Countess Dracula (22 page)

In the National Museum of Arts and Crafts in Budapest is a fabulous, nameless object. If the thing has any practical use it is not obvious, but as an ornament, a gift for someone already possessed of wealth and power in abundance, it is exquisitely impressive. It is a model about eighteen or twenty inches high of a hilltop or a steep mound cast in gold; at its foot tiny figures sculpted in silver are depicted toiling in a mine, worker-mannikins, bent double under their burdens of rubble, run up and down its flanks on glistening steel ladders, its upper reaches are set around with gems and minerals, and the whole miniature edifice is crowned by the figure of a Renaissance knight,
kneeling in homage before a silver-grey block of ore. It is not known who fashioned this celebration of industry nor whom it was intended for: the kneeling knight is clearly an allegorical figure, but could as well have been a representation of Elisabeth Báthory's nemesis, Count George Thurzó.

Lord George Thurzó of Bethlenfalva, Count of Árva, was one of the richest and most powerful grandees in Hungary by virtue of his birth, but he was acutely conscious that by comparison with the Báthorys or the Nádasdy and Zrínyi families he was to some extent a parvenu who still had to prove himself, socially and politically. He was the principal heir to hereditary rights – the governorship and regional judgeship of the counties of Orava and Spiš; patronage of the Lutheran church in Trenčín, Tematin, Hlohovec, Bojnice, Hricov, Lietava and Byt
č
a in what is now Slovakia – as well as to enormous incomes from investment in mining, metallurgy and trade. The Thurzós were recent additions to the ranks of the nobility, originating, they said, from the village of Bethlenfalva, then in Upper Hungary. Their name is not a Magyar one and the usual fanciful origins were proposed, including an unlikely theory that they had come from the Norse port of Thurso in the far north of Scotland. What was known for sure was that they had made their fortunes at the end of the fifteenth century from development of copper- and ironworks and silver mines in their own region as well as in Poland, Bohemia and Baia Mare (in present-day Romania), where they leased gold mines with the German Fugger family of Augsburg, the famous moneylenders – or infamous usurers – who with Genoese financiers bankrolled the Spanish and French in their imperial adventures and exercised more real power in Europe than most royal houses. Together the Hungarian and German entrepreneurs founded the Thurzó-Fugger Company, one of middle Europe's first and largest transnational concerns.

The family member who confirmed the Thurzós' rise to preeminence was Count Francis Thurzó, George's illustrious father, who had been educated in Italy and became Catholic Bishop and Governor of Nitra county (by inheritance; he had not been ordained), head of Orava county and Prefect of the Royal Chamber. Like many of the Magyar lords he later converted to the Lutheran faith. When George Thurzó was only seven years old his father died and his mother, Lady Katherine Zrínyi, remarried to Count Imre Forgách, who was not a politician but a distinguished humanist intellectual who wrote treatises on history and
the nature of marriage. The couple's relationship was warm, and it seems that the young George and his stepfather were quickly on good terms with one another. Imre Forgách was the centre of a very important humanist circle in northern Hungary, whose members corresponded with major Reformation figures in western Europe. George Thurzó inherited his stepfather's library on his death and collected for himself the works of Erasmus and books on Protestant theology as well as the writings of such luminaries as Castiglione (on courtly etiquette), Lipsius (‘on Constancy') and Macchiavelli.

Thurzó's relationship with his second wife, Lady Elisabeth Czobor, was unusually good and exceptional for the age in the expressions of intimacy the couple exchanged. Their marriage produced many daughters, of whom six survived, and one son, and on one occasion when his wife was visiting her mother and Lord George was alone with the children, he wrote to her of the affection he felt towards his little daughter, that he was kissing her and playing with her – something very rare in itself at that time and hardly ever mentioned in correspondence.
¹
There were two girls from the first marriage, and the first child from the new marriage, Barbara, was always her father's favourite. George asked after her constantly in his letters and after Imre, his only son and heir.

