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Elisabeth Bathory
(1560-1614)
The Blood Countess
First off: trigger warnings. All of the trigger warnings. No trigger unwarned. (okay, fine, it’s actually just triggers for gore, violence, rape, incest, and murder. I think that’s it. but, um, tread lightly regardless.)
Now then, let’s take a step into the life of one of the most vilified women in history. On December 29, 1610, a garrison of soldiers stormed the Hungarian castle of Cachtice and arrested Elisabeth (Erzsebet) Bathory. They accused her of roughly a hundredSaw movies worth of torture, and took her into custody. As the story goes (and please keep in mind, absolutely NONE of this should be taken at face value), they caught her in the act, finding a freshly-buried corpse and a cowering servant, badly beaten but still alive.
There were literally so many charges levied against her that when I typed them all out, it took up 10 single-spaced pages.
So let’s make a drinking game of it. The rules are simple: every time you’re grossed out, take a shot. I hope you have a full bottle or a strong stomach. Here we go, then!
According to the surviving testimonials, she and/or her closest servant/confidants:
- Kept her servants chained up every night so tight their hands turned blue and they spurted blood.
- Beat them to the point where there was so much blood on the walls and beds that they had to use ashes and cinders to soak it up.
- Beat a servant in Vienna so loudly that her neighbors (some monks) threw clay pots at the walls in protest.
- Strangled a servant to death with a silk scarf (a harem technique known as “the Turkish way”, a euphemism I now endeavour to work into my daily life).
- Burned her servants with metal sticks, red-hot keys, and coins; ironed the soles of their feet; and stuck burning iron rods into their vaginas.
- Stabbed them, pricked them in their mouths and fingernails with needles, and cut their hands, lips, and noses with scissors.
- Used needles, knives, candles, and her own freaking teeth to lacerate servants’ genitals.
- Stitched their lips and tongues together.
- Made servants sit on stinging nettles, then bathe with said stinging nettles. During the bath, she’d pushed the nettles into their shoulders and breasts.
- Had them stand in tubs of ice water up to their necks outside until they died.
- Smeared a naked girl with honey and left her outside to be bitten by ants, wasps, bees, and flies.
- Kept them from eating for a week at a time, and, if they got thirsty, made them drink their own urine.
- Forced them to cook and eat their own flesh (usually from the buttocks), or make sausages and serve it to guests.
- Heated up a cake to red-hot temperatures and made a servant eat it.
- Baked a magical poisonous cake in order to kill a rival magistrate, George Thurzo (who was also the guy who arrested her — more on him in a bit).
- Cast a magic spell to summon a cloud filled with ninety cats to torment her enemies. Okay, that’s actually kind of awesome.
- Had an ongoing affair with some guy named “Ironhead Steve” (no, really).
- Stuffed five servants’ corpses underneath a bed and continued to feed them as if they were still alive.
- Buried them in gardens, grain pits, orchards, and occasionally cemeteries. Sometimes with rites, often without.
She was accused of casting a magic spell to summon a cloud filled with ninety cats to torment her enemies.
- She bathed in virgins’ blood! (a lie dreamed up centuries afterward. also would’ve been impossible due to coagulation. I checked.)
- She was syphilitic from centuries of inbreeding! (maaaaybe? seems perfectly with-it in her letters though)
- She was epileptic! (well, she did once mention her eye hurt in a letter…?)
- She was raped when she was young. (possible, but given scant evidence for it, unlikely. Her powerful position in the world, practically since birth, further complicates this theory.)
- Her aunt Klara was a bisexual or lesbian (possible!). The two had an incestuous relationship! (uh… reaallly doubt it…) After having numerous affairs, Klara was raped by an entire Turkish garrison before having her throat cut! (augh, no! what the fuck!?)
- She was menopausal, and thus crazy! (sounds like someone is afraid of lady bits)
- Her cousin Gabor (whom I will talk about below) slept around a lot (true), was bisexual (maybe?), had an incestuous relationship with his sister Anna (not true), who was herself accused of sleeping with a silversmith (super not true) and being a witch (super ultra not true).
