Countess Dracula

by Tony Thorne

  In Illésházy’s case, once King Rudolf had ordered a trial from Vienna, the proceedings were carried out according to Hungarian law and the defendant was acquitted by the Hungarian High Court of all the charges against him. At this point the King simply overruled the judgement and forced through the death sentence and the confiscation of lands, tithes and treasures. Before the sentence could be carried out, Illésházy followed the convention of escaping to the sanctuary of Poland, thence to Transylvania, where he intrigued against his enemies until 1606, when he was pardoned and allowed to return. The war-hero Francis Nádasdy openly opposed Vienna, and by implication its agent Thurzó, during the Illésházy trial and it may be significant that ugly and damaging rumours of cruelty by the Nádasdy-Báthory family at Sárvár began to circulate at just this time.

  During the Fifteen-Year War, the Hungarians had seen for themselves that their western allies were cynical, rapacious and, worst, incapable of once and for all expelling the Turk. The aggressive policies of the Counter-Reformation served to inflame feelings even further and many became convinced that not only the infidel, but the ‘Germans’ were the enemy. As the noble poet Peter Bornemissza lamented at the end of the sixteenth century:

  The haughty Germans persecute me;

  The infidel Turks surround me:

  Shall I again enjoy, and when,

  A residence in old Buda town?4

  After all the blood spilt in the fight against Islam, a serious collaboration with the Ottomans was out of the question, but the welling indignation and the resurgence of national pride were coming to a head. The existence of a free Protestant state, embodying Magyar traditions and dealing with both Vienna and Constantinople on equal terms, became an irresistible prospect; indeed, that state had already come painfully into being twenty years before but was still not recognised by all parties as an independent entity. That nation was not Hungary but Transylvania, which once again became the stage on which Hungary’s conflicts were played out. The Imperial troops had occupied and despoiled Transylvania and the eastern Hungarian counties during the Fifteen-Year War, and, once the fighting had died down, Archduke Matthias and his clerical advisers decided to use the armies’ presence there forcibly to restore the region, which had enjoyed religious toleration since 1580, to Catholicism. In protest against the seizure and reconsecration of their church by the agents of Vienna, the Lutheran Saxon burghers of Kosice (Kassa) refused to speak their own German mother tongue and conversed in Hungarian: they were among the great majority who rushed to support the figurehead of a new nationalism, the man who raised the flag against the Roman Empire and inspired the 1605 declaration, Count Stephen Bocskai.

  Bocskai had been brought up with Francis Nádasdy in Vienna as a Habsburg protégé, the two men had been lodged together as boys, and Bocskai’s family had served the Báthorys, to whom they were related by marriage. When they reached adulthood the two men functioned in tandem for a time as the Empire’s strongmen inside Hungary, Nádasdy in the west and Bocskai in the east. The ruthlessly determined Bocskai, a member of the newer nobility who had himself been counsellor to Prince Sigmund Báthory (and the real power behind the throne) became the ruler of Transylvania and was made a gift of an ‘alternative’ crown of Hungary by the Turks. He agreed to accept the crown only in its capacity as a fabulous object, knowing that its symbolic power was meaningless unless he could first bring the Principality under his military control and then end the war between the Habsburgs and the Turks. To strengthen his hand within Transylvania and to prevent interference from Hungary, Bocskai, whose power-base was in Kassa, fomented a revolt against the crown in the north-eastern Hungarian territories and moved to annex the Seven Counties with the help of a fighting force, the Hajdúks, which, to paraphrase Wellington, frightened their commanders as much as they terrified their enemies.

  The Hajdúks, who in later centuries became a sort of police force within Hungary, were originally Balkan shepherds and cattle-drovers who had formed a military order whose members fought as mercenaries against the Turks during the Fifteen-Year War. They lived outside the feudal system of servitude and were joined by Hungarian peasants and refugees who had renounced serfdom. These homeless warriors were notorious for their fanatical savagery and their bisexuality; they fought on foot and wore a uniform of sheepskins or furs and caps in which three crows’ feathers were stuck. During the winter of 1604-5 Bocskai’s Hajdúks – characterised by one historian as ‘miserable, landless, lawless, godless creatures of an inhuman epoch’5 – matched the brutal excesses of the Empire’s troops and fought a guerrilla campaign with no quarter given to military foes or civilians who happened to get in their way. Bocskai knew what he had unleashed, but kept his part of the bargain with the Hajdúks, to whom he gave land where they could settle with their animals and camp-followers and begin to found communities. With the help of these shock-troops Bocskai defeated the Imperial armies under the Italian Belgiojoso, while his allies the Turks returned to the offensive against the Empire too.

