Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds

by Leslie Carroll

  While Ferenc was off butchering his enemies the Ottoman Turks, his young wife developed an odd way of relieving her boredom. No embroidery or dancing lessons for Erzsébet. She didn’t even curl up with a good heretical tract. Instead, she satiated her libido in numerous extramarital affairs, even performing sex acts in front of her household with an exceptionally well-endowed manservant.

  Aunt Klara began popping over to school her niece in her preferred methods of entertainment: flagellation, lesbian orgies, and various forms of sadomasochism. Klara was abetted by a loyal retainer named Thorko who introduced the beautiful young Erzsébet to the occult, piquing her interest in mixology. Erzsébet grew adept at concocting sundry drugs, brews, and potions; and in her husband’s absence her various houseguests included self-proclaimed sorcerers and seers, warlocks, witches, and alchemists.

  She was obsessed with her own beauty and needed constant affirmation of it. The countess would sit before her mirror for hours at a stretch, murmuring incantations to preserve her looks. If this behavior sounds familiar, Erzsébet Báthory was very likely the model for the inordinately vain wicked queen in Snow White, who in the early versions of the tale commands a hunter to take her young, virginal rival into the forest, cut out her heart, and return with it as proof of the girl’s dispatch.

  Before long, black magic and torture were Erzsébet’s favorite ways to pass the time. She became especially fond of a set of silver pincers that could clip and claw off chunks of someone’s flesh. The device had a particular allure because it was so versatile: It could be heated until it was as hot as a branding iron, or attached to a sturdy whip, turning it into an effective flaying tool.

  While Ferenc was out massacring Turks, Erzsébet decided that blondes had more fun; so she used cinder water and distilled herbs to bleach her black hair the same flaxen hue that was all the fashion in Venice among both noblewomen and courtesans. She also amused herself with a variety of Italian sex toys. While her biographers don’t go into specifics, the Italians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were known throughout Europe for their dildo manufacturing.

  Erzsébet liked to collect recipes, too, writing to her husband at the front about a particularly effective procedure she’d learned from one of her handmaidens. “Dorka has taught me a lovely new one. Catch a black hen and beat it to death with a white cane. Keep the blood and smear a little of it on your enemy. If you get no chance to smear it on his body, obtain one of his garments and smear it.”

  Like most sadists she learned that the best victims were the weak. And the peasant girls employed at Castle Csejthe were fair game and fertile fodder for Erzsébet’s and Klara’s gruesome hobbies. The countess’s preference was for strapping blondes no older than eighteen; perhaps the sturdier girls resisted the various tortures with more vigor, making the hideous games more “sporting.” For a few years, the town of Csejthe, “where the people were even more stupid than elsewhere,” according to Erzsébet, supplied a steady stream of gullible girls, handed over by their trusting parents who were eager to gain favor with the countess.

  Five of Erzsébet’s most loyal and trusted servants ensured that the girls who survived the tortures, or made it safely through another day after their fellow slaveys and sculleries were murdered, would keep quiet about what they had seen or heard. Girls who were deemed too voluble had their mouths sewn shut.

  Everyone in Hungary, regardless of rank or proximity, lived in terror of the powerful Báthorys. Still only an adolescent herself when she began torturing peasant girls, Erzsébet took advantage of a serving wench’s merest misstep, using it as an excuse to punish her. She often devised tasks that were nearly impossible to accomplish, just so she could torture someone. But rebukes and slaps were for sissies. If a girl was suspected of theft, she was commanded to strip naked and was then tortured by the application of red-hot coins pressed against her bare skin. Sometimes the countess opted to go organic: The girls were whipped with stinging nettles after being beaten with some other device. And even if a servant girl hadn’t misbehaved she might still end up as the day’s entertainment. Mutilation was frequently on the menu. Girls were placed into cages fitted with internal spikes that impaled them everywhere as the cage tightened, resulting in an agonizing and bloody death. Pincers and tongs, heated until they glowed, were used to tear off bits of flesh. Scalding irons branded their tender skin. Erzsébet even perfected a technique of tearing a girl’s head apart by tugging the sides of her mouth until they ripped and her neck snapped in two.

