Countess Dracula

by Tony Thorne

  From the legal point of view, the differences are interesting. In the Listhius case the letters of interrogation have been prepared with greater care and attention to detail and the content of the ‘confessions’ is more logical than in Elisabeth Báthory’s case (the distinction between personal eyewitness testimony and hearsay is made clear, for example, and the chronology of events is much more consistent).20

  The length of time taken over the investigation into Elisabeth Báthory, which began early in 1610 and was still incomplete at the time of her death in 1614, contrasts with the speed and efficiency with which Listhius, a less influential woman, was tried and judgement passed. Only the condemnation and execution of Countess Báthory’s accomplices was achieved speedily. In Listhius’ case the order for the trial to be initiated was given on 27 June 1637; the interrogation took place on 2, 4 and 6 July.

  Of all the statements transcribed in the course of the trial it is not the by now familiar testimony of the witnesses which stays in the mind, but the words used by the priest who interceded to secure the payoff – words whose wider implications have not been picked up: ‘Even should you desire to begin something, you will never get to the end of it [this must have been a common form of words; it is almost the same as the Royal Chamber’s dissuasion of King Matthias in 1611], for you cannot demonstrate conclusively that the hand of the woman was the cause of your mother’s death, rather than the hand of her servant.’ In those days it was not possible to convict someone on the basis of indirect guilt, in other words for inciting murder rather than committing it in person. The hints in Elisabeth Czobor’s cryptic note of 1610 and the ambiguity of the evidence against her mean that Báthory would certainly have used in her defence the fact that she could not be held responsible for acts carried out by other hands.

  If in Elisabeth Báthory’s case there is no sign of a compromise with the victims, this shows that the accusations of the murder of noblewomen are likely to be false. It also seems clear from the Listhius case that the mere murder of a commoner was not enough to start off legal proceedings; only the murder of (only one) noble victim could have this effect. The case shows that punishment of servants was the unlimited right of the lord or lady, and, if that punishment resulted in death, it was considered an unfortunate accident. Homicide was viewed as a relatively minor abuse of power or privilege, and could be compensated by money. The social rank of perpetrator and victim were of paramount importance, and, providing she limited her abuse to commoners, a high-born lady could continue for many years to exhibit bizarre behaviour or commit domestic outrages. Only when the killing of a well-born victim coincided with ulterior or exterior motives would the full weight of the law descend on the guilty party.

  According to those who knew her, all Anna-Rosina’s murders, like many of Countess Báthory’s punishment-tortures, were the result of some insignificant breach of discipline. Could this be the way a terribly frustrated and otherwise powerless woman released her rage? Men’s rages were legitimised and dissipated in military games or real warfare, or banditry or wife-beating or hunting. Noble Hungarian women had all the responsibilities of men but few of the privileges, apart from absolute power over their female domestic staff. Where better to go to vent their anger at the intolerable tensions of their lives?

  With clear evidence of her guilt, and the machinery of the state against her, the result of the trial was probably a foregone conclusion, but, as often happened in those days, during the proceedings in 1637 Anna-Rosina Listhius escaped and fled to Poland. Because of her rank and because other members of her own family were respected servants of the crown, on 27 March 1638 the King issued a letter of mercy pardoning her and even allowing her to keep some of her former family estates. The portion of the Thurzó fortune to which she was entitled very probably passed into the ownership of her accusers.

  The fate of Anna Báthory, sister of the murdered Prince Gábor and niece of Elisabeth, was as extraordinary as theirs and her story, too, deserves to be looked at in detail for the parallels it contains with Elisabeth’s treatment at the hands of great men.24