  In the Ecsedy branch of the Báthory family, loyalty to the Habsburgs was traditionally stronger than in the senior Somlyói branch with its aspirations to royalty, but Elisabeth’s brother Stephen sided with Bocskai in 1605 because he lived close to Transylvania. If Elisabeth had openly declared for Bocskai, she would have risked losing her estates as her western lands were so near the Imperial capital, so she remained nominally loyal to Vienna but, as Thurzó and the Austrians well knew, she was also maintaining close links with her nephew Gábor Báthory, whose mentor was the new Prince. Bocskai ordered the Hajdúks to leave her estates alone.

  The whole country was on the edge of civil war and, even when Elisabeth wished to travel through the southern and western regions in late August 1605, she was obliged to send to her son-in-law Count Zrínyi, who supported Bocskai, for a safe pass before setting out from his castle of Monyorókerék. ‘I have invited My Mother, My Right Honourable Lady, together with her servants and chattels, and I will not impede her . . .’ it read.6

  On the first of July 1605 George Thurzó, the stalwart ally of the King, had written to his wife:

  I have received from Bocskai the document guaranteeing the protection of my estates. But do not you show it to anybody, it is only for a case of emergency should the Hajdúks wish to enter into my possessions, because he writes in his letter that I have accepted his authority, but it is not the truth, and I shall never accept him, I need only his protection to defend myself against his soldiers, so it would be most unfortunate if other respected persons were to see this letter.7

  During the continuing unrest following the rebellion in the latter part of 1605, Hajdúk troops burned and looted the town of Bytča and the village of Čachtice. They tried to occupy George Thurzó’s castle in the middle of Bytča, but were bought off; Elisabeth Báthory’s castle they left untouched. It is not known whether local people were given shelter by their master and mistress in the fortified castles, but it is known that around fifty commoners died in Bytča and an unknown number in Čachtice. We can try to imagine the feelings of those whose family members were slaughtered while the neighbouring aristocrats went unscathed. The fragmentary Chronicles of Csejthe record cryptically that as late as 27 March 1606 ‘devils carried András Vajda from the town’:8 the devils in question being, in all probability, from among the Hajdúks who had been left out of the land-sharing, and were still running amok in search of plunder.

  Elisabeth’s brother Stephen, Count of Ecsed, although a reclusive man, wielded great influence in the kingdom. He was Chief Justice of Hungary and was besides the guardian of the two children of the more exalted Somlyói branch of the Báthorys, Gábor and Anna. When Stephen died on 26 July 1605, Gábor Báthory was considered by many to be the strongest candidate for the throne of Transylvania, should it become vacant – and Prince Bocskai was in poor health. With his uncle no longer alive to promote his cause, the young Count was at a disadvantage, and a group of the most powerful aristocrats, includin
g George Thurzó and his new ally, the former fugitive Stephen Illésházy, opposed Gábor’s nomination. There were good political reasons for this as well as the family jealousies and dynastic rivalries which permeated the world of the senior nobility: Báthory would provide a spectacular focus for those who aspired to independence from the Habsburgs, and once in place he might well re-establish a hereditary Magyar royal line which would be virtually unchallengeable. Bocskai himself wished Gábor Báthory to succeed him, but somehow Thurzó and Illésházy managed to prevail upon him to name their candidate Bálint Homonnay Drugeth as his successor in his will (some say they simply forged the document with the help of their many agents in the Transylvanian court).

