Standing in the cool, quiet halls of Sárvár castle, in the museum ambience that fills them today, it is almost impossible to re-create in the mind the noises and smells and the subtler sensations that invested the place in the days when the Nádasdys held court there. We do not know if the household, only a day’s hard ride from the war front, was a fraught, manic environment of bustle and suppressed hysteria, or a haven of ordered calm, an asylum for the warrior-lord and his senior aides when they returned from the fighting.
Like all other Hungarian ladies of her age, Elizabeth Báthory was forced to adapt to the almost constant absence of her husband during the years of skirmishes and military manoeuvres, which were followed by the fifteen years of continuous war against the Turks. Between 1591 and 1604, during her years of motherhood and maturity, Elisabeth would have seen her lord and his retinue for only brief moments, if at all, in the campaigning season from February to late November, and would have attended him dutifully once he had put his official tasks aside for the Christmas period. It was customary for the great ladies to send to Vienna for special delicacies, then turn their head cooks out of the kitchens at the return of their menfolk and prepare an extravagant meal with their own hands. Even while at war, the men were not incommunicado, and Francis could still decide important family matters and transmit his judgements in local disputes. But Elisabeth’s responsibilities were hugely enlarged when he was away. There were retainers left on the estates to take care of the collection of tithes, the buying and selling of produce, harvesting and husbandry, and staff to carry out administration in the houses and farms. But the Lady was now the authority to whom they all reported, and it was she who was entrusted with the patronage of the local church, the education of scholars, the direction of repairs and the hiring and dismissing of officials and artisans.
The fact that Countess Báthory coped so well with her extra burden is another proof that she was not the weak-minded degenerate that some history and some fiction has suggested. Francis and Elisabeth’s marriage was outwardly exemplary and, if the private reality was otherwise, the option of divorce was available to a Protestant couple. There is absolutely no evidence to support the literary accounts of her infidelity and his whoring during the many months they spent apart.
If there was no verifiable scandal attached to the marriage, nor were there any external signs of anything more than dutiful commitment. Elisabeth sent news of the childrens’ health in May 1596: ‘I can write to your lordship of Anna and Orsik [the pet name for their daughter Ursula, named after Elisabeth’s mother-in-law] that they are in good health. But Kate is in misery with her mouth because that rot has appeared, and the rot is even in the bone of her jaw. The barber-surgeon went in with his iron up to the middle of her tooth, and says that she will be fortunate if she does not lose some teeth. Of myself, I can say that I am better than formerly.’1 In July the same year she writes: ‘Anna, thank God, is in good health. Ursula’s eyes are quite painful, but as for Kate, again she has a rot [it was probably trench mouth or gingivitis, which was endemic] in her mouth. I am well, thank God, only my eyes pain me.’2
Writers have taken these scraps of domesticity and from them deduced that Elisabeth was a neglectful mother, that the family were afflicted with inherited defects and that Elisabeth was suffering from epilepsy, but they are surely no more or less than the banalities that would fill a letter to an absent father in our own time. If news of health is given prominence, it is because a desperation to cling to one’s own life and protect one’s dependants was uppermost in everybody’s thoughts in an age when some women had lost ten children by the time they were thirty years old.
Letters were of two types: those written privately, in the certain knowledge that they would not be intercepted, and those written on the assumption that they might be examined by enemies. The latter were particularly important in Transylvania, where one’s neighbour might well belong to the rival political faction. Sensitive diplomatic correspondence was written in numerical code, while other important messages were conveyed orally by servants in the wake of a note naming the person and indicating their time of arrival. Many of Elisabeth’s letters were in her own hand and were articulate, forceful, contrasting with the clumsy conversational style of Thurzó’s wife Elisabeth Czobor.
Elisabeth Báthory had been taught to read Greek and Latin by her tutors at Ecsed, understood classical models of structure, in short wrote as well as any man, but without the long-windedness, pomposities or poetic flights to which men were prone. There were no spontaneous intimacies in Elisabeth’s letters, only the prescribed and respectful forms of address – ‘your loving wife’, ‘your servant’. The letters from Elisabeth’s father-in-law, Thomas Nádasdy, to his young wife Ursula contain jesting allusions to their age differences – he calls himself ‘your old grey vulture’ – and are full of phrases such as ‘the arrival of your letter caused me to rejoice’, whereas Elisabeth’s to Francis are businesslike and dry (though this, not her parents-in-law’s playful intimacy, was the norm in those days). ‘I commend my service to your mercy. They have brought some letters to me which I include in my letter to you. May the Good Lord keep you in good health . . .’ is typical of the conventional style she employs.3
Apart from her articulacy, there were other signs that Francis Nádasdy’s wife was not a passive partner in the relationship. Also in 1596 she upbraided her husband, saying, ‘I understand from your lordship’s writing that you were almost sent to Transylvania, and everyone wonders at this since you can enjoy no good from Transylvania and the soil from which you take all good things is this soil. We are at a loss to understand this news which I heard first from a friend who wrote of it to me and I have suffered bitterly of this . . .’4 From the correspondence of fellow-nobles we learn that Elisabeth accompanied Francis when he was required to attend the Diet in Bratislava. Francis’s comrade at arms, George Thurzó, reported to his own wife, the unsophisticated Lady Czobor, that he envied the other lords ‘who have their loving wives with them in Pozsony, like Mistress Nádasdy’. At this time Thurzó, the man who would later seek to destroy her, seems to have had a special admiration for Elisabeth Báthory, and may have seen her as a model for his gauche partner to emulate. ‘When Mistress Nádasdy journeys to Ecsed by way of Bytča, send, my dear heart, to her and ask her to visit you that you might have an opportunity to know her better, if you do not already . . .’5
Only the humble local squires were able to live, except for their hunting expeditions and displays of horsemanship, a lazy, sedentary life among their vineyards and orchards. The senior lords were preoccupied with their duties, which involved attendance at court, dealing with the affairs of local government, inspecting their own estates and either making war or preparing for it. In most noble families in post-Reformation Hungary the strict education they had been given by their tutors and parents ha
d instilled in the boys a sense of public responsibility: the fifteen-year-old Lord John Révay wrote to his parents in a mixture of pride and some distress that his mind was preoccupied with public matters both day and night.6
For the elite class, Hungary was very much part of Europe: aristocratic boys studied in Wittenberg, the Low Countries, Vienna, Padua or France; future politicians were sent to be formed in Vienna. In their everyday habits Turkish and Balkan manners did have some effect on the Hungarians, but in terms of conscious behaviour the orientation was towards Germany and the Netherlands, and to a slightly lesser extent Italy, whence came artistic, decorative and literary influences, as well as, some said, a familiarity with the more recondite arts of the bedchamber.
The paragon Lord Francis Nádasdy was, apart from his high-sounding official titles – Comes of the County, Master of the King’s Horse, sometime Captain-General of the Danubian Army – a living embodiment of a cult of heroic savagery and a way of life that found its fulfilment in bloodletting and blood-sports. It was the nineteenth-century Austrian writer von Elsberg, an Imperial patriot and a man who knew the soldier’s life well, who linked Francis’ triumphs on the battlefields with Elisabeth’s campaigns conducted in the privacy of her own houses. Von Elsberg speculated that the brutalities of war must have infiltrated the home life of the family and even affected the womenfolk from the early days (the only real evidence, gleaned from the investigations and trial, that he and others cite is that Francis showed his wife the technique, presumably learned while at war, for reviving an unconscious person by lighting paper between their fingers and toes).7 This is not wholly convincing, but the family members did live surrounded by active soldiers and pensioned-off veterans and could not have separated the two worlds entirely.