The woman known to history as Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed - or The Blood Countess, murderer of 650 young women - was born on 7th August 1560 at her family estate in Nyírbátor in the east of the Kingdom of Hungary, 146 miles from Budapest. Her mother was Baroness Anna Báthory of the Somlyo branch of the family and her father was Baron George VI Báthory of the Esced branch of the same family – which meant that her parents were blood relatives. The family had a long history, dating back to 1310, and the direct translation of the name Báthory is, “good hero” – which is ironic given how Elizabeth has been remembered.
The term ’good hero’ was a reference to a family legend involving a semi-mythical Báthory named Vitus who slayed a dragon which had been rampaging through the countryside in the year 900 and was rewarded with the name Báthory as well as Ecsed Castle, the family estate which Baron George VI came to inherit and which was not actually built until the 1300s. The Báthory coat of arms featured three bared dragon teeth on a blood red and white background as a reference to this family myth. Elizabeth Báthory spent her childhood at Ecsed Castle, now known as Nagyecsed, or Great Ecsed, in the Northern Great Plain region of eastern Hungary near the modern border with Romania.
She was raised as a Calvinist Protestant and was well-educated, as was appropriate for a young noblewoman from an influential family. She mastered many languages, including Latin, German, Hungarian and Greek, and by many accounts was intelligent and headstrong. Throughout her childhood, she apparently suffered from seizures and complained of headaches, possibly caused by epilepsy - a condition which ran through the Báthory family tree.
But at the time, epilepsy was not understood and, although Renaissance scholars began investigating the idea that epilepsy was a manifestation of physical illness, it was commonly seen as a moral or occult affliction, or as a sign of madness, and so it was hushed up. Living at the cross-section between the Middle Ages and modernity - a period termed the Renaissance by historians - Elizabeth’s life was full of contradictions. She herself experienced a Renaissance-style education, as befitted a woman, but science could not yet understand her medical condition.
She had taken up the relatively new Protestant faith but came face-to-face with the lasting power of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire - the great power of the region. She was expected to embody the gentile idea of femininity, but was exposed to the gore of medieval punishment, war and violence. As a young child and noblewoman, Elizabeth would have seen the violent punishments metered out on family servants and on those of a lower social order.
Violence was desensitised in a way that can be hard to understand from the vantage point of the modern era. Whipping was a common form of punishment on landed estates and the law across much of Europe handed down bloody punishments often exceeding the level of violence of the crime itself. Limbs could be cut off for petty theft, women suspected of witchcraft or unwomanly behaviour were burnt alive or drowned, and treason - the most serious of all crimes - was punished through grotesquely inventive methods of torture intended to kill and cause maximum pain.
Only a few decades before Elizabeth’s birth, a peasants’ revolt in 1514 was brutally suppressed and its leader - György Dózsa - was forced to sit on a burning throne wearing a heated iron crown, watching the chopping up of his younger brother, enduring hot pliers being forced into his skin and finally having his skin eaten by the other rebels who faced a brutal death if they refused, before he finally died. For lesser crimes, however, punishments were decided at a local level, often by the landlord, meaning that Elizabeth and her family were both responsible for, and exposed to, the violence of medieval punishments. The Báthory family was very prominent and powerful in 16th and 17th century Hungary and Poland.
As well as her baron and baroness parents, Elizabeth’s uncle on her father’s side - Andrew Bonaventura Báthory - was the Voivode, the highest-ranking official of Transylvania as well as Chief Justice of Hungary. And her uncle on her mother’s side - Stephen Báthory - married the Queen of Poland, becoming the famous Polish King Stefan Batory in 1575, adding to his titles of Grand Duke of Lithuania of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Prince of Transylvania. Several members of the Báthory family wore the title of Prince of Transylvania throughout and after Elizabeth’s lifetime, including two of her cousins, Sigismund and Gabriel Báthory.
The Báthory family owned land in the Kingdom of Hungary, now Hungary, Slovakia and Romania, and were extremely wealthy - so wealthy that they lent money to many influential families, including the Habsburgs of Austria. The Habsburgs were one of the most prominent royal families in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, with a dynasty which stretched from 1282 to 1918, spanning a total of 636 years. The core Habsburg lands were in East Central Europe, with its capital at Vienna, in Austria, although during Elizabeth’s lifetime the Habsburg dynastic seat was moved to Prague from 1583 to 1611.
But the House of Habsburg produced kings of several countries, including Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, Galicia-Lodomeria, Spain and Portugal, which therefore brought their respective colonies too under Habsburg control. The Habsburgs also claimed, though later in history, several principalities in Italy and the Low Countries as well as the 19th-century emperors of Austria and Austria-Hungary, and even an emperor of Mexico. The family expanded its power through war and fortuitous marriages, but split into several branches, most significantly in the mid-16th century when the Spanish and Austrian branches were divided after Charles V abdicated.
