Elizabeth Báthory

• 1. Introduction

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  Elizabeth Báthory spent the evening of the 20th of August 1614 under guard in a castle, complaining that her hands were cold. Her bodyguard answered, "It's nothing, mistress. Just go lie down." She went to sleep and was found dead the next morning.

  The woman who died so quietly was a Hungarian countess from the powerful House of Báthory. Her name is now bound up with accusations of torture and murder. Hundreds of girls and women were said to have died at her hands.

  Yet the story told about her today differs sharply from the surviving records. Why did a king, a palatine and a crowd of witnesses turn against a widow who managed vast estates? Who stood to gain from her fall? And how did a tale of bathing in blood grow around a woman whose witness accounts never mention it?

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• 2. Born To Power

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  In 1560, Elizabeth was born on a family estate at Nyírbátor in Royal Hungary, and she grew up at Ecsed Castle. Her father, Baron George VI Báthory, belonged to the Ecsed branch of the family. He died in 1570, the same year as her mother, Baroness Anna Báthory of Somlyó.

  The family tree reached the highest offices. Through her mother, Elizabeth was the niece of Stephen Báthory, Prince of Transylvania, who went on to rule the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. Her father's brother, Andrew Bonaventura Báthory, had served as Voivode of Transylvania before his death in 1566. Her older brother Stephen later became Judge Royal of Hungary. Her paternal great-grandparents included Anna Radziwiłł of the Polish-Lithuanian Radziwiłł family. They also included Konrad the Red, Duke of Masovia and Warsaw, of the Piast dynasty.

  Báthory learned Latin, German, Hungarian and Greek as a young woman, and she was raised a Calvinist Protestant. Wealth, education and high rank were hers from birth. Some sources, searching for the roots of the cruelty alleged later, propose that her family trained her to be cruel.

  Seizures that doctors of the day called falling sickness troubled her as a child, and they may have been epilepsy. Treatments of the period included rubbing the blood of a healthy person on the sufferer's lips. Another remedy mixed such blood with a piece of skull and gave it to the patient as an episode ended.

  At the age of 13, before her marriage, she allegedly gave birth to a child fathered by a peasant boy. The story says a woman trusted by the family was paid to take the child away to Wallachia. This account surfaced only through peasant rumour long after Elizabeth's death, so its truth is disputed.

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• 3. Mistress Of Estates

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  On the 8th of May 1575, Elizabeth Báthory married Count Ferenc Nádasdy at the palace of Varannó, today Vranov nad Topľou in Slovakia. The engagement came the year before, in 1574, as a political arrangement among aristocrats. Ferenc was the son of Baron Tamás Nádasdy and Orsolya Kanizsai. The marriage joined their lands in Transylvania and the Kingdom of Hungary.

  Nádasdy's wedding gift was his household in the Castle of Csejte, known today as Čachtice. It stands in the Little Carpathians, near Vág-Ujhely and Trencsén, which are now Nové Mesto nad Váhom and Trenčín. King Maximilian II owned the castle, but in 1569 he made Ferenc's mother, Orsolya Kanizsai, its official steward. Ferenc finally bought it in 1602 from Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor. After the wedding the couple lived at his castle in Sárvár.

  In 1578, three years into the marriage, Nádasdy became chief commander of the Hungarian troops and led them to war against the Ottomans. Elizabeth ran the business affairs of the family's many estates while he was away. In his absence she also kept Csejte, its country house and seventeen adjacent villages. Her duties included medical care for local Hungarian and Slovak people during the Long War of 1593-1606. She was also charged with defending estates that lay on the route to Vienna.

  The danger was real, because the Ottomans had once plundered the village of Csejte. Sárvár stood near the border dividing Royal Hungary from Ottoman-occupied Hungary, which put it at even greater risk.

  A daughter, Anna Nádasdy, was born in 1585 and later married Nikola VI Zrinski. Other known children were Orsolya, born in 1590, who married István II Benyó, and Katalin, born in 1594. András lived from 1596 to 1603, and Pál lived from 1598 to 1650. Pál's son Franz III Nádasdy became a leader of the Magnate conspiracy against Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I. Some chronicles mention another son, Miklós, but he is missing from her will of 1610, so he cannot be confirmed. Governesses cared for all the children, just as they had cared for Elizabeth.

