by Tony Thorne
Nor is the role of women in physical atrocities unusual; the Brazilian Gilberto Freyre wrote in the 1930s of the wives of wealthy Portuguese estate owners in that country who, to avenge the ravages of age which they detected on their own bodies, tortured and blinded their beautiful young African female slaves.24 While this book was in preparation the widespread abuse of Filipina maidservants by wealthy Gulf Arab families became an international cause célèbre, the wives of the households in question regularly joining in or instigating the cruelties. The parallels with feudal Hungary in terms of power, status, ethnicity do not need to be elaborated.
The women’s cruelty to one another is only a reflection, a fairly pale reflection, of the tide of mayhem which the men saw ebbing and flowing outside the manor-house walls, but the men, hardened to all sorts of indignities and to the quick, casual brutalities they inflict on each other, will not conceive of physical violence by woman upon woman. Death was palatable when part of male sport, when dressed up with plumes and swagger, strutting bravado or a rapid lunge, but not when it accompanied the refined cruelty and day-by-day suffering of the secret women’s world of the inner household.
By all accounts, including her own in letters and in her last testament, Countess Báthory loved her children, and fiercely protected and cherished them, fulfilling her motherly responsibilities absolutely according to custom, even without the support of her lord. It seems she could love other children, not of her blood – one witness told how she doted on a thirteen-year-old orphan girl who soon sickened and died. But the low-born were of no account. To a Báthory, as we know from the swathe her nephew Gábor cut through the ladies of his principality, even the highest-born were just playthings. From George Thurzó’s own example we learn that the greater nobility could treat the lesser nobility with oppressive contempt. As for the commoners, they were literally worth less than their masters’ livestock; at the end of the sixteenth century the doctor Ferenc Pápai Párisz lamented the lot of those citizens ‘living in the countryside where a sick animal gets medical aid sooner than a sick man’.25 It is quite conceivable that, just as Count Thurzó was capable of doting on his young wife, his daughters and his infant son, and executing his neighbours’ servants without trial (and, come to that, of sacrificing Elisabeth’s attendants without a qualm), so Elisabeth could have loved her husband faithfully and cared tenderly for her children, and yet beaten and pricked and burned and doused her maidservants with freezing water.
In the final analysis, who really suffered? The maids, the accomplices? At that time, in a Renaissance culture, their lives would be considered of no significance. Even the well-born and powerful could be poisoned with relative impunity for material gain, stabbed in a brawl. Peasants could be hanged for theft, burghers for fraud, mothers for infanticide, old women for sorcery. The inferiority of the poor was immovably enshrined in the early modern scheme of things. The various visual metaphors which underpinned the late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century imagination – the ladder, the chain, the universe of concentric spheres – all took for granted the existence of an immutable hierarchy of being, in which the social order within human society was a stratification ordained by God. The right of the aristocrat to his or her pre-eminence normally went as unquestioned as the divine right of kings and emperors to rule: even the new modes of thought such as egalitarian Calvinism or Lutheranism, or social upheavals such as Dózsa’s rebellion, failed to dent these certainties in the minds of the mass of people. If the serfs of Hungary could not think of bettering themselves, they could at least gaze on the noblewoman’s castle and indulge their imaginations to their limits, speculating on the sinful excesses being committed behind its walls.
What Elisabeth herself saw, when she retired to her private chamber and pondered on her dependencies, may once have been a perfect world in miniature, but by the time she was in her late forties might well have been a messy microcosm, in her possession but only barely under her control. Threatened from the outside by covetous neighbours, political schemers, insolent Germans and marauding bandits and from within by ineptitude and feuding, the several communities she ruled over, with their population of stewards, soldiers, bookkeepers, domestics and serfs, must have at times come close to calamity. Even allowing that Elisabeth’s wealth was enormous and her authority unchallenged, when epidemics struck, when incompetence went too far and could not be covered up, and when the feuds which erupted in the cloistered atmosphere threatened to get out of hand, the mistress of the house must have felt a sense of helplessness and panic. Whenever we consider institutions, especially those which are alien to us, belonging to other societies in other times, we tend to see them as they were intended to be, in working order. Just like their modern counterparts – the children’s home, the hospital ward, the private academy for young ladies – it is quite likely that Elisabeth’s health service and her system of schooling did not work. For one thing, Death kept on intruding.