  Anna was born in 1594 to the still pre-eminent Somlyóis, the senior branch of the Báthory family. Such was her fall from privilege and power that the exact date of her death was not even recorded – nothing was heard of her after the year 1640 and she is presumed to have passed away in penury and obscurity somewhere in Poland or Hungary. She spent the years from 1601 at the Ecsed court of her uncle Stephen, Elisabeth Báthory’s elder brother and Chief Justice of Hungary, who doted on her not least because she bore the same name as his beloved mother. Among the charges later levelled against her were that she fornicated with a local silversmith while at Ecsed and that she committed innumerable acts of incest with Gábor her brother. While this cannot be disproved, it is hard to see the pious, reclusive guardian Count Stephen allowing his eight- or nine-year-old charge such freedoms. Two years before his death in 1605 Stephen drew up a will bequeathing the town of Tasnád with its surrounding lands to Anna with the provision that she employ only Calvinist priests to minister to its population. In the same will he also instructed the fourteen-year-old Gábor to take responsibility for his younger sister’s wellbeing.

  On 11 November 1608 the deafening gun salutes which rang out across the city of Koloszvár in Transylvania cracked the walls and chimneypieces of many local houses: Anna Báthory was marrying Transylvanian lord Dénes Bánffy, a supporter of Stephen Bocskai, who had appointed him captain of Nagyvárad fortress and rewarded him with estates at Tokaj, Tarcal and Kereki. Almost nothing is known of the couple’s life together at Kereki castle, but it seems that the strong-minded bride refused to consummate a marriage which was probably nothing but a political arrangement: Bánffy died in 1612 and after the required year of mourning Anna married again to a young noble named Sigmund Jósika, a union which may have been initiated by love (she gave birth to a son and named him Gábor like her brother) but which fuelled the controversy that surrounded the Countess for the rest of her life. Jósika was a Catholic, a fact which turned the powerful Calvinist priesthood against Anna, and he was an intriguer who several times switched allegiances during the rule of Prince Gábor Bethlen.

  If not actually widowed, the headstrong and very wealthy noblewoman was living in circumstances similar to those of her aunt in the years before her imprisonment. Left alone by Jósika, who had fled to join the Homonnay Drugeth faction in Hungary, and without a male relative to protect her since the murder of her brother in 1613, Anna nevertheless presided over a flamboyant and merry court at Kereki. Public gossip was sure that she had taken her estate manager János Krajnik as her lover and had even married him bigamously in secret.

  But it was not only the prurience of hostile neighbours and tavern rumours that Anna had to fear. The new Transylvanian Prince Gábor Bethlen still lacked the wealth, property and reputation that would guarantee his hold on the Principality. He needed quickly to dispossess a noble family or two, and the relatives of the former Prince presented irresistible targets. Their dynasty was in decline, their landholdings were placed in key defensive sites across the country and their only adult heirs were three vulnerable widows, one of whom was already notorious as a shameless femme fatale.

  With Anna’s enemies the Protestant pastors to help and advise him, Bethlen put Lady Kate Török, Lady Kate Iffjú and Lady Anna Báthory on trial for witchcraft. Witnesses were called to blacken Anna’s name: a certain Illés Nagy testified: ‘I have heard about my ladyship, Mistress Bánffy, that she gave birth to a child by János Krajnik, her estate manager, and I was invited to Kereki castle to dine and there at dinner I saw them together over the table, winking and nibbling at each other . . .’ This was the quality of the evidence laid against Anna, along with the unsupported charges of incest and infanticide. As for witchcraft, it has been seen how seamlessly and dangerously the roles of aristocratic healer and sorceress shaded into one another at that time, and Anna seems indeed to have consorted with ‘witches�
�, judging by her co-defendants in a later trial. This time, the less powerful women accused with her were duly condemned and their properties seized; Anna too forfeited part of her wealth, but escaped with her life.

  After getting a portion of what he coveted, Bethlen turned his attention to political matters, among them the threat from Anna’s estranged husband, Jósika, who attacked him in 1616 at the head of an army of Hajdúks loyal to the late Elisabeth’s son-in-law George Drugeth. By 1618 the absurd merry-go-round of intrigue and betrayal had brought Bethlen and Jósika together again, giving Bethlen a new excuse to arrest Anna, this time on the whimsical pretext of forcing her into a reconciliation with her husband. In fact, the Prince had been plotting against the Lady throughout the year. In July he had written to his brother-in-law: ‘There is no negotiating with Mistress Bánffy [he still affected not to recognise her marriage to Jósika]; she is very stubborn. I even appointed my Chancellor Péchy to act as her confessor, but all his efforts were in vain. She behaves so inhumanly towards me that I must needs find another way of dealing with her.’ Bethlen ordered the arrest and interrogation of Stephen Horváth, another of Anna’s retainers and supposed lovers who he hoped would confess the secrets of his mistress’s incest and dabblings in sorcery.