  Ferenc Nádasdy died on the 4th of January 1604 at the age of 48, after 29 years of marriage. His illness began in 1601 with debilitating pain in his legs, and by 1603 he was permanently disabled. The exact illness is unknown. Before he died he entrusted his widow and heirs to György Thurzó, the man who would later lead the investigation into her alleged crimes.

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• 4. The Witnesses

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  Between 1602 and 1604, rumours of atrocities spread through the kingdom, and the Lutheran minister István Magyari complained about the countess both publicly and at the court in Vienna. In 1610, Matthias II assigned György Thurzó, the devoutly Lutheran Palatine of Hungary, to investigate. Thurzó ordered two notaries, András Keresztúry and Mózes Cziráky, to gather evidence in March 1610. By October they held 52 witness statements, and by 1611 the number had passed 300.

  Tamás Nyereghjárto, aged 35, was sworn in and questioned in the town of Beckov. He described a girl in Újhely under medical treatment, her right hand torn between the fingers and the arm and the tendon destroyed. Katalin, the 36-year-old wife of Janós Kun, told a similar story and added that flesh had also been cut from between the girl's shoulders. Martinus Zamechnyk, aged 50, said he asked the girl who had done it. She answered, "The Lady Widow Nadasdy had done it." The testimony was published on the 28th of July 1611 on the orders of King Matthias II.

  One of the accused servants, Dorottya Szentés, said that Báthory pushed needles into the fingers of some victims. The countess would remark, "If it hurts the whore, then she can pull it out." According to Szentés, a girl who did pull a needle out would then lose the finger to a knife.

  At the trial, witnesses described abuses at many of her castles. They spoke of beatings with cudgels and needles driven into lips, arms, shoulders and fingernails. Flesh was said to be cut from the buttocks and from between the shoulders and then roasted. Victims were locked in dungeons and starved for weeks. Red-hot pokers and irons scorched arms and abdomens. Girls were made to stand naked in the winter cold and doused with water until they froze to death.

  Three men gave first-hand accounts without being tortured: Jakab Szivassy, Gergely Paztory and Benedek Deseo. Deseo headed the lord's staff at Castle Csejte, and he and Szivassy spent the most time near the countess. The accomplices Ilona, János and Dorottya, by contrast, were tortured into confessing. Deseo told the court that Báthory stripped a shoemaker's daughter named Illonka and drove a knife up both her arms, starting at the fingers. She then burned the girl with a candle and kept tormenting her until the girl's life ended. He also said she would push a sewing needle into a victim's arm and cut her way up it if the girl could not sew.

  Gergely Paztory, a 40-year-old court judge at Sárvár, described a young woman from Bratislava named Modl who travelled with the countess to Fuzer. Báthory forced her to dress and act like a young girl. Modl begged for forgiveness, since she was married and had a child. Szivassy added that the countess cut out Modl's flesh and roasted it, and that Modl was later killed at Sárvár. These statements were published on the 14th of December 1611.

  Janós Deseö, warden of Castle Keresztúr, had heard rumours that his niece Kata Berényi was being mistreated at the countess's court. He intercepted the party as it set out for Csejte and found Kata dejected, crying and freezing cold. He begged Báthory not to take her along. The countess replied that Kata had already escaped three times, and "All the more I will kill her." Deseö testified that the girl was taken away, never returned, and was tormented until she died.

  Lady Barbara Bixi, aged 25, had travelled with the countess for the previous four months as an attendant. She testified that she saw girls beaten, cut and stabbed with needles at Bitcá, with stinging nettles pressed into their wounds. She did not know all their names, because the girls were grabbed from anywhere. The servant János Újváry, known as Ficzkó, backed her up by saying the household would lure or kidnap girls from many places. He would soon stand beside the countess when the authorities came for her.

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• 5. The Gynaecaeum

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  In the winter of 1609, Báthory opened a Gynaecaeum, a kind of finishing school for high-born young women. The school brought in badly needed funds. It also gave her a new kind of victim, because peasant families near her castles had stopped sending daughters to work there once her reputation spread. She was said to have tortured or killed peasants for years, since their disappearances rarely prompted an investigation.

