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- THE BLOODY COUNTESS BATHORY
-
- ELIZABETH BATHORY was born in 1560 in a great castle in the northwest part of
- Hungary in the shadows of the Carpathian mountains near Transylvania. Her
- father, the Count Gyorgy Bathory, was a famous soldier and her mother, Anna, was
- the sister of Stephen Bathory, the king of Poland. They were leaders of the
- Protestant nobility within the empire.
- Elizabeth was brought up carefully and lovingly by her parents, who were so
- far ahead of their time intellectually that she was taught to read and write, a
- rare accomplishment for young women in those days, even among the nobility. But
- when she was ten years old, her father died suddenly, and on her mother's
- shoulders fell all the cares of the family's enormous estates. Also, she alone
- had to determine the fate of her daughter Elizabeth.
- The next year, Anna arranged for the 11-year-old girl's betrothal to
- Ferencz Nadasdy, scion of another of the important Protestant families of
- Hungary. It was decided that Elizabeth should go to live in Leka at the chateau
- of the Countess Ursula Nadasdy, her fiance's mother, to be trained to rule over
- those great lands. So she moved to that strange environment. She was a
- precocious girl in every way and was quickly bored by the routine of managing a
- noble house. For amusement, she took to frolicking with the peasants, which was
- all right so long as she was eleven. When she became twelve, things began to
- change; and by the time she was thirteen, she was quite a grown-up young woman.
- She continued to frolic, however, until she turned up pregnant, a peasant boy
- the father of her unborn child.
- Elizabeth had the good sense to conceal her condition from her future
- mother-in-law, but she did tell her mother, and Anna came storming down to the
- Nadasdy chateau. The poor girl, Anna declared, was in the first throes of a
- dreadful and very infectious disease. She had detected in just in time to
- prevent the most dreadful consequences; there was not even opportunity to
- discuss the matter with the Countess Nadasdy. She rushed Elizabeth away for
- "treatment." At least part of what she said was true; among the nobility in
- sixteenth-century Hungary, a young noblewoman could do almost anything to the
- peasants except sleep with them. Had the Countess Nadasdy even sniffed a hint
- of the scandal, Elizabeth's betrothal would have been voided. But she did not.
- Countess Anna took her daughter to one of the more remote of the Bathory
- castles, and there she remained until the disease had run its course and
- Elizabeth had given birth to a baby. Without a moment's delay, the child was
- turned over to a local woman, who was sent out of the country with a generous
- financial settlement and orders not to reappear in Hungary during Elizabeth's
- lifetime. That was the last ever heard of the baby.
- A few months later, when Elizabeth was not quite fifteen years old, she
- was married to the young Count Nadasdy. For Hungarians it seemed a marriage
- blessed by heaven. The soldier-husband was a handsome, dashing young man with a
- dark beard, and dark eyes and skin. The bride was a beauty with big black eyes,
- dark hair, the fairest of skin, regular features, and sensual lips. He was
- the youngest general ever to command the border fortress defenses of Southwest
- Hungary. She was the image of noble young woman hood, educated, intelligent,
- apparently shy and virtuous, and beautiful in every way. They were married in
- Varanno on the edge of the Hungarian plain, between the two remote family
- castles, on a lovely day, May 8, 1575. The Emperor Maximilian was so pleased
- with this alliance of two of the greatest houses of Hungary that he sent a
- letter of approval, along with large golden jar of rare wine for a wedding
- present and two hundred thalers in gold, which would keep a common Hungarian
- citizen for ten years.
- In what was a hint of Elizbeth's true character, she chose to settle in one
- of the smaller of the Nasady castles, Csejthe, a dark and foreboding
- bastion on a rock high on the side of one of the Carpathian foothills, bordered
- by dense forest where the wolves howled at night. It was a wild and gloomy
- place, with thick walls, low ceilings, few windows, and a labyrinth of
- underground passages, cellars, and dungeons, hardly the sort of honeymoon
- cottage one would expect a sprightly, blushing bride to adopt. But it was
- just what Elizabeth wanted, so she moved in, with husband, mother-in-law, and
- a raft of servants.
- When the count was about, life was fine for Elizabeth. They began thinking
- about raising a family and enjoyed themselves. But when the count was off
- fighting the wars with the Turks, Csejthe was indeed a dark and gloomy place.
- Also, like many a young bride before and after her, Elizabeth had problems with
- her mother-in-law. The countess was a somber, puritanical, religious woman.
- She forced Elizabeth to manage the household in the way of the Nadasdys. As the
- Turks took more and more of the count's time, it was not long before Elizabeth
- became thoroughly bored.
