Countess Dracula

by Tony Thorne

  She is Elisabeth Báthory, but is she at the same time the tigress? She is a lady of high rank with a cultivated mind, but her great eyes let us see deeper within to her devilish passion. Her finely chiselled nose, her wilful and obstinate lips show her siren-like personality, her wild heart . . . long white hands and in contrast to her white skin, her black hair: these are the features which perfectly define her difficult nature.24

  The costume worn by the girl in the von Elsberg picture and her pose are almost identical to those in the two portraits which survived into the twentieth century, one of which can still be viewed. His picture and the portrait kept until recently in Čachtice are probably one and the same, although it is possible that there still exists a third version, hanging forgotten in a private gallery in one of the great houses of middle Europe.

  The only portrait of Countess Báthory which can still be seen, although it is not on public display, is kept in storage in the National Museum in Budapest. The shades of red, red-brown and gold on this full-length canvas are rich, and the overall condition is excellent, partly because the painting was restored in 1974 when 75 per cent of the surface, excluding the face, hands and apron, were overpainted and some detail, particularly around the subject’s right hand, was lost. Still, the whole work is convincing as an early modern family portrait and, although no masterpiece, it meets the criteria of official portraiture; it expresses a dignified formality at a distance which gives way to a different sense of intimacy when seen from close up.

  The woman in the painting stands stiffly and stares gravely out at the world, but when the viewer gazes into her face, a more sensitive and enigmatic expression, an awareness in the eyes and the hint of a smile, is revealed. (For the historian Katalin Péter, the Budapest portrait is genuine but reveals a sullen, ‘ugly moth’, a stupid woman, oppressed physically and socially by her huge vulgarian husband. Another Hungarian, the art historian István Kelényi, disagrees: ‘I like her, I think she is pretty in that painting.’) She has the large brown eyes, the high forehead, long nose and prominent ears common to her fellow-Báthorys, but these are to some extent stylistic conventions of the period. Other conventional features are more significant. The artist uses the late Renaissance language of symbolism in the detail surrounding the figure. Elisabeth holds in her right hand an almost invisible key, a sign that she was accomplished in domestic organisation, a perfect mistress of her household. On her little finger is a ring, signifying in those days generosity (and not the coquettishness which it later came to mean), and she is wearing pearls, which stand for nobility of character as well as great material wealth. On the table upon which Elisabeth’s hand rests there is a little ornamental clock, at that period a rare and precious object which also symbolised life and continuity. The clock is standing on a small box, which can denote a knowledge of medicine and healing, or may just imply the possession of secrets, which Elisabeth’s own box, described by witnesses and by her son, certainly contained.

  Of the known portraits, this is the most likely to be authentic, but there are problems in proving beyond doubt that it is a likeness taken from the living lady. The painting bears the date 1594, but this does not mean that it was produced at that time (dates inscribed on canvases could also refer to famous events, battles or the birthdates of children); the costume that Elisabeth is wearing is almost identical to one shown in a portrait of Christina Nyáry, the wife of Palatine Esterházy, dated 1625, leading some to suspect that it was reconstructed using that better-known painting as a model. (The Dutch expert Dr J. van Wadum saw the Báthory portrait when it was on loan to The Hague and pronounced it genuine, dating it to the period 1594 to 1620 and pointing out the Italian rather than Austrian style, which would accord with the close family links with Venice and Padua.) More importantly, the portrait of Elisabeth seems to be the work of the same artist who produced portraits of her son Paul Nádasdy and his wife Judith Révay around the year 1633 and it seems probable to this writer that all three pictures, together with the matching portrait of Francis Nádasdy, were commissioned then, either by Paul to fill the portrait cabinet of one of the Nádasdy properties, or by his widow to commemorate Paul’s death the same year.25 This would mean that the work was not taken from life, though it may well be a copy from a lost original painted while Elisabeth was still alive.

