Countess Dracula (36 page)

For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the only authentic documents available to investigators were the incomplete testimonies of the witnesses at the inquiries, the confessions of Elisabeth's servants and a couple of letters from the King to the Palatine, together with the diary of Thurzó's secretary, George Závodský, and the reconstructed
Chronicles of Csejthe.
(Writings purporting to be missing trial documents were published in several Hungarian periodicals in the mid-nineteenth century, but when they were examined carefully glaring anachronisms in the language revealed them as forgeries.) With only these as their raw material, it is not surprising that there is a great consistency in most of the Báthory literature, even down to the repetition of certain turns of phrase which echo back and forth. Unable to adduce new evidence, the various writers could only offer by way of originality their opinions and their assumptions, but it is possible to detect certain changes of theme as the last century unfolded. Some works were more influential than others. It was von Elsberg who, inspired by his own knowledge of the Imperial armies, introduced the notion of a military culture in the Nádasdy household, picturing Elisabeth trying to match her Black Bey's victories by triumphing over her imagined enemies within the walls of her houses. He also introduced the element of doubt about Elisabeth's
sanity, which came to replace the picture of a simple paragon of evil and vanity in search of an elixir of beauty.
⁶

At the very end of the nineteenth century the eminent Hungarian historian Dezs
ő
Rexa, writing under the
nom de plume
of ‘H
ő
ver' (‘Hotspur'), produced a short and elegantly written monograph which portrays Elisabeth as afflicted and not merely possessed.
⁷
But the veracity of the earliest accounts is still not questioned: ‘Bathing in blood is not unknown in legend. Blood in ancient times was thought to be the very substance of life, and was used – according to Pliny – as a miraculous medicine. Lucrezia Borgia bathed in blood as well as our own Elisabeth.' With attention to abnormal mental states came an interest in the sexual nature of violence: ‘Today it is clear that Elisabeth Báthory was neurotic and perverted. She suffered from the same illness that made insane the ill-famed Marquis de Sade, and after him this illness is called Sadism . . .' In his later life of Elisabeth, Rexa added: ‘If the explorers of the human mind had known of her illness earlier, Sadism would be called Bathoryism now.'
⁸

The idea of mental illness was taken up by later writers. The respected historian Kálmán Benda in a work from 1974 claimed that there was a hereditary taint, possibly syphilitic in origin, in the princely Somlyói branch of the family, which Elisabeth's mother Anna enabled to cross into the Ecsedy line,
⁹
and in 1978 Gabrielle Raskó considered Elisabeth's pathological behaviour (her guilt was assumed) from a criminologist's point of view, concluding that there were some indications of early ‘sexual damage'.
¹⁰

In the late 1970s there was a postscript to Dezs
ő
Rexa's 1896 monograph and the expanded life of Elisabeth which he published in 1908: the elderly historian visited a magazine editor in Budapest and announced that he wished to write an article on the case that would reveal startling new evidence. He had discovered, he said, that the allegations of murder and torture were a pretext by which a secret group consisting of influential aristocrats and members of the Lady's own family intended to dispossess her. Rexa, who was ninety-two years old, said no more on that occasion and died before he could complete the article.
¹¹
It may be that he had learned of the correspondence which had been discovered at around the same time by the archivist Dr Jozef Ko
č
iš among the tons of unsorted papers in the county archives, stored since 1925 at Byt
č
a castle, which showed that Elisabeth's son-in-law, Count Zrínyi, and son, Paul Nádasdy, were privy to the Palatine's plans well
in advance of the arrest. It was not until Dr Ko
č
iš' slim book appeared in 1981 and became the standard work on the subject in the Slovak language that it began to seem that there might be grounds for absolving Elisabeth altogether from the accusations of cruelty and murder; that she might have been the victim of a conspiracy whose real purpose was not to punish a mass-murderess, but to achieve some less exalted objective. This was not, however, the view that Jozef Ko
č
iš took then or takes now. His verdict is that Elisabeth was spared by the Palatine in defiance not only of the King, but of juridical and natural justice: ‘it is obvious that the Palatine's motive was to protect the prestige of the feudal elite and at all costs to cover up her illegal acts . . . beside Báthory before the tribunal of history, we must also place the Palatine, Thurzó'. As regards Elisabeth's motives: ‘The Báthory case from the medical point of view is a sadism on the sexual-pathological basis with the preservation of rational (intellectual) capabilities.'
¹²
Privately Ko
č
iš suspects that the real tally of girls tormented and murdered by Elisabeth must be much higher than 650, given that evidence recorded in personal testimonies was collected only in certain parts of the country. Dr Ko
č
iš argues vehemently that to doubt the veracity of the witnesses and the damning words of Ficzkó, Dorkó, Helena and Benecká is to dishonour the memory of the slaughtered innocents.