- She was intelligent enough to leave the peasant boys alone now, but she had
- to have something to love, so she turned to herself. She painted her face
- for hours. The servants concocted various cosmetic preparations, and she
- tried them all. After every application of each new balm, she regarded
- herself critically to see if it had made her more beautiful and, if so, how
- much more beautiful. She fussed for hours with her hair- when she was not
- having headaches. These came often. Small wonder her servants prepared drugs
- and potions by the score and she took them all in great quantity. These were
- supposed to bring about the conception of a child, for, in spite of the fact
- that she and the count tried often when he was at home, no baby came for nearly
- ten years. It was very frustrating to the young bride, enough to drive her to
- turn almost anywhere. Elizabeth turned to magic, and that annoyed the
- Countess Nadasdy. To avoid arguments, Elizabeth took to keeping to her own
- apartments when the count was not around. That behavior forestalled family
- arguments, but it did not solve any of her problems, including loneliness. Since
- peasant boys were off-limits, Elizabeth turned to peasant girls for amusement
- when the count was soldiering.
- But as she grew older, the idea of amusement became something special. She
- favored beautiful blonde girls with big breasts, and among other things, she
- liked to beat them and bite them. The countess Ursula had some hint of this
- behaviour, but fortunately for her immortal soul she died before she learned too
- much about what was going on in Elizabeth's rooms.
- What was going on stopped, or slowed down, only when the count came home
- for a respite from the wars. Then he would take Elizabeth to Vienna, to the
- great balls and parties given by the emperor and his entourage.
- Elizabeth loved the glitter, but too soon it was time to return again.
- As time went on, she found herself able to relax enough to conceive again,
- and between 1585 and 1595 she bore four children. But the preoccupation with
- the girls was an established part of her life. To conceal from her husband what
- really went on, she was constantly complaining about help. The sewing girls had
- to be beaten because they were slow in their work. The maids had to be beaten
- because they were slow in their work. The maids had to be beaten because they
- were stupid and insolent. The serving girls had to be beaten because...
- The count heard these litanies with half an ear. He had others things on
- his mind, such as figuring out how to overcome the Turks, and raising that
- family.
- One day when they were walking in the garden, the count and the countess
- came across one of the servant girls, naked, tied to a tree, smeared with honey,
- with insects crawling all over her body. The count looked and made no
- objection. In fact, he taught his wife a few new tricks: for example, how to
- put paper between the girl's toes and then light it. That particular torture
- was called "star-kicking," because it was said the pain would make the victims
- see stars.
- When the children began coming along, from Elizabeth's letters to Ferencz
- one would think that she was a totally devoted mother with no thought for
- anything but her children. But the fact was that the children were in the hands
- of nurses and governesses, and Elizabeth was dabbling in black magic these days,
- under the guidance of Dorottya Szentes, known as Dorko >note: there is a accent
- over the o like /< Dorko had been the wet nurse for Elizabeth's daughter Anna
- until Anna was weaned. When Elizabeth learned the Dorko was adept in the black
- arts, the witch's future was assured. She taught the countess chants and
- incantations and the ways of magic. One day Elizabeth wrote delightedly to
- Ferencz at the front:
-
- Dorko has taught me something new: Beat a small black fowl to death with a
- white cane. Put a drop of its blood on your enemy's person, or, if you
- cannot reach him, on a piece of his clothing. Then he will be unable to
- harm you.
-
- This was the faithful helpmeet, offering her soldier-husband the very
- latest wrinkle in self-protection from his Turkish enemies. He need
- it. The wars went on for years and he was away from home for months at a time.
- Elizabeth had nothing to do but refine her own amusements.
- Often, she went to visit her aunt, the Countess Klara Bathory, who was
- among Hungary's foremost lesbians of her day. It was said that she raped
- all her ladies-in-waiting. What a time the two of them had! Beating up naked,
- big-bosomed serving girls was apparently the principal amusement of aunt and
- niece during these visits. Elizabeth learned a lot. And so her two personal
- maids, Barsovny and Otvos. They were young, beautiful lesbians. "Elizabeth
- abandoned herself to all the possible pleasure one woman may know in the arms of
- another," it was said.
- Back at home, Elizabeth put into practice what she had learned. Girls were
- marched down to the torture chamber in the bowels of the castle. Sometimes they
- were kept in the dungeon for days without food or water, awaiting their turns to
- amuse the countess. The Jo Ilona, along with Dorko took part in some of these
- tortures. So did Kateline Beniezky, Elizabeth's washerwoman. But Elizabeth was
- the leader; she was becoming a tiger in the torture game.
- In the winter of 1604 when Elizabeth was forty-four years old, her husband
- took sick and died. All Hungary mourned the death of this great soldier of
- the realm. To Elizabeth, his death meant an end to her sexual relationships
- with men and a renewed furious round of torture orgies to keep herself merry in
- her widowhood.