The confessions of the inner circle of servants paint a convincing picture of mounting chaos, climaxing in the macabre farce in which Elisabeth and her daughter are left without one able-bodied maidservant to attend them, while Dorkó, as soon as the Countess is out of the way, attempts in a frenzy to cover up her homicidal blunders, stuffing bodies into hiding places all round the estate. The discovery of body parts by Zrínyi’s dogs may well be true, but possibly refers to long-dead victims of earlier epidemics. It is conceivable that large numbers of such victims were buried without ceremony to avoid local panic, but of course fuelling the most sinister rumours.
From the testimony of witnesses and what we know of her court, it seems also beyond doubt that Elisabeth herself often but not always took part in the quasi-medical experiments of her entourage, and in the punishment of those girls of her household who offended her, however innocently or trivially. She personally requested curing plasters and poisons, and, like most women of her station, traded herbs with the wives of her noble neighbours. She was as superstitious as any woman – or man, for that matter – of her age, and relied not only on the imported manuals of sympathetic magic but on local folk wisdom, charms, talismans and incantations, for which she would call on Erzsi Majorosné of My java, among others. The principles underlying sympathetic magic were the same as those which gave the rationale for punishment at all levels of that society: the chastisement should mirror the crime, expunge the crime in all its gravity, not by rehabilitation but by the severity of pain and shame inflicted – repentance and deterrence were secondary, but important too. Elisabeth had the coins and keys heated red-hot to scald or brand the hands of the pilferer, saw the lazy or the brazen stripped naked, dipped the runaway in the brook, starved the greedy, beat the stubborn and the slow. In all this we can be sure that she was no different from other great ladies, no doubt more inventive, more resolute, but within the tolerable bounds of cruelty as they were then understood. But tearing the flesh with tongs or teeth, stabbing with knives and needles, burning the pubic hair with candleflames, inserting hot iron bars into the vaginas of the maidens, feeding them their own flesh? These torments were indeed worthy of Bosch or Brueghel or the most refined and sinister levels of the executioner’s repertoire.
The attempt made recently to explain the alleged tortures away as therapeutic techniques is ingenious, but raises several questions. It does not account for the many reports of systematic beatings, which, if they were true, must refer to punishments or deliberate brutality (slapping, in contrast, could be explained as astringent therapy). If the other practices were standard healing methods, why would witnesses describe them as deliberate tortures? And if the witnesses were searching their imaginations for elaborate torments to accuse their enemies of, why not choose unambiguous examples that could not be confused with medical treatments? (Perhaps they did not have the wit – or the time – to do better.) The healing explanation stands up only if we assume that these cures were always carried out in secret by a select few ‘specialists’, so that an unsophisticat
ed person who chanced upon a therapy in progress would not understand its real purpose. This may indeed have been the case, as amateur healers guarded the secrets of their craft as carefully as the orthodox doctors did theirs, and many of their practices were bizarre.
Lunacy is popularly believed to be intimately bound up with nobility, and not only in pre-Enlightenment Europe: a British writer estimated in the 1970s that one-third of the ducal families of England were affected by madness.26 When trying to make sense of sadism and murder as described in the Báthory case, there has been an understandable temptation to bring in a retrospective verdict of ‘guilty but insane’. The derangement of the senses was of course a familiar concept to our ancestors, but how madness was defined – and whether it could be publicly ascribed to an individual of Elisabeth’s status – is far from clear. Gábor Báthory has been posthumously condemned as crazy, but his contemporaries, even when they were scandalised, seem to have considered his wild impulses to be the prerogative of a prince. Whether or not madness ran in the Báthory family is a moot point, but it seems beyond doubt that they saw themselves as carrying a burden of glamour and glory to which members of the clan responded in different ways: Elisabeth’s brother Stephen, for instance, came to shun public life in spite of the responsibilities of his birth and retired to Ecsed to write his religious meditations. It was particularly in the nineteenth century that the ‘psychological’ interpretations of the Báthorys’ peculiarities were developed, and these culminated in the twentieth century in a standard treatment of the family even in school history texts as tainted, unstable and immoral.