  Bocskai died on 27 December 1606, and by January 1607 his chancellor Kátai, who supported the Báthory cause and had already been slandered and politically isolated by Illésházy, was cut down by a group of Hajdúks in the pay of Thurzó’s faction. After Kátai’s death rumours spread that he had poisoned his master. It is much more likely that Bocskai died of natural causes, but the coincidences were too much for seventeenth-century chroniclers, who treated their readers to another lurid set-piece, masquerading as history, which became the version of events that everyone remembered, including those who later testified against Elisabeth Báthory:

  1606 die 29 decembris hora 5 matutina His Majesty the Prince Stephen Bocskai, the liberator of the Hungarian nation, died in Kassa, having been administered poison by Mihály Kátai some months before at a garden feast.9

  After Kátai had been betrayed in turn, according to the folk-tales by his young envoy’s talkative mistress, the stage is set for the Grand Guigno resolution:

  Then at dawn, Mihály Kátai was brought forth from his detention by the Prince’s men of court, so he said, ‘What are you doing, men-at-arms? It was Ferenc Gymes who first slashed him, and then the crowd cut him up into small pieces for poisoning the Prince. Afterwards, around nine o’clock, his wife had the several thousand small pieces swept up, put into a blanket and, bringing the remains out of Kassa the same day, had him buried in Misle.

  Popular legend adds the detail that dogs carried off some of the pieces and ate his liver and lights.

  Before his death, Bocskai had succeeded in mediating between the Turks and the Habsburgs, represented by Thurzó, and forcing an accommodation which effectively ended what the German-speakers called the Great Turkish War and awarded the disputed Seven Counties to Transylvania, whose status was finally recognised by the Empire. As part of the 1606 Peace of Vienna the great reconciliation between the Hungarian nobles and the Habsburgs was belatedly arranged under the auspices of Rudolf’s successor Matthias II, who, although as poor a soldier as his brother, knew that essential allies could not be persecuted or snubbed indefinitely. He overlooked, officially at least, the actions of the many nobles who had sided with Bocskai (among them Elisabeth’s brother, Stephen), restored the mediaeval office of palatine, giving the Hungarians back their own viceroy while he retained the crown, and reluctantly recognised the Lutheran and Calvinist faiths. The treaty, which seemed to guarantee Hungarian independence and the rights of its aristocracy for the future, was signed on 23 September. On 9 December the Treaty of Zsitvatorok formally ended hostilities with the Turks.

  One month later, the Transylvanian Diet approved Sigmund Rákóczi as the new prince, and, although the Drugeth family’s ambitions were thwarted, Thurzó was content, knowing that Rákóczi’s large landholdings inside Hungary would prevent him from severing the alliances with the kingdom that were now in place. This reassurance lasted only as long as Rákóczi’s tenure – one year and one month – before he resigned and the golden youth, Gábor Báthory, succeeded him. Although he had managed to carry Bocskai’s crown in triumph to Vienna, this was not at all what Thurzó had hoped for; the Báthorys were long-time rivals of his patrons the Habsburgs in the international arena and the main obstacle to his raising his own family to pre-eminence in Hungary. The Báthory family, in the shape of Elisabeth, allied by marriage to the Nádasdys and Zrínyis, owned more square miles of the country than either he or the King; their dependencies were so extensive that if they changed allegiance it could once again destabilise the Kingdom – and not just its eastern fringes.

  Against this background of political turmoil and seething intrigue, the messages which passed between Countess Báthory and the man who masterminded her downfall are evidence of an increasingly tense, precarious relationship, masked by the demands of written protocol.

  On 11 December 1606, when the worst of the political crisis was over, Countess Báthory wrote to George Thurzó from her castle at Keresztúr:

  I have received your letter and I understand its cause, that you wish me to give the abbacy of Csorna to Peter Kálli. Regarding this matter I can write to you that it would be a great pleasure for me if I were able to do this, but I cannot. I have previously been required for the same purpose before by some lords, as my lord Othkavio also has. But I have not yet decided which of them shall be given the abbacy, for there are four candidates. I shall gather them all together in the next days and I shall speak to them of this, and according to their decision the abbacy shall be granted. I will fit my order to their decision. As soon as we come to our decision, I shall inform you, so that you can give a certain answer to our friend.