- Her valet, Ujvari Janos, was the only man in the castle privy to
- Elizabeth's strange manners of amusement. Ficzko, as she called him, around the
- castle for big-busted peasant girls and promise their families that they would
- be taken "into service" at the castle. Then he brought them to Elizabeth, who
- showed them what their service would be: To begin with, they were starved and
- beaten bloody. And soon there was to be more.
-
- At forty-four Elizabeth fretted ever more about her beauty. It seemed to
- be fading. No longer was her skin pristine and unwrinkled. There were lines at
- her throat and on her forehead, the skin of her neck was not as white and soft
- as it had once been. The search for potions and lotions grew ever more frantic.
- And onto the scene came Anna Darvulia, Elizabeth's new house magician, to
- supervise the transformation of a middle-aged woman back into a girl. Darvulia
- stayed up half the night writing up incantations and preparing potions, and
- during the day Elizabeth up incantations and preparings potions, and during the
- day Elizabeth said the words and drank the draughts. Darvulia made poulitices
- from the leaves of deadly nightshade, henbane, and thorn apple, and Elizabeth
- applied them to her skin. Ever whiter the skin must be, younger, smoother,
- lovelier- all in the increasingly frenetic search to restore her failing beauty.
-
- One day, as a maid was arranging Elizabeth's long black hair with a net of
- pearls, the girl did something that annoyed Elizabeth. The countess turned
- around and dealt the girl such a blow in the face that blood spurted all over
- her arms and hands. When the blood had been washed away Elizabeth looked with
- amazement at her hands and arms.
- Where the blood had fallen, her skin looked twenty years younger. It was
- beautiful and soft once again.
- Blood! Blood was the answer to everlasting beauty.
-
- What a dreadful discovery it was! Sorcery and torture for sadistic
- pleasure would now give way to baths of blood for beauty. The girls
- in the dungeon would soon know a new sort of service.
- Elizabeth now began to revel in blood. Before, it had pleased her enough to
- see the blood run as she beat the poor servants girls. Now she sucked their
- wounds and smeared the blood over her body. She had come a long way in a
- short time.
- The new Elizabeth had girls brought up from the cellars to her bedroom and
- laid stark naked on the floor. Then she tortured them, until the blood
- ran so deep that the servants had to scoop it up by the cupful and being up
- cinders to cover the puddles and stains.
-
- Soon one girl was not enough. So they were brought up in twos and threes, and
- Elizabeth would run about her room beating one girl after another. The more
- they pleaded for mercy, the harder she beat them. When she would become covered
- with blood, everything would stop while the countess changed her dress- and then
- she would be back at it agina. When the girls collapsed from loss of blood and
- the pain, more girls were brought up from the dungeon to replace them. And when
- there had been enough blood, it was time for other amusements. If a serving
- "lingered long and lovingly between Elizabeth's ceaselessly voracious thighs,
- she might gain the Countess's favor." But the favor never lasted long, for
- Elizabeth cast off her favorites once the novelty each brought to her work had
- faded.
-
- She would burn their cheeks and breasts with red-hot pokers prepared by her
- lesbian assistants. When she tired of this activity, she would sit in her
- chair and watch while Dorko tortured the girls. Dorko beat them and burned
- them, and cut them with razors until the blood spurted. The sight of spurting
- blood began to give the countess the most extreme sexual pleasure. She would
- work herself into an almost maniacal state. She screamed "more Dorko, More.
- Harder, much harder." Then she would get back into the game and take a lighted
- candle and burn the genitals of the girls. it did not take much of this to turn
- even a former favorite into something less than beautiful.
- Precisely when the first girl was beaten to death is a mystery, but it
- could not have been long after Elizabeth discovered all the "virtues" of blood.
- Soon beating to death became a ritual in itself. Darvulia tied the girls' hads
- and arms, and all the participants beat them, until "their whole bodies were
- black as charcoal and their skin was rent and torn."
- Dorko cut their fingers with shears and then slit the veins of their arms and
- legs with swering scissors. Dorko did the stabbing. The wet nurser Jo Ilona,
- graduated from her old duties, now tended the fires in the braziers, heated the
- pokers, and applied them to faces and noses, sometimes opening the poor victim's
- mouth and shoving the burning iron inside. One day the countess discovered a
- new treat: she put her fingers in a girl's mouth, and puller with all her might
- until the mouth split wide open. She also liked to tear the skin with white-hot
- pincers and to cut the skin between their fingers to see the blood run. The
- blood was saved and became Elizabeth's favorite skin lotion. Day after day, she
- laved her face and arms and body in blood.