  Noble families, by contrast, were eager to send their daughters to her court. They hoped the girls would learn courtly etiquette and gain status from a link to the high-ranking countess. When the daughters did not come home, the families appealed to King Matthias for answers.

  Anna Zelesthey, a 54-year-old noblewoman from Milhalifalva, testified that her daughter Zsuzska went to the countess's court and was beaten and tortured to death in the Gynaecaeum. She said she knew this partly from what others told her. Anna Köszeghy, aged 32, made many trips to the school and saw victims with broken fingers and scorched hands. The girls told her the countess had burned them with red-hot irons. Dorottya Jezernyczky, aged 45, said she had sent her daughter Erzsébet to the school and that the girl was killed there.

  Michael Horvath, the castellan of Csejte, said he knew of at least seven girls who had died at the Gynaecaeum. He told the court they were buried in a little garden behind the courtyard, but not deeply enough. Dogs dug up the corpses and carried body parts around in their mouths.

  It was alleged that within weeks every attendant at the Gynaecaeum had been killed. When nobles pressed Báthory about their missing daughters, she told them one girl had gone mad, killed all the other attendants and then killed herself. The motive, she claimed, was greed for jewelry. Dozens of complaints from Hungarian nobles then flooded the courts of the king and the palatine. The king could no longer ignore them, so he sent the notaries Mózes Cziráky and András of Keresztúr, together with György Thurzó.

  Another story says that one victim escaped from Csejte and ran to the nearby village to warn the locals. It was said that she had a knife stuck in her foot.

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• 6. Arrest And Executions

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  On the 13th of December 1610, Báthory's son-in-law Nikola VI Zrinski confirmed an agreement with Thurzó about imprisoning her and dividing her estate. Weeks later, on New Year's Eve 1610, Thurzó arrived unannounced at Csejte Castle. He arrested the countess together with four servants accused of helping her: Dorottya Szentés, Ilona Jó, Katarína Benická and János Újváry, nicknamed Ficzkó or Ibis.

  Popular accounts have her caught in the act of torture, but she was actually having dinner. Thurzó's own letter to his wife says the surprise visit turned up one dead girl and another living "prey" girl. There is no evidence anyone asked the survivor what had happened, and she recovered without testifying at the trials. Thurzó still told the guests and villagers that he had caught the countess red-handed. She was in custody before any victims were found or shown. The picture of a blood-covered countess most likely comes from fictionalised retellings.

  During a long conversation that night, Báthory tried to blame her servants for the bodies. Pastor Barosius asked why she had not stopped them. She said, "I did it... Because even I myself was afraid of them." The source stresses that she said this herself and was not tortured.

  Thurzó discussed what to do next with Báthory's son Paul and two of her sons-in-law, Nikola VI Zrinski and György Drugeth. The family wanted to protect her property from seizure by the crown after a public scandal. They first planned to send her to a nunnery, but as accounts of her actions spread they chose strict house arrest.

  Two trials followed, on the 2nd of January 1611 and the 7th of January 1611. Seventeen witnesses testified at the first, including the four servants, who had been tortured beforehand. They confessed and said they had acted on Elizabeth's orders. Ilona Jó and Dorottya Szentés had their fingers torn out with red-hot pincers and were burned alive. János Újváry, thought less guilty because of his youth, was beheaded and his body burned on the same pyre. Another servant, Erzsi Majorova, escaped at first but was burned alive once captured. Katarína Benická received a life sentence, after evidence showed that the others had abused her.

  The highest victim count named at the accomplices' trial was 650. It came from a servant named Susannah, who said the court official Jakab Szilvássy had seen the number in one of Báthory's private books. The book never surfaced, and Szilvássy never mentioned it in his own testimony. The accomplices Dorka, Ficzkó and Ilona each gave different numbers, and all had been tortured.

  Benedek Bicsérdy, castellan at Sárvár, said in October 1610 that he knew of at least 175 girls and women who had died there. He could not say how they died, because he was not allowed into the countess's house unless she called for him. Baltazar Poby, another Sárvár castellan, had heard the toll ran above 200, "if not already mounting to nearly 300". Those figures cover only Sárvár, leaving out Keresztúr and Csejte.

