Countess Dracula

by Tony Thorne

  When the late-mediaeval epidemics were ravaging western Europe, the baths there were closed down because it was thought that water was the conduit for disease. In contrast, the spas of Hungary remained open and the wealthy took the waters to ease their maladies and enjoyed their visits there as an important social ritual. Before the seventeenth century sheets, nightclothes and clean underwear were rare, even among the rich, but in the inventories of castles there are always washbasins, tubs and ornamental baths and these were given as wedding presents. Hungarians knew to wash their hands before eating, although in his memoirs, which were written during his imprisonment by the Habsburgs, Lord Nicholas Bethlen says that water touched his skin only once or twice a year. So in spite of the army of ‘balneators’ who operated in Hungary and despite the great ladies’ attendance at the many spas, cleanliness was by no means universal. Bathing in hot or cold water or herbal mixtures, dieting, the drinking of herbal infusions and purging were very common practices, usually applied according to astrological indications.

  After the death of Lady Ursula Kanizsai, the Nádasdys did not have a male doctor or barber-surgeon resident in their court, so the women may have undertaken minor surgery, bloodletting and the prescribing of ointments and medicines. In towns and cities poisons and strong medicines were not to be administered without the permission of a doctor, but once again Elisabeth and her court ignored the strictures binding ordinary citizens.

  There were respected and respectable doctors whom the wealthy were able to consult, but they were few and usually resided in cities or at a major court. Typical of these exalted physicians was the Hungarian Praximus, who had cared for the infant Francis Nádasdy. The rest of the very small number of trained medical practitioners were all male and were organised in a hierarchy which ran from physicians with degrees from foreign universities down through apothecaries, barbers (who doubled as dentists and were regulated by their own guilds), chirurgeons (who were qualified to set bones, administer simple potions and carry out crude surgery) and bath attendants, but the most numerous members of the health system were the lay healers, herbalists and shamans who were almost all women. These untrained local practitioners, who learned their craft from their parents or by unofficial apprenticeships, were given many different names which reflected their overlapping functions in the community: there was the healing woman (orvosló asszony), the woman doctor (orvos asszony), the wise woman (tudós asszony), the learned woman (tudományos asszony), the herb-woman (füves asszony), the seer (nézö), the bed-maker (agyvetö), the smearer (kenö) and the midwife (bába), whose profession was further subdivided according to her social status and where she practised.18

  These women might be illiterate crones living in shacks in forest clearings, but they might as easily be the wives or widows of peasants, tradesmen, county officials or noble lords. They often claimed to have supernatural sensitivity and the gift of a healing touch, and their treatments consisted of secret potions and rituals as well as folk medicine and common sense. But in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries even the humblest traditional healers were generally tolerated by their neighbours as well as by the priesthood – even the zealot Cardinal Pázmány commended the use of natural remedies – and by the gentry, who made full use of their services. (It is important to remember that what now look like ‘alternative’ methods were then as much part of orthodoxy as the early ‘scientific’ approaches.) The attention of a qualified male doctor even for a short time was beyond what most patients could afford, but, even when the physician had ministered, many wealthy clients asked their local healer for extra help, particularly where women’s afflictions or fertility or childbirth were concerned, as these were both symbolically and practically the province of women. The women of the local aristocratic family, even if they were not themselves practising healers or sorceresses, would act as patrons for the poorer women who had inherited or learned the skills of magic and to whom, in the idiom of the time, ‘the herbs and flowers talked’.

