Countess Dracula

by Tony Thorne

  Just as the manor of Čachtice, beyond the reach of the Transylvanian Prince, had been the logical setting for her arrest, its isolated castle was the ideal place to imprison the disgraced Countess. Apart from the irony that it had witnessed the cruel death of the girls in the autumn of 1610, it was almost midway between the national capital at Bratislava, whence the power of the King and the Palatine was exercised, and Bytèa, from which Thurzó personally ruled over the surrounding counties. The spider in the web had become the fly. Once Elisabeth was secured, Čachtice was easily policed; most of the small population were loyal to the young Paul Nádasdy and his guardian in Sárvár, the rest were intimidated by the invisible, covetous presence of Lord George Thurzó.

  After the events of January 1611 the little community had settled back into its usual seasonal routines, though this was not a return to the recent past, it was a new kind of normality, for the place was quieter, more serene than it had been for more than a decade. A great catharsis had come and gone, as when the witch is at last taken out of the village, chained in a cart.

  After Elisabeth had become invisible, she began to merge in the dreams of the local people and in the musings of scholars with other creatures from legend: witches, fairies, empresses. In time she became part of the topography too, infused into the cellars and underground passages where dark water and wine and blood were indistinguishable.

  By 1614 Pastor Ponikenus was gone, promoted to superintendent of the whole region, Zvonarić had been made a bishop. Records examined now for the first time show that the Čachtice estate was shunned by the senior family members after Elisabeth’s death.1 Her son Paul visited the village only rarely to negotiate the transfer of parcels of land, and it was a handful of his servants who posted guards in the empty castle and sat down to dine in the manor-house in the years before it was finally destroyed by fire. In the list of retainers employed between 1623 and 1625, three names are of particular interest: Stephen Vágy, Imre Ocskai and Balint Jelen were still in the service of the Nádasdys. All three had testified against their mistress in the hearings of 1611.

  Their testimonies and the others had started cautiously. Then, when it became clear that Countess Báthory was doomed, there came a great release of tension, a flood of denunciations. The things they said were not ‘true’, but were the symbolic representation of their memories of living in and around her court, years spent in awe and in fear of her when she was there, in terror of her assistants when she was not. As the horrible allegations accumulated, it became less and less important whether they were truthful or not. The Palatine had the evidence he needed to make a hostage of her. The little people of the estates, assured that they were safe from the last Báthorys and promised by Imre Megyery that they would be forgiven by the Nádasdy family, were encouraged to say what they liked, allowed their own moment of triumph over their oppressor.

  While she was free Elisabeth had moved regally through two different sealed worlds, each bound by strict conventions. She stalked through the hot-house below stairs and perhaps she indulged her curiosity, experimenting with the help of her assistants with healing methods and magical procedures. At the same time she attended the nobles’ festivities, slightly outside the throng, watching the great game with its hundred or so players, all known to one another, all aware of the rules, jostling for land, arranging weddings of mutual convenience, plotting to dispossess a neighbour or ruin a family member.

  She had been a creature of her time, but an extraordinary woman, who was generous (‘like a mother I was to you . . . from the smallest to the highest . . .’) and strong (‘You will feel our anger!’), but who thought too much of herself and demanded too much of those who attended her. In their turn her servants feared her and tried clumsily to emulate her, substituting brutal force for the authority that had been bred into her.

  The Palatine, Thurzó, could be content that he had done what was necessary, even though neither he nor Lady Czobor would ever be certain of what had really gone on in the Widow Nádasdy’s court. His own feelings about the woman were probably ambivalent until the end. He had admired her strength and been in awe of her self-assurance, but he had grown up with the darker rumours that clung to her family: on the shelves of the family library when he was a pious, impressionable boy was the history by his stepfather’s kinsman, the humanist Bishop Ferenc Forgách, in which Lady Klára Báthory’s spectacular vices had been catalogued in more than disinterested detail.