Writers have ground more than one axe before contending with the Blood Countess, and a former prime minister of Hungary, the late Dr József Antall, combined two contentious themes, the sexual and the religious, in a quasi-scientific analysis written with a fellow-historian of medicine, Károly Kapronczay, which appeared in 1973. The essay begins from the stated assumption that Elisabeth was ‘schizophrenic and insane [sic]' and cites the interrogation statements, before concluding that ‘eroticism played an important part in her mental life . . . prodding and scorching naked bodies is a sign of sexual perversity coupled with sadism. We may also take into account the possibility of an epileptoid manic state which occurred on a hysterical basis. . . there is no evidence of homosexual aberration . . ,'
¹³
Antall was a devout Catholic and he and his co-writer accused the Countess of religious fanaticism, which they suggested might be further evidence of a hysterical personality.

Of those contemporary historians who have written on Elisabeth it was László Nagy (a military historian who published a life of Francis Nádasdy and a short history of the controversial members of the Báthory line) who most trenchantly questioned the assumptions made by his
fellow ‘experts'. Nagy suspected that Elisabeth had sided with Prince Gábor Báthory, who was trying to gain territory in Habsburg Hungary, an act of high treason on her part which would normally have been punished by beheading and confiscation, shaming and impoverishing her heirs, too; this would provide a rationale for the investigations and the trial-without-a-trial. He also reminded readers that at the end of the sixteenth century the right of life and death over serfs was still enjoyed by individuals of Elisabeth's rank and that the country was on a war footing during much of her lifetime; this could account for the instances of cruelty. Nagy admitted that his researches had not enabled him to settle once and for all the question of Elisabeth's personal innocence or guilt. In 1985 he summed up his position as follows:

I posed two questions: one, was it possible for Elisabeth Báthory to have done all those things of which she had been accused? To this I answered yes, because the age in which she lived was a very brutal one. It was not impossible for a female aristocrat, especially when menopausal [!], to punish some of her maids . . .

Nagy secondly asked himself whether there was any reliable evidence to substantiate such charges and whether the official proceedings which were carried out were lawful: ‘To this second question I had to answer, no.'
¹⁴

Another Hungarian authority on the case is Professor Katalin Péter, a believer in Elisabeth's guilt who is routinely consulted by writers and film-makers on the subject. Katalin Péter considers that the affair illustrates the unfettered nature of feudal power and the lack of protection for the lower-ranking members of society. She sees the avoidance of dishonour as the key to Thurzó's prosecution of the Widow Nádasdy rather than political machinations, and Elisabeth's ‘diseased sexuality' as the trigger for the systematic murder of the girls.
¹⁵
Professor Péter believes that Elisabeth's strict Calvinist upbringing instilled in her the idea that her ungovernable desires were wrong, and as a result ‘her sickness – her nymphomania [sic] – overcame her'. At the same time she subscribes to the view of this Báthory as a
rara avis,
a freak.

There is no doubting the scholarly credentials of Nagy, Ko
č
iš and Péter, and there are no signs of crude prejudice intruding into their work. But it is worth noting that they were all three writing during the last
years of communist regimes – relatively liberal in Hungary, illiberal in Slovakia – under which opportunities for research and publication were limited and orthodoxies (such as the ritual excoriating of feudalism) had to be observed, and within which complex issues of nationalism were bubbling up from deeper strata. Ideologies and personal slants were not confined to scholars under socialism: in 1990 the German Michael Farin published a comprehensive collection of source material on the Báthory case entitled
Heroine des Grauens
(roughly, ‘Horror-Heroine'). His work was dedicated to the surrealist 1960s experimental rock musician Captain Beefheart, and in his own commentary took for granted the guilt of the Countess.
¹⁶