The long-term Habsburg strategy of using intermarriage to maintain close diplomatic relations between its family branches dangerously reduced the family gene pool, resulting in disabilities and deformities including the infamously oversized Habsburg jaw. The Habsburgs reached the zenith of their power in the late 1500s, during Elizabeth’s lifetime. Holding the title of Holy Roman Emperor for 368 years, from 1438 to 1806, with only a small gap in between, from 1740 to 1745, the Habsburgs were then the most powerful royal family ruling over the most powerful state in Europe in the Middle Ages.
Although this single family dominated the position for centuries, the Holy Roman Emperor was actually elected, admittedly only by the elites - the prince-elects - though the Habsburgs did have a significant advantage in that Habsburg land made up a large portion of the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire encompassed modern-day Germany, Austria, Czechia, Switzerland, the Low Countries, Slovenia and parts of eastern France, northern Italy, western Poland and northern Croatia. The Empire saw itself as the rightful inheritor of the legacy of Imperial Rome and promoted the Roman Catholic faith brutally throughout its territories.
It was in the Holy Roman Empire that Protestantism first arose, when Martin Luther pinned his Ninety-Five Theses or protests on a church door in Wittenberg in modern Germany in 1517. A country in East Central Europe in the Middle Ages, like Hungary, would have to contend with the great power of the Holy Roman Empire and also that of the House of Habsburg. The lives of the Hungarian nobility were often blighted by the whims of these powerful neighbours in the west.
And, after 1453, another threat lay in the east. Throughout Elizabeth’s lifetime, Hungary suffered the consequences of being surrounded by dangerous and powerful neighbours - from the menacing power of the House of Habsburg to the frequent incursions from the Ottoman Turks. In the 16th century, external events would dramatically impact domestic events in Hungary and, as a result, would have huge personal consequences for the life of Elizabeth Báthory.
In 1490 Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus, a Renaissance king who was known as Matthias the Just, died and Hungary was left in decline. In 1453 the Turks had taken Constantinople, bringing an end to the Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire, protector of the Orthodox Catholic faith, and the whole region around the Balkans had been left shaken. King Matthias had created a mercenary army, known as the Black Army, to keep Hungary strong during a period of huge uncertainty and tension but his death brought the progress achieved under his reign to an abrupt end.
His successors as King of Hungary were selected by a diet, or national assembly, of important nobles - the nobility’s preference for a weak king that could be easily controlled provided the opportunity for Turkish ruler Suleiman the Magnificent to seize part of Hungary after a rousing victory at Mohács in 1526, during which the city of Buda was burned down and the Hungarian King at the time - Ulaszlo II - was slain in battle. The throne of Hungary was then fought over between Ferdinand I, Archduke of Austria and later Holy Roman Emperor, who wanted to claim Hungary for the Habsburg Empire, and Janos Zápolya, Voivode of Transylvania and commander of what remained of Hungary’s army. Archduke Ferdinand relied on his impressive aristocratic connections to lay claim to the throne of Hungary - he was the brother-in-law of the previous king and brother to the powerful Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.
Yet the Hungarian nobility were divided. The two branches of the Báthory family chose to support different sides in the struggle for power - the Somlyo Báthorys that formed Elizabeth’s maternal line supported Janos the Voivode, while the Esced Báthorys of Elizabeth’s father backed the Habsburg Archduke in the hopes of support against the Turks, whom Hungary had been attempting to hold back for over a century. Both Janos and Ferdinand were elected as King by rival factions of the Hungarian nobility and lesser gentry.
Elizabeth’s father, George, swapped sides to support Janos, perhaps due to the rising influence of Anna’s brother Stephen and the opportunity to strengthen the power of the Báthory line. The Habsburgs stripped George of his castle, Bujak, in retaliation as George cemented his new alliance by marrying Anna. The two sides of the Báthory family were now united, but the anger of the Habsburgs at this betrayal was to be long-lasting.
Janos ruled Hungary through a turbulent period of peasant uprisings, the capture of Buda and seizure of western Hungary by Archduke Ferdinand, and an ill-fated alliance with the Turks. When Janos died in 1541, Hungary was partitioned into three entities: Habsburg Royal Hungary which bordered Austria in the west, Ottoman Hungary, which included central and southern Hungary, and the semi-independent Principality of Transylvania in the east. Elizabeth Báthory was born in the Principality of Transylvania, where elected Hungarian princes ruled often as vassals under either the Ottoman Sultan or the Habsburgs, and her life was greatly impacted by both military conflicts against the Turks and by the machinations of the Habsburgs who continued to rule part, and later all, of Hungary until 1918.
Transylvania, where much of the Báthory family’s power was based, prospered despite the tumultuous conditions. The princes of Transylvania had their power guaranteed by a constitution and were seen as representatives of the three “historic nations”: the Hungarians, Saxons, and Hungarian-speaking Szeklers. Although trapped between the Muslim Turks and Catholic Habsburgs, Transylvania was also spared the religious strife common in the period as the country’s princes often promoted religious tolerance.
