October 12, 2021 • 28 mins
Elizabeth Báthory is famous for being one of history's most prolific serial killers, a Hungarian Countess who tortured and slaughtered hundreds of young women, protected by her power as a noble. But what is the story is a little more complicated? What if the political power that allegedly protected her was actually a target for her political enemies? Is it possible that history's favorite murderess is actually innocent?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky. Listener discretion is advised.
In the more than two years since I've been putting
Noble Blood out into the world, by far, the most
frequently requested subject for me to cover is the Hungarian
(00:22):
countess Elizabeth Bathory. Chances are if you're a fan of
historical trivia or true crime corners of the Internet, you
at least have a passing familiarity with Bathory. She's often positioned,
including by the Guinness Book of World Records, as the
most prolific female serial killer of all time. In the
(00:44):
centuries since Elizabeth Bathory's life, her story has traveled as
folklore and word of mouth, horror story, as pop history,
and now spooky Internet irreverence. The basic version of the
narrative is that Elizabeth Bathory was a wealthy and powerful
countess in sixteenth and seventeenth century Hungary, and that her
(01:08):
estates became nightmare dens of sadistic torture that she inflicted
first on her servant girls and then eventually as time
went on and the daughters of noblemen too young girls
who had been sent to her palaces to learn basic
courtly etiquette. Stories of Elizabeth Bathory often include gruesome details
(01:31):
of her torture. That she would take a girl and
strip her naked before covering her with honey and sending
her out into the fields to be devoured by insects.
Bathory would stick needles beneath fingernails, cut off flesh, whip
servants with stinging nettles, or forced girls naked into freezing
(01:52):
ice baths. There was seemingly no end to Elizabeth Bathori's depravity,
nor to her creative means of indulging her sadism. Most
popular culture depictions of Elizabeth Bathory also include one very
specific element that the countess not only murdered young girls,
(02:15):
but that she bathed in their blood, believing that it
would keep her forever young and beautiful. It's the perfect detail,
incredibly visual and cinematic. Can't you picture it now, the
aging Countess, vain and ever fearful, lowering herself into a
(02:35):
golden tub filled with crimson. It gives her motivation for
the murders beyond insanity or mere sadism. It makes the
story unforgettable. If you know the name Elizabeth Bathory, at all.
It's because, you know, Elizabeth Bathory, the bloody serial killer,
(02:56):
the blood countess. But what if we been wrong about
her this entire time? What if Elizabeth Bathory was completely innocent.
In recent years, a few scholars have attempted to reframe
Elizabeth Bathory not as a murderous but as a victim
of circumstances, manipulated by the Hungarian crown and the encroaching
(03:22):
Habsburg power, punished for being a wealthy and powerful woman
in the wrong family, conveniently disposed of on trumped up charges.
Those scholars suggest that, as so often happens, hundreds of
years of rumors and exaggeration have taken root, and when
(03:42):
a story is better than the truth, well that story
is almost impossible to kill. Now, personally, I'm not certain
I'm fully convinced one way or the other. I think
the problem with certain pieces of evidence is that they
can be explained reasonably in either direction. But to put
(04:02):
the case into modern legal parlance, there's certainly reasonable doubt,
and I think it's worth trying to understand why maybe
a famous historical monster might have just been a woman
all along. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is noble blood.
(04:26):
In the sixteenth century, when Elizabeth Bathory was born, Transylvania
was a principality within the Kingdom of Hungary. The Holy
Roman Empire was a looming neighbor ruled by the powerful
Habsburg family. At certain periods in history, Hungary and the
Holy Roman Empire would have the same monarch. That's what
(04:47):
the Habsburgs certainly wanted to consolidate their power, for their
leader not only to be emperor but also king of Hungary,
and why not Lithuania and Poland as well. Transylvan Out
was a pebble in their shoe, a stronghold for Eastern
independence from Western Habsburg influence of these little principalities, and
(05:09):
the Bathories were one of the most influential families across
those principalities. Elizabeth born August seventh, fifteen sixty was a
product of an illustrious lineage. Her paternal uncle was the Voivode,
or highest ranking official of Transylvania. Her father was a baron.