There are hints of complex motives behind the most recent treatment of the case, a work which examines in forensic detail the statements gathered during the investigation and extends its analysis to the social networks operating in and around the Nádasdy and Thurzó courts, the political changes taking place as the case progressed and the legal system which obtained in the Hungary of the seventeenth century. The author of the work, which was undertaken as a thesis, is Dr Irma Szádeczky-Kardoss, the former judge and legal adviser to the Hungarian government, now a practising solicitor. Her title is
Báthory Erzsébet – Igazsága
(the last word can be translated as ‘the Truth' or ‘Justice'), and is subtitled, ‘The Signs of a Frame-up'. Its stance is confirmed on the first page: ‘I dedicate this book to all who bear the stamp of false accusation, injustice, harassment and indignity on their destiny, their minds and their memories.'
¹⁷

Szádeczky-Kardoss, a descendant of Gáspar Kardoss, the Byt
č
a notary who was one of the prosecutors at the trial of Elisabeth Báthory's servants, uses her knowledge of law and experience of actual trials to demonstrate the illegality of the sentence passed upon Elisabeth by George Thurzó, and to refute the testimonies lodged against the Countess by identifying inconsistencies, possible collusion and hidden motives on the part of the witnesses and their masters. Drawing on research into healing practices by Ágnes R. Várkonyi, an authority on the early modern era in Hungary, she also demonstrates elegantly and at length how each of the tortures described in the case papers mirrors a method of healing that was in use at the time: even the more outlandish procedures – rolling in stinging nettles, smearing with honey, poking the genitals with metal rods, chaining the victims, can be rationalised in this way. Some dissenting historians have criticised
Dr Szádeczky-Kardoss for applying modern standards of proof to a pre-modern society and others, including Jožef Ko
č
iš, have rejected the emphasis on medical practices, pointing out that there were no explicit references to healing by witnesses. But the general thrust of her argument – that Elisabeth Báthory was unjustly condemned and possibly quite innocent – has caused many in Hungary and some in Slovakia to revise their opinions.

A younger generation of historians in Budapest and Bratislava are anxious to avoid what they see as the distractions of psychosexual theories and underlying nationalist issues which have re-surfaced to cloud the judgement of writers and to look instead for a more objective assessment. Discussing the case with them points up the beginning of a consensus view based on the facts now uncovered set against a greater understanding of the way in which early modern societies worked.
¹⁸

All accept that the letters discovered at Byt
č
a show an agreement between the Zrínyis and the Nádasdys (in the person of the tutor Megyery) to avoid a Habsburg-style show trial, to save the estates (vast, strategically placed and potentially providing the Habsburgs with a crippling power-base in the middle of West and Upper Hungary) and thus protect the family inheritance. That George Homonnay Drugeth was a party to this is implied by his meetings with Thurzó in 1610 and by his later actions. The plan that was formulated would not necessarily have advantaged George Thurzó personally (although at different stages of the investigation he probably had hopes of intervening to enrich himself – perhaps it was the
Č
achtice estate that he coveted above all), but would have safeguarded the interests of the great families of Hungary and helped to ensure their loyalty to his masters.

Comparisons suggest that Elisabeth Báthory was not treated so harshly compared to other victims of the Habsburgs, who had to forfeit their estates and flee for their lives, but this is to underestimate the overwhelming effect of the weight of shame on a personality like hers, not to mention the physical privations of captivity. Before her arrest, Elisabeth was in any case in a very precarious position. As a rich widow she was permanently vulnerable and the letters printed for the first time in this work make it clear that she had been playing an active role in family politics, and was in close contact with her nephew in the period just prior to her arrest. We can be fairly certain, although there is only circumstantial evidence for it, that Elisabeth was for a time the focus
of the ‘Transylvanian party' in Western and Upper Hungary, and that she was secretly funding the ambitions of the Habsburgs' arch-enemy and the personal enemy of the Palatine, her nephew Gábor Báthory. Sooner or later the threat posed by the Prince would have prompted action against her. By the standards of the time it was laudable to prevent a show trial and protect the inheritance for those who had more claim to it than an obstinate elderly woman: the children of the most illustrious Hungarian families, Nádasdy, Zrínyi and Drugeth.