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• 7. Doubts About Guilt

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  Beginning in the 1980s, scholars including László Nagy and Irma Szádeczky-Kardoss argued that Báthory was the victim of a politically motivated frame-up. Nagy pointed to her extensive wealth and land, which grew after her husband's death. Hungary at that time was torn by war with the Ottoman Empire, the spread of Protestantism and Habsburg moves toward centralised power. The Habsburgs were Catholic, and Báthory was a Calvinist.

  Her nephew, Prince Gábor Báthory, ruled Transylvania, which backed Ottoman-supported Hungarian independence from Habsburg rule. That gave the imperial court in Vienna another reason to discredit the family. Gábor also wanted the Hungarian throne, which made him a threat to King Matthias. Elizabeth's fortresses could have helped a Transylvanian army if Gábor had marched against Matthias.

  Money may have mattered as well. Matthias had ordered the investigation, yet he owed Báthory a large debt, and it was cancelled after her arrest. He also believed that a death sentence would pass her property to the Crown and wipe out his debts. By January 1611 he was angry that no one was discussing the death penalty.

  On the 14th of January 1611, the king wrote to Thurzó in Vienna, complaining at the pace of the case. He professed shuddering horror at her alleged deeds and ordered that she be summoned to Csejte to answer. The letter shows that the king and the palatine were not agreeing on how to proceed.

  On the 12th of February 1611, Zrinski wrote to thank Thurzó for treating his mother-in-law as he had. He said Thurzó had chosen the lesser of two evils. The family would have died of shame, he wrote, had the king's wish for judicial torture been carried out. On the 23rd of February 1611, her son Pál wrote that her present punishment was worse than death. He added that before her arrest she had turned her property over to him and his two sisters' husbands.

  The frame-up theory has a problem. The complaints that started the case came from the Lutheran minister István Magyari, and Thurzó was a Lutheran too. That does not fit a plot by Catholic Habsburgs against a Protestant family. Religious tension could still have played a role, since the Báthorys were Calvinists rather than Lutherans.

  Thurzó had ambitions of his own. He was an ally of Matthias and had been involved in an assassination attempt on Prince Gábor. He wanted his son to become Prince of Transylvania, in competition with Elizabeth's son. Szádeczky-Kardoss argues that Thurzó exaggerated the physical evidence when he said he found dead and dying girls. In her view he presented sick and injured patients as Báthory's victims. Landowners were responsible for the medical care of their tenants, and female landowners looked after the female patients.

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• 8. Confinement And Legend

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  On the 25th of January 1611, Thurzó wrote to King Matthias that Báthory had been captured and confined to her castle. Thurzó also coordinated the investigation with the political struggle against the Prince of Transylvania. He wrote that she was locked in a bricked room. Documents from a visit by priests in July 1614 show she could move about the castle unhindered, which looks more like house arrest.

  She had written her will in September 1610 and left all present and future possessions to her children. In the last month of 1610 she signed an arrangement dividing her estates, lands and goods among them.

  In 1729, the Jesuit scholar László Turóczi published Tragica Historia, the first written account of the Báthory case. It carried the legend that she bathed in the blood of virgins to keep her beauty or youth. This motif became the most common one in the stories of the 18th and 19th centuries. The witness accounts surfaced in 1765, and when they were first published in 1817, they contained no mention of blood baths.

  John Paget's book Hungary and Transylvania, published in 1850, describes the supposed origin of the blood bathing. His tale seems to be a fictionalised retelling of local oral history, and it is hard to judge how accurate it is. At least three historians repeated the blood-bath stories in the 18th and 19th centuries, yet modern historians consider them unreliable. They are thought to rest on rumour and were recorded as fact more than a century after her death. Sadistic pleasure is considered a far more plausible motive for her crimes.

  Some insist her story inspired Bram Stoker's novel Dracula of 1897. Stoker's notes on the novel offer no direct evidence for that idea. Her nicknames include Blood Countess and Countess Dracula.

  Báthory was buried in the church of Csejte on the 25th of November 1614. Some sources say the villagers' uproar over a countess lying in their cemetery led to her body being moved to her birthplace at Ecsed, in the Báthory family crypt. Her resting place today is unknown, though it may lie deep in the church area of the castle. Neither the Csejte church nor the castle bears any marking of a possible grave.

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