  One of the first consequences of the opening up of eastern-central Europe after the demise of communism was a field-day for art thieves, who took advantage of the naivety of curators and the almost total lack of security devices and quietly looted museums and churches all over the region, often stealing to order on behalf of collectors from wealthier neighbouring countries. In Čachtice in 1990 someone broke into the little museum in the manor-house and made off with several early oil paintings of local dignitaries, including what is thought by some to be an authentic image of Elisabeth Báthory created in her own lifetime, but which is dismissed by others as a fake. The technique of that painting, which was ascribed to one Valentino, was also mediocre but by no means abysmal: examination of photographs shows that it bore the date 1593, or possibly 1598, but this rendering appears to be the likeness of a young girl and not a woman in her thirties, as Elisabeth was in that decade. At some point – certainly not during Elisabeth’s lifetime – the caption in Latin, Hyena Chejtensis (‘the Hyena of Csejthe’), has been added, and lower down on the canvas and almost invisible is a second date, 1869. The canvas had been crudely cut down but was originally full-length, and the costume details seem to have been overpainted at some point perhaps to conform to late-seventeenth-century fashions. The young Countess which this portrait gives us has a haunting, tantalising expression into which many other qualities can be read, from bruised innocence to cool cunning, and it has been widely reproduced as being the definitive incarnation of the real Elisabeth.

  Unfortunately, although it fascinates, there are good reasons to think that the Čachtice portrait is a reconstruction produced in the nineteenth century, either to coincide with an upsurge of local interest in the case in Slovakia (two books that might have been inspired by the painting appeared in 1870)26 or again as a commission for the collection of a noble family, perhaps the Zays. Apart from the inconsistencies implied in the two dates inscribed on it, there is one glaring anachronism in the picture: the artist has given Elisabeth a pointed nineteenth-century rather than straight baroque bodice; and the cuffs and collar she is wearing seem to be a crude imitation of those on the Budapest portrait.

  As always with Elisabeth Báthory, the fascination felt for her by later ages has tended to obscure rather than reveal the truth.

  Chapter Six

  The Palatine and His Enemies

  There is little friendship in the world,

  and least of all between equals . . .

  Francis Bacon, Essays, ‘Of Followers and Friends’

  Count George Thurzó ~ the Hungarian lords and the Empire ~ the trial of Illésházy and the Bocskai insurrection ~ plots and counterplots ~ gruesome folktales ~ the Báthory-Thurzó correspondence ~ a widow’s defiance ~ Elisabeth’s domains

  In the National Museum of Arts and Crafts in Budapest is a fabulous, nameless object. If the thing has any practical use it is not obvious, but as an ornament, a gift for someone already possessed of wealth and power in abundance, it is exquisitely impressive. It is a model about eighteen or twenty inches high of a hilltop or a steep mound cast in gold; at its foot tiny figures sculpted in silver are depicted toiling in a mine, worker-mannikins, bent double under their burdens of rubble, run up and down its flanks on glistening steel ladders, its upper reaches are set around with gems and minerals, and the whole miniature edifice is crowned by the figure of a Renaissance knight, kneeling in homage before a silver-grey block of ore. It is not known who fashioned this celebration of industry nor whom it was intended for: the kneeling knight is clearly an allegorical figure, but could as well have been a representation of Elisabeth Báthory’s nemesis, Count George Thurzó.

  L
ord George Thurzó of Bethlenfalva, Count of Árva, was one of the richest and most powerful grandees in Hungary by virtue of his birth, but he was acutely conscious that by comparison with the Báthorys or the Nádasdy and Zrínyi families he was to some extent a parvenu who still had to prove himself, socially and politically. He was the principal heir to hereditary rights – the governorship and regional judgeship of the counties of Orava and Spiš; patronage of the Lutheran church in Trenčín, Tematin, Hlohovec, Bojnice, Hricov, Lietava and Bytča in what is now Slovakia – as well as to enormous incomes from investment in mining, metallurgy and trade. The Thurzós were recent additions to the ranks of the nobility, originating, they said, from the village of Bethlenfalva, then in Upper Hungary. Their name is not a Magyar one and the usual fanciful origins were proposed, including an unlikely theory that they had come from the Norse port of Thurso in the far north of Scotland. What was known for sure was that they had made their fortunes at the end of the fifteenth century from development of copper- and ironworks and silver mines in their own region as well as in Poland, Bohemia and Baia Mare (in present-day Romania), where they leased gold mines with the German Fugger family of Augsburg, the famous moneylenders – or infamous usurers – who with Genoese financiers bankrolled the Spanish and French in their imperial adventures and exercised more real power in Europe than most royal houses. Together the Hungarian and German entrepreneurs founded the Thurzó-Fugger Company, one of middle Europe’s first and largest transnational concerns.