  Although uneducated women could claim extraordinary powers and draw upon folk wisdom dating back to pre-Christian times, they relied on an oral tradition of spells and incantations and could not decipher the language of the grimoires, herbariums and medical handbooks that were imported by the cosmopolitan rich, nor could they afford to supplement their native flowers and plants with the drugs that had become available at pharmacies in the larger towns. The noble lady with her bath-houses, laundries, clean linen and capacious medicine chest was well placed to operate an unofficial health service if she so wished, and some of Elisabeth Báthory’s contemporaries were well known for their personal healing expertise, among them Lady Anna-Rosina Listhius, whose family contained many alchemists and whose later fate echoed that of Elisabeth herself, and Lady Potencia Dersffy, who lent her book of cures to Elisabeth’s father-in-law. Those aristocratic women who were herbal experts included Thurzó’s wife Elisabeth Czobor – a renowned healer in later life – and Éva Poppelova Lobkowitz of the Batthyány family.

  Dispensing health care from the courts would bring Elisabeth and her inner circle in contact with other women in the most intimate surroundings, in which all occult wisdom and all power to inflict or assuage suffering was invested in them. The mock-surgical techniques that she and her female assistants resorted to in the absence of better-qualified male surgeons were indistinguishable from torture, and anyone carrying them out would need to become hardened to others’ suffering.

  In central Europe a popular medical handbook of 1586, the Ars Medica (written by György Lencsés, a member of the entourage of Prince Christopher Báthory’s wife, Lady Elisabeth Bocskai), recommends that patients be bound tightly in chains to help expel poisons from the body, after which they should be bathed or steamed. Applying plasters – ‘emplastures’ or poultices – was a very popular process, as was ‘cupping’, whereby small ceramic or glass cups were heated and fixed to broken skin: the suction effect would draw off blood or pus.19 (These practices involved using hot candle wax to fix the plasters or cups in position, a fact that possibly explains the reports of Elisabeth holding candles to the naked bodies of her maidservants.)

  Leeching was also widely used and, for boils, open sores or lacerations, cauterising with a hot iron was the standard treatment. Purging, to rid the body of unhealthy excesses of the humours and purify the blood, was universally approved of, but the most popular technique in the healer’s repertoire by far, and the one prescribed for the widest array of quite different physical and behavioural symptoms, was venesection or phlebotomy: bleeding. The more these methods caused pain, the more efficacious they were, claimed the healers; and the more drastically invasive they were (they might have added but did not), the more the patient’s desire for a dramatic cure was satisfied.

  Just as happened in England, the local wise woman, especially if she was reclusive, harsh and strange (whether those qualities were part of a carefully cultivated mystique or whether they were forced upon her), was a useful target when panic seized the village. Sometimes a cure would go wrong and a child would die, or an ailing patient declared themselves bewitched, sometimes a rival healer would lay charges of witchcraft to usurp a lucrative practice. Although in this early period there was a good chance that any woman accused of witchcraft would be acquitted, it was nevertheless one of the easiest ways to have an enemy arrested.

  The use of magic cosmetics, which Elisabeth was accused of posthumously, was also part of the spectrum of herbalism and healing. The Hungarian scholar Ferenc Schram, in his exhaustive account of the witchcraft trials taking place in Hungary between 1529 and 1768, tells the story of women villagers fighting over possession of a magic cosmetic. Desire for the substance caused a wave of hysteria which died down only after the local wise woman had been condemned to death and her ointment had been carried off by her enemies.20

  If we can apprehend the way of life and thinking of Elisabeth Báthory and her contemporaries, perhaps we can perceive the logic in their a
ctions and they will cease to be unreachably alien. For most people in that era society was static and inert, Enlightenment concepts of improvement, progress and the power of understanding were unknown. During the endless conflicts, time sometimes seemed to have been reversed: the waterways became choked with weeds and silt, the fertile plain became dusty desert, fields were overgrown and dry land turned to marsh. Hungarians started to measure time then, and became extremely conscious of its running out, of a sense that the sins of the present were jeopardising the future; children were at the centre of this consciousness. The national psyche was very insecure after the religious schisms and the change of faith, the threat from the Turks, the political pressure from Austria. Continuity and futurity became important – matters of desperate concern, not the leisured consideration of the stability of the spheres with telescopes and astrolabes as practised by Emperor Rudolf or the wise men of the west. All over Europe there was a sense of what was termed by Rembrandt ‘lamenting the future’, as shown allegorically in paintings like Brueghel’s Massacre of the Innocents.