- Even with so many diversions, life palled for Elizabeth, and she trabeled
- frequently to one of her other castles or to Vienna where she had a big
- town house at 12 Augustinerstrasse. Wherever she traveled, she installed a
- torture chamger. At Becko Castle, the girls were tortured in an abandoned
- storeroom; at Sarvar, in a disused wing of the castle; at Keresztur, in a little
- dressing room off Elizabeth's own room. Scarcely a day went by that she did not
- indulge herself in at least a bit of torture. Even when she was traveling in
- her coach, she always had a servant girl or two aling, so that she could bite
- them and pinch them and stab them with needles.
- In Vienna, the countess learned something new. She acquired an iron cage,
- which was installed in the cellar of her house on the Augustinerstrasse.
- Huge pointed metal spikes stuck inward from the edge of the cage,which could be
- lowered and raised on a pulley. Dorko would drag a naked girl down the stairs
- and thrust her into the cage, which was then hoisted up to the ceiling. The
- countess sat on a stepladder directly beneath the cage and watched as Dorko
- stabbed at the girl with a sharp iron stake or a red-hot poker, and as the poor
- girl writhed about inside the cage, trying to avoid Dorko's thrusts, she ran
- into the razor-sharp spikes, which slashed and tore her flesh. The blood would
- flow down onto Elizabeth and she reveled in it. when the girl had fainted or
- died, the countess would gather her bloody garments about her lovingly and
- return to the upstairs world.
- Magician Darvulia assured Elizabeth that she would remain beautiful as long
- as she had plenty of blood, and devised a new method of useing it. Elizabeth
- was to have the regular baths in the blood of virgins. The supply of peasant
- virgins in Hungary in those days seemed limitless. Girls were brought to the
- upstairs room and tied up; then their blood vessels were slit with razors to
- make the blood flow fast and hot. Dorko collected the spurting blood in a
- large earthenware vessel, and while the girls lay dying, she poured virgins'
- blood over her mistress.
- The therapeutic bloodbaths continued, but they had lost their power to
- amuse. So had the iron cage in the cellar at 12 Augustinerstrasse.
- Elizabeth was bored again.
-
- Then she heard of a great clock that had been built for the Duke of
- Brunswick at his castle at Dolna Krupa. It was a fantastic piece of machinery,
- and all Vienna talked of its intricate works and chimes. It had taken a
- clockmaker two years to build it. People came from great distances to see the
- marvelous maching at the castle. So did Elizabeth. The countess spent more
- time at Dolna Krupa than she had expected. She had long talks with the
- clockmaker. What she wanted, however, was not a duplicate of the Duke of
- Brunswick's clock but a copy of the famous Iron Virgin, or Iron Maiden, of
- Nuremberg, which was known throughout Europre as the century's most famous
- torture machine.
- What the countess wanted, the countess got. The clockmaker agreed to build
- an Iron Maiden. When it was ready, he delivered it to Csejthe Castle, where
- Elizabeth had it installed in the dungeon. When the Iron Maiden was not in use
- she lay in an ornate oak chest. Next to the chest was the Iron Maiden's
- pedestal, where she did her grisly work.
-
- What a maiden.
-
- The machine was a life-size figure of a beautiful woman; it had the long,
- flowing blonde hair of a woman. The body was painted flesh color; it had red
- nipples and pubic hair. The mouth opened by clockwork to reveal real human
- teeth in its cruel smile. The eyes moved. A necklace of semiprecious stones
- hung down over the big breasts. Certain of these stones activated the
- clockworks. As Elizabeth sat in a chair and watched, a girl would be brought to
- stand before the Iron Maiden, and the stones would be moved. The arms would
- rise to clutch the victim to the iron bosom in a grip that was totally
- relentless. The painted bosom opened. Five daggers emerged to stab the
- victim's body, while other spikes appeared below to pierce the genitals. The
- touch of another stone caused the Maiden's smile to fade, the eyes closed. The
- blood flowed down into a catchment, and it was saved to pour over the countess,
- either then, or later in her bath.
- Peasant girl after peasant girl was embraced by the Iron Maiden before
- Elizabeth, like any child with a mechanical toy, tired of the sameness of it.
- The blood made the works begin to rust, and finally Elisabeth ordered the Iron
- Maiden put into her case and retired- but not before the rumors of her
- performance had begun to move across the countryside.
-
- Beginning in about 1608 talk about the Countess Bathory around Hungary began
- to take on a definitely unpleasant tone. The monks in the monastery in Vienna,
- near 12 Augustinerstrasse, complained that when Elizabeth was staying at her
- town house, they were distressed night after night by shrieks and screams and
- wailing that rent the quiet of the night. In the inn near the cathedral, people
- spoke of blood in the streets and murdered girls. Patrons of the inn began to
- refer sardonically to Elizabeth as die Blutgrafin, the Bloody Countess.
- They didn't know the half of it.
-