So after all this went down, the sentences went into effect almost immediately. Her female “accomplices,” all old ladies, first had their fingers torn off with iron tongs, and, once fingerless, were bodily tossed into a large fire. Her one male “accomplice”, being less of a participant to the supposed crimes, was shown a tremendous amount of mercy: he was decapitated *before* they tossed his body into a fire. And Elisabeth Bathory herself was “immured” — which is to say, bricked up into a room in her own castle, where she died four years later.
In conclusion: the aristocrats!
Elisabeth Bathory is innocent.
Mic drop.
Now, this is not to say she was a nice person. The overwhelming impression one gets from reading all these documents (an act I do not recommend you do in one sitting — learn from my mistakes) is that she was a take-no-crap kind of lady. Her husband was off at war, and she had to manage an INCREDIBLE amount of stuff in his absence, even before he died – thousands of servants, governing the local populace, and handling an amount of property second to none.
And so, Elisabeth Bathory needed everyone around her to know one thing, and one thing only: she was Head Bitch in Charge, and she had no time for your shit.
Her surviving letters illustrate this beautifully with their overwhelming curtness (even to her husband!). My favorite thing she ever wrote was to an encroaching squatter: she ended it by saying “do not think I shall leave you to enjoy it [settling illegally on my land]. You will find a man in me.” — a saying that translates roughly to “I will crush you.”
So no, she was not warm and cuddly. I absolutely believe she made life shitty for misbehaving servants (or, more likely, had her head servants do it for her). It is beyond questioning that she beat the hell out of them, and some undoubtedly died from it – I mean, she had thousands of servants in an age before penicillin. In fact, one scholar claims that the more outlandish tortures (stinging nettles, metal rods, amateur acupuncture) were contemporary folk remedies. Tough, mean lady? Yes. Cartoon supervillain? Hell no.
So what happened? George Thurzo – Palatine of Hungary and dickass extraordinaire – did.
Now, I already said Elisabeth was powerful, but you need to get the magnitude of the target she was: the Bathorys were like the Hungarian Kennedys and had been for centuries. By the time all this went down, Elisabeth’s cousin Gabor (earlier mentioned) was gunning for the throne (literally was starting a war), and Elisabeth was widowed, with more money than god. So Thurzo was like, “oh hell no, I am not letting those two partner up,” and decided to take Elisabeth down.
Now, the details of the plot are a bit murky. Thurzo was a known schemer who’d made a career out of backstabbing people, so a plot wouldn’t be much of a surprise. There’s evidence in correspondence with his wife (who kept forgetting to write in code) that Thurzo was moving against Elisabeth over a year earlier. He’d been in contact with the local church leaders, who were whipping up the general populace against the Bathorys by telling them stories – stories that would, with minor variations, be repeated over and over in the proceedings against Elisabeth, passed off as “I heard this” but with very few saying they’d actually seen it.
And that’s just the cooperating witnesses. In all likelihood – it was standard operating procedure at the time – the members of Elisabeth’s household were tortured before testifying. Their testimonials, which are confused and contradictory, lend credence to that.
The only way to get rid of such an entrenched power as Elisabeth was to catch her committing a horrific act red-handed – which Thurzo said he did, although it took him 24 hours to produce said evidence. Afterwards, they never had a trial (despite the king demanding one for three years straight). Elisabeth never got to speak in her defense and her family records were mostly destroyed. There is very little to go on in determining what sort of a person she actually was.
So, even if she did commit said acts (which is possible, although nowhere near the scale of the accusations), ask yourself what is more likely: an incredibly outlandish list of violence perpetrated by a cadre of old women over decades; or, an orchestrated persecution against a powerful, harsh, and independent woman – in the age of actual witch hunts, no less!
(enjoy the art? you can get it as a poster, shirt or phone case!)Art Notes
Oh boy, I spent a lot of time figuring out just how to represent Lady Bathory. I am happy with how it turned out. Here’s the thought processes and callbacks:
- I wanted to have the viewer see through her eyes, as best as possible.
- We never see her, just a reflection in a dusty mirror. Her expression is meant to be somewhat inscrutable, without you being able to tell what’s on her mind. She’s purposely stiff and posed.
- She’s got her back turned to Thurzo (in background, with feathered cap in silhouette) bricking her up, with her image caught in her own shadow – sort of symbolizing how her true story’s been locked away and obscured.
- The whole composition is meant to feel claustrophobic, with her not only caught inside the mirror, but surrounded by the shadows cast from the bricked-up wall.