  The complexities of emotional attachments are not easy to deconstruct even today, and those of that strange transitional society even less so, but it appears that true intimacy and deep affection among the ruling caste of Hungary was restricted to the family, in particular to the relationships between brothers and sisters, and with favoured sons or daughters. Two of Elisabeth’s children, Ursula – ‘Orsik’ – and Andrew, died in infancy, and almost as little is known about the early years of the surviving Nádasdy children as is known of their mother’s life in her childhood home at Ecsed. The first recorded landmarks in the girls’ lives were the splendid dynastic marriages that Elisabeth arranged for them with partners from the few ancient families of comparable status. As was customary, the education and wellbeing of Elisabeth’s son Paul, who was only twelve years old when his mother was arrested, was shared between his mother and a male, Imre Megyery, who was appointed as the boy’s tutor and guardian.

  Anna, the eldest child, married Count Nicholas Zrínyi, the grandson of another Nicholas, the hero of Szigetvár, whose son George had been a companion of Francis Nádasdy on the battlefields; the second daughter, Kate, married Count George Drugeth of Homonna (now Humenné in eastern Slovakia), whose family blood had been intermingling with the Báthorys’ for generations (Elisabeth’s mother’s second husband had been Count Antal Drugeth and her brother Stephen married another Drugeth, Lady Fruszina). It is said that the Drugeth family had come to Hungary from Naples to serve the Angevin King, Charles Robert, who ruled Hungary from 1310. The dynastic connections had a strategic basis, too; Drugeth’s stronghold of Homonna, which dominated the north-east routes into Poland, and Zrínyi’s estates in the south-west meant that the combined families controlled a string of vast landholdings across the whole remaining arc of Royal Hungary.

  There has been nothing from which we could resurrect Elisabeth’s conversations with her children, no authentic record of their voices. During this author’s research just one fragment came to light in the form of a letter that Elisabeth’s elder daughter, the twenty-year-old Lady Anna Nádasdy, wrote to her mother on 22 December 1605 to describe her reception at the home of her new husband, Count Zrínyi, at his castle of Csáktornya (now Čakovec in Croatia). The letter is polite and dutiful, with a hint of spontaneity relegated to the postscript (often the most revealing part in letters of this period):

  Thanks be to God, I travelled hither without trouble and my health is good. My lord husband came to meet me two miles before our home, we are in good spirits and health. He has only a slight pain in his hand, for he fell from his horse. But it is nothing grave, his hand will soon be well. As concerns his servants, they are all obedient to me, they do as I command them. Do not worry for us, all is well with us, even his servants respect me greatly. God keep you happy.

  Your poor servant and sister

  Anna Nádasdy

  P.S. I have sent to you and to my beloved brother a basket of figs, I would have sent others, too, but this is all that we have received from the seaside.21

  Anna and Kate Nádasdy may have simply obeyed their mother, or perhaps they married for love, but their husbands also wanted to share in the inheritances which their wives brought with them, and would expect to do so before they were too old for it to matter. Their mother-in-law’s skill and tenacity in running the estates was an obstacle that could not be tolerated indefinitely, and Imre Megyery, the protector of the principal male heir, knew that his charge would have to compromise with these ambitious young men sooner or later if open conflict between the families was to be avoided.

  Some writers have speculated that, even before the death of Francis Nádasdy, Elisabeth was abandoned by her relatives for some shameful transgression, excluded from the family council and so forced to consort with common servants, falling prey to their superstitions and like them resorting to black magic when flight was impossible. The few demonstrable facts tell a different story. Letters unearthed by this author prove that, far from being excluded from her family’s social and political dealings, Elisabeth played an important and independent role in the international intrigues carried on by the male Báthorys in Hungary and Transylvania.