  Girls died – perhaps more in Elisabeth Báthory’s court than in any other, given the severity of her regime. Dozens or even scores may have died over the years, but it was not the deaths so much as the disdain with which she treated curious relatives and bereaved parents and meddlesome priests that incensed outsiders, just as her Báthory pride ruffled the feathers of the other nobles. Men in particular were snubbed; it was galling for Bicsérdy, Szilvássy and the other courtiers to be overruled, sidelined, while she continued on her despotic course, dispensing gifts, issuing her instructions, conferring with her wise-woman, confounding her enemies, answerable to nobody at all.

  If the way in which she was treated by her male enemies was not unique but part of a larger consistency, her own actions can be seen as part of another pattern. ‘You will find a man in me!’ she warned, more than a century before women retreated into a pose of fluttering defencelessness. Her sarcasm, unsettling in a woman, and her splendid cruelties were talked about in awed whispers on both sides of the Danube, and she drew like the men on an ancient tradition, the peculiarly Hungarian delight in káröröm, in the ingenious, even witty, exercise of grotesque cruelty, a mingling of the tragic and the hilarious.

  We cannot finally know if she was guilty – of mutilating and murdering with her own hands – but we can see that she was responsible, solely and absolutely, for what happened in her courts. The blood-fetishist, the insatiable lesbian dominatrix and the serial murderess are constructs of our time, anachronisms. But so, too, is the proud lady in the tower waiting with sad dignity for history to restore her tarnished reputation. From the little hard evidence available, we cannot say for sure that Countess Elisabeth Báthory was not a uniquely prolific killer, literally a she-devil, but it was not necessary that she should be these things in order to preside over multiple deaths. If they believed that she was a depraved torturer who littered the countryside with corpses, why did the churches (the Catholics in the years before her grandson Francis converted, the banished Lutherans thereafter) remain silent and miss the opportunity to preach and propagandise?

  Up by the castle in the night, it becomes more and more difficult to concentrate on the questions that remain. Individual humans, named and dated, seem impossibly distant, irrelevant, neither their misdeeds nor their suffering are easy to evoke. Just before setting off down the path through the trees and past the gypsy houses to the Slovak village, the words of the English elegy return to mind:

  We are all one

  She sees the clouds scud by, she breathes your air, pities the past and those who settled there.

  Plate Section

  The Čachtice portrait of Elisabeth Báthory (unknown date), stolen from the village museum in 1990

  The Budapest portrait of Elisabeth Báthory, thought to date from the 17th century

  Count Francis Nádasdy, the ‘Black Bey’, Elisabeth’s husband (1555–1604)

  The castle of Sárvár in the 16th century

  The castle of Varannó – the scene of Elisabeth’s wedding to Francis Nádasdy in 1575

  Count George Thurzó, Palatine of Hungary (1564–1616)

  The obtaining of confessions: techniques of torture in the 16th century

  The execution of traitors: a depiction from the early 17th century

  Medical instruments from the early modern era

  A 16th-century witch is ceremonially burned

  Cardinal Andrew Báthory (d.1599)

  The seal of the Báthory family

  Matthias II, King of Hungary and Holy Roman Empero
r (1557-1619)

  The Old Town Hall in Bratislava, seat of the Hungarian Diet in the early 17th century

  The English cartographer John Speed’s map of Hungary in the 17th century

  The castle at Beckov in the 19th century

  Elisabeth Báthory’s castle of Németkeresztúr

  Paul Nádasdy’s letter pleading for the life of his mother, addressed to the Palatine Thurzó on 23 February 1611

  The Esterházy castle of Forchtenstein where Elisabeth was reputed to have tortured her victims

  The castle of Devín overlooking the Danube, inherited by the Báthorys in the 17th century

  Delphine Seyrig playing Elisabeth Báthory in Le Rouge aux Lèvres, 1971

  An imaginary portrait (detail) of Countess Báthory in later life accompanied by her children, by the Dutch artist Erzsébet Baerveldt (1996)