The nobility and many of its princes, though notably not Elizabeth’s uncle, Prince of Transylvania Stephen Báthory who was Roman Catholic, were Calvinist Protestants and Protestantism flourished in Transylvania. The Edict of Torda in 1568 gave religious freedom to the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Unitarian churches, though the Romanian - or Vlach - nation and its Greek Orthodox faith were excluded. This Edict represented the first legal guarantee of religious freedom in Christian Europe.
The Royal House of Báthory officially came to power in 1571 when the first Báthory - Stephen - ruled as Voivode, then as Prince in 1576, under first Ottoman and then Habsburg suzerainty. It was during the Báthory reign that the Principality of Transylvania became a semi-independent state, with relative independence outside of foreign affairs which were controlled by its powerful neighbours. Under Sigismund Báthory, who served as Prince of Transylvania several times between 1586 and 1602, it entered the Long Turkish War from 1593 to 1606 - another stage of the two-century-long struggle known as the Ottoman-Habsburg War which lasted from 1526 to 1791.
The country formed part of the Christian alliance against the Turks, but the conflict also represented a four-way struggle with, the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, and another semi-independent region – Wallachia, now a region of southern Romania, with Transylvania falling - for a short time - under the control of Habsburg Rudolf I after 1601, who attempted to Germanize the population and revive Catholicism in the region. Rebellion against Habsburg rule, led by Hungarian nobleman Stephen Bocskay, saw Transylvania enlarged and re-empowered. But religious tensions - and military campaigns - between Transylvania and the Habsburgs were not at an end.
And holding power in Transylvania was a dangerous balancing act. As the Báthory family was keen to expand the family’s influence further, Elizabeth was engaged to Count Ferenc II Nádasdy at the age of 10 and sent, as was the tradition at the time, to live with the family of her husband-to-be at Castle Sárvár in west Hungary near the Austrian border, now known as Nádasdy Castle. It was around the time that she was at Sárvár in her young teenage years that the first possible controversy about Elizabeth surfaced, although the rumour actually originated long after her death - it was said that she had had a relationship with a man of lower social status and had borne a child out of wedlock.
When Count Nádasdy found out, he is said to have had the man castrated and thrown to a pack of hungry dogs to be torn apart while he was still alive. The child - possibly a girl - was said to have been spirited away or even murdered at Nádasdy’s orders. However, this story is made questionable by contemporary letters which praised Elizabeth’s chastity, particularly later in her life when her husband was away at war.
And if the story was true, it tells us much about the power and influence of the Báthory family to have successfully forced through the union even after the damage to their daughter’s reputation. At the age of 15, Elizabeth was married to Count Ferenc II Nádasdy on 8th May 1575 at the palace of Vranov nad Topľou, which is in eastern Slovakia today. The marriage was a political arrangement between two old and important aristocratic families - the importance of Elizabeth’s own family is shown by the fact that she kept her own surname Báthory de Ecsed, rather than become a Nádasdy.
The Count and Elizabeth had several children, and it is commonly understood that many of her children died before reaching adulthood and that only two daughters and a son reached maturity - Anna, Katalin and Paul. Elizabeth’s children were raised, as she herself had been, by a governess and there was a good reason for this - Elizabeth spent much of her married life managing her husband’s estate, as well as her own, while he was away as a commander of Hungarian troops in the Ottoman-Habsburg Wars - a war that Transylvania had again become involved in when it renounced its vassalship to the Ottomans in a bid for full independence. As her husband left in 1578 and did not return for several years, Elizabeth took on the full management of her husband’s business affairs and their estates and historical records have shown that Elizabeth was generally very successful at this.
Her tasks involved defending her husband’s estates which were on the route to Vienna - an important Habsburg city, even though it was not at that time the dynastic seat, providing medical care across the region and intervening on the behalf of destitute women who had lost their husbands, and therefore their financial security, in the war. Assessing the relations between landlords, their tenants and the local people can be difficult, but surveying surviving letters of complaint and petitions is often the best way to determine how vassals and local people felt about their landlords - these written documents were the main form of complaint when grievances arose, whether from petty theft or something more serious such as accusations of bodily harm. However, no letters of complaint - neither hinting at the torture she supposedly subjected local girls to nor over minor grievances like the cost of the manorial taxes paid to the Báthorys - have survived from this period, which could suggest that Elizabeth’s tenants and the local people were content with her rule.