(05:30):
Elizabeth's mother was also a Bathory, and on that side,
her grandfather was a previous by vote of Transylvania, and
her uncle, Stephen Bathory, was the King of Poland and
Grand Duke of Lithuania. Some here that Elizabeth's parents were
both Bathories, and we've that into their Halloween story about her,
(05:51):
that being in bred was the source of her mental illness,
her sadism. There were reports of her having epilepsy in
her childhood. Surely that too, some believe is the result
of her parents blood being too close. Fortunately for Elizabeth,
her parents were from two extremely distant branches of the family,
(06:12):
though the name had been preserved. Her mother and father
were separated from their last common ancestor by seven generations
and two hundred years. But Elizabeth was sickly as a
young child, prone to seizures that were diagnosed in the
sixteenth century as falling sickness. Some say that one of
(06:32):
the treatments involved opening a cut and letting the blood
of a healthy person enter the body, and so that too,
is used as a morbid little detail to foreshadow Elizabeth's
alleged blood lust. The rumors about Elizabeth Bathory's life are countless,
and I've found that most sources on the Internet either
(06:53):
willfully forego actual evidence or just except that Elizabeth today
lives more as folklore than an actual historical figure. One
of the rumors is that when Elizabeth was thirteen, she
had an affair with a peasant boy and gave birth
(07:15):
to a child. There's no evidence of that. What we
do know is that when she was ten years old,
she was engaged to Count Ference Nadashti, who was five
years older than her and from one of the most
powerful noble families over in the Kingdom of Hungary. The
pair were married when Elizabeth was fifteen and Ference was twenty,
(07:35):
at an event with four thousand and five hundred guests
in attendance. We don't know if the pair were in love,
but they seemed to at least like each other well
enough to have five known children, three of whom survived
to adulthood. But the purpose of their marriage, like most
early modern marriages, wasn't happiness. This marriage codified an incredibly
(07:59):
lucrative allotans, one that would make the couple two of
the most powerful figures in Eastern Europe at the time,
with enough the states scattered across Hungary that an army
could traverse the country by using their properties as protective
lily pads. If it's difficult for you to visualize the
very complicated geopolitics at the time. Think of Transylvania and
(08:23):
Hungary as a square rectangle situation. All squares are rectangles,
but not all rectangles are squares. Transylvania was a part
of Hungary, but there were parts of the Kingdom of
Hungary that existed outside of Transylvania. At the start of
the sixteen hundreds, when Elizabeth was reaching middle age, Habsburg
(08:43):
Emperor Rudolph the Second inherited and claimed both the titles
of Holy Roman Emperor and King of Hungary. There was
so much resentment and an anti Hapsburg independence movie in
Transylvania that eventually forced Rudolph to abdicate Hungarian throne and
give it to his brother Matthias. It was still in
(09:04):
the family, but hopefully people would get less mad if
it was more of a nominally separate kingdom. In sixteen
o four, after twenty nine years of marriage, Count Ference
died while off fighting the Ottoman invasion of Hungary, and
Elizabeth Bathory became one of the wealthiest and most powerful
women in the kingdom. She was sitting on incredibly important
(09:28):
land that she inherited from her husband's powerful Hungarian family.
States that she was already more than comfortable managing. She
had managed them for decades while her husband was off fighting.
The properties were vast, and she was so wealthy that
even King Matthias the Second was in debt to her. Meanwhile,
over in Transylvania, her nephew, Gabor Bathory was being crowned prince.
(09:53):
With Elizabeth's wealth and rank, Gabor seemed like an even
bigger threat to the Habsburgs of Hungary. Her estates were huge,
stretching from the west to the southeast of the Hungarian Kingdom.
If the Bathories wanted, Elizabeth could grant Gobor safe passage
across the entire kingdom, giving him access to possibly claiming
(10:15):
the Polish throne or even the Hungarian throne. The Bathories
were a threat. This is the larger context in which
Elizabeth Bathory was accused of terrible things. On December, the
Palatine of Hungary, Gregory Thorzo, stormed into Elizabeth Bathories castle
(10:41):
with a regiment of guards. The Palatine is the highest
ranking official of the country, think of him almost like
a prime minister, and had been ordered by King Matthias
to investigate the terrible rumors about the widow Elizabeth Bathory.
Thorso had succeeded in his task and then some, eventually
(11:02):
gathering hundreds of testimonies, all of which were in agreement
that Elizabeth Bathory was a murderer. Thorso would right that
he burst into the castle and found Elizabeth Bathory in
the act of torture, with one young girl already dead
at her feet and another strung up and being flayed.
But in truth, according to the documentation of the secretary
(11:26):
at the time, Bathory was actually just eating dinner. It's
hard to find where the stories of Elizabeth Bathory murderer began.
One visiting priest had written to the king back when
Elizabeth's husband was still alive, saying that he saw the
two of them being noticeably cruel to their servants. The
(11:46):
local Lutheran pastor, Janis Picenus seemed to delight in accusing
Elizabeth of witchcraft and cannibalism. He even wrote to Thurso
saying that Elizabeth would transform into a black ut and
that she would stalk him at night. His clearly exaggerated
outrage doesn't seem particularly easy to explain, at least from
(12:09):
a religious perspective. Though Elizabeth's husband was Lutheran, Elizabeth herself
remained a lifelong Calvinist, just like her mother had been.