- Her outfit is from one of the two surviving portraits of her, and all the furniture and whatnot are period-accurate.
- The mirror is a Venetian glass mirror (one of the only types of mirror at the time – each one was as expensive as a battleship!), and the scratches and cloudiness are actually characteristic of that type of mirror.
- She’s washing her hair, a reference to the blood-bathing legends. Is that water reflecting the red candlelight and her dress, or…?
- The symbol at the top of the mirror (the dragon) is the actual Bathory family crest, believe it or not. The candle holders are callbacks to that dragon.
- Everything on the desk (and the bleeding candles) are related to a different torture rumor. The chest with the small mirror is a scrying box that witches were said to use.
- Very barely visible in the darkness of the reflected room, up above a balcony, are a bunch of cats, a reference to the 90-cat curse.
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Next Time on Rejected Princesses
Stepping away from violent women for a while, and heading back 7 decades before Rosa Parks.
One issue that has been overlooked, with respect to Elisabeth Bathory, is the fact that she was an avid user of cosmetics. Unfortunately, in her era, there did not exist any safety testing thereof, and consequently, even a cursory look at the materials used in her beauty regime, would have any modern day pathologist squirming.
Apart from the more obvious sources of chronic poisoning, such as white lead, her beauty regime included a whole brace of plants that are now known to be sources of a number of, shall we say, interesting chemicals. Many of which are psychoactive. Consequently, if she was engaged in even a small percentage of the murderous activities for which she later became infamous, any competent modern defence lawyer would point to her long term exposure to all of these psychoactive and neurotoxic chemicals, and immediately move that she be considered unfit to stand trial, upon account of the fact that her brain had been systematically poisoned over three decades. I’m pretty sure that long term exposure to plants such as Deadly Nightshade and Henbane would have a less than delightful effect upon many of us, and in combination with some of the other ingredients of her cosmetics regime, would quite probably have a truly florid long term effect. Ironically, her privileged position, and her privileged access to luxuries completely beyond the reach of anyone other than members of royal households, may have been her undoing in more ways than one.
Quite simply, any deranged behaviour on her part would be immediately explicable in terms of the chronic and systemic neurotoxicity of her cosmetics table.
This makes quite a good bit of sense, actually. Any mental issues on her part coming from lead poisoning (or any other sort of poisoning) from her makeup is a realistic explanation for the murders she may or may not have committed. At least, it makes more sense than the whole menopausal/incest/bisexual thing.
Please could you add your list of sources? It’s just that I want to do my history assessment on this and I need legitimate sources to even start the project
Good point! Thanks for sharing. :D
Right there in the article, under “Citations”: Tony Thorne’s “Countess Dracula: the life and times of the Blood Countess, Elisabeth Bathory.
Thank you, but you said that there are more sites that you looked at. Could you even tell me what made you doubt the claims made against her? Was it a site that you looked at?
The doubt in the claims against her came from Thorne’s book. He presents a very compelling case for her innocence.
As for the other sources, I don’t quite remember. I know I looked at another book or two, mostly on Google Books, as well as the first 10-20 sites that come up when you google her name.
Okay, thank you so much!!
she is actually one of my favorite women in history… i learned about her in my social studies class a long time ago and thought she was pretty cool
Can’t believe ANY uneducated person can just create a website.
Worse site ever!
Uneducated + opinionated = waste of a life
Cool! Thanks for sharing, and upping the level of discussion.
Whaaaaaat? 0_o
Can’t believe ANY uneducated child can just write a comment.
Worst commenter ever!
Uneducated + opinionated + bad grammar = waste of parents’ money.
Just because someone is powerful doesn’t mean that they aren’t victims of rape. I’m a rape crisis counselor and I can guarantee you that powerful women are raped, it’s just ignorantnt to say they’re not. I was really enjoying the article but I couldn’t finish after reading that…
Why is it so hard to admit, that she was a serial killer with too much power at her hands? By the way, it is most unfair to make the victims responsible for what happend. Ah, and the cosmetics: Other ladies used them too.
Same reason it seems to be so hard to imagine she might not have been as bad as claimed…?