While away fighting in the Ottoman-Habsburg War, Count Nádasdy built a reputation for effective command and fearless bravery, assisting in the seizure of several Ottoman-held castles, including Esztergom on the hilly banks of the Danube northwest of Budapest in 1595. He was also known for his fierce cruelty to Ottoman prisoners of war, with some stories outlining his grotesque defilement of the corpses of those who had died under torture, including playing catch with their decapitated heads - though the poor and violent treatment of captured enemy combatants, particularly non-Christians, was commonplace at this time. Upon his return from the war, it is said that Nádasdy taught Elizabeth methods of torture he had perfected in his army days and advised her on dishing out inhumane punishments to their servants, including coating a young girl in honey and leaving her outside to be bitten by ants and putting lit oiled paper between her toes.
Although undoubtedly inspired by her husband’s bloodlust, the majority of the violent crimes for which Elizabeth was accused were committed later, after her husband’s death. Stories of the way in which Elizabeth herself treated those who served her, are perhaps not surprising considering that relations between masters and servants at the time were so often fraught with violence. A tale of Elizabeth striking a servant for accidentally tugging at her hair with a brush is really not far out of the common way.
And as a noble, Elizabeth legally had the right to do as she wished to the peasants under her rule - even murdering a servant would only have resulted in a fine to allow financial compensation to be offered to the victim’s family. Indeed, once charges were brought against Elizabeth - as we will soon discuss - it was her responsibility for the deaths of noble children, not violence against her servants or members of the lower social classes, which were seen as immoral crimes and formed the most serious of the charges. This is not to say, of course, that tales of Elizabeth’s cruelty to her female servants were untrue - they are just difficult accusations to prove given the lack of evidence.
Stories spread at the time saying that Elizabeth took pleasure in causing pain and had been delighted by her husband’s gift of a black claw, reminiscent of the dragon which featured in her family’s founding myth, which she strapped to her hand to claw at the skin of her victims. She apparently also enjoyed pushing needles under the nails of her poorest servant girls and responded to any signs of laziness or ineptitude with extreme violence, including breaking the arm of one such unlucky servant. As though to emphasise that a woman could not possibly commit such acts of evil alone, Elizabeth’s connections were caught up in the rumours.
There were unsubstantiated claims that she was taught about Satanism and witchcraft by family members at a young age. But it was not witchcraft - a common accusation against rebellious women at the time - which Elizabeth was to be charged with but torture and murder. One woman, in particular, was said to have inspired Elizabeth’s bloodlust - Anna Darvolya, known as Darvulia, had long been a servant of the Nádasdy family but rose to a prominent position in 1601 as Elizabeth’s confidante.
It was said that Darvulia taught Elizabeth everything she knew about methods of inflicting pain and had instructed the other servants on how best to assist the Countess in her torture sessions. These servants later claimed that when Darvulia arrived “the lady herself became crueller and crueller”. It was around this time, between the rise of Darvulia’s influence and the slow decline of her husband’s health in the early 1600s, that Elizabeth began luring young girls from the lesser gentry to join her gynaeceum or women’s quarters.
A gynaeceum in the 1500s was not the same as the women’s quarters of Ancient Greece, where the term gynaeceum originated from - in ancient times women would live the majority of their married lives in private, their gynaeceum providing them with a completely separate sphere from men and a place for women of the household to gather together, complete chores and leisure activities and learn important womanly crafts. In 16th-century Hungary, the gynaeceum was a place for the women of the household to gather, but often also included unmarried young women who came, sometimes great distances, to learn. In the women’s quarters of influential noblewomen, girls and young women would learn courtly etiquette, be taught the dance steps they would need to prosper in court and attract a respectable husband, learn how to manage a grand household, and practise foreign languages - something which would have been especially important in Hungary, given that it was a country sandwiched between powerful neighbours where illustrious matches would require fluency in at least German and Hungarian.
Needlecraft, reading, playing musical instruments, games and other leisure activities would also have been part of the daily routine for the women. Elizabeth, who had mastered at least four languages in her youth and had married a very respectable man, would have been seen as the ideal noblewoman to instruct these young women of the lesser gentry. But Elizabeth’s gynaeceum had another function.
It was said that she had lured these young women to her castles to torture them. No longer satisfied with torturing her servants and running out of new victims in the local area, Elizabeth drew in the daughters of the lesser gentry with her status and promises of social advancement. Although it was certainly not out of the ordinary for an intelligent noblewoman like Elizabeth to take in and educate unmarried young women, what did raise suspicion were the numerous deaths which occurred amongst the young women in her care.
Stories of cruelty, including starvation, began to spread as strange injuries and disappearances plagued the gynaeceum. After several of the young women there died, Elizabeth announced that a cholera outbreak had been to blame. But the number of bodies brought for burial in the local churchyard and the frequency with which the local priests were called made an investigation into the matter almost inevitable.
However, while her husband was alive Elizabeth was shielded from open criticism and accusations. Count Nádasdy died on 4th January 1604, after 29 years of marriage to Elizabeth. He had suffered from debilitating pain in his leg, perhaps caused by his wartime experiences, which left him permanently disabled in 1603 - although, the exact cause of his death is unknown.
