Countess Dracula (17 page)

It has been calculated that sterility and infertility among the Hungarian ruling class, along with a low life-expectancy and the effects of intermarriage and syphilis, meant that every second generation there was a strong risk of a family being left without a male heir of an age to inherit. For more than ten years after their marriage, no children were born to the Nádasdy couple, and in this masculine society it would be the woman who was assumed to be deficient, even if the tension between notions of pious celibacy and the pressing need to procreate, not to mention simple fear of sex and venereal disease, could play havoc with a man's potency. The cures on offer for women's infertility were legion, but almost completely ineffectual. From her fellow-aristocrats and her relations Elisabeth would have borrowed or bought the
grimoires
translated from the French and on sale in Venice, or acquired the Persian and Turkish recipes carried by word-of-mouth through Transylvania. If it was fecundity she desired, then there were simple procedures – watch a cat as it licks its genitals, sprinkle a tortoise with cold water – or more costly ones, such as buying a holy relic or the appropriate magic stone. Emeralds and aquamarines, sharing as they do the colour green, would strengthen the bonds of marriage and guard the owner against infidelity by a spouse or the temptations of a would-be seducer.
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Perhaps an aphrodisiac was in order, to stimulate a husband who was a lion on the battlefield but a mouse in the bedchamber (or had he already spent his energies with the camp-followers and well-born lady admirers who had managed to have themselves smuggled to the front?). The simplest of the remedies available meant slipping fireflies into his food, or spicing his meals with red grass and mistletoe. If it was the wife whose ardour was feeble, the answer was to mix the powdered
heart of a dove, the liver of a sparrow, the womb of a swallow and a hare's kidney with drops of the husband's blood. This concoction was to be used with caution as only three thimblefuls could, it was said, madden a woman with desire. There was another source of potions and enchantments near at hand, and nineteenth-century writers, trying to explain how a virtual princess had taken the lowliest peasant women into her confidence, decided that it was during her years of barrenness that Elisabeth had fallen under the influence of the local witches who promised to cure her.

Elisabeth's contemporary, the gifted amateur healer Lady Éva Poppelová, was contemptuous of orthodox medicine as practised by men and strongly recommended that women's ailments, infertility included, were better treated by traditional folk remedies. She went further and warned, probably not without justification, that male surgeons could do more damage than good to a woman's body.
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Perhaps Elisabeth stumbled on a charm or a medicine that worked (it may even have been the clumsy attentions of the gynaecologists of Vienna which had caused Elisabeth's inability to conceive in the first place, and the herbal baths and infusions of the wise-women which restored it), for in 1585 she gave birth to a daughter, Anna, followed by Ursula and Andrew, both of whom died in infancy, another daughter, Kate, and a surviving son and heir, Paul, who was born in 1598.

The military frontier between the Hungarian and Turkish lands, a second home for Francis Nádasdy, his peers and the men at his command, was made up of a chain of fortresses stretching about a thousand kilometres from the Dalmatian coast to the borders of Transylvania.

The frontier lands bred a frontier mentality with its own values and customs, shared by both sides in the endless war. Criminals and runaway serfs could get shelter there, among the military outposts where the
robot
was not enforced and where allegiance was limited to one's own captain and comrades; booty from raids and ransoms might occasionally enrich the poorly paid, hard-bitten soldiers, but for much of the time it was harsh, unremitting discipline that kept them in check.

Francis Nádasdy excelled at his military duties and mastered the strategies of war as well as inspiring the men who served under him, who were also awed by his sheer physical strength. For the whole of his adult life, war against the Turk was his vocation and for nineteen
years his wife hardly saw him in domestic surroundings at all. (Sárvár itself, well to the west and the north of the war zones, had been raided by the Turks in 1532 and again in 1588, but Elisabeth was well guarded and the walls had been strengthened to withstand a siege.) With no hope of real political and cultural progress or social stability in Hungary, the energies of the men were of necessity devoted to war. The romantic uncertainty of ‘life on the marches' provided a setting for a cult of heroic chivalry that became the only
raison d'être.

