Countess Dracula

by Tony Thorne

  In the courts of the Nádasdys and Thurzós the household would begin to stir just before dawn when the lord and lady would rise and wash their hands and faces in a basin brought into their chamber, before dressing or being dressed. A small breakfast would then be served, consisting mainly of an invigorating drink: men favoured bitter-sweet wine or brandy, women might take cinnamon-water or a concoction of honey, figs and raisins dipped in brandy and set alight. They ate bacon or health-giving titbits of ginger and lemon or other fruits.8

  The tasks of the morning had to be completed by ten o’clock when the cup-bearer would set the table for a lunch that might last for two hours. Dinner was usually taken at six or seven o’clock in the evening in summer, sometimes earlier in winter, and all but the watchmen would retire not long after night had fallen.

  The diet of the privileged was heavy and included far too much meat. When the senior aristocrats travelled across the country, one or more kitchen wagons would accompany them, hung with whole carcasses of venison, game and sides of beef and pork; in a noble household an average meal for the senior members would consist of eight courses, and the more abstemious men would drink around a third of a litre of wine with each one. Over-indulgence was one of the main causes of illness: gout, of which George Thurzó is thought to have died, was prevalent, and digestive disorders and poisoning from eating tainted food were a commonplace. The rich suffered from a lack of ascorbic acid and vitamins whereas the poor, who mainly subsisted on grain and vegetables, lacked protein. Water was not potable, and had to be drunk boiled with herbs, so Hungarians of all classes constantly drank the wines which were produced all over the Kingdom: cloudy brown beer, brewed by the Saxons in Žilina and elsewhere, was an occasional alternative for those living in the north and east.

  The great families were unrestrained in their feasting, not only on special occasions but every day that the lord or lady was in residence. A Friday diet of fish was the rule, but dishes of grouse and veal were slipped in among as many as twenty different preparations of the freshwater fish (great and small sturgeon, pike, loach and catfish were the favourites, and the prehistoric fogas, the pike-perch which is found only in Lake Balaton, was also prized), which were cheap and plentiful.

  While the humbler maidservants practised the skills of sewing as they repaired and adapted clothing and linen, the noblewomen of all ages would pass a great deal of their time in needlecraft: sewing, knitting, crochet and embroidery. Women competed to excel in these crafts as well as spinning and weaving, using models and methods from Italy, Spain, Poland and the Low Countries and Turkey as well as Hungary itself.

  Women of the aristocracy passed their time also in hunting, nearly always in the company of their menfolk. Riding was also a popular recreation, and so, more surprisingly, was fishing. The ladies would organise outings to fish without the company of the men of the household and would combine the excursion with elaborate picnics. When bad weather or delicate health did not permit the genteel outdoor pursuits, women would read (edifying literature was recommended by husbands and priests, and more entertaining works were exchanged privately between ladies) and indulge in letter-writing, which in the sixteenth century began for the first time to be a literary art or hobby for the most cultivated families as well as the main means of communication.

  Unfortunately, very few of these personal letters have survived; most private notes were not thought important enough to preserve in family archives, and many of those which were collected were lost in the upheavals that racked Hungary over the next 300 years. (One result of this is that when a noble line died out or fell from grace, its collected papers might be destroyed or scattered: there is no ‘Báthory archive’, as there is for the Thurzó, Nádasdy, Zrínyi or Drugeth families.)

  This means that there are two areas of the lives of these inhabitants of the past, the women in particular, that have been frustratingly closed to us, areas which bear directly upon the crucial mysteries of Elisabeth Báthory’s story. The first concerns the mundane minutiae of everyday life: the interplay of social relations within the household, the pattern of duties and tasks and the quarrels and reconciliations and petty transgressions that attended them together with the transient thoughts and feelings of the players in the domestic drama of the castle or the manor-house or the village. There was no need to objectify these things, no outsider to describe them to; everyone from the Great Lady to the serf was living inside this reality and was utterly familiar with it. To try to reconstruct it we must fall back upon wedding lists, menus, payrolls and contracts, together with the few oblique references to the trivialities of life that we find in more important communications such as official notices of births and deaths.