George began his political and military career at the time of the Fifteen-Year War against the Turks, first acting as a political adviser to Rudolf II, the absentee King of Hungary, later becoming commander of the Cisdanubian armies and of the Fort of Nové Zámky, then known as Érsekújvar. While he was engaged on diplomatic and court business in Vienna, he developed some sort of admiration for the Habsburg Archduke Matthias and remained loyal to him when Rudolf was replaced first as king and then as emperor. Elisabeth Báthory's husband, Francis Nádasdy, and Thurzó fought together in the wars against the Turks and together rode their horses into the courtyards of the Stára Radnica – the Old Town Hall in Bratislava – to attend the sittings of the Hungarian Diet. Their estates were close to one another in Upper Hungary and the families exchanged invitations to their children's weddings. There was a later cooling of the relationship between the Thurzós and the Nádasdys, as evidenced by letters, but no clear indication of whether political or personal differences triggered the change.

George Thurzó was a cultivated man who spoke Latin, Greek and
German, could communicate in Slovak and Croatian and wrote poetry in Greek. He was popular with his Slav tenants, not only because he supported the spread of their Lutheran religion, but because he allowed both the estate managers and the scholars and clerks who worked for him to communicate in their own Slovak language:

The Count Palatine of Hungary was elected by the whole of the Diet – the parliament made up of an upper house comprising the senior aristocrats and a lower containing representatives of the cities and towns and the lesser nobles – from a choice of four candidates put forward by the King, of which two had to be Catholic, one Lutheran and one Calvinist. The Palatine was not only the representative of the King in Hungary, but the mediator between him and the native aristocracy – and indeed the defender of that aristocracy all at the same time. During those years of the early seventeenth century Thurzó, elected Palatine in 1609, could rely on the tacit support of the Hungarian nobility for virtually anything he did, given that he was their only champion against the growing absolutism of the Habsburgs, against pressure from the Catholic Counter-Reformation and against the establishment all over Europe of a state apparatus that would eventually sideline the traditional ruling elites. Thurzó saw his political mission as modernising and strengthening the mediaeval office of the Palatine as the one guarantee of stability in the fragile remains of a kingdom. In this he was successful, and he is remembered today in Hungary as a master tactician and a shrewd statesman, if not for being one of the country's truly charismatic leaders.

In private Thurzó, like many of his fellow-lords, nursed more grandiose dynastic dreams. He had probably coveted the throne of Transylvania himself, but lacked the glamour of illustrious ancestors or a name that resounded throughout half a continent. Nonetheless, once he had attained the office of palatine it was not unreasonable to suppose that he might achieve his other ambitions, if not for himself then for Imre, his only son. Count George Thurzó died still in office in 1616 at the age of fifty-one and, in spite of the predictable rumours of poisoning, the cause of his death was probably gout.

The arrest of Elisabeth Báthory was not the first manoeuvre executed by George Thurzó during the dead time of midwinter, when social and political life was in temporary suspense. On Christmas Day 1600, Thurzó had tricked the twenty-three-year-old lord, Michael Telekesi,
into leaving his forest hiding place and travelling to Thurzó's seat at Byt
č
a in the hope of an amnesty. The young noble had ambushed and robbed a convoy transporting gifts to the Habsburg Emperor, Rudolf II, who deemed the crime high treason and ordered the Hungarian aristocrats to respond. When George Thurzó, eager to ingratiate himself with his master, agreed to besiege Telekesi's stronghold at Lednice, not one of his fellow-lords would accompany him or provide troops – all of them were suddenly indisposed. Thurzó, with his own 150 horsemen and 400 footsoldiers, took the castle anyway and chased Telekesi into Poland, whence he returned in secret, hoping to negotiate. Once he had surrendered at Byt
č
a, Telekesi was summarily imprisoned, then taken by Thurzó to Bratislava, tried by the compliant tabular court and quickly beheaded. Thurzó's actions were judged unnecessarily cruel and his part in the affair was widely resented in Hungary: Telekesi was nobly born, young and as popular as Rudolf was unpopular; he had fought heroically against the Turks; and he was the last male of his line, all of which should have won him clemency.
²

There were plenty of other instances showing Thurzó, the loving husband and father, to be utterly ruthless where his material interests were concerned. In 1605, at the time of the Bocskai rebellion, someone looted the Thurzó family crypt in Byt
č
a, later abandoning some of the stolen objects near the Thurzó country estates. George suspected his neighbour Jan Kubinyi and his wife Magdalena Esterházy and without warning seized and burned Bodina, a Kubinyi village, and executed several family servants without trial. The robbery had in fact been carried out by marauding Hajdúks with the probable help of Thurzó's own servants, but no apology or compensation was ever offered to the less powerful victims of Thurzó's anger.
³
The young and intensely ambitious Lord Nicholas Esterházy, among others, is unlikely to have forgotten this incident, which was only one of many in which Thurzó harassed the Kubinyis, and when the new generation of aristocrats came into their own and Esterházy became palatine, retribution rich in irony was visited on George's own heirs. The Platthy family also owned land adjoining Lord George's estates and Thurzó took eleven of their villages by force, daring the weaker Platthys to resist. This one-sided feud simmered for twenty-seven years, during which time Thurzó turned his attention to persecuting Lady Kate Pálffy, the widow of his predecessor as Palatine, Stephen Illésházy, and many lesser members of the squirearchy.