Fair enough, poor wording on my part. Amended.
from wikipedia “All but one of the Countess’s servants testified against her—the one who refused had her eyes gouged out and her breasts removed before being burned at the stake” well it smells like salem trials to me a very nice way to get many people testify isn’t it ….. we all know how the “witchcraft” trials were settled back in those times the sure thing is that she was ruthless about her economic interests so I think that besides all those you said and I agree , she was also antagonist of the church in economic feudal interests maybe I don’t phrase it well but I think you get what I say , she had more enemies than she could handle plus the king owed a serious money ammount to her which she demanded to get back and which he wasn’t so happy to pay back actually (this is bad tactic usually everyone in history everywhere who had given a loan to a king and demanded it back got a witchcraft trial and ugly death …. gouh gouh Templars & Phillip IV) in my opinion she was as cruel as most aristocrats in her time maybe a bit more to get respect cause she was scorned as a woman not remarried after widowed also this to not bow to another family’s interests and keep her authority intact and she was firm to keep her position and property under her authority , so yes she was cruel , she was for certain giving bad bad pennalties to those disobeying her but I think all for status and economy issues , I believe neither she was a nice peson nor I’d like her to be my enemy for sure but I say inquisition did much worse and many of them considered saints so I agree with all you say …. plus that the moral point to me is even if you want your intrests intact when your antagonists start to become more than your allies you should do a little back and never never demand back a loan from the king it might piss him off ….
oh and I like your site it’s truly nice
Such a sad state of affairs that in the name of female empowerment, one have to defend someone who preyed on females. If Bathory were a man, there would be no doubt of her guilt.
I couldn’t read the sickening detail but I do appreciate You Did and Printed it for our edification and knowledge. :)
Everything you just wrote sounds exactly like what I just watched in the movie Bathory: Countess of Blood (2008). By chance, did that movie influence your decision on how you believe she was innocent? Because I swear, it’s like a plot summary of what you are saying with some extra research on the methods she was accused of using on the young girls.
Nope, didn’t even know that movie existed! Like it says in the citations section, I used Tony Thorne’s “Countess Dracula: the life and times of the Blood Countess, Elisabeth Bathory.” Sounds like that movie did as well.
You think by swearing you’re going to be look as cool and awesome? Swearing is not good and you know that. Please be more sensible with your words. I appreciate the effort of writing this but it’s sometimes went out of focus and rambling. You should get straight to the point.
Thank you for the constructive criticism, but it’s actually just how I talk (they say find your voice when you’re writing, right?). I’m sorry to have perturbed you with my swearing, but thank you for not being offended by the graphic descriptions of torture, incest, and rape. I hope you find a writer on the net that better suits your sensibilities. Best of luck out there!
Seems to be a trend of finding murdering, aristocratic Satanists posthumously innocent. Never when this happens do these subversive shills explain what happened to the victims, under their new theory of innocence.
Except I did. There was all of one corpse found, which was likely due to beatings and lack of modern medicine. This writeup doesn’t deny that she was a cruel and vicious person, just that she was an outlandish serial killer.
I welcome corrections, so if you can adequately refute the medieval Hungarian scholarship on display in Thorne’s book, I’m all too happy to recant the theory I’ve put out there.
Or, just maybe, a lonely, not very attractive, unloved woman. History has had, in all reality, a surplus of them. Not trying to be mean, or sexist, heaven forbid, but when most women are past their “sell by” date, even money will not help. Or education. Or status. Even today. It would be interesting to know the “truth” about her crimes, but it is probably too late. She has become a heroine, as such, to some self- styled Satanists, and, of course, she has a band named after. She might be a misunderstood soul. But, we tend to love “dark” people, so she is, to a certain extent, what we want her to be. Sad, eh? All things being equal, being a rich, powerful, woman, meant one thing. You still had the “disability” of being a woman. Cheers.
That does not square with my (by now fairly considerable) research on historical powerful women. Even when they’re well past the age to bear children, if they’re in charge of vast sums of money and property, they have no shortage of suitors.
Well said.