  In March 1601 while Count Nádasdy was staying at the capital, Pozsony (Bratislava), he was afflicted with an illness that caused him intense pain in his lower limbs and left him unable to stand. He recovered enough after a few weeks to resume his round of public duties, and the sickness was not mentioned again in his letters, but in late 1603 he was seriously ill again and this time he prepared his family for the possibility of his death. On 3 January 1604, a letter was carried from Francis to Lord George Thurzó, informing him that ‘God hath visited me with sickness’, and formally entrusting the wellbeing of the heirs and the widow to Thurzó’s protection and benevolence should he not survive.9 Nádasdy was too ill to sign the letter himself and died in his bedchamber in Sárvár castle on the day after it was sent. This observation of a common aristocratic convention may have been a sincere reflection of a close friendship between the two that had endured from the times in which they had made war on the Turks together, or more probably was a tactical move to ensure that Thurzó, already one of the greatest powers in the land after the King, would be shamed if he tried to harm the family’s honour or their fortunes in any way.

  The instructions for Francis Nádasdy’s funeral, written by an anonymous senior member of the Sárvár household, have survived, although the names of the notables who were able to attend have not.10 The funeral procession ceremony and burial were nonetheless as impressive as the embattled nation could manage: the lord’s body in its coffin was displayed on a decorated catafalque hung with black cloth and lit by four giant candelabra, there were public readings from the New Testament throughout the night before the funeral and the singing of hymns began at seven in the morning.

  There was a first sermon when the body was brought out of the castle and then, at the end of the proceedings, the eulogy was delivered from a specially constructed mobile pulpit by the same Stephen Magyari who had denounced the Count and his lady for cruelty two years earlier. This was not a time for truth-telling or provocations, but for an inspiring peroration, and he praised his dead patron fulsomely. Where once the Lutheran priest had chastised Francis for oppressing his serfs, he now reminded his congregation how Nádasdy had given food and clothing to the needy and had paid for poor scholars to pursue their studies. The late lord had taken food and drink always in moderation and had never indulged himself to excess. The more exalted he had become, the priest said, the more modestly he had behaved, for pride was no part of his being.11 The body of Francis Nádasdy was then placed in a covered carriage and taken to the graveyard to be interred. Despite conflicting suggestions, its whereabouts today is unknown.

  The great ladies of feudal Hungary, more emancipated perhaps, but essentially living like the wives of mediaeval crusaders, had not only to bear the burdens left to them by their absent husbands but to prepare themselves for bereavement which might come at any time. Elisabeth Báthory was more than equal to those responsibilities while Francis lived and also continued to exercise her husband’s legal rights and maintain his sponsoring of students after his death, as well as pursuing his debtors, who included the Imperial Treasury itself. On Francis Nádasdy’s death she immediately took over the responsibility for the running of the estates, as attested by the letters confirming the annual taxes levied on her villages which she signed during 1604
. When these letters and others are examined, what is notable, if we compare Elisabeth’s correspondence to that of her peers, is how terse they are, often to the point of curt aggression.

  On 12 May 1588 Elisabeth had written in her telegrammatic style, but also in what were for her the very warmest terms to a certain Mrs Ponticzka:

  After my greeting, Mistress Ponticzka our good sister, I wish to say to you that you should send to me immediately that book which is about pains in the back, and write to me of Ghéczi, how is he, and write to me also of how you find yourself, are you at peace or not.

  Her Ladyship Elisabeth Báthory in her own hand12

  On 5 November 1589 a more typical letter was sent from the twenty-nine-year-old Countess to one of the family retainers, a minor noble named Imre Vasváry:

  Egregio Domine Nobis salutem . . . We have received your letter together with the food. Especial thanks for the bustard [a large game bird], we will keep it to await my husband, but you should know, Sir, that these provisions should have been sent to us during the last week. Therefore for next Saturday send to us all that you are accustomed to send, and even the provisions for the week to come, or you will see our anger, for we will expect guests and my husband, too, will return home. For tomorrow evening send fishes and crayfishes. You excuse yourself that you have distributed food amongst the poor, but we set you in your office for the government of our estates, that we might have everything that we require in our kitchen.