But even still, she didn't renounce Lutheranism or hinder the
religious freedom of the Lutherans on her land. Her records
as a landowner indicate that she built schools and educated ministers,
(12:31):
and supported Lutheranism to the healthy extent that the local
pastor should have been content with. Still, it's worth noting
that before Thorso's investigation into Bathory, there were no formal
legal complaints made against her at any time from either
anyone on her estate or in her community, and this
was during a period when the Hungarian legal system kept
(12:53):
meticulous records of all grapes and grievances. It was just
rumors that swirled around her that motivated Thorso to move
on Bathory. King Matthias authorized Thorzo to investigate the rumors
around Bathory at the start of six and the Palatine
(13:13):
sent two notaries out into the Hungarian territories to gather
whatever evidence they could. By October there were fifty two witnesses. Later,
after Bathori's arrest, there would be over three hundred. The
stories were damning Elizabeth Bathory, they said, like to torture
(13:34):
young girls, that she mutilated even bit them, that she
beat and stabbed and starved them. Almost all of the testimony,
it's worth pointing out, was word of mouth hearsay from
people who had heard of Bathoris abuse, or from people
who had had relatives who had entered service at the
(13:54):
castle but who had never emerged. Elizabeth was arrested that
night December in her castle, along with four of her servants,
her so called accomplices. Thorso tortured all of the servants
into confessing to assisting the countess with various murders, although
all four gave differing numbers of victims, ranging from twenty
(14:18):
to sixty. One of the later witnesses would allege that
an officer had told him that he had seen a ledger,
the Countess's own ledger of her murders, and that they
numbered in these six hundreds. Under torture, one of the
countess's servants gave Thorso the location of a young girl's
body buried on the estate. Before the torture, the servant
(14:42):
had maintained that the young girl was one of eight
who had died of the plague earlier that fall. Bristling
with excitement, Thurso and his men dug up the body,
still fairly well preserved, having been buried in the cold
dirt of autumn. There's a hoisted the decomposing, play gritten
corpse onto a wooden platform in front of the castle,
(15:04):
and he invited all the servants and noblemen of neighboring
estates to come and see, Come, be witness see the
naked tortured body of one of the Countess's victims. Elizabeth
herself was forced to stand there in full view a
punishment of public humiliation. Thorso shouted at her to look
(15:25):
at her poor victim. Though the body was more than
two months old, Thorso claimed that it was fresh, which
no doubt colored the opinions of onlookers when it came
to make their statements about Elizabeth's brutal torture. After all,
they had seen the Countess standing next to a clearly
mutilated body. Though King Matthias urged Thurzo to follow the
(15:54):
strictest legal procedures, Thurso ignored the wreck. He claimed to
spare the Bathory family the shame of a public trial
and to preempt the order of execution. The servants that
had been arrested, were tried and quickly put to death.
But though Elizabeth had private hearings, she never had the
(16:14):
large public trial that would have been standard at the time.
She wasn't permitted to make a defense or speak on
her own behalf. There was never a sentencing. Thurzo continued
to claim that it was a mercy that if she
went to trial she would be put to death instead.
Without a verdict, she was merely detained under house arrest
(16:36):
at the castle for the rest of her life. The
rumors would only continue and grow. The thorso wrote to
the king and said that she was bricked into a
locked room. Visiting priests at the castle would write and
remark that she actually moved freely about the castle, at
least until she died three years later at age fifty four.
(17:02):
The story could be complete there. Elizabeth Bathori as a murderess,
for whom the extent of her crimes will never be
fully known. A woman who was cruel and sadistic, who
killed as many servants as she could because she could
protected by her wealthy and powerful family. Only in the end,
(17:23):
when she was no longer fully protected, her wealth and
privilege at least allowed her to remain comfortable under house arrest,
guilty and disgraced, but not hanged by the neck. But
in recent years, Hungarian scholars in particular, have found that
Bathori's case is less cut and dry than some people
(17:43):
might believe. I don't know if there's a smoking gun
one way or the other, but I think it's interesting
and important enough to examine that there might be more
gray area than originally meets the eye. Doctor Irma Shadeki
Kardo's posits that the quote I witness testimony of the
hundreds of witnesses against Elizabeth Bathory are less compelling than
(18:06):
they might originally seem. For one thorso had restricted his
investigation only to the parts of the Hungarian Kingdom where
he had full power and where many of the tenants
were beholden to him. He obtained confessions under torture. The
vast vast majority of the testimony gathered is hearsay. There
(18:27):
are no firsthand accounts of anyone who was actually abused
by the Countess. Much of the later testimony came after
the witnesses would have seen a decomposing corpse on a
platform with Elizabeth standing beside it, while Thorzo was shouting
that this was one of her victims. I think that
would buy us anyone a little, at least subconsciously. But again,
(18:50):
though Thorso claimed that his lack of public trial was
to protect Elizabeth, it also conveniently prevented any recorded defense.
Her disgrace, and the rippling disgrace of the entire Bathory
family was irreconcilable. It was also fairly convenient for Thorso
that his own son, Imre, happened to be the same
(19:12):
age as Elizabeth's son, Paul. Paul, being the scion of
two powerful families, would easily eclipse Thorso's son when it
came to Hungarian politics, unless, of course, the Bathories family
fortunes changed. Dr shadeky Cardo's also raises a fascinating point
(19:37):
that many of the so called tortures that Bathory was
reported to have engaged in were actually well recorded medical
procedures for the sixteen hundreds. In Transylvania, where Bathory had
grown up, in the seventeenth century, it was considered the
duty of landowners and nobles to provide for the welfare
(19:57):
of their tenants and servants. The lady of the house
was responsible for the women and children. According to Schadecki Cardo's,
Elizabeth's letters aren't blood chilling manifestoes of a sadistic murderer,
their normal, reasonable business management. Elizabeth writes, petitioning the King
for her tenants, she installed in each of her estates
(20:20):
herbalists and healers, and appointed the same personal healer that
she used for her own children for her underlings. Coming
from Transylvania, Elizabeth was familiar with a more hands on
approach to herbal medicine and healing methods that would have
been unfamiliar to the local people when she moved with
her husband to western Hungary. One of Elizabeth's most famous,
(20:44):
quote unquote accomplices was a woman named Anna Darbuglia, a
Croatian midwife and healer and one of the few women
who performed rudimentary surgeons on her patients so that the
female patients wouldn't have to be treated by men. It
would have been a rare and strange sight, maybe for
some to see a woman doing something like blood letting,
(21:04):
even though blood letting at the time was a conventionally
accepted medical procedure. The medical texts of a contemporary Transylvanian
doctor Fence Papa peris contain a number of procedures that,
to the untrained eye, or to an eye mistrustful of
a woman holding a knife, might look suspiciously like torture.