The Count left his widow and heirs under the care of György Thurzó, who was a powerful Hungarian magnate and Palatine of Hungary, which made him the representative of the monarch, from 1609-16. Despite being given this responsibility of care for Elizabeth and her children, it was Thurzó who would eventually lead the investigation into Elizabeth's crimes - tellingly, Elizabeth had been left to manage the family’s wealth and lands as her son was still an infant, which made her a lucrative target. Elizabeth’s downfall began in 1602 when rumours began to spread of the horrific crimes she had committed.
By 1602, the priests on her estates began to question the number of servants and young ladies at her gynaeceum who were dying from what Elizabeth said was cholera. Elizabeth reportedly prevented the priests from examining the victims’ bodies, allowing them only to look at the victims’ faces, which fuelled further rumours. Nádasdy’s reputation and political connections had protected her before his death, and even after 1604 Elizabeth’s own power and wealth kept her safe for a while.
The first to speak out against her publicly was a Lutheran minister, István Magyari, who denounced her both in public and at the Habsburg court in Vienna. Soon the rumours were taken up as fact and word spread that Elizabeth was a serial killer and torturer of young women. In October 1610 Elizabeth retreated to the isolated Csejthe Castle, now called Čachtice, in the mountains of Slovakia approximately 50 miles from Bratislava, presumably hoping that by the time moves were made to arrest her, the steep roads to Csejthe would be impassable due to winter storms and snow.
Elizabeth prepared to wield the considerable influence of the Báthory family if she was to be charged and was already in correspondence with her cousin Gabriel Báthory, the Prince of Transylvania from 1608 to 1613. A formal investigation into Elizabeth’s crimes was launched in 1610 when King Matthias II asked Thurzó - his representative as the Palatine of Hungary - to investigate Elizabeth. Letters sent between Thurzó and the notaries on the case, András Keresztúry and Mózes Cziráky, show that 52 witness statements against Elizabeth were collected by October 1610 and that this number had risen dramatically to over 300 by 1611.
There were, of course, political motivations behind the investigation into Elizabeth. Historians have argued throughout the centuries about the crimes of Elizabeth Báthory and particularly in recent years as to whether she was the victim of a conspiracy. There are three arguments commonly made which suggest that Elizabeth was set up: the first relating to money, the second - and perhaps the most convincing - power, and the third religion.
It is possible that Elizabeth’s excessive wealth and land-ownership in the much-fought-over Principality of Transylvania - and her relative vulnerability as a widow - made her an easy and lucrative target. But the financial motive was even more personal for the Habsburg King Matthias as Count Nádasdy had lent Matthias’ predecessor a great deal of money and Matthias had reluctantly inherited the debt. Elizabeth had reportedly travelled to Matthias’ court several times in an attempt to call in this debt - a move which irritated Matthias and failed to result in any payments.
The fact that this debt was cancelled after Elizabeth was arrested shows the importance of money to the investigation. The Habsburg-Báthory relationship was extremely strained, even without the debt. The influence of Elizabeth’s family in the region represented a threat to the political interests of the Habsburgs who desired control over Transylvania and sought to lessen the influence of both the Ottomans and the powerful local nobility.
Matthias II, a Habsburg and brother of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, and a future Holy Roman Emperor himself, had been pronounced King of Hungary in 1608, but Hungary was still partitioned and there were frequent attempts by local nobles to break away from Habsburg hegemony and revive their rights to elect their own kings. One of these rebellions which had aimed to reassert Transylvania’s independence had been led by Sigismund Báthory, Elizabeth’s cousin, who was later jailed for conspiracy against the Emperor in 1610-1611 - and Elizabeth had spoken out in support of her cousin. Equally another cousin, Gabriel Báthory, then Prince of Transylvania, had his eye on expanding his territory into Royal Hungarian lands and Elizabeth had pledged to support him financially and provision him with troops.
At the same time as investigating Elizabeth, Thurzó was attempting to negotiate peace with Gabriel Báthory and was well aware of the damaging impact that removing Elizabeth from the political field would have on her cousin’s cause. Perhaps Elizabeth’s family were targeted because they were Protestant at a time when Protestant-Catholic tensions were escalating in the run up to the Thirty Years War which lasted from 1618-1648. This war would see the future Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II attempt to impose Roman Catholicism on his domains, including in Transylvania, and would spark violent rebellion from the Protestants of eastern and central Europe.
The difference in religion may have heightened the tension between the Báthorys and the Catholic Habsburgs - but several of Elizabeth’s relatives, including her uncle King Stefan Batory of Poland, were Catholic and the suggestion that the investigation was a Catholic/Habsburg plot against the Calvinist Protestant Elizabeth ignores the fact that the first accusations were made by a Lutheran minister. Perhaps religious differences can explain why few went to Elizabeth’s defence once accusations were made, but this ignores the fact that religious toleration was much more common in Transylvania at this time than in the rest of the region. The argument that the investigation against Elizabeth was motivated by religious differences seems far less convincing than the motives of money and power.