Francis Nádasdy was first appointed Master of the King's Horse and then named Captain of the Field Army of Upper Hungary – the equivalent of a modern general. With his co-commanders Pálffy, Zrínyi and Batthyány, all four of them drawn from the country's noble elite, Nádasdy led his troops in a series of brilliant campaigns against the Ottomans under Amurad III, who honoured their enemy by nicknaming him the ‘Black Bey of Hungary'. He played a leading part in the battles of Bajcsa and Sissek and the siege of Pápa in 1600, after which he was joined in his soldiering by a fellow-Lutheran aristocrat and patriot whose seat was in Upper Hungary, Lord George Thurzó. For his own side, Francis the ‘War Thunderer' was and still is a national hero: his strength was said to be more than that of a mere human and the admiring folktales that were told have him dancing at victory celebrations with the corpses of Turks, tossing them in the air and catching them and playing bowls with their severed heads. The official iconography can be seen in the Sárvár castle frescoes which show the glowering bearded champion besieging castles and transfixing dozens of Ottoman foes on the end of his lance.

Francis had covered himself in glory in the service of Hungary and the Empire: his fame as a soldier spread all across Europe and he was honoured and rewarded in Vienna, although he quarrelled with the Habsburgs over ransoms for Turkish prisoners which he thought they had denied him and over the return of the funds which he had loaned to the Imperial Treasury. He was at the same time a man of strong principles and when the Catholic Austrian King conspired to flout Hungarian law and have the Protestant Count Illésházy dispossessed and beheaded, Nádasdy dared to declare his support for Illésházy, in opposition to his comrade-in-arms, the Habsburgs' catspaw, Thurzó, who had helped to orchestrate the plot. Lord Francis had earlier taken a risky and courageous stand against Elisabeth's own family when he protested at Prince Sigmund Báthory's judicial murdering
of the Hungarian lords during the purge of the pro-Turkish party in Transylvania in 1594.
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Francis was also a staunch patron of the Lutherans, occupying the Catholic churches on his lands by force and handing them over to worshippers of his own faith. Elisabeth had been brought up in a devoutly Calvinist household whose religious principles had inspired her brother Stephen but seem not to have been infused into the personalities of her nephew and niece, Gábor and Anna, who were raised there. Elisabeth's deeper thoughts on her faith are lost to us, but in common with most of their peers the couple's religious beliefs were probably held sincerely and not just factors of social tradition, although piety did not seem anywhere in Europe to enforce kindness or pacifism. The earnest discourse of the Reformation, with its emphasis on humility, redemption and an all-pervading awareness of retribution, can be seen not only in the many published homilies and editing works that were circulating, but in every recorded conversation, every letter and every essay.

The extreme puritanism seen in some western societies was never embraced by the Magyars, nevertheless in the sixteenth century the nobility had welcomed the Reformation, not least because it restricted the power of the Catholic king. Although the church of Rome remained the official faith, it was practised widely only in Croatia. Reformers preached to the people in their own languages and readily took on a role as the champions of the oppressed against the feudal landlords. Disputes between the noble landowning families and the priesthood were commonplace. When the aristocrats and their followers had first converted, the Protestant pastors took full advantage of their status to criticise the excesses of their rulers and to intercede zealously on behalf of the oppressed peasants, but soon the real status quo became clear again; the senior nobility had a monopoly of power in Hungary, and not even the new church would be allowed to interfere with that. The Calvinists and Lutherans excoriated one another, and for a while the Catholic influence was blotted out altogether. The priests continued to agitate, but more circumspectly, speaking out only when they were sure of the patronage of a strong local grandee.