(21:27):
Necrotic tissue needed to be cut from healthy flesh to
prevent infection from spreading. Maggots were frequent. Blight boils and
abscesses had to be lanced. Wounds needed to be cauterized
with red hot irons. For some ailments, hot cupping was recommended,
and for those with fever or rubonic plague, a weak,
(21:50):
sweating body would be shocked with an ice cold bath.
Singing nettles were an old wives cure for rheumatism and arthritis.
Some seamstresses suffered from boils under their nail beds, a
condition known as finger nail poison. The treatment was lancing
finger tips under the nails with needles. Hearing those treatments
(22:14):
out of context, and particularly if they were unfamiliar or
gasped done by a woman, you can almost see where
the stories of torture might have begun. Shadeki Cardos also
points out that the deaths that Dorzo ascribes to Elizabeth
happened to coincide with outbreaks of disease. The eight girls
(22:36):
whom Thurzo built his case around had possibly actually died
of the plague. They had been quarantined together and treated
by two of Elizabeth's servants, and they had died when
Elizabeth wasn't even at the castle. Elizabeth was frequently touring
between her estates. The pace and pre neticism with which
(22:56):
the rumors of Elizabeth Bathery's guilt took hold of the
Countryside could also possibly point to Thurso's haste to make
her guilt quote common knowledge. Common knowledge was accepted evidence
in court at the time. Elizabeth's confinement meant that her
relatives were able to take control of her valuable properties
(23:18):
a few of her son in law's new in advance
of impending quote surprise arrest. They even helped him to
arrange it. King Matthias's debts that he owed to Elizabeth
were conveniently dissolved. I don't know exactly where I stand
(23:39):
when it comes to a proclamation that Elizabeth Bathory was
either a sadistic monster or completely innocent a framed woman. Personally,
I tend to find it a little easier to believe
that a few hundred people living in close and unhygienic
quarters at the start of the sixteen hundreds were more
likely to have died from the plague than from a
(24:02):
cruel and unusual Lady Dracula. People were suspicious of powerful women,
and especially of powerful women with regional and religious differences.
Rumors were easy to spread, and Elizabeth Bathi's downfall financially
benefited many people in power. But on the other hand,
(24:23):
I also don't find it difficult to believe that a wealthy,
noble woman might have been exceedingly cruel, abusive, maybe even
deadly in her treatment of servants. You'll notice that throughout
this I didn't mention the whole bathing in blood thing. Well,
that's because that's objectively a complete fabrication. There were absolutely
(24:47):
no contemporary witnesses who alleged even rumors of Elizabeth bathing
in the blood of young women to preserve her own youth,
or doing anything with their blood. That rumor came over
a hundred years later during the Counter Reformation. In seventeen
twenty nine, the Hungarian Jesuit priests Laslow Taroshi used the
(25:08):
by then infamous saga of Elizabeth Bathory as a parable
to discuss the dangers of becoming Protestant. He wrote that
she was a Catholic who had broken bad and converted
to Lutheranism, and that unleashed in her a blood lust
that caused her, this demented Protestant to sadistically torture servants
(25:30):
and bathe in young blood in order to try to
stay young herself. It's a compelling detail, and kudos to
Taroshi for his imaginative creativity that still persists in the
popular culture today. But it's just not true. Elizabeth wasn't
even ever Lutheran. She was never elapsed Catholic. As I mentioned,
(25:51):
she was a lifelong Calvinist. So no blood lust. But
as for the murders, it's up to you to decide
what's to and what's merely rumor. That's the saga of
(26:12):
Elizabeth Bathory. But keep listening after a brief sponsor break
to hear a little bit more about her legacy. Lists
of pop history fun facts are littered with the type
(26:33):
of historical anecdote that seems like it should be true,
and so these anecdotes are just repeated often enough that
they become fact. One of those seems like it might
as well be true is the idea that, upon hearing
the rumors of this Eastern European countess from Transylvania, an
Irish author named Bram Stoker, while staying on the misty
(26:56):
northern coast of Scotland, was inspired to write Us to
worry about a man who sucked blood from others to survive.
His book, of course, became Dracula. Now there's no real
consensus on whether Bathory directly or even indirectly inspired Stoker,
but Bathory did inspire another recent character in pop culture.
(27:20):
In the video game Resident Evil Village, there's a glamorous
woman with a large black hat and sweeping white gown
who stands at over nine ft tall. The character is
named Countess Alcina or Lady Dimitrescu, and she became an
almost instant fan favorite. A villainist who rules over a
(27:44):
feudal peasantry with allegations of murder and cannibalism swirling around
her incredibly glamorous and incredibly tall person. Noble Blood is
a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild
(28:04):
from Aaron Mankey. The show is written and hosted by
Dana Schwartz. Executive producers include Aaron Mankey. Alex Williams and
Matt Frederick. The show is produced by rema il Keali
and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at
Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the
show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more
(28:25):
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
M
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky. Listener discretion is advised.