  The countess was said to have achieved sexual ecstasy during these torture sessions, squealing in girlish delight at the sights and sounds of her victims’ agony. She enjoyed whipping them from the front, just so she could see the pain and terror on their faces. Sometimes for kicks and giggles Erzsébet would slather a girl with honey and tie her to a tree, leaving her to the mercy of insects and other wildlife with a sweet tooth.

  One day Ferenc discovered such a victim, but was satisfied by his wife’s explanation that the girl was being punished for her disobedience. As long as the household was smoothly run, the tired Turk-killer didn’t want to hear about how hard it was to get good help nowadays.

  The countess’s water torture involved stripping the girls naked, dousing them with liquid, and then leaving them in the frigid mountain air to freeze to death. Her “starkicking” game was a trick she learned from her warrior husband; Ferenc used it on soldiers who were too lazy to get out of bed in the morning or who may have been having epilectic fits. Bits of oiled paper were inserted between her victims’ toes and set aflame. Erzsébet had endless hours of fun watching the hapless young women trying to kick off the burning paper, which, thanks to the pipinghot oil, was stuck to their skin, searing it as well. If that became boring, she could always burn the girls’ genitals with a hot poker or candle wax. Oiled paper, set alight, worked well when she placed it between a victim’s legs so that it would scorch her pubic area. Other instruments of torture included razors, torches, and knives.

  Sometime after Ferenc’s death, the widowed Erzsébet commissioned a mechanical device called the “iron virgin.” It resembled a beautiful naked girl with real hair (taken from one of her flaxen-tressed victims), painted red nipples, pubic hair, and movable eyes. The iron virgin even had teeth, extracted from one of the tortured girls. If one pressed on the figure’s jeweled necklace the mechanized arms would rise and tightly clasp the victim to her chest as five knives emerged from the hollow cavity behind the machine’s breasts, slowly impaling the victim (usually a young virgin herself) and stabbing her to death.

  Ferenc died on January 4, 1604, at the age of forty-nine, possibly from a wound he received in battle. He and Erzsébet had been married for twenty-eight and a half years. She had spent their first decade together doing her best to avoid becoming pregnant, but between 1585 and 1598 the couple sired five children. The three who survived infancy, Anna, Katerina, and their son, Pál, were placed in the care of governesses, a common practice at the time.

  Ferenc’s death left Erzsébet facing the specter of her own mortality. Given her well-established penchant for torture, it’s no surprise that she would endeavor to confront the gremlin of growing older in a truly ghoulish fashion. She was now a lonely widow in her early forties, losing her looks and intent on staving off the aging process. Traditional cosmetics weren’t doing the trick. Even a glamorous new wardrobe failed to deflect attention from her epidermal flaws. As her rage to preserve her vanishing youth literally turned to bloodlust, the countess’s games became even more sadistic.

  Erzsébet now convinced herself that torture and mutilation had an additional, and healthful, benefit. One day, a hapless servant accidentally pulled the countess’s hair while she was drawing a section of her tresses through a mesh hairnet studded with pearls. The girl received such a resounding slap that her nose bled, splashing on Erzsébet’s hands (or face, depending on the source of the anecdote). After regarding herself in a mirror, Erzsébet was convinced
that her skin looked much more youthful where the virgin girl’s blood had spattered her.

  A self-proclaimed local sorceress who called herself Darvulia (real name Anna), and was known as “the witch of the forest,” had by then become one of Erzsébet’s cohorts. Darvulia suggested to the countess that bathing in the blood of virgins would be as beneficial as a fountain of youth. So Erzsébet lured as many peasant girls as she could to Castle Csejthe, as well as to her other properties, including a town house in Vienna, to ensure that her new beauty regimen, as well as her preferred form of entertainment, remained uninterrupted. According to historian Margaret Nicholas, Darvulia and her confederate procuresses (aging widows who were well paid for their services) roamed the region after dark in search of fresh victims.