You atheismucalicum fool or just a blind little sheep all dressed in red of her blood in straight line of relatives of the hungarian and of the romanian satanum bloodline – you! I will tell a tale of inferno, of hell or est um satanum ergo large aste luciferium, the soldiers in the army of death, blood and hell walked the dusty earth of my land – subcarpathian, and made it all rotten soil of cloven hoofs in 300 years ye old femalirium antiumchristum just a poor womanikkularem bastardical nonhumaniodicom eco homo est! The bodies were in the 7000’s each fuck up aborteus ed asperi week they came for seven more, more seven again see? Seek hell thy lord or countess Therionical bitch, or why not see heaven, NOT WITH THE BLOOD IN MY VEINS OR IN MY, HIS OR OURS EYES! She will say silencius only to queen on hill of death. But they were dragged in chains, not even eight or nine of ages all virgins from area of podgopackie or subcarpathian um infernus Poland, oh ye! oh yes, to her – YOU! – borgia ast em Carpathian Mountains, you should know this you old hungarian relativium windsoressum of blaspemical sands of only death! i SAW, I FELT I HEARD THEM SCREAM, every day for 900 mornings, 900 days and 900 nights, did you Boria Trigitym of Bathory, did you her El diabolicum sing hymns of glory and of war to him Tepescz or her, she the queen of blood and hell – Bathorian whore as the countess for whom you here open all seven time triungulariem six hundred sixty six doors, down under southern bowed crosses and of jericho,
or?
Are you well educated in occultrem or in the words of the hammer of the witches, heard of Lord solares of Torqemada, or of them angelous who flew on four horses in all black over apocalyptus um tellicum in winds of three, south east and north, did you see or touch him, or shall i romanian slave say – she? The stars over head of non scolarem is your way out of the void or into the dark, see the light is not for thy hungerian and romanian DNA ye old babylonical whore!
As in necromanticum, much respectalarem written in 677 after the death of the Son of God, on human flesh and in blood and when the last ot dots were texted on flesh by the hand of a convicted massmurderer,, they slaughtered him and dismembered his unholy lecamus and forced all of his relatives to caniblismus so the had to eat him! Read in three lines, all versus or upmore in to down, right be wrong or left hand show right your the less strong.
Bow when you iditicum verbaly express names of the underworld or take the fall, a warning from a poor lost man who in 53 long ond solo years seen all you think is movies and badly written fairytales, beware! The world is on fire,, He is amongst us now, take a bow and can you go really low hungarian adept?
Just a warning from a man who say Gabriel, blow now! t
of ritmoria borgius Romanus Hungerius it will fall. Exilum sept infernus amenus!
Those seek out of the void, in to light go herenth from or fall in blackened souls into eternal coma of ye souls!
Psalms and hymneus for joy and the reprazialem oh the femalitum infernos personata um satana! Learn, turn or ye all will eternicolarem um inferno buuuurn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vL9zCFpv-0
While I agree that much of the more outlandish details are likely false, we can be fairly certain that at least some of the claims were true. The fact that around 300 witnesses and survivors testified to her crimes, the consistency of the accounts and the presence of *physical evidence* is hard to argue against. Especially considering her position meant she couldn’t be tried. Yeah, most of the more gruesome stuff, undoubtedly made up. However, Bathory having murdered/tortured servant girls and daughters of nobility, is more than likely. I mean we can say with no uncertainty that: Nero, Caligula, and Ivan the terrible were evil people, who did much of what history accuses them of, and there was less evidence against them than Bathory.
Meanwhile, I just giggle because her name is Bath-ory, and she’s famous for her blood BATHs…
I never said I was clever :p
U r sick
You should meet a psychiatrist ASAP
I honestly think she’s guilty… of something more normal. Like, she probably did torture and kill some ‘disposable’ servant girls, but of course the witch stuff and the blood bathing is just dumb.
In one of the original letters that she wrothe to her husband she said “Az én szerelmes urmanak” which roughly translate to something like ‘to my beloved husband’ .
And it’s true that they say she was lonely and unsociable but it is also true that she lived in a harsh age, in the middle of a reeally long war.
So yeah. Ah, and her real name was Báthori or Báthory Erzsébet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABf9a_DcWnE
Being both an historian and a member of a band named after her for 25 years (no not the famous one) I’ve done quite some research into this and, well, I think it’s safe to say we’ll never know the truth. There is something to be said for both guilty and not guilty. These were cruel times and aristocrats being rather awful in their dealings with lower classes was very common. On the other hand, there were people who had something to gain by disposing of her and many people convicted of horrible crimes in times past are looked upon as innocent today (such as Gilles de Rais, the Knights Templar).