In the more than two years since I've been putting
Noble Blood out into the world, by far, the most
frequently requested subject for me to cover is the Hungarian
(00:22):
countess Elizabeth Bathory. Chances are if you're a fan of
historical trivia or true crime corners of the Internet, you
at least have a passing familiarity with Bathory. She's often positioned,
including by the Guinness Book of World Records, as the
most prolific female serial killer of all time. In the
(00:44):
centuries since Elizabeth Bathory's life, her story has traveled as
folklore and word of mouth, horror story, as pop history,
and now spooky Internet irreverence. The basic version of the
narrative is that Elizabeth Bathory was a wealthy and powerful
countess in sixteenth and seventeenth century Hungary, and that her
(01:08):
estates became nightmare dens of sadistic torture that she inflicted
first on her servant girls and then eventually as time
went on and the daughters of noblemen too young girls
who had been sent to her palaces to learn basic
courtly etiquette. Stories of Elizabeth Bathory often include gruesome details
(01:31):
of her torture. That she would take a girl and
strip her naked before covering her with honey and sending
her out into the fields to be devoured by insects.
Bathory would stick needles beneath fingernails, cut off flesh, whip
servants with stinging nettles, or forced girls naked into freezing
(01:52):
ice baths. There was seemingly no end to Elizabeth Bathori's depravity,
nor to her creative means of indulging her sadism. Most
popular culture depictions of Elizabeth Bathory also include one very
specific element that the countess not only murdered young girls,
(02:15):
but that she bathed in their blood, believing that it
would keep her forever young and beautiful. It's the perfect detail,
incredibly visual and cinematic. Can't you picture it now, the
aging Countess, vain and ever fearful, lowering herself into a
(02:35):
golden tub filled with crimson. It gives her motivation for
the murders beyond insanity or mere sadism. It makes the
story unforgettable. If you know the name Elizabeth Bathory, at all.
It's because, you know, Elizabeth Bathory, the bloody serial killer,
(02:56):
the blood countess. But what if we been wrong about
her this entire time? What if Elizabeth Bathory was completely innocent.
In recent years, a few scholars have attempted to reframe
Elizabeth Bathory not as a murderous but as a victim
of circumstances, manipulated by the Hungarian crown and the encroaching
(03:22):
Habsburg power, punished for being a wealthy and powerful woman
in the wrong family, conveniently disposed of on trumped up charges.
Those scholars suggest that, as so often happens, hundreds of
years of rumors and exaggeration have taken root, and when
(03:42):
a story is better than the truth, well that story
is almost impossible to kill. Now, personally, I'm not certain
I'm fully convinced one way or the other. I think
the problem with certain pieces of evidence is that they
can be explained reasonably in either direction. But to put
(04:02):
the case into modern legal parlance, there's certainly reasonable doubt,
and I think it's worth trying to understand why maybe
a famous historical monster might have just been a woman
all along. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is noble blood.
(04:26):
In the sixteenth century, when Elizabeth Bathory was born, Transylvania
was a principality within the Kingdom of Hungary. The Holy
Roman Empire was a looming neighbor ruled by the powerful
Habsburg family. At certain periods in history, Hungary and the
Holy Roman Empire would have the same monarch. That's what
(04:47):
the Habsburgs certainly wanted to consolidate their power, for their
leader not only to be emperor but also king of Hungary,
and why not Lithuania and Poland as well. Transylvan Out
was a pebble in their shoe, a stronghold for Eastern
independence from Western Habsburg influence of these little principalities, and
(05:09):
the Bathories were one of the most influential families across
those principalities. Elizabeth born August seventh, fifteen sixty was a
product of an illustrious lineage. Her paternal uncle was the Voivode,
or highest ranking official of Transylvania. Her father was a baron.
