Countess Dracula (12 page)

Gregory Paisjártó, the second witness, had not been to the house of the Lady. He could say nothing of what happened or of the attitudes of the people there, but he knew that girls were carried out in coffins, accompanied by singing. He could say nothing regarding the causes of their deaths. He was not permitted to enter the Lady's house.

The third witness, Benedict Zalay, was the estate bookkeeper, but said he had no business in the castle and that he knew nothing of the events there.

The fourth witness, Gregory Balázs, said that he had carried girls' bodies on the cart (another version has ‘he knew that girls had been carried out in coffins on the cart') accompanied by priests singing, but he did not know what manner of death those girls had suffered.

The fifth witness was Ambrose Borbély, who was a ‘doctor' (he was probably a humble barber-surgeon, but some versions describe him as a quack or body-snatcher), and said that when the Lady summoned him he would go, but otherwise he would not. When he was there, and saw some sick girls, he gave them some medicine because the Lady ordered it, and he saw the faces and mouths of the girls, but did not know if other parts of their bodies had been beaten or tortured.

The sixth witness said he, Michael Zvonari
ć
, was the priest of the place, and confessed that when he was in the Lady's house nothing could be seen, because they were very careful and they had enough staff to ensure that it was cleaned. There was a guard on the door and none could enter without permission. And there inside she had a secret place, and he heard from others that she tortured the girls, but he himself saw nothing. He had been told that on one occasion the Lady had had three girls laid in one coffin and buried together in that way, so he had gone to the Lady and reproached her, asking why she had three maidens buried in one casket. She had replied to him that there were only two bodies in the coffin, and that she had ordered it to be done so that suspicions would not be raised that they had died
one shortly after the other. Zvonari
ć
said that he asked her not to do such things because her household was suffering as a consequence.

The seventh witness was a squire named Adam Szelesthey from the village of Dienesfalva. He stated that he had heard that the two daughters of Gábor Sittkey were killed cruelly by torture, as were the daughters of Stephen Szoltay. He also heard from a coachman called Peter that when he (or ‘she', it is not clear) was travelling from Ecsed, she was torturing the daughter of a noble for a long time. When the girl died they just buried her by the road. The same Peter said that when they returned at the time of the coronation ceremony (of King Matthias in 1608) there was an exhausted girl who had suffered torture, having been stabbed and burned with hot irons; it was in this state that they brought her from Pressburg (Bratislava). She died after a few days in Keresztúr.

The next to testify was Francis Török, a knight and magistrate, who swore that Countess Báthory had done nothing before his eyes as she had before others, but he knew that when she was travelling to Ecsed after the death of Stephen Báthory, her brother, in 1605, she had been carrying with her the corpses of three girls who had died after torture. The Countess ordered the bodies to be buried at Branisko, beyond Siroka (near the Polish border). A girl of noble birth had been brought to Ecsed and had later been killed at Keresztúr: when Elisabeth Báthory had come to Füzér the girl's relatives had asked after her and the Countess told them that she had died of the plague. On her first journey to Ecsed, he said, she had cruelly tortured a maiden in Varannó. The witness went out hunting hares and when he returned, the footmen told him, ‘Sir Francis, the girl you saw being tortured was strangled in the Turkish way.' (This was a harem technique of discreetly dispatching domestic victims in private with a silk scarf.)

Here occurs for the first time in the testimonies the oft-repeated story of the young woman from Bratislava who was employed by Elisabeth Báthory at the castle of Varannó. The Countess, who was short of serving maids, ordered this woman to dress as a maiden to wait at table. (There was a tradition that only virgin girls should attend the table at marriage feasts.) When she refused, saying she was a married woman with an infant son, named Francis, her mistress became furious and gave her a log and forced her to suckle it as if it were a child, and then she tortured the girl to death using many kinds of torment. (This story was repeated by two other witnesses at this hearing, but
the woman concerned was not named.) Before Lord Homonnay's wedding to her daughter, Török added, the Lady had two dead girls in her chambers and she caused them to be buried at night. A witness had seen the marks of torture and of burning on their bodies.

Török said that he had heard that the Lady had inserted a hot iron bar into the girls' vaginas. Her household servants had declared that she had already murdered 200 victims and he himself knew that the daughters of Sittkey had died not of the plague, but of torture. He knew too of the means employed: the Lady had had the maidens' hands tied so tightly that they turned blue and blood spurted from their fingers. ‘God alone', he said in conclusion, ‘could account for all her brutalities.'