  At the castles the girls were systematically slaughtered, their blood collected in vats and buckets for the courtesan’s ritual baths, taken at the mystical hour of four a.m. If a victim was particularly beautiful, Erzsébet was reputed to have imbibed her blood.

  It is a sad comment on the culture of sixteenth-century Hungary that countless young peasant women went missing and the authorities never bothered to search for them. No one dared speak out against the Báthory family, even if they had their suspicions; and other members of the nobility were loath to betray one of their own. Erzsébet wasn’t even discreet about cleaning up after herself, and few others might have been around to mop up the gore, since her supply of domestics eventually dried up, so to speak. Rotting corpses and mutilated bodies dotted the castle’s hallways and corridors. The stench was appalling.

  After more than three decades of wholesale kidnapping, torture, and mutilation, Erzsébet ran out of peasants. She managed to purchase the service of a few more by telling their families that their daughters were being given the opportunity to serve the illustrious Báthory family. Naturally, the countess neglected to inform them that it was as a moisturizer.

  But in 1609 came a stroke of fortune. Darvulia had disappeared into the woods one night, never to return. Her position was filled by a woman known as Erzsi Majorova, a local widow who had become one of Erzsébet’s confidantes. Erzsi, who was skilled at manufacturing potions and poisons and writing incantations, had been concocting anti-aging remedies for Erzsébet, but the countess’s mirror didn’t lie; nothing was foolproof at staving off the ravages of time. After Erzsébet threatened to kill the sorceress for failing her, Erzsi, thinking quickly, informed the countess that she’d been doing it all wrong for years. No wonder she was getting wrinkles and crow’s-feet, aging despite her best efforts! She’d been using peasants! The way to ensure a permanently youthful complexion was to bathe in the blood of virginal aristocrats!

  So Erzsébet cleverly advertised for young women of the minor nobility to attend a sort of finishing school at Castle Csejthe, accepting twenty-five girls at a time to learn “the social graces appropriate to their class.” The young ladies were indeed finished—but not in the way their families had anticipated. Finally, after several young noblewomen permanently disappeared, people began to notice; the rumors even reached Vienna, the epicenter of the Holy Roman Empire.

  Evidently, the complaints had started years before, when from time to time Emerich Megyery, the tutor to the countess’s son, Pál, had spoken up. In addition, some of Erzsébet’s relatives seem to have been privately aware of her crimes, but dismissed any mention of them as malicious gossip and idle supposition, as well as the superstitions of unlettered peasants.

  For so long Erzsébet had literally gotten away with murder because she owned Castle Csejthe and could do what she pleased on its grounds. But Csejthe itself was a free village, governed by local councilors. And every once in a while, someone dared to speak out against the dark doings they believed were going on up at the castle.

  As early as 1602 a courageous Lutheran minister named Janós Ponikenusz complained to the local and Viennese authorities. Ponikenusz had long suspected some ghoulish scenario after Erzsébet had asked him to discreetly bury a number of bloodless bodies; one of them belonged to Ilona Harczy, a girl he recognized because she used to sing at the church and he had been touched by the extraordinary beauty of her voice. The countess demanded that Ponikenusz’s eulogy refer to the fact that Ilona had been killed for disobedience. The priest refused. By then, he had also noticed something unusual written in the parish register by his late predecessor, the Reverend Andras Berthoni. Alongside the usual list of births, deaths, weddings, and christenings was an entry recording the mysterious burial of nine female corpses on the same day.

  In 1610, four broken bodies of adolescent noblewomen were discovered on the opposite side of one of the castle’s walls, where they had been unceremoniously tossed.

  At long last, the local officials agreed to hear the priest’s allegations against Erzsébet. No one of note had cared about dozens, if not hundreds, of missing peasant girls; but the disappearance of so many aristocratic young ladies bore investigation. Thanks to Janós Ponikenusz and Emerich Megyery, the evidence of Erzsébet’s atrocities eventually reached King Matthias II of Hungary.