  May God bless you.13

  To modern eyes there is an ironic contrast between the required salutation and blessing and the message itself. Perhaps Vasváry deserved her anger, but this same tone of haughty impatience is also seen in her letters to her steward Benedict Deseő, whom she several times chastised, and in most of Elisabeth’s surviving correspondence; it is echoed in the few reports of her conversations as they were remembered by (admittedly hostile) witnesses.

  Elisabeth’s pride and independence manifested themselves in other ways. She appears to have ignored the convention that a widow should retire and mourn for one year after her spouse’s death, attending a function in Vienna only four weeks after Francis’ passing and continuing to buy the finest clothing for herself and her ladies-in-waiting as shown on her bills from September 1604, ‘to a total sum of 2,942 forints and 11 denar’. The bill was signed by the purchaser and by George Péchy the merchant, who probably brought the goods from Vienna. The sum of money involved was enormous – the annual salary of a senior steward of noble blood or one of the few doctors of good reputation was around 150 silver florins – and this was only one of many similar bills paid, always on time and in full, that same month.

  The correspondence shows that Elisabeth also bartered valuables, mainly jewels, with merchants such as the German Péchy, and that on occasions she borrowed the cash that was in short supply from her stewards for brief periods, but far more often it was the Lady who advanced money or quantities of grain or other produce which her servants could then trade on their own account. The names of the servants who were indebted to her include the Sárvár bookkeeper Zalay, the squire Zamobothny and Benedict Deseő and Benedict Bicsérdy, all of whom later came forward to speak against her. There were also transactions with other aristocrats of more senior rank, including Count Paul Zichy, who wrote to Elisabeth in February 1607 acknowledging the receipt of a lease of land. Zichy’s letter, although brief, is almost ingratiatingly respectful in its tone.14

  Elisabeth was the authority to whom local lawsuits and other personal disputes were brought, and a great deal of her time was taken up with ensuring that the outbreaks of petty lawlessness, and the vendettas and misunderstandings which occurred on her lands were resolved. The names of the officers who assisted her in this are again familiar from the documents of the later investigations: an undertaking sworn by a constable, Mihály Tulok, to let drop a three-year quarrel with the bookkeeper Benedict Zalay, for instance, is countersigned by the castle warden Benedict Bicsérdy and the local dignitary Adam Szelesthey. Bicsérdy’s behaviour later is cast in a new light by the record of a gift that Elisabeth and her nine-year-old son (who was required to add his signature to the deed) bestowed on him and his family in April 1607:

  We, Lady Elisabeth Báthory. . . declare to all who should be aware thereof, that those ownerless allotments in the village of Hegyfalu to the value of one hundred florins are hereby granted to Benedict Bicsérdy by me in recognition of his true and devoted service in his office and to my husband in the late Wars . . . We give these lands to him, and to Orsik Mesterházy, his wife, and to his children, namely John Bicsérdy, Francis Bicsérdy, and to his daughters Anna, Kate, Orsik and Elisabeth for their lifetimes, on condition that they serve us with the same devotion. If otherwise we or our successors should wish to take back possession of these allotments, in such case we shall pay one hundred florins to Benedict Bicsérdy or to his successors.15

  The irony of Bicsérdy’s subsequent betrayal lies not so much in his ingratitude for this not inconsiderable reward, as in the fact that he and his wife had obviously named their younger children after his master and mistress and their own daughters.