  An example was the private note sent from Cardinal Andrew Báthory to Elisabeth in 1587, prefaced: ‘may this letter be given into the hands of my most beloved sister . . .’:

  I wish all the best to my beloved sister. I had to travel to Rome, I informed them of the sad news of the death of King Stephen [Báthory of Poland and Transylvania]. I pray that the man who has presented my letter to you remain unknown to the others in your court, for his mission requires secrecy and it would not be good if others knew him. Please ask your husband to forgive me, we shall certainly meet one another on the next occasion. A certain Venetian gentleman has accompanied my man, he is a great friend to our family, therefore I pray you to take care of him. I hope he will be given all that he needs in your court.22

  After Francis was gone, some also speculated that his loss combined with Elisabeth’s menopause, aggravated by the lurking family taint, tipped her into madness from which she never recovered. Once again there is no evidence for this: no change of tone in the letters she wrote, no abrupt withdrawal from public life. If she was insane, it was a carefully concealed insanity which went unremarked by her fellow aristocrats.

  Although no one spoke up publicly on her behalf when she was arrested, she had not been friendless. She may have enjoyed the dubious attentions of Ironhead Stephen and the loyalty of her crones, but far from being a social pariah, a famous madwoman, Countess Báthory was also, in the words of one recent commentator, ‘much respected and loved by other aristocratic ladies: many corresponded with her and more visited her’.23 She seems to have been especially close to Lady Margaret Choron, the wife of Lord Christopher Nádasdy, her father-in-law’s younger brother, with whom she exchanged frequent letters around the turn of the century and she also corresponded with Lord Bathory who advised her on political matters after her husband’s death.29 If witnesses at the interrogation sessions are to be believed, she boasted of the calibre and number of her advisers and supporters: whoever they were, they failed her when she had most need of them.

  The letters and the bills and contracts and the statements lodged in official records are not enough in themselves to bring the people of the past fully into existence: to a modern ‘western’ eye, the surviving portraits of the protagonists look like quaint caricatures, even grotesque, but we must remember that the Hungarian aesthetic of the time was constrained in two ways. Firstly, the artists available to the far-flung courts of the Hungarian and Transylvanian aristocrats were usually itinerants, mainly Italians or their local imitators, working quickly on one-off commissions for which they sometimes simply substituted heads on to a standard set of shoulders or on to the template body of a rider on horseback. In a time of almost permanent warfare the true likenesses of men, at least, were subordinated to the need t
o show their power, ferocity and heroism: piercing eyes, bristling moustaches and thick, curling beards were de rigueur. Cardinal Andrew Báthory appears in his portraits first as an intense and nervously alert presence, then, with raised eyebrows and half-smile, as a severed head on display. Prince Sigmund is shown at the age of twenty-six with the large eyes, long nose and sensual lips common to many images of the Báthorys, then at a later date as a blustering tyrant with bulging eyes and a curlicued topknot. Francis Nádasdy is pictured, full-length, as a stooping, kaftanned bear of a man, with the uncomfortable look of a warrior impatient to return to the fray (his father’s fears regarding a snub nose had been quite groundless). From several portraits the bushy-bearded Palatine, George Thurzó, glares fixedly at the artist with a sort of savage imperiousness from beneath luxuriant black eyebrows, while his arch-enemy, Gábor Báthory, the great seducer, is painted as a jaunty clown. The results are in all cases quite different both from the delicate-featured dandies in their colourful finery who appear in Elizabethan English portraiture and from the more austere and haughty elegance of Habsburg likenesses.

  The first reference to the existence of a portrait of Elisabeth Báthory comes in R. A. von Elsberg’s 1894 work, Die Blutgräfin, in which he includes a poor black-and-white copy of a picture which he had seen in the gallery of the aristocratic Zay family. The image is of a dark-eyed young woman with dark hair drawn under a cap, and wearing a starched lace collar above a bodice and apron. The person depicted in the somewhat bland portrait seems a pert rather than sinister figure, but von Elsberg sees more in it than that: