Countess Dracula (25 page)

To comprehend