(05:30):
Elizabeth's mother was also a Bathory, and on that side,
her grandfather was a previous by vote of Transylvania, and
her uncle, Stephen Bathory, was the King of Poland and
Grand Duke of Lithuania. Some here that Elizabeth's parents were
both Bathories, and we've that into their Halloween story about her,
(05:51):
that being in bred was the source of her mental illness,
her sadism. There were reports of her having epilepsy in
her childhood. Surely that too, some believe is the result
of her parents blood being too close. Fortunately for Elizabeth,
her parents were from two extremely distant branches of the family,
(06:12):
though the name had been preserved. Her mother and father
were separated from their last common ancestor by seven generations
and two hundred years. But Elizabeth was sickly as a
young child, prone to seizures that were diagnosed in the
sixteenth century as falling sickness. Some say that one of
(06:32):
the treatments involved opening a cut and letting the blood
of a healthy person enter the body, and so that too,
is used as a morbid little detail to foreshadow Elizabeth's
alleged blood lust. The rumors about Elizabeth Bathory's life are countless,
and I've found that most sources on the Internet either
(06:53):
willfully forego actual evidence or just except that Elizabeth today
lives more as folklore than an actual historical figure. One
of the rumors is that when Elizabeth was thirteen, she
had an affair with a peasant boy and gave birth
(07:15):
to a child. There's no evidence of that. What we
do know is that when she was ten years old,
she was engaged to Count Ference Nadashti, who was five
years older than her and from one of the most
powerful noble families over in the Kingdom of Hungary. The
pair were married when Elizabeth was fifteen and Ference was twenty,
(07:35):
at an event with four thousand and five hundred guests
in attendance. We don't know if the pair were in love,
but they seemed to at least like each other well
enough to have five known children, three of whom survived
to adulthood. But the purpose of their marriage, like most
early modern marriages, wasn't happiness. This marriage codified an incredibly
(07:59):
lucrative allotans, one that would make the couple two of
the most powerful figures in Eastern Europe at the time,
with enough the states scattered across Hungary that an army
could traverse the country by using their properties as protective
lily pads. If it's difficult for you to visualize the
very complicated geopolitics at the time. Think of Transylvania and
(08:23):
Hungary as a square rectangle situation. All squares are rectangles,
but not all rectangles are squares. Transylvania was a part
of Hungary, but there were parts of the Kingdom of
Hungary that existed outside of Transylvania. At the start of
the sixteen hundreds, when Elizabeth was reaching middle age, Habsburg
(08:43):
Emperor Rudolph the Second inherited and claimed both the titles
of Holy Roman Emperor and King of Hungary. There was
so much resentment and an anti Hapsburg independence movie in
Transylvania that eventually forced Rudolph to abdicate Hungarian throne and
give it to his brother Matthias. It was still in
(09:04):
the family, but hopefully people would get less mad if
it was more of a nominally separate kingdom. In sixteen
o four, after twenty nine years of marriage, Count Ference
died while off fighting the Ottoman invasion of Hungary, and
Elizabeth Bathory became one of the wealthiest and most powerful
women in the kingdom. She was sitting on incredibly important
(09:28):
land that she inherited from her husband's powerful Hungarian family.
States that she was already more than comfortable managing. She
had managed them for decades while her husband was off fighting.
The properties were vast, and she was so wealthy that
even King Matthias the Second was in debt to her. Meanwhile,
over in Transylvania, her nephew, Gabor Bathory was being crowned prince.
(09:53):
With Elizabeth's wealth and rank, Gabor seemed like an even
bigger threat to the Habsburgs of Hungary. Her estates were huge,
stretching from the west to the southeast of the Hungarian Kingdom.
If the Bathories wanted, Elizabeth could grant Gobor safe passage
across the entire kingdom, giving him access to possibly claiming
(10:15):
the Polish throne or even the Hungarian throne. The Bathories
were a threat. This is the larger context in which
Elizabeth Bathory was accused of terrible things. On December, the
Palatine of Hungary, Gregory Thorzo, stormed into Elizabeth Bathories castle
(10:41):
with a regiment of guards. The Palatine is the highest
ranking official of the country, think of him almost like
a prime minister, and had been ordered by King Matthias
to investigate the terrible rumors about the widow Elizabeth Bathory.
Thorso had succeeded in his task and then some, eventually
(11:02):
gathering hundreds of testimonies, all of which were in agreement
that Elizabeth Bathory was a murderer. Thorso would right that
he burst into the castle and found Elizabeth Bathory in
the act of torture, with one young girl already dead
at her feet and another strung up and being flayed.
But in truth, according to the documentation of the secretary
(11:26):
at the time, Bathory was actually just eating dinner. It's
hard to find where the stories of Elizabeth Bathory murderer began.
One visiting priest had written to the king back when
Elizabeth's husband was still alive, saying that he saw the
two of them being noticeably cruel to their servants. The
(11:46):
local Lutheran pastor, Janis Picenus seemed to delight in accusing
Elizabeth of witchcraft and cannibalism. He even wrote to Thurso
saying that Elizabeth would transform into a black ut and
that she would stalk him at night. His clearly exaggerated
outrage doesn't seem particularly easy to explain, at least from
(12:09):
a religious perspective. Though Elizabeth's husband was Lutheran, Elizabeth herself
remained a lifelong Calvinist, just like her mother had been.