Elisabeth does not seem to have been physically or mentally abnormal in any obvious way. Had she been deranged, she could not have written the lucid business letters and will that we have in her own hand, and there is nothing to substantiate the idea of fits. If she had suffered from physical disabilities that were out of the ordinary, this would almost certainly have been mentioned at the trial or hinted at in previous family correspondence.
Regarding other instances of madness, eccentricity and excess among the Hungarian aristocracy, there was certainly widespread neurosis, depression and hysteria brought about by the pressures of the age. A noble family might contain members loyal to the Habsburgs in the west and others espousing the Transylvanian cause in the east of the country – quite apart from having to cope with the ever-present threat to psychic and physical wellbeing from the Turks. There were great tensions inherent in the noble milieu: the possibility of total self-indulgence tempered by Lutheran or Calvinist notions of sin and retribution, and a deference to the sacred crown that had become ingrained over centuries. Dealing with conspiracies by neighbours, even members of one’s own family, and the need to protect oneself and one’s loved ones from disease, together with the obligation to observe European values and Hungarian traditions required a sort of fanaticism, as did the charged role that the feudal Hungarian lords had to play: they were the intelligentsia, the politicians, the soldiers, the patrons of religion, statesmen and defenders of their families all at once. A man could – should – be simultaneously a poet, a chivalrous knight, a Macchiavel and a brute. Sigmund Báthory for one seems to have buckled under the intolerable burden of his private sensitivity – as evidenced by his religious preoccupations and his intense love of music – and the caricature role of warrior prince that he was required to play.
Many women went mad with grief, either gradually as their children died one by one before their time, or suddenly when, for example, the death of a spouse tipped them over the edge of despair. Those who held on to their sanity may not by any means have met the standards of normality assumed today: extremes of behaviour were – and are – for both sexes a trait that goes with privilege; hormonal influences and the effect of diet on rationality and mood were not well understood (although the doctrine of the humours was a subtle enough precursor of our science), intoxication by alcohol or drugs, poisoning by ergot, agaric or lead, the insidious progression of syphilis could all result in delusions, rages, terrifying reversals of character.
A savage hauteur was associated with those in power in Hungary at least up until the inter-war period of our own century. But tales of the cruelty of wayward and quixotic aristocrats often come in the form not of complaints but of celebrations of gruesome mischief – the strange Hungarian cult of káröröm.
Typical is the story told about the proud Magyar squire George Kapy, who was the föispan (high sheriff) of Hunyad county in the seventeenth century. Once when Székely raftsmen were rowing by on the River Maros, they caught sight of Kapy’s daughters looking down from the windows of his manor-house in Arany. When they saw the girls, the light-hearted oarsmen began neighing and whinnying at them in a teasing display of lust. Squire Kapy roused the village and had the Székelys pulled to the shore, where he commanded his blacksmith to take up his hammer and nails and neatly shoe each of them in turn.27
Another such anecdote tells of two country gentlemen who were in the habit of paying each other occasional visits, accompanied by their servants and their prize horses. The pair were fond of practical jokes, and on one occasion one of the squires complimented the other on the spotless appearance of his horses. The latter went outside to find that they had been whitewashed. On the next visit the duped gentleman whispered to his servant, who quietly slipped away, before remarking to his host that he was astonished to see that his horses were wearing stockings. The owner dashed out to where his horses stood with their legs flayed from knee to fetlock.