The legend continues to intrigue many, though. Here’s a song about her: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6Jng1EJu-I
Agreed, In fact, a lot of the records detailing her horrible acts were burned because it was so horrific they didn’t want anyone to know. Many have tried to say that she was experimenting with early medical procedures or that she was helping her servants with abortions but most historians recognize this as balderdash. People just have a harder time accepting women as cold blooded killers, thinking that maternal instinct keeps women from carrying out these acts. As you said I don’t believe she bathed in blood but I do believe she tortured and killed many innocent girls, and to try and play it off as a smear campaign of sorts just seems insensitive.
I’ve heard that Bathory might have been a lesbian. If that’s true maybe she liked things rough in the bedroom and the deaths were accidental?
Lol, that’s a hilarious response. Saints are rarely interesting but a woman of power who may have been a serial killer, well that’s interesting. Even if one admired someone like Bathory, that is not necessarily a mark of ones mental state… many of the greatest, most influential people in history, people who had a huge impact (often in a positive way) had horrendous aspects of their personal histories. Henry 8 broke with the Catholic Church, and coincidentally qualifies as a mass murderer who cut off his spurned wives heads. Isabella of Castile funded the expedition that “discovered” America and “settled” the lands; she also unleashed the scourge of the inquisition on her people, expelled the Jews and ravaged the Islamic world. Ceaser built an amazing legacy for Rome, and brought whole civilizations to their knees. The aztec kings gave us amazing history, built a fantastic civilization and loads of end times entertainment in the modern era; they also spilled rivers of blood…. on the personal level, these interesting people had streaks of cruelty, selfishness, greed, perversion; just as people of interest today are forever getting their skeletons brought to the light… we just have media to speed it all up and ensure it’s around the globe in a few hours time.
And really, meeting and seeing a psychiatrist are two very different things; a little introspection is good for everyone. Perhaps some consideration of the difference between an idea you don’t like and an action, along with possible consequences … Or perhaps the vast difference between academic opinion and moral belief.
Why do you choose to reply now? This proves you need medical attention
I think there is one crutial detail missing that supports her innocence. In those days the church was keeping a book on everyone born in the congregation, which there was few of even if not just one after 1558. People were super sharp about having a baby baptised as soon as possible to make sure if it dies (what they did quite frequently) it goes to heaven. Funerals were exlusively ecclesiastic territorry too. Subsecvently the church had a closer eye on the population count than most states today have.
If tens of servants vanished let alone hundreds they would have a track of the people missing …they did’t. No researcher ever found any. Remember, In a feudal society non-nobles cannot just relocate at their own volition. Everyone was acounted for. We do not have a single name of a supposed victim for real.
People who swear are smarter than those who do not.
Case. In. Point.
well she was terryfying
I’m not going to make this crazy long. But a couple things. I’m a feminist and I find this whole argument terribly flimsy… I know it’s all up for speculation, and I don’t doubt the possibility of her innocence… I simply am not sold on it with your argument.
1.) Excusing the cruelty and beatings as “normal” for the time doesn’t make her innocent. Did they just make up 650+ servants being buried? Not improbable but it seems pretty unlikely.
2.) She didn’t bathe in blood. She reportedly showered, from a victim suspended above her, bleeding to death. She was obsessed with her beauty (you didn’t say this either), and was reported to have thought that the blood kept her skin young. Indeed, she was incredibly beautiful by many accounts… So coagulation isn’t a problem. This is actually pretty basic lore about her, I’m surprised it didn’t come up even to be discredited.
Not saying she wasn’t but you don’t earn a reputation like this just because you’re a rich woman. It was actually really common for nobles to die in war and leave the wives in charge. Many women that weren’t princesses (ie: bargaining chips for monarchs) actually had more power than history likes to show, so the whole having enemies just because she is rich doesn’t add up.
Maybe she wasn’t as terrible as they say she was, but I have no doubt in my mind that she reveled in the suffering of those below her. Which really, makes her pretty fucking guilty.
Psychiatrists give horrible pills with horrible side effects that rarely work.
Killing and abuse must have taken place, but who really cared back then? It was probably more common then we believe, but Bathory got punished only cause it was a nobles daughter who were victims. I think alot of the accusations were false, but it is likely alot of girls were beaten to death, or the work environment she provided was real harsh.
That explains “turkish way” i guess
Lol