On 30th December 1610, the investigation was ramped up and Thurzó arrested Elizabeth and five suspected accomplices - all of them servants - at Csejthe Castle for torture and multiple murders carried out between 1590-1610. Although it was later said that Thurzó had caught Elizabeth in the act of torturing a young girl in her torture chamber, Elizabeth was actually arrested while eating an evening meal at the dinner table with several guests. Despite Thurzó’s declaration that he had caught her red-handed, a claim preserved through time in a letter he had written to his wife, Elizabeth had been arrested and detained before the discovery of any victims, therefore leaving open the possibility that she was set up.
Thurzó’s open statement that he had found a dead girl and another kept alive as prey in the castle whipped up the villagers and spurred further rumours of Elizabeth’s crimes. Given that no physical evidence of this bloody scene was presented at trial, it can be argued that Thurzó deliberately misrepresented, or even completely fabricated, the horror scene of dead and wounded patients which he classified as Elizabeth’s victims. Thurzó certainly had much to gain from Elizabeth’s downfall, not only the chance to seize her estates and wealth - to which he had tenuous rights as the guardian of her and her children, as appointed by her dying husband - but also to further his political career.
By January 1611, the case was brought to trial. The witness testimonies formed a central part of the trial, but the majority of the witnesses gave only second-hand testimonies. It was reported that the majority of Elizabeth’s victims had been girls aged 10-14 years old who had, as members of the lesser gentry, been sent to Elizabeth’s gynaeceum to receive instruction from the Countess.
Some witnesses named relatives who had died at the gynaeceum or reported seeing traces of torture on dead bodies in the graveyards and other unmarked locations. Of the three first-hand testimonies offered during the trial, two came from two court officials - Benedek Deseő and Jakab Szilvássy - who claimed to have personally witnessed the Countess torture and kill young servant girls. One of the court officials stated that a servant girl had been found to have burns on her hands, but no explanation or evidence was offered as to whether these burns were the result of a kitchen accident or of malicious torture by a demented mistress.
No physical evidence or corroborating testimonies were presented to confirm anything stated in these reports by the court officials. The third first-hand testimony came from an injured girl apparently found at the scene named Anna, who testified that the Countess had hurt her and damaged her hand and arm, but the fact that she was later awarded 50 gold pieces, 15 pounds of wheat and a small farm in Csejthe, and had twice changed her story about how her arm had been hurt, casts doubt on her testimony. At the trial of Elizabeth’s accomplices, it was reported that there had been 650 victims - but this statistic came solely from the testimony of a servant girl named Susannah, who claimed that court official Jakab Szilvássy had seen the number in one of Elizabeth’s private books but could not confirm this herself.
The book was never revealed to the court and Szilvássy himself did not mention it in his own testimony. The number of victims more commonly reported in the trial was between 50 and 60. Given that the majority of the evidence came from hearsay and that no physical evidence was presented, it can be hard to know whether Elizabeth was actually guilty of any or all of the crimes for which she was punished.
Further confusion from the trial was caused by the testimonies of Elizabeth’s servants and accomplices. Two servants - Ilona Jó, the former wet nurse for the Countess’ children, and her friend Dorottya Szentes - confessed under torture to being accomplices in Elizabeth’s crimes, however, these testimonies are invalid in modern eyes as they were extracted under duress. Both women had their fingers torn out with a pair of red-hot pincers and were then burned alive.
Another servant - János Újváry - was executed, though in a less painful manner due to his youth and most likely his gender, and his body joined that of Jó and Szentes on the pyre. A fourth servant - Erzsi Majorova, who was denounced as a witch and apparently told Elizabeth to lure young noblewomen for torture when she ran out of local victims - was burnt alive after being recaptured following an escape attempt, and a fifth - Katarína Benická, an elderly washerwoman who was also an accomplice was only given a life sentence in prison after it was proved that she had been abused by the other servant women. The sixth - and more sinister - figure said to have been involved in the torture and murders was Elizabeth’s companion Anna Darvulya, or Darvolia, who had died before the arrests were made, but the other servants admitted under torture that it was Darvulia who had taught Elizabeth witchcraft and demonic methods of torture.
Any kernel of truth to be found in these claims against Darvulia is hidden by the brutal tactics used to extract this information from the accused and it seems likely that the other servants simply found the deceased Darvulia an easy target for blame. It was only later during the torturous interrogations that Elizabeth’s servants began to blame the Countess herself for the horrific crimes. While her servants began pointing the finger of blame at her, Elizabeth aimed to clear her name by asking the mother of a deceased girl from her gynaeceum to make a statement that her daughter had died from natural causes.