  In December that year a new trial was mounted and Anna Báthory, in addition to being tortured, suffered the indignity of being accused of the murder of her own son – actually alive and being sheltered in Hungary by Nicholas Esterházy – and of bewitching Prince Gábor Bethlen himself in an incident which must have stretched the credulity of her judges to its limits. Bethlen solemnly recorded that while they were passing Anna’s castle of Kereki the previous May his counsellors had seen their prince dancing naked with the accused – a vision which, the court was told, could only have been the result of an evil spell cast upon them by the Lady herself. As the trial progressed Sigmund Jósika again turned against Bethlen, this time siding with the figurehead of the Counter-Reformation, Cardinal Peter Pázmány, while rumours surfaced in Constantinople that the Turks might back the very last surviving male Báthory, Anna’s young brother Andrew, against Bethlen. Seeing that Bethlen was in deadly earnest and being completely without supporters in Transylvania, Anna allowed the Prince to seize Kereki and gave up most of her movable treasures in return for the dropping of all the charges against her. Bethlen also occupied the ancient Báthory seat, the fortified palace of Ecsed in the marshlands near the Partium, but failed to get legal title to it. Within a few months his wife was serving meals on Anna’s golden dishes; the Báthory family silver had been melted down to pay the wages of the Prince’s mercenaries.

  There is a subtext to all the letters and testimonies that record Gábor Bethlen’s persecution of Anna Báthory; Susannah Károlyi, the Prince’s wife, was plain and sickly and suffered from melancholia, and hated the vivacious siren whom she rightly saw as her rival for Bethlen’s affections, while her husband had secretly considered divorcing her to marry the woman he had conspired against (whether his real motive at that point was love or profit is not known; the likelihood is both). Anna was probably beautiful, with the huge eyes, long nose and black hair that ran in the Báthory family, and may have enjoyed many lovers as the gossips said and as her brother undoubtedly had – although virtually any woman who flaunted her independence was assumed to be sexually insatiable. But the evidence used against her was always tainted by prejudice and superstition and almost always hearsay. One of many similarities with the case of Elisabeth, the Blood Countess, is that those contemporary chroniclers and pamphleteers who were not in the pay of Bethlen or part of his circle were silent on the subject of Anna, as if they knew that the slanders levelled against her were just that, fictions grasped at to cloak a campaign of extortion.

  What happened next is just as bizarre as what had gone before and has to be pieced together from fragmentary sources, but it seems that Bethlen agreed to re-arrest Anna Báthory, who was now living in her estate at Tasnád, to force her to cure his wife’s illnesses by witchcraft. When the ‘curing’ failed, she was accused of using her magic to try to kill Lady Károlyi. In his letters to his depressive and deluded wife, Bethlen pandered to her fantasies about Anna, describing her as ‘the fifth consort of the devil’. ‘We shall start a trial’, he wrote, ‘and if she is condemned, we will take her life. She can expect nothing more from me. The sinful must be burned! The flagrant murderous devilish whore!’ And Anna Báthory was on trial for her life again, this time alongside several poor ‘wise women’ and ‘smearers’.

  The trial took place in 1621, and the defendants would almost certainly have been burned at the stake had not Bethlen been distracted by threats to his regime from Hungary and Turkey. As it was, he succeeded this time in taking full possession of Ecsed and confiscated Anna’s last substantial estate of Tasnád too. The destitute and powerless woman, still only twenty-seven years old, was allowed to flee into Poland with Andrew, her young brother.