  Čachtice castle in the early 17th century (a 19th-century reconstruction)

  Maps

  Acknowledgements

  The most sincere thanks are due to everyone who joined the author in risking what became known during the preparation of this book as ‘the curse of Erzsébet’. This was the malign influence that, despite the gift from a Brazilian friend of a rosary blessed in turn by a priest and a white witch, must have caused the strange attacks of lassitude and confusion which beset the writer, and led to his near-death in a Caribbean lagoon, followed by an unexplained erasing of computer files just as writing began in earnest. The effects of the curse extended to those who accompanied the writer in his fieldwork, particularly two colleagues and friends without whom the project would scarcely have been manageable. One was the eminent Hungarian historian of the early modern period Dr Gábor Várkonyi, who witnessed the unseasonal snowstorms that came out of nowhere to block the roads at Lockenhaus and again at Deutschkreuz, and who was then marooned with the author in deeper snow beneath the walls of Castle Forchtenstein, and trapped once more, this time by a vast steel shutter, in the underground car park below the Esterházy palace at Eisenstadt. The other was the writer, critic and translator János Széky, who helped to interpret the spirit of Hungary as well as its literature and language, and who found himself at dusk on All Souls’ Night locked into the grounds of Bratislava castle with the author as a red sky darkened and the temperature fell.

  Another friend and guide, L’uba Vávrová of the British Council in Bratislava, with Dr Tünde Lengyelová of the Slovak Academy of Science coped bravely with further near-death experiences on the highways to and from Čachtice and Bytča. In Vienna the curse conjured up the spirit of ancient female furies, the apparition in the Haus, Hof und Staatsarchiv who glaringly brushed aside a plaintive request for assistance. In the Austrian National Library, the staff could not have been more accommodating, but there, as in the Budapest and British Libraries, key texts – some which had not been consulted for years – mysteriously disappeared from their places on the shelves as soon as they were requested, reappearing magically months later.

  All those mentioned above gave most generously of their time and expertise for little or no reward, as did Professor László Péter of the London University School of Slavonic and East European Studies, who provided encouragement from the outset, and Professor Susan Bassnett of Warwick University, to whom thanks for Alejandra Pizarnik. In Budapest the historians Dr Katalin Péter, Professor Ágnes R. Várkonyi, Pël Ritoák, Borbála Benda, Zsuzsana Bozai and Tibor Lukács all provided invaluable and very tangible support, details of which can be found in the chapter notes. Attempts to trace Dr László Nagy were unsuccessful, but his published and broadcast opinions on the Báthory family scandals were enormously helpful. In Slovakia it was Beata Havelská of the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Bratislava, Dr Pavol Štekauer, Dr Štefan Franko and the students of the Faculty of Arts at Šáfárik University who helped translate the great volume of source material, only a small part of which could be reproduced here. Professor Henrich Pifko, the photographer Karol Kallay and the curators of the Čachtice Museum and the State Archives at Bytča deserve especial gratitude, also extended to the heirs of Jozo Nižňanský for permission to quote from his work.

  Given the deep divisions of opinion on the question of the Widow Nádasdy’s guilt and the disagreements – sometimes approaching acrimony – between scholars writing on the case, it was immensely gratifying that the chief proponents of the two main views and the two most important living authorities on the life of Countess Báthory, Dr Jozef Kocis, the former archivist at Byča castle, and Dr Irma Szádeczky-Kardoss, lawyer and defender of Elisabeth’s good name, not only were willing to spend long hours answering this author’s questions, but gave permission to quote extensively from their published works and even allowed materials from their private archives to be used in the making of this book. Both refused to accept payment. Neither of them is likely to be satisfied by the conclusions reached in this appraisal of the Báthory affair, but perhaps the sincere acknowledgement of a scholarly debt will go some way towards appeasing them.