Both Elisabeth and her castles were remote, hidden, unreachable. She stood – and stands – apart from and above the lives of others. She was probably intensely private and difficult to approach, features explained by her upbringing and education. She and her lairs provide an easy focus for our fantasies, just as the gaunt closed-up fortress on the top of the forested hill became in the local imagination the scene of unimaginable horrors. The standard parallels which are usually quoted are the fourteenth-century Mongol warlord Timor the Cruel, Lucrezia Borgia, Gilíes de Rais and Vlad Tepes. Each of these four was an aristocrat; each abused the power their status conferred on them; but they do not offer useful parallels in other respects. Timor, known as Tamerlane or Tamburlaine, and Vlad Tepes were military leaders in times when inventive forms of mass-slaughter were a necessary part of a tyrant’s repertoire; the impaling for which Vlad has become notorious in the west was in fact a common form of execution, as the British ambassador to Constantinople noted when he crossed Hungary in 1596: ‘we found two men most miserably put to death, having each of them a stake thrust in at his Fundament, through his body, and so out by his neck, the stake being set up-right on end . . ,’28 Lucrezia Borgia’s reputed poisonings were part of an Italian tradition of dynastic and domestic intrigue. The Italian-born Catherine de Medici, who became Regent of France at the time of Elisabeth Báthory’s birth, was another high-born lady who surrounded herself with an entourage of beautiful girls and was rumoured to have used the blood of virgins in her experiments with cosmetic potions, aphrodisiac elixirs and poisons, as well as exciting her passions by watching her maidservants being beaten. Writing in 1864, in his Notes from Underground, Dostoyevsky observed that the Egyptian queen Cleopatra kept boredom at bay by sticking golden pins into the flesh of her helpless slaves.
The French aristocrat Gilíes de Rais or Retz was the origin of the Bluebeard legend. He was entrusted with the safety of Joan of Arc and became Maréchal de France in the early fifteenth century. This immensely wealthy grandee outdid the royal family in the lavish finery of his display and the splendour of his court. He was a dandy, a libertine and dilettante who combined humanist scholarship with patronage of the arts and satanism and was said also to have practised alchemy, sorcery, necromancy and ritual murder, torturing and sodomising up to 200 young boys whom his servants abducted for him from the surrounding countryside. In his case, too, the truth of the charges eventually laid against him was obscured by political and personal mot
ives. De Rais was hanged for murder and heresy in 1440 and his body was consigned to the fire.
All that these famous precedents demonstrate is the truism that depravity was a prerogative of the ruling elite. But there are other authentic historical characters, obscure protagonists from the margins of the Christian world, whose examples may bring us closer to a final understanding of the Báthory enigma.
Chapter Ten
Stories of Witches and Widows
I am in blood
Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Witches and witchcraft in old Europe ~ fairy queens and other beings ~ subterranean mysteries ~ blood myths and bloody traditions ~ the fate of Dame Alice Kyteler ~ the persecuted widow ~ Elisabeth Czobor and the end of the Thurzós ~ a case for comparison ~ the enchantress, Anna Báthory
The pre-Enlightenment world was permeated by a belief in the influence of the numinous and the magical on every aspect of life. While wizards concerned themselves with alchemy, astrology and numerology, mundane magic was universally accepted to be the province of women and merged seamlessly with women’s other customs and duties. When, however, a whole community or a group within it turned on an individual woman and sought to destroy her, there were three standard charges which the condition of all females made it easy to bring against her: the first was sexual impropriety; the second was infanticide; and the third, the most ambiguous and imprecise, yet more often than not with a fatal outcome, was witchcraft.
For this reason it is not surprising that, among the many acts of wickedness that Countess Báthory was accused of in the course of the investigations, were acts of maleficium too. It was likewise unsurprising that the priest, Ponikenus, should have included black magic (something embedded in his religious ideology) and given it prominence in his highly coloured condemnation of the Lady. Even though she was never formally charged with the crime of sorcery, it is useful when looking for precedents and parallels for Elisabeth’s persecution to seek them in the wider context of the trials which were instituted against other women in other parts of Europe and beyond, nearly all of which could be categorised as witch-trials.