  The family member who confirmed the Thurzós’ rise to preeminence was Count Francis Thurzó, George’s illustrious father, who had been educated in Italy and became Catholic Bishop and Governor of Nitra county (by inheritance; he had not been ordained), head of Orava county and Prefect of the Royal Chamber. Like many of the Magyar lords he later converted to the Lutheran faith. When George Thurzó was only seven years old his father died and his mother, Lady Katherine Zrínyi, remarried to Count Imre Forgách, who was not a politician but a distinguished humanist intellectual who wrote treatises on history and the nature of marriage. The couple’s relationship was warm, and it seems that the young George and his stepfather were quickly on good terms with one another. Imre Forgách was the centre of a very important humanist circle in northern Hungary, whose members corresponded with major Reformation figures in western Europe. George Thurzó inherited his stepfather’s library on his death and collected for himself the works of Erasmus and books on Protestant theology as well as the writings of such luminaries as Castiglione (on courtly etiquette), Lipsius (‘on Constancy’) and Macchiavelli.

  Thurzó’s relationship with his second wife, Lady Elisabeth Czobor, was unusually good and exceptional for the age in the expressions of intimacy the couple exchanged. Their marriage produced many daughters, of whom six survived, and one son, and on one occasion when his wife was visiting her mother and Lord George was alone with the children, he wrote to her of the affection he felt towards his little daughter, that he was kissing her and playing with her – something very rare in itself at that time and hardly ever mentioned in correspondence.1 There were two girls from the first marriage, and the first child from the new marriage, Barbara, was always her father’s favourite. George asked after her constantly in his letters and after Imre, his only son and heir.

  George began his political and military career at the time of the Fifteen-Year War against the Turks, first acting as a political adviser to Rudolf II, the absentee King of Hungary, later becoming commander of the Cisdanubian armies and of the Fort of Nové Zámky, then known as Érsekújvar. While he was engaged on diplomatic and court business in Vienna, he developed some sort of admiration for the Habsburg Archduke Matthias and remained loyal to him when Rudolf was replaced first as king and then as emperor. Elisabeth Báthory’s husband, Francis Nádasdy, and Thurzó fought together in the wars against the Turks and together rode their horses into the courtyards of the Stára Radnica – the Old Town Hall in Bratislava – to attend the sittings of the Hungarian Diet. Their estates were close to one another in Upper Hungary and the families exchanged invitations to their children’s weddings. There was a later cooling of the relationship between the Thurzós and the Nádasdys, as evidenced by letters, but no clear indication of whether political or personal differences triggered the change.

  George Thurzó was a cultivated man who spoke Latin, Greek and German, could communicate in Slovak and Croatian and wrote poetry in Greek. He was popular with his Slav tenants, not only because he supported the spread of their Lutheran religion, but because he allowed both the estate managers and the scholars and clerks who worked for him to communicate in their own Slovak language:

  The Count Palatine of Hungary was elected by the whole of the Diet – the parliament made up of an upper house comprising the senior aristocrats and a lower containing representatives of the cities and towns and the lesser nobles – from a choice of four candidates put forward by the King, of which two had to be Catholic, one Lutheran and one Calvinist. The Palatine was not only the representative of the King in Hungary, but the mediator between him and the native aristocracy – and indeed the defender of that aristocracy all at the same time. During those years of the early seventeenth century Thurzó, elected Palatine in 1609, could rely on the tacit support of the Hungarian nobility for virtually anything he did, given that he was their only champion against the growing absolutism of the Habsburgs, against pressure from the Catholic Counter-Reformation and against the establishment all over Europe of a state apparatus that would eventually sideline the traditional ruling elites. Thurzó saw his political mission as modernising and strengthening the mediaeval office of the Palatine as the one guarantee of stability in the fragile remains of a kingdom. In this he was successful, and he is remembered today in Hungary as a master tactician and a shrewd statesman, if not for being one of the country’s truly charismatic leaders.

  In private Thurzó, like many of his fellow-lords, nursed more grandiose dynastic dreams. He had probably coveted the throne of Transylvania himself, but lacked the glamour of illustrious ancestors or a name that resounded throughout half a continent. Nonetheless, once he had attained the office of palatine it was not unreasonable to suppose that he might achieve his other ambitions, if not for himself then for Imre, his only son. Count George Thurzó died still in office in 1616 at the age of fifty-one and, in spite of the predictable rumours of poisoning, the cause of his death was probably gout.