  The author would like to give thanks to the explorer Rob Humphreys, to the British novelist Jennifer Potter for sharing her insights and lending him her memories of Căchtice, and to the Dutch artist Erzsébet Baerveldt, who not only provided new and essential information concerning the portraits of Countess Báthory and her costumes but reminded a distracted writer of the need for emotional empathy in any re-creation of the mysteries of the past.

  Thanks must also go to the publishers, Bloomsbury, for their patience in the face of a writer labouring under a curse, and to M.M., who had to live with its daily manifestations.

  Tony Thorne

  London, 1997

  The Báthory Dynasty

  Dramatis Personae

  Countess Erzsébet (Elisabeth) Báthory

  Count Ferenc (Francis) Nádasdy, her husband

  Lady Anna Nádasdy, her elder daughter

  Lady Katalin (Kate) Nádasdy, her younger daughter

  Lord Pál (Paul) Nádasdy, her son

  Count Miklós (Nicholas) Zrínyi, her son-in-law, husband to Lady Anna

  Count György (George) Homonnay Drugeth, her son-in-law, husband to Lady Kate

  Gábor Báthory, her nephew, Prince of Transylvania

  Anna Báthory, her niece

  Anna Darvulid, her confidential servant

  Dorottya Szentes, known as Dorkó, her confidential servant

  Ilona (Helena) Jó, her confidential servant

  János Újváry, known as Ficzkó, her manservant and factotum

  Katalin (Katherine) Benecká or Beniczky, her servant

  Erzsi Majorosné, a witch

  Count György (George) Thurzó, Palatine of Hungary

  Countess Erzsébet (Elisabeth) Czobor, his wife

  Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Hungary

  Matthias II, brother and successor to the above

  Sir Imre Megyery, tutor to Paul Nádasdy

  A note on Hungarian proper names

  In Hungary – then and now – names are given in reverse order, so Báthory Erzsébet. In this text names are given in ‘English’ order and the Christian names of the main protagonists have been anglicized. The family name ending -γ or -i can be the equivalent of the French de or the German von when attached to a place-name; the ending -ffy originally signified son of, and -falva (of) the village of. Given the ethnic mixture in eastern-central Europe there are many cases of non-Magyar names which can be represented in a Hungarian spelling or in their original form. Where it is probable that the bearer of the name did not have Hungarian as their first language, the Slovak, Croatian, etc. form has been used here.

  Bibliogrphy

  Ady, Endre, Rengj Csak Föld, Budapest, 1912

  Antall, József, and Kapronczay, Károl, ‘Aus der Geschichte des Sadismus: Elisabeth Báthory’, Die Waage. Zeitschrift der Chemie Grünenthal, Rheinland, 1973

  Baring-Gould, Sabine, The Book of Were-Wolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition, London, 1854
<
br />   Bassnett, Susan, ‘Blood and Mirrors: Imagery of Violence in the Writings of Alejandra Pizarnik’, Essays on Latin American Women, Oxford, 1996

  Bataille, Georges, Les Larmes dÉros, Paris, 1961

  Bauer, Max, Titanen der Erotik. Lebensbilder aus der Sittengeschichte alles Zeiten und Völker, Berlin, 1931

  Benda, Borbála, ‘Menus from the Estate of Csejthe, 1623-1625’, Budapest, 1996

  Benda, Kálmán, Egy Új Forrástudomány: a Psychografológia, Budapest, 1974

  Bérenger, Jean, Histoire de Γ Empire Habsbourg, Paris, 1990

  Bindoff, S. T., Tudor England, London, 1950

  Biographie Universelle, Paris, 1843

  Bocatius, János, Chronicles of the Life of Prince Gábor Bethlen, Koloszvár, 1620

  Boner, Charles, Transylvania: Its Products and Its People, London, 1865

  Bornemissza, Péter, Órdögi Kisértetekröl, Sempte, 1578

  Bozai, Zsuzsana, ‘Hungarian Aristocratic Women in the Seventeenth Century’, Budapest, 1995