After her claims that cholera had killed the girls at her gynaeceum were rejected, she at first blamed one of the girls for killing the others, then openly blamed all unexplained deaths and injuries on her servants, claiming that their sadism was beyond her control because even she was afraid of them. Yet it was too late to stop the rumours that were swirling against her. The second-hand testimonies detailing the torture methods which Elizabeth used on the young women in her care sparked further rumours and gossip.
Word went around that Elizabeth and her accomplices had used hot tongs, needles and freezing water to harm the young girls and her own servants. It was said that Elizabeth took such pleasure from these tortures that she would use her teeth to tear away the skin of her victims and bathe in the blood of her young victims as a youth-enhancing beauty regime. It was said that as her crimes escalated, so too did the network which she used to facilitate them.
As well as the servants implicated in Elizabeth’s crimes, noblewomen such as Lady Anna Welyker, Lady Judith Pogan and Lady Szell were also accused of luring girls to Elizabeth’s gynaeceum once her supply of local female servants had dried up. Elizabeth’s youngest daughter Katalin was also alleged to have participated in at least one torture session at Csejthe Castle, where it was rumoured that Elizabeth had installed a torture chamber in the dungeons. Yet it was only the servants who were ever called to trial.
Elizabeth herself was never called to trial and although two trials had been held after her arrest to unpick her crimes and pass judgement on her accomplices - on 2nd January 1611 and 7th January 1611 - she was denied her rights as a noblewoman to attend court lawsuits and receive judgement. Instead, her son Paul and two of her sons-in-law - Nikola Zrinski and György Drgeth - negotiated with Thurzó to avoid the loss of Báthory property to the Crown. Letters between Zrinski and Thurzó show that the plan had been to send her to a nunnery, but after the scandal became public it was decided that she would be kept under strict house arrest in her isolated castle at Csejthe.
But King Matthias, keen to reduce the power of this powerful Transylvanian family, was displeased with this deal. Although the King had initially wanted her to stand trial so he could seize her land and wealth, King Matthias finally agreed to the punishment of house arrest. Thurzó had worked hard to convince the King that house arrest was the more prudent punishment for a Hungarian noblewoman of Elizabeth’s status and fame, given the nasty precedent that a trial and execution could set, including for Thurzó himself who was from the Hungarian nobility and was also a Protestant.
Wary of alienating the already-rebellious nobility of Transylvania, King Matthias agreed to house arrest, rather than a formal trial, if his debts to the Báthory family were cancelled - a request which was complied with by Elizabeth’s son Paul. The conditions of Elizabeth’s house arrest are hazy - it was later said that she was kept in a bricked-up room, but this idea is undermined by the presence of a bodyguard in her apartment and rumours of an escape attempt. In many accounts whether confined to a bricked-up room or free to wander around the castle, Elizabeth’s years under house arrest were spent, as her earlier years had been, in lavish surroundings with servants attending to her needs and wants.
Elizabeth died on 21st August 1614, aged 54, at Csejthe Castle in the Kingdom of Hungary. She died while still under house arrest and - because she had never been brought to trial - succeeded in leaving her estates, lands and possessions to her children. Other than the historical damage to the family’s reputation, the greatest loss that the Báthory family suffered over Elizabeth’s crimes was the forced renunciation of King Matthias’ debts - a sizable amount of money and interest that was never repaid to the Báthory family.
Elizabeth’s body was reportedly moved from the local cemetery at Csejthe after the villagers caused an uproar at the presence of a serial killer in their graveyard. The new location of Elizabeth’s body has never been discovered - perhaps she was interred in a nameless grave in the Báthory family crypt at her childhood home at Ecsed Castle or at her birth home of Nyírbátor, or perhaps the rumours that she was secretly reburied deep in the church area of Csejthe Castle are to be believed, however when a possible grave in the crypt of Csejthe Church was opened in 1938, it was found to be empty. Elizabeth’s final resting place, like the question of the extent of her guilt, remains lost to history.
Saying it is difficult to find out about the extent of Elizabeth’s alleged crimes is an understatement. The first written accounts of Elizabeth’s story were penned over a hundred years after her death and the only first-hand evidence used in the trials, and later published, came from György Thurzó and his team. To make matters even more complicated, myths have been added on top of myths, with blood-bathing and claims of vampirism particularly obscuring the real crimes committed.
The myth that she bathed in the blood of her young victims to retain her youth first appeared in print in Tragica Historia by Jesuit scholar László Turóczi in 1729, which was the first written account of the Báthory case. This myth seems to have circulated amongst the superstitious local peasantry and was written down, uncritically, by Turóczi. The myth was later repeated - and published much more widely around Europe - in Hungarian historian Matthias Bel’s account in 1742, which quoted directly from Turóczi’s.