  I serve you with pleasure as my brother10

  This politely framed letter shows Elisabeth fully in command of her privileges and dispensing patronage confidently and, in this case, not necessarily to the advantage of her powerful and potentially vindictive neighbour. (The reference to ‘Lord Othkavio’ is obscure; it is possible that it is an error which should read ‘as my lord also has [been petitioned] by the Octave court’.)

  At the end of 1607 Elisabeth was still on cordial terms with the Thurzó family, as her polite acceptance of a wedding invitation from George Thurzó dated 16 November shows.11

  On the same day she wrote separately to Thurzó’s wife, Lady Elisabeth Czobor asking her to convey a secret message to Lord Dersffy at Strećno. Elisabeth Báthory had been on friendly terms with her, also writing to request that Czobor send her herbs, among other things.

  There are long gaps in the archive records of their correspondence, but, perhaps coincidentally with Gábor Báthory’s rise to power in Transylvania (the young Gábor was the idealised – even idolised – figurehead of the ‘Báthory party’, the anti-Habsburg, pro-Transylvanian nationalist faction that Thurzó, the Habsburg’s man, bitterly opposed), the families’ former friendship became increasingly strained. On 20 October 1610, two months before her arrest, Elisabeth Báthory addressed a longer communication to Thurzó, now the Count Palatine of Hungary. After the usual greetings (and she was careful to allude to Thurzó’s elevation to his new post) she writes:

  The reason for my letter is the following: A few days ago Gáspar Tatay together with my men of court went into Ujhely [Nové Mesto nad Váhom] to the market; he took drink there, and during the way home he fell out with a man of my court. He was challenged to a duel by Gáspar Tatay, and if the other men of mine had let them, and had not separated them, nobody can say what would have happened between them. They parted from each other on the way, and my men came home in peace, but Gáspar Tatay did not return to his home, in truth he went to the home of my servant and, in his anger, cut the legs of his horse. But he was not satisfied and came even to my house, where he was cursing and again challenged my servant to a duel. My servant went out of my house and they fought until my servant broke Tatay’s sword and in the end of it Tatay fled. But even after the duel Tatay came again to my house and he was cursing and damning again. I was informed of the matter, I did not let my servants out, and knowing your lordship’s authority and even that Tatay is said to be your servant, I wished to inform you at once. I must request you, if Tatay does not tell you the same as I have in my letter, please ask for information from my son-in-law Lord Zrínyi’s men named George Zalay and Michael Baranyai; they were here i
n the company of my daughter and my son-in-law. If my servant had done anything against Tatay, the latter should have informed me, and I would have punished my servant by law. He would not have come to my house, nor would he have cut the legs of my servant’s horse. I can assure you that my servant is not guilty. Gáspar Tatay provoked him in all instances and I will not allow this to go unpunished. If my servant were found guilty of anything, he also would suffer punishment. Be that as it may, I beg you, please command Tatay to behave himself, not to come to my house with cursing and damning. I have never done anything against him, nor has my servant either. Otherwise, I expect protection from your honour and from your servant, too. Barring other incidents, I commend you to the protection of the Almighty, may you remain in health in your office in favour of our country.

  I serve you12

  After the greetings and preamble the letter is uncompromising. The closing phrase is curt, and, just before it, Elisabeth’s reference to Thurzó’s high office is not only in deference to his rank (in becoming palatine one year before, he had attained the most exalted position possible for a loyal Hungarian), but a reminder that upon accepting his office he had taken an oath to uphold the law impartially. This interesting document may simply illustrate the day-to-day tensions of life in the court, the taverns and the marketplace, but it may contain more than this. It is possible that Tatay was a provocateur sent by Thurzó to incite Báthory’s entourage to commit some crime or indiscretion; against this would be the fact that the Lady’s daughter and Lord Zrínyi were present as powerful – if not wholly impartial – supporters of her cause. It is intriguing that Elisabeth nowhere gives the name of the member of her household whom Tatay challenged and who fought him off. Could this have been Ficzkó, her factotum, who was accused by the squire Gregory Pásztory, testifying in the later investigation, of provoking a fight with his servant in very similar circumstances at almost exactly the same time?13