  Other women had lost their minds in circumstances less formidable than those Anna had faced, but in 1634, after the death of her persecutor Bethlen, she insisted on returning to Transylvania to fight once more to reclaim the lands that had been stripped from her so unjustly. It was not to be, of course. The families who were left with the spoils from the previous confiscations simply resurrected the charges of incest, witchcraft and murder to discredit her and she was tried yet again in 1640, inconclusively but humiliatingly. Some acquaintances pleaded on her behalf for sympathy, reporting that she was ageing and ailing with swollen legs and haemorrhages from the womb. And not everyone abandoned her in her final plight. Back in Hungary in 1636 she had visited the court of the grandest of the new aristocrats, Nicholas Esterházy, the same magnate who had dispossessed George Thurzó’s widow and who the following year would arrest and try Anna-Rosina Listhius. Esterházy, who as an impoverished youth had admired the glamorous Gábor Báthory, took pity on her, giving her a house and servants near his seat at Kismarton, now Eisenstadt.

  At the heart of this narrative is a blank: we know even less of Anna’s real character and appearance than we do of her aunt Elisabeth. All we can be sure of is that Lady Anna Báthory was comprehensively ruined and vilified at the hands of a prince whom Hungary has since celebrated as a wise and just ruler. The most important study of her ordeals, ‘The Enchantress Anna Báthory’, published by the historian András Komáromy in 1894, was poetic but riddled with inaccuracies. It was this article that inspired the fictional versions of the case that soon completely overwhelmed the history. A young seductress, even if she was a witch, was a more romantic and less shameful icon than a mass-murderess, and Anna became a colourful bit-part player in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century romanticising of Transylvania’s golden age and the myth of Gábor Bethlen.

  The few commentators who have been aware of it have treated the Listhius affair as an open-and-shut case – there is after all written proof that the woman was unstable, and her last victim’s family were willing to take action against her publicly. But it cannot be coincidence that, as with Elisabeth and her niece Anna Báthory, the defendant was an isolated and self-willed widow who was the only obstacle to the disposal of an enormous inheritance. In each of the three cases the real instigator of the legal process was the person who, if a successful trial were concluded, stood to confiscate the lion’s share of that inheritance. In every case the accuser, twice the ruling Palatine, once the Prince of Transylvania, was a rapacious representative of the new aristocracy, bent on establishing the basis for a lasting dynasty. Given this compelling motive and the overwhelming power of the prosecuting forces, the guilt or innocence of the women on trial was incidental, but the choice of crime with which to charge them was a crucial element. The great attraction of sorcery and bodily harm was that they were personal transgressions, and no other powerful figures need be involved or compromised. The shock effect of crimes like these was enough to distract people from any weakness in the proof. They were in any case easy t
o substantiate if we conclude that many if not most nobles beat their servants or had them beaten, and that nearly all noblewomen dabbled in magic, often with the help of commoners of doubtful reputation.

  Epilogue

  There is no feast without cruelty.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  At midnight, just before Midsummer’s Day, the ruins of Castle Čachtice are transformed. Here and there among the piles of stones on the escarpment little campfires are flickering. Lit by the faint light of stars and crisscrossing meteors on a moonless night, the castle seems to stand, as the phrase goes, on the roof of the world. One shooting star, passing close by, lights up the whole hillside, bleaching out shadows, as briefly and suddenly as an arc-light switched on for an instant. From somewhere inside the ruins comes the sound of a woman laughing, not loudly, but an unrestrained and unaffected laugh that continues for minutes, then minutes more; long after her clear voice should have died away the woman goes on laughing.

  Now in summer, just as in the autumn of the previous year, there is nothing especially sinister about the hill above Čachtice, and straining for intimations of the past and its ghosts goes unrewarded. But still there is something. A belief in ley-lines, geomancy, feng shui – the ‘dragon-wind’ – has been a fashionable distraction in the west for years now. In Slovakia it is almost unknown, yet at this site among the White Carpathians on this clear night it is possible to experience something like a concentration of pure energy in the earth and in the sky, a sense of the nearness of elemental forces that are beyond description and (pace the French philosophers) beyond judgement.