Even at the peak of its power, which had not yet arrived, finesse was not a quality associated with the Vienna court, and in their determination to keep Hungary allied to the Empire, to rule it in what Henry VII of England described as ‘the French manner' – by absolutist decree – the Habsburgs often employed heavy-handed tactics. One of these was to organise show trials to discredit the more troublesome, or simply more powerful, members of the native aristocracy who were associated with Transylvanian politics. The easiest charge to trump up was high treason (the crime was ill-defined and there was no shortage of pro-Vienna Hungarian officials who would help in the concoction of a case), the penalties for which were death and, most attractively, the forfeiture of property. In this way the Habsburgs hoped to cow the rest of the aristocracy, to rid themselves permanently of troublemakers and to redistribute the estates of those accused among their own German- or Czech-speaking nobles. Religious motives were also mixed up in this policy: it was the Protestant lords whom the Catholic Habsburgs moved against, and the dispossessions were also designed to weaken the Calvinist and Lutheran hold on the Magyars and hasten the spread of the Counter-Reformation. The problem was that, for all its fierce frontier ways and outbreaks of local lawlessness, Hungary had a long tradition of observation of the law – and high expectations of the crown – at a national level. Rightminded lords, among them Elisabeth Báthory's husband Francis Nádasdy, were outraged by the Austrians' blatant injustices, particularly during the most famous of these trials in 1602, in which the new Palatine himself, Count Stephen Illésházy, stood accused.

In Illésházy's case, once King Rudolf had ordered a trial from Vienna, the proceedings were carried out according to Hungarian law and the defendant was acquitted by the Hungarian High Court of all the charges against him. At this point the King simply overruled the judgement and forced through the death sentence and the confiscation of lands, tithes and treasures. Before the sentence could be carried out, Illésházy followed the convention of escaping to the sanctuary of Poland, thence to Transylvania, where he intrigued against his enemies until 1606, when he was pardoned and allowed to return. The war-hero Francis Nádasdy openly opposed Vienna, and by implication its agent Thurzó, during the Illésházy trial and it may be significant that ugly and damaging rumours of cruelty by the Nádasdy-Báthory family at Sárvár began to circulate at just this time.

During the Fifteen-Year War, the Hungarians had seen for themselves that their western allies were cynical, rapacious and, worst, incapable of once and for all expelling the Turk. The aggressive policies of the Counter-Reformation served to inflame feelings even further and many became convinced that not only the infidel, but the ‘Germans' were the enemy. As the noble poet Peter Bornemissza lamented at the end of the sixteenth century:

The haughty Germans persecute me;
The infidel Turks surround me:
Shall I again enjoy, and when,
A residence in old Buda town?
⁴

After all the blood spilt in the fight against Islam, a serious collaboration with the Ottomans was out of the question, but the welling indignation and the resurgence of national pride were coming to a head. The existence of a free Protestant state, embodying Magyar traditions and dealing with both Vienna and Constantinople on equal terms, became an irresistible prospect; indeed, that state had already come painfully into being twenty years before but was still not recognised by all parties as an independent entity. That nation was not Hungary but Transylvania, which once again became the stage on which Hungary's conflicts were played out. The Imperial troops had occupied and despoiled Transylvania and the eastern Hungarian counties during the Fifteen-Year War, and, once the fighting had died down, Archduke Matthias and his clerical advisers decided to use the armies' presence there forcibly to restore the region, which had enjoyed religious toleration since 1580, to Catholicism. In protest against the seizure and reconsecration of their church by the agents of Vienna, the Lutheran Saxon burghers of Kosice (Kassa) refused to speak their own German mother tongue and conversed in Hungarian: they were among the great majority who rushed to support the figurehead of a new nationalism, the man who raised the flag against the Roman Empire and inspired the 1605 declaration, Count Stephen Bocskai.