Sir Balthazar Poky, who spoke next, was also a castle warden at Sárvár. He stated that the total number of victims involved was more than 200, who he heard had probably died of different forms of torture.

Stephen Vágy, an official at her court, then asserted that the Lady had a kind of grey cake which she had been given by sorcerers. In the centre of this cake was a wafer through which the Lady peered while she recited words against the Lord Palatine, the judge (Cziraky was named in some versions) and the head of the county. When she looked through this wafer she looked at a picture of the person she was thinking of and repeated the following formula: ‘I am looking at you through a wafer, and as I cannot see you there, do me no harm.' This would sometimes continue for an hour.

The twelfth person to be questioned was Stephen Szabó (a common name, then and now): he volunteered almost nothing. It may be of significance that Elisabeth Báthory's confidants later named the wife of a Stephen Szabó of Sárvár as one of many women who procured girls and brought them to the court.

The sixteenth witness, Andrew Lakatjártó, said that he had been told that a woman named Anna and nicknamed ‘Delbora', had tortured maidens, and that the Countess had had her kill Matthew Fekete's younger sister and others.

The nineteenth witness, Francis Bornemissza, a nobleman, related that Stephen Magyari, the former priest at Sárvár, had told the people of the village that they should remain (behind in the church after the service) for he had something important to say. He said that he was bound to warn her ladyship because a girl who was buried the day
before had died as a result of cruelty. The girl who predeceased that girl had also died from cruel treatment, and the lady should desist because God would be offended, and the priest would be damned if he failed to admonish her. That is why he suggested that the body should be exhumed and the signs upon it examined to determine how she had died. And then her ladyship said, ‘You will see, priest Stephen, that I will make you regret this. I have relatives who will not tolerate your behaviour: you are creating a shameful situation for me and exposing me to public disapproval, and I will write of this to my husband.' Then the priest answered, ‘Well, if your ladyship has powerful relations, so have I, and mine is the Lord; like it or not I will have the corpses exhumed and you can see what you have done.' Then the Lady went into the castle and wrote an aggrieved letter to her husband to the knowledge of the witness (her husband was in Vienna at the time).

The final witness in this part of the proceedings was Paul Bödy, described as a student (usually meaning an educated person with scholarly or clerical duties) and assistant castle warden at Sárvár. He claimed often to have seen the bodies of girls taken through the gates of the castle to be buried with the accompaniment of singing. He himself did not witness their deaths because he did not go into the Lady's quarters. He heard that they had died of torture. On one occasion when John Mogyoróssy, the captain-in-chief of Sárvár, and Gregory Jánossy were together, the priest Stephen Magyari was with them and they were speaking as follows: ‘Beware that, as well as punishing her, God will also punish us. We had better leave this place, and you sir, Stephen, as a man of God, it is your duty to reproach her, and if she does not cease, then you must declare it from the pulpit!' Magyari did just this and his master (Count Francis Nádasdy) was furious, but the priest eventually pacified him.

During this round of depositions the number of Elisabeth's supposed victims is estimated for the first time and rises from 175 (the figure given by Francis Nádasdy's faithful servant, Benedict Bicsérdy) to ‘more than two hundred'. The tormenting and killing, they say, was not confined to the secret places inside the Lady's properties, but went on behind the curtains of her carriages in transit between one estate and another. There is a first mention of sorcery by Stephen Vágy, who describes a ceremony of sympathetic magic that was typical of the era. Obtaining magic cakes from witches was something that many noblewomen were commonly supposed to do and the principle of framing your enemy
or victim in a transparent surface was widespread – the Elizabethan magus Dr John Dee had a ‘scrying-glass' for just such a purpose. This same Stephen Vágy was named by Elisabeth's servant Dorothy Szentes (‘Dorkó') during her trial at Byt
č
a as one of those who knew all about their mistress's secret activities.

Several of the witnesses stress the high social status of the girls who were mistreated, including the daughters of the Sittkey family, who were related by marriage to the Nádasdys. Other victims came from what the Slovaks call the Zemani, the lowest rank of the gentry.