  Although Matthias had undoubtedly heard tales of Erzsébet’s brutality, he had dithered for years before agreeing to confront it. According to some sources he had been financially indebted to Erzsébet’s late husband, Ferenc, and was loath to stir up trouble because the Báthorys might suddenly demand payment. However, it finally became convenient to take the matter in hand, because he had made it a cornerstone of his reign to curb the power of the nobility. By bringing the Blood Countess to justice, Matthias would make an example of the Báthorys to any nobles who might be getting too big for their breeches.

  In December 1610, eight years after Janós Ponikenusz first spoke up about the dark doings at Castle Csejthe, King Matthias and one of Erzsébet’s cousins, the lord palatine of Hungary, Count György Thurzó, paid a visit to Csejthe to spend the Christmas holidays with the countess. Erzsébet sensed that the men suspected her of something, so she tried to poison them with a cake baked using some of her bathwater. Since she routinely bathed in the blood of her virgin victims, the ingredients may have been truly nauseating. Those who partook of the dessert suffered violent stomach pains afterward, but Matthias and Thurzó had been too savvy (and suspicious) to touch it. Thurzó confronted his cousin with the contents of Ponikenusz’s whistle-blowing letter, but Erzsébet dismissed the allegations as “mad lies” and explained that the nine girls whose bodies they had found buried under the Csejthe church floor had expired from a contagious disease.

  Thurzó wasn’t buying any of her excuses, allegedly exclaiming, “Before God, you are responsible, and before the laws, which it’s my duty to see are respected! If I weren’t thinking of your family, I’d obey my conscience and imprison you on the spot, and then judge you.” Thurzó convened a meeting of the Báthory family and ordered them to watch her like a hawk so that she would be unable to commit any further atrocities.

  For three days the parliament, meeting at Hungary’s capital, Pressburg, debated how to handle the matter. Finally, an emissary from King Matthias commanded Thurzó to conduct an inquiry at Csejthe. Thurzó accepted his commission, and on his arrival at the castle, discovered that his kinswoman’s atrocities were even worse than he had imagined. As she’d been given little advance warning of his visit, Erzsébet hadn’t been able to clean house and hide her crimes. The walls were caked with dried, splattered blood. As he nearly tripped over the corpse of a girl in the main hall, a groan grabbed his attention. It came from a dying girl whose body was so pierced with holes that she resembled a sieve. Broken sections of the defunct “iron virgin” led the investigators to the swift conclusion that the device had been an instrument of torture.

  Dead and near-dead girls were found in a number of holding cells. In the basement several more victims were discovered hanging from the rafters, their bodies slit open and dripping blood into large vats placed on the floor below them that would be used for another of the countess’s rejuvenating
soaks.

  After Thurzó ordered the excavation of the basement floor, another fifty corpses were uncovered. A maidservant named Zusanna directed him to Erzsébet’s desk, where he found a ledger containing a tally, in the countess’s handwriting, of her victims. Some 650 names were on the list, though her confederates would later dispute this number, placing the total body count at four to five dozen. However, between a hundred and two hundred bodies were removed from the castle by Thurzó’s investigators. (It’s worth noting here that according to a BBC biography of Erzsébet, the famous ledger was referred to in court, but never produced, which has recently raised suspicions about its existence; but at the time, and for centuries thereafter, the contents of the countess’s alleged ledger were believed to be true.)

  By the time Thurzó arrived at Castle Csejthe, the countess had already fled for a smaller castle farther down the hill, and her escape from this residence was already planned as well. Her coach awaited, packed with portable implements of torture.

  Erzsébet’s accomplices, Dorottya (“Dorka”) Szentes; her children’s former wet nurse Ilona Jó; and a washerwoman named Katarína Benická, were all arrested. Also apprehended was Erzsébet’s dwarf, János Újváry, nicknamed both Ibis and Ficzko, and often described as “retarded.” Erzsi Majorova, the woman who had urged the countess to import aristocratic virgins for her skin-care regimen, managed to escape, but was subsequently apprehended.

  Erzsébet had maintained a diary in which she would comment on her victims and how they endured (or didn’t) the various tortures she devised for them. After this journal was discovered, it was impossible to ignore her complicity.