But even still, she didn't renounce Lutheranism or hinder the
religious freedom of the Lutherans on her land. Her records
as a landowner indicate that she built schools and educated ministers,
(12:31):
and supported Lutheranism to the healthy extent that the local
pastor should have been content with. Still, it's worth noting
that before Thorso's investigation into Bathory, there were no formal
legal complaints made against her at any time from either
anyone on her estate or in her community, and this
was during a period when the Hungarian legal system kept
(12:53):
meticulous records of all grapes and grievances. It was just
rumors that swirled around her that motivated Thorso to move
on Bathory. King Matthias authorized Thorzo to investigate the rumors
around Bathory at the start of six and the Palatine
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sent two notaries out into the Hungarian territories to gather
whatever evidence they could. By October there were fifty two witnesses. Later,
after Bathori's arrest, there would be over three hundred. The
stories were damning Elizabeth Bathory, they said, like to torture
(13:34):
young girls, that she mutilated even bit them, that she
beat and stabbed and starved them. Almost all of the testimony,
it's worth pointing out, was word of mouth hearsay from
people who had heard of Bathoris abuse, or from people
who had had relatives who had entered service at the
(13:54):
castle but who had never emerged. Elizabeth was arrested that
night December in her castle, along with four of her servants,
her so called accomplices. Thorso tortured all of the servants
into confessing to assisting the countess with various murders, although
all four gave differing numbers of victims, ranging from twenty
(14:18):
to sixty. One of the later witnesses would allege that
an officer had told him that he had seen a ledger,
the Countess's own ledger of her murders, and that they
numbered in these six hundreds. Under torture, one of the
countess's servants gave Thorso the location of a young girl's
body buried on the estate. Before the torture, the servant
(14:42):
had maintained that the young girl was one of eight
who had died of the plague earlier that fall. Bristling
with excitement, Thurso and his men dug up the body,
still fairly well preserved, having been buried in the cold
dirt of autumn. There's a hoisted the decomposing, play gritten
corpse onto a wooden platform in front of the castle,
(15:04):
and he invited all the servants and noblemen of neighboring
estates to come and see, Come, be witness see the
naked tortured body of one of the Countess's victims. Elizabeth
herself was forced to stand there in full view a
punishment of public humiliation. Thorso shouted at her to look
(15:25):
at her poor victim. Though the body was more than
two months old, Thorso claimed that it was fresh, which
no doubt colored the opinions of onlookers when it came
to make their statements about Elizabeth's brutal torture. After all,
they had seen the Countess standing next to a clearly
mutilated body. Though King Matthias urged Thurzo to follow the
(15:54):
strictest legal procedures, Thurso ignored the wreck. He claimed to
spare the Bathory family the shame of a public trial
and to preempt the order of execution. The servants that
had been arrested, were tried and quickly put to death.
But though Elizabeth had private hearings, she never had the
(16:14):
large public trial that would have been standard at the time.
She wasn't permitted to make a defense or speak on
her own behalf. There was never a sentencing. Thurzo continued
to claim that it was a mercy that if she
went to trial she would be put to death instead.
Without a verdict, she was merely detained under house arrest
(16:36):
at the castle for the rest of her life. The
rumors would only continue and grow. The thorso wrote to
the king and said that she was bricked into a
locked room. Visiting priests at the castle would write and
remark that she actually moved freely about the castle, at
least until she died three years later at age fifty four.
(17:02):
The story could be complete there. Elizabeth Bathori as a murderess,
for whom the extent of her crimes will never be
fully known. A woman who was cruel and sadistic, who
killed as many servants as she could because she could
protected by her wealthy and powerful family. Only in the end,
(17:23):
when she was no longer fully protected, her wealth and
privilege at least allowed her to remain comfortable under house arrest,
guilty and disgraced, but not hanged by the neck. But
in recent years, Hungarian scholars in particular, have found that
Bathori's case is less cut and dry than some people
(17:43):
might believe. I don't know if there's a smoking gun
one way or the other, but I think it's interesting
and important enough to examine that there might be more
gray area than originally meets the eye. Doctor Irma Shadeki
Kardo's posits that the quote I witness testimony of the
hundreds of witnesses against Elizabeth Bathory are less compelling than
(18:06):
they might originally seem. For one thorso had restricted his
investigation only to the parts of the Hungarian Kingdom where
he had full power and where many of the tenants
were beholden to him. He obtained confessions under torture. The
vast vast majority of the testimony gathered is hearsay. There
(18:27):
are no firsthand accounts of anyone who was actually abused
by the Countess. Much of the later testimony came after
the witnesses would have seen a decomposing corpse on a
platform with Elizabeth standing beside it, while Thorzo was shouting
that this was one of her victims. I think that
would buy us anyone a little, at least subconsciously. But again,
(18:50):
though Thorso claimed that his lack of public trial was
to protect Elizabeth, it also conveniently prevented any recorded defense.
Her disgrace, and the rippling disgrace of the entire Bathory
family was irreconcilable. It was also fairly convenient for Thorso
that his own son, Imre, happened to be the same
(19:12):
age as Elizabeth's son, Paul. Paul, being the scion of
two powerful families, would easily eclipse Thorso's son when it
came to Hungarian politics, unless, of course, the Bathories family
fortunes changed. Dr shadeky Cardo's also raises a fascinating point
(19:37):
that many of the so called tortures that Bathory was
reported to have engaged in were actually well recorded medical
procedures for the sixteen hundreds. In Transylvania, where Bathory had
grown up, in the seventeenth century, it was considered the
duty of landowners and nobles to provide for the welfare
(19:57):
of their tenants and servants. The lady of the house
was responsible for the women and children. According to Schadecki Cardo's,
Elizabeth's letters aren't blood chilling manifestoes of a sadistic murderer,
their normal, reasonable business management. Elizabeth writes, petitioning the King
for her tenants, she installed in each of her estates
(20:20):
herbalists and healers, and appointed the same personal healer that
she used for her own children for her underlings. Coming
from Transylvania, Elizabeth was familiar with a more hands on
approach to herbal medicine and healing methods that would have
been unfamiliar to the local people when she moved with
her husband to western Hungary. One of Elizabeth's most famous,
(20:44):
quote unquote accomplices was a woman named Anna Darbuglia, a
Croatian midwife and healer and one of the few women
who performed rudimentary surgeons on her patients so that the
female patients wouldn't have to be treated by men. It
would have been a rare and strange sight, maybe for
some to see a woman doing something like blood letting,
(21:04):
even though blood letting at the time was a conventionally
accepted medical procedure. The medical texts of a contemporary Transylvanian
doctor Fence Papa peris contain a number of procedures that,
to the untrained eye, or to an eye mistrustful of
a woman holding a knife, might look suspiciously like torture.