Several also refer to the sermon preached against the Nádasdys at Sárvár in 1602. The letter that Elisabeth was said to have sent to her absent husband complaining about the local priest's interference has been preserved, but it does not specify the reason for the complaint.
⁷

When witnesses describe burials ‘accompanied by singing', this refers to the custom of hiring students or trainee priests to chant prayers and sing hymns over the bodies of paupers and plague victims. Here it implies unorthodox funeral arrangements, but of course it argues against these burials being carried out in total secrecy.

The story of the German servant-girl who was publicly humiliated by being forced to suckle a log is one which recurs throughout the testimonies and must refer to an authentic incident, although it is not clear when it happened – the dates given differ by almost a decade. It is fairly easy to rationalise what looks at first sight to be a grotesque and arbitrary ritual, lending weight to the idea that many of Elisabeth's supposed cruelties were in fact instances of imaginative punishments meted out for real misdemeanours. It makes sense to assume that Miss Modl's insolence was connected with the mood of defiance among the Germans living within the Kingdom at the end of the Bocskai rebellion when they took advantage of the Imperial anger at the Hungarians' disloyalty to express their own ingrained resentments. It was at this time that Elisabeth was humiliated by the Germans of Bratislava, who refused to let her cross the Danube on their ferries; she would have been doubly enraged at the thought of a wave of disobedience spreading through her households, and an effective means of stopping this was to parade the bare-breasted maidservant through her estates as a lesson to the other domestics. The log was a refinement that Elisabeth probably borrowed from a widespread form of punishment, the so-called ‘stone of shame', suspended from the neck of a wrongdoer who would be
displayed in a village square to expiate the crime of slander or disrespect to one's betters.

In passing we can also note that one aspect of this testimony rebuts the idea that the age was so brutalised that the death of an individual was quickly forgotten. That may have been tragically true in the case of the unbaptised babies of the poor, who up until the end of the nineteenth century were buried in unmarked graves around crude crosses at the roadside. But here the death of a girl in a brook at Kostol'any was clearly recalled from eighteen years before – if it was true.

There is perhaps a parallel between the witnesses' evidence and the visions of disorder which preoccupied the European mind and can be seen in such masterworks as Brueghel's
Fall of the Rebel Angels
and
Dulle Griet
(‘Mad Meg') and in the cruder, more lurid depictions on the walls of churches right across the troubled eastern regions of Hungary. The early modern imagination was informed – or inflamed – not only by sermons dwelling on sin and retribution, but by the sensationalist content of pamphlets and broadsheets which circulated among the just-literate and the educated alike, and which were read to those who could not decipher them. One popular theme was visions of purgatory or hell. Those of George, the son of Krizsan, from 1353 were still recounted in Báthory's time:

then George saw . . . souls who were hanged aloft with burning ropes, but when he saw better those ropes, he realised that they were rather snakes, which could bite and burn the souls, too. And each soul was hanged by eyes, ears, lips or tongue, or other parts of their bodies wherewith they had sinned . . . He saw male and female souls, who were pierced with heated iron pikes in their stomachs, but the spikes went through their vulvas or penises. Female souls were pierced through their wombs as well. The devils put heated iron tools on the penises of the male souls . . .
⁸

This second phase of the inquiry made mention in passing of some sort of feud between the aristocratic couple who presided over the Sárvár estates (and were also hereditary administrators of the whole of Vas county) and the Lutheran priests who officiated there. As well as these hints of a religious aspect to the campaign against the Countess, there is one other document, a letter, in existence which is central
to the Báthory mystery and which sheds unique light on the volatile relations between factions from the church, the noble families' courts and the local communities of Royal Hungary, as well as hinting at the secret agendas that were operating at a more rarefied level. The document is a rich mixture of the minutiae of life in the village and the imaginative landscape of the Lutheran mind. It was sent on New Year's Day, 1611, by the Vicar of
Č
achtice, the Slovak pastor Jan Abrahamides Ponický, who had latinised his family name according to humanist custom as Ponikenus, to his superior, Elias Láni or Lányi, and was found attached to the investigation papers in the Thurzó family archives, but there is no indication that it was ever formally introduced in evidence, or officially certified as a case document. Láni was the Lutheran Superintendent in the area and Thurzó's own minister. The letter was certainly passed on to Thurzó by him, which was probably Ponikenus' intention when he wrote. The handwriting, which is clear and workmanlike, is probably Ponikenus' own, and the text begins in competent Latin with the conventional lengthy expressions of respect and piety, then . . .