By the time that actual reports from the trial were published for the first time in 1817, the tales of Elizabeth’s unnatural, demonic thirst for blood had set in. Although neither the blood-drinking nor blood-bathing were mentioned in the trial scripts, these myths have lasted throughout history. The rise of Báthory’s bloodthirsty reputation coincided with the vampire scares that haunted Europe in the early 18th century.
Vampires had always had a prominent place in Eastern European folklore since the Medieval period, however during the 17th and 18th centuries famine, disease and social instability gave rise to new levels of fear and tension which culminated in a renewed belief in the supernatural and in old superstitions. It may have been The Age of Reason, but the belief in vampires was so widespread that the Austro-Hungarian government undertook official reports on vampire outbreaks across Eastern Europe and scholars wrote academic papers on the phenomenon. Witchcraft, magic, miracles and possession by evil spirits were other common explanations for the terrible things that happened in this tumultuous period, but it was the vampire - the activities of a living corpse - which enflamed the imagination of Eastern European people.
The first vampires to transcend the world of oral folklore and appear in the pages of literary works appeared in 18th-century poetry and they soon became the central figures of gothic fiction when John William Polidori published his The Vampyre in 1819 - a short story which had come from the contest between Polidori, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley - the same contest from which Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein came. The macabre tastes in literature in the 18th and early 19th centuries resulted in a caricature of Elizabeth which conceals as much about her as it reveals. The focus on vampirism in retellings of her story has led to the sexualisation and demonisation of Elizabeth, from rumours of lesbianism to the determined tracing of satanic teachings through her family tree and acquaintances.
Perhaps these stories of demonic cults and sinister connections originated from the common belief at the time that women were not capable of violence for its own sake. Or perhaps thinking of her as a supernatural and demonic monster was easier to palate than the realisation that an ordinary woman might commit such crimes. As well as her gender, Elizabeth’s class has certainly had an impact on the story of The Blood Countess.
The idea of a noblewoman abusing her aristocratic power and literally draining the blood of the poor would have struck a powerful note with popular and national European movements at the time. The literary obsession with depicting Eastern European counts and countesses as blood-thirsty vampires in their gothic, isolated castles is so commonplace that it has become a cliche. It has also been suggested that Elizabeth provided inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Drcula, along with Vlad the Impaler, three-time Voivode of Wallachia, Romania, and although her association with both Transylvania and crimes of the blood made Elizabeth a natural subject for vampire tales, there is no evidence that she was truly an inspiration for Drcula as there is no mention of her in Stoker’s notes.
But her epithets - The Blood Countess and Countess Drcula - have determined her legend. The modern world seems determined to remember Elizabeth as The Bloody Countess - numerous films have presented her as a vampiress-type character, from her appearance in Necropolis in 1970 to Blood Countess in 2015, and she was labelled by Guinness World Records in 2018 as the most prolific female murderer, despite the lack of physical evidence and reliance on hearsay. The gory, sensational and often sexualised nature of Elizabeth’s story has often outweighed the search for evidence.
Her work as an educator of young girls, as a countess and supporter of war widows, and her own intellectual achievements have been hugely overshadowed by these rumours of barbarity that can never be proved or disproved. While it is certain that Elizabeth lived at a time when wealthy, powerful and isolated women were targeted with accusations of witchcraft and demon-worship, the extent of her supposed crimes seems almost too large to have been entirely made up. Assessing Elizabeth Báthory is a difficult task because much of what is known about her is based on rumour and hearsay.
On the one hand, it seems likely that Elizabeth was caught up in a conspiracy. No physical evidence of torture or murder was presented at the trials and Elizabeth herself never gave testimony. The trials relied heavily on hearsay evidence and the investigation in the first place was ordered and carried out by two men with much to gain from Elizabeth’s conviction - King Matthias II, who wanted his debts cleared and to increase his control over the semi-independent Transylvania, and György Thurzó, who had his eye on Elizabeth’s wealth and estates.
Elizabeth’s own story is overshadowed by the political motivations of those around her and little is known about her beyond her supposed crimes. On the other hand, it seems incontrovertible that Elizabeth was unusually cruel to her servants and that too many young daughters of the gentry died in her care to have been caused by accident or epidemic. Although the figure 650 is likely a gross exaggeration of the number of women killed by The Blood Countess, perhaps the real figure is closer to the 50 which was referenced more often in the trial, making Elizabeth a prolific serial killer but not a mass murderer of epic proportions as she has sometimes been portrayed.
The Blood Countess myths that grew up around Elizabeth have no doubt flourished more because she was from Transylvania than because she was actually a blood-drinking, blood-bathing mass murdering psychopath. But the answers to the questions of who the real Elizabeth Báthory was and how many people she actually tortured and killed will never be uncovered as macabre rumours have long filled the gaps left by limited historical evidence. What do you think of Elizabeth Báthory - The Blood Countess?
Was she guilty of six hundred grisly murders or was she merely an unusually sadistic but powerful woman who had many enemies? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