  The arrest of Elisabeth Báthory was not the first manoeuvre executed by George Thurzó during the dead time of midwinter, when social and political life was in temporary suspense. On Christmas Day 1600, Thurzó had tricked the twenty-three-year-old lord, Michael Telekesi, into leaving his forest hiding place and travelling to Thurzó’s seat at Bytča in the hope of an amnesty. The young noble had ambushed and robbed a convoy transporting gifts to the Habsburg Emperor, Rudolf II, who deemed the crime high treason and ordered the Hungarian aristocrats to respond. When George Thurzó, eager to ingratiate himself with his master, agreed to besiege Telekesi’s stronghold at Lednice, not one of his fellow-lords would accompany him or provide troops – all of them were suddenly indisposed. Thurzó, with his own 150 horsemen and 400 footsoldiers, took the castle anyway and chased Telekesi into Poland, whence he returned in secret, hoping to negotiate. Once he had surrendered at Bytča, Telekesi was summarily imprisoned, then taken by Thurzó to Bratislava, tried by the compliant tabular court and quickly beheaded. Thurzó’s actions were judged unnecessarily cruel and his part in the affair was widely resented in Hungary: Telekesi was nobly born, young and as popular as Rudolf was unpopular; he had fought heroically against the Turks; and he was the last male of his line, all of which should have won him clemency.2

  There were plenty of other instances showing Thurzó, the loving husband and father, to be utterly ruthless where his material interests were concerned. In 1605, at the time of the Bocskai rebellion, someone looted the Thurzó family crypt in Bytča, later abandoning some of th
e stolen objects near the Thurzó country estates. George suspected his neighbour Jan Kubinyi and his wife Magdalena Esterházy and without warning seized and burned Bodina, a Kubinyi village, and executed several family servants without trial. The robbery had in fact been carried out by marauding Hajdúks with the probable help of Thurzó’s own servants, but no apology or compensation was ever offered to the less powerful victims of Thurzó’s anger.3 The young and intensely ambitious Lord Nicholas Esterházy, among others, is unlikely to have forgotten this incident, which was only one of many in which Thurzó harassed the Kubinyis, and when the new generation of aristocrats came into their own and Esterházy became palatine, retribution rich in irony was visited on George’s own heirs. The Platthy family also owned land adjoining Lord George’s estates and Thurzó took eleven of their villages by force, daring the weaker Platthys to resist. This one-sided feud simmered for twenty-seven years, during which time Thurzó turned his attention to persecuting Lady Kate Pálffy, the widow of his predecessor as Palatine, Stephen Illésházy, and many lesser members of the squirearchy.

  Even at the peak of its power, which had not yet arrived, finesse was not a quality associated with the Vienna court, and in their determination to keep Hungary allied to the Empire, to rule it in what Henry VII of England described as ‘the French manner’ – by absolutist decree – the Habsburgs often employed heavy-handed tactics. One of these was to organise show trials to discredit the more troublesome, or simply more powerful, members of the native aristocracy who were associated with Transylvanian politics. The easiest charge to trump up was high treason (the crime was ill-defined and there was no shortage of pro-Vienna Hungarian officials who would help in the concoction of a case), the penalties for which were death and, most attractively, the forfeiture of property. In this way the Habsburgs hoped to cow the rest of the aristocracy, to rid themselves permanently of troublemakers and to redistribute the estates of those accused among their own German- or Czech-speaking nobles. Religious motives were also mixed up in this policy: it was the Protestant lords whom the Catholic Habsburgs moved against, and the dispossessions were also designed to weaken the Calvinist and Lutheran hold on the Magyars and hasten the spread of the Counter-Reformation. The problem was that, for all its fierce frontier ways and outbreaks of local lawlessness, Hungary had a long tradition of observation of the law – and high expectations of the crown – at a national level. Rightminded lords, among them Elisabeth Báthory’s husband Francis Nádasdy, were outraged by the Austrians’ blatant injustices, particularly during the most famous of these trials in 1602, in which the new Palatine himself, Count Stephen Illésházy, stood accused.