In the early 1600s the Catholic Counter-Reformation, backed by Vienna, began to gain ground in Hungary and by the second decade of the new century the number of recusants among the aristocratic families and their serfs was growing in earnest, encouraged above all by
the efforts of the noble Protestant turned ardent Catholic propagandist, Cardinal Peter Pázmány. One of Pázmány's most energetic opponents in the theological battles of the time was Lord Francis Nádasdy's family priest, the Lutheran Stephen Magyari, who published an important tract,
On the Present Troubles Afflicting the Two Nations
(the two being Hungary and Transylvania), which provoked Pázmány to produce his even more influential
Response.
In the meantime, in the smaller world of Sárvár, Magyari was negotiating the dilemma that faced all of the favoured ecclesiasts in his position: he had been sheltered and sponsored by a noble family, but in theory at least he was also answerable to his parishioners who, whether they were themselves of the gentry, or servants, or just humble soldiers or peasants, were living at the mercy of his patron's whims. From the archives, we know that those whims included the seizing of grazing land, the forcible rededication of churches, and the collecting of punitive taxes. Perhaps there were also other, more sinister reasons for the resentment that was communicated to the priest, reasons that concerned one of the other protégées of the family.

It is known that by the turn of the seventeenth century Elisabeth Báthory had added to her personal entourage the teenage boy, Ficzkó, and, from around 1595, a widow named Anna and known as ‘Delbora' or ‘Darvulia'. Darvulia is a mystery that has perplexed all those writers on the case who have paused to consider her. In 1610 and 1611 she was posthumously accused both by the senior servants who had known her and by other witnesses of being the most evil of Elisabeth's confidantes, indeed of being the Lady's guide and inspiration in her torturing. Even Darvulia's name, which was a nickname transcribed in several different forms, is mysterious; it is not Hungarian, nor does it seem to be Slovak, unless, as has been suggested, it is a corruption of the words
dar
(give or gift) and
bol
(sickness or pain), which can be found in Croatian and Serbian, too, the implication being that she had the gift of curing sickness. Unfortunately, Slovak linguists cannot find a precedent for this ingenious etymology.

According to the evidence, while Anna Darvulia was in charge of the domestic arrangements at the castle in 1602 the pastor Michael Zvonari
ć
wrote to Gregory Pythiraeus (or Piterius), the preacher in Keresztúr near the Austrian border, to inform him that Stephen Magyari, the Sárvár deacon and the family's personal priest, had been discussing certain matters with him upon which he desired Pythiraeus' advice. In particular the two of them, with fellow-ecclesiasts, had decided that
a decision must be made ‘regarding the admonition of his excellency [Lord Francis Nádasdy] and his wife for their acts of cruelty, and there is a woman about whom everyone knows who the Lady uses as her assistant in that place'. The letter is extant and is preserved in the Lutheran archives in Budapest. It is a key document in the armoury of those who believe in Elisabeth's guilt, as it is the only confirmed example of an accusation which predates the final investigation. Even then Elisabeth's defenders have pointed out that the letter may be a reaction to Anna Darvulia's cruelty, and that Elisabeth and Francis are guilty only of harbouring her. These apologists point to the suggestion in the letter that the cruel woman be deprived of the eucharist and, if she refuses to repent, be excommunicated, as an indication that this was actually a doctrinal feud between Lutherans and Calvinists, in which, they think, Elisabeth sided with her servant and co-religionist against the cabal of local priests.

Magyari did indeed denounce the couple from the pulpit for what he termed the ‘tyrannical cruelty practised in their court by an evil woman'. (The quotation is again from Zvonari
ć
, and there is no ambiguity about the word
kegyetlen
– ‘cruelty'.) Witnesses, such as Bornemissza and Bödy, who recalled the incident years later said that Elisabeth was reprimanded in the absence of her husband and that she complained in a letter to Lord Francis that she deeply resented the behaviour of the preacher (this document has also survived, but the text is ambiguous).
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Magyari nevertheless continued to serve the family for another eight years, asking pardon from Lord Nádasdy and later delivering the eulogy at his funeral in which there was no mention of the matter. Zvonarić took over the parish on Stephen Magyari's death, but strangely when he was called upon to testify against Elisabeth in 1610 he insisted that he had himself reproached her in the meantime, but did not mention Magyari's denunciation, although it was still being talked about by the people living around Sárvár eight years after the events.
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