  The other vital part of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lives that is missing from the archive documents is, not surprisingly, the whole panoply of the sins of the flesh that we know the inhabitants of that world must have indulged in. Later romantic literature and sensationalist religious tracts are full of hushed-up pregnancies, incestuous affaires, adulteries and poisonings, but if they were confessed or were gossiped about, as they certainly were, this was in the marketplace or at the wedding feast and was only very rarely entrusted to ink and parchment. Of the lesser excesses little was written: a few pious instructions to family members to drink and eat in moderation hardly does justice to a society in which it is thought that most of the squirearchy and the more affluent peasantry were habitually wine-drunk from dawn to dusk and gluttony was endemic at all levels. Crime itself was not restricted to the poor and desperate, but the privileged were able to beat, extort and seize their weaker neighbours’ property with impunity and without coming to public notice, not least because it was they who controlled the local administration of justice.

  The Hungarians were suspected by their German neighbours of indulging in peculiar Venetian or Turkish sexual practices, and there were signs that libertinage and the erotic refinements of the harem had taken hold in Transylvania even before the antics of Prince Gábor Báthory became the stuff of gossip throughout the region. But in Hungary itself George Thurzó, for instance, was much affected by Protestant ideology, and like all his family strictly avoided any mention of sexual practices in his letters and private papers. Hungarians were seen and saw themselves as hotter-blooded and less physically inhibited than other races, and Calvinism and Lutheranism in Hungary never involved the same degree of self-mortification that they did in colder climates. Nevertheless, for all but the most sophisticated, the discourses of love and lust did not even allow for concepts such as sex between women or sexually motivated sadism. In the Magyar and Slav lands, these were not so much taboos as unexplored and unacknowledged areas until early in the twentieth century.

  Male homosexuality was practised, but how prevalent it was is not known: one of the few references to it comes in a visitor’s uncorroborated aside: ‘There is a great number of gentry in this kingdom, but being untravelled abroad, they are far less mannerly at home, being luxurious and ill-taught, and damnably given to that masculine misery the whole southern world is defiled with.’16

  The concept of family honour was taken very seriously and, although men at war may have indulged themselves sexually with partners of both sexes, open infidelity or violence to a wife would breach the Renaissance codes and invoke the dangerous wrath of another family. Thurzó did write teasingly to his wife Elisabeth that he was looking for beautiful women in Bratislava, but could find none as beautiful as her and would cease to look henceforth.17

  The other, illicit side of lo
ve is illustrated by the many stories that are still recounted with relish about the sixteenth-century noble poet Bálint Balassi. This half-mad philanderer had an amorous technique that was considered robust if not actually scandalous in his day; today it would be characterised simply as rape. Balassi habitually assaulted women and only afterwards became infatuated with them and dedicated his verses to them. It is said that while riding in the countryside he found himself behind a miller’s young wife seated on her horse and accompanied by two servants. Even though her face was turned away from him, the sight of the woman so inflamed him that he knocked her from her horse and straddled her then and there as she lay on the ground. The young lady’s honour was saved by her servants who, after a moment’s hesitation, beat the distracted poet unconscious.

  Of women’s sexual needs and how they satisfied them nothing was written and nothing is known for certain. The nature of Elisabeth Báthory’s private desires will always be a mystery, but, whatever they were, once her husband was gone the absolute power she wielded within the closed world of her court meant that anything she wanted was, providing some discretion was observed, in theory within her reach.

  Such women’s duties as overseeing the servants, attending to the herb gardens and cultivating and trading in honey, milk and eggs were taken for granted and went almost unmentioned in correspondence or chronicles (although Lady Révay declared proudly in a letter of 1560 that she had refused to give credit, even for three florins’ worth of butter), but historians have discovered another important part of the aristocratic lady’s routine, one which reinforced the power of life and death that she held over her serfs and minions. This was the healing of the sick and the dispensing of advice on health and hygiene, in particular to other women, inside and in the surroundings of the court. Although high-born ladies could choose whether or not they would undertake this curing (many but not all aristocratic women were practising healers), there was a desperate need for such a service in a country – or rather a long arc of territory stretching from Croatia to Wallachia – in which nine out of ten people lived in rural isolation, far from the few qualified doctors, who were needed in any case to tend to the war-wounded on the ever-shifting front-lines.