(21:27):
Necrotic tissue needed to be cut from healthy flesh to
prevent infection from spreading. Maggots were frequent. Blight boils and
abscesses had to be lanced. Wounds needed to be cauterized
with red hot irons. For some ailments, hot cupping was recommended,
and for those with fever or rubonic plague, a weak,
(21:50):
sweating body would be shocked with an ice cold bath.
Singing nettles were an old wives cure for rheumatism and arthritis.
Some seamstresses suffered from boils under their nail beds, a
condition known as finger nail poison. The treatment was lancing
finger tips under the nails with needles. Hearing those treatments
(22:14):
out of context, and particularly if they were unfamiliar or
gasped done by a woman, you can almost see where
the stories of torture might have begun. Shadeki Cardos also
points out that the deaths that Dorzo ascribes to Elizabeth
happened to coincide with outbreaks of disease. The eight girls
(22:36):
whom Thurzo built his case around had possibly actually died
of the plague. They had been quarantined together and treated
by two of Elizabeth's servants, and they had died when
Elizabeth wasn't even at the castle. Elizabeth was frequently touring
between her estates. The pace and pre neticism with which
(22:56):
the rumors of Elizabeth Bathery's guilt took hold of the
Countryside could also possibly point to Thurso's haste to make
her guilt quote common knowledge. Common knowledge was accepted evidence
in court at the time. Elizabeth's confinement meant that her
relatives were able to take control of her valuable properties
(23:18):
a few of her son in law's new in advance
of impending quote surprise arrest. They even helped him to
arrange it. King Matthias's debts that he owed to Elizabeth
were conveniently dissolved. I don't know exactly where I stand
(23:39):
when it comes to a proclamation that Elizabeth Bathory was
either a sadistic monster or completely innocent a framed woman. Personally,
I tend to find it a little easier to believe
that a few hundred people living in close and unhygienic
quarters at the start of the sixteen hundreds were more
likely to have died from the plague than from a
(24:02):
cruel and unusual Lady Dracula. People were suspicious of powerful women,
and especially of powerful women with regional and religious differences.
Rumors were easy to spread, and Elizabeth Bathi's downfall financially
benefited many people in power. But on the other hand,
(24:23):
I also don't find it difficult to believe that a wealthy,
noble woman might have been exceedingly cruel, abusive, maybe even
deadly in her treatment of servants. You'll notice that throughout
this I didn't mention the whole bathing in blood thing. Well,
that's because that's objectively a complete fabrication. There were absolutely
(24:47):
no contemporary witnesses who alleged even rumors of Elizabeth bathing
in the blood of young women to preserve her own youth,
or doing anything with their blood. That rumor came over
a hundred years later during the Counter Reformation. In seventeen
twenty nine, the Hungarian Jesuit priests Laslow Taroshi used the
(25:08):
by then infamous saga of Elizabeth Bathory as a parable
to discuss the dangers of becoming Protestant. He wrote that
she was a Catholic who had broken bad and converted
to Lutheranism, and that unleashed in her a blood lust
that caused her, this demented Protestant to sadistically torture servants
(25:30):
and bathe in young blood in order to try to
stay young herself. It's a compelling detail, and kudos to
Taroshi for his imaginative creativity that still persists in the
popular culture today. But it's just not true. Elizabeth wasn't
even ever Lutheran. She was never elapsed Catholic. As I mentioned,
(25:51):
she was a lifelong Calvinist. So no blood lust. But
as for the murders, it's up to you to decide
what's to and what's merely rumor. That's the saga of
(26:12):
Elizabeth Bathory. But keep listening after a brief sponsor break
to hear a little bit more about her legacy. Lists
of pop history fun facts are littered with the type
(26:33):
of historical anecdote that seems like it should be true,
and so these anecdotes are just repeated often enough that
they become fact. One of those seems like it might
as well be true is the idea that, upon hearing
the rumors of this Eastern European countess from Transylvania, an
Irish author named Bram Stoker, while staying on the misty
(26:56):
northern coast of Scotland, was inspired to write Us to
worry about a man who sucked blood from others to survive.
His book, of course, became Dracula. Now there's no real
consensus on whether Bathory directly or even indirectly inspired Stoker,
but Bathory did inspire another recent character in pop culture.
(27:20):
In the video game Resident Evil Village, there's a glamorous
woman with a large black hat and sweeping white gown
who stands at over nine ft tall. The character is
named Countess Alcina or Lady Dimitrescu, and she became an
almost instant fan favorite. A villainist who rules over a
(27:44):
feudal peasantry with allegations of murder and cannibalism swirling around
her incredibly glamorous and incredibly tall person. Noble Blood is
a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild
(28:04):
from Aaron Mankey. The show is written and hosted by
Dana Schwartz. Executive producers include Aaron Mankey. Alex Williams and
Matt Frederick. The show is produced by rema il Keali
and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at
Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the
show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more
(28:25):
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
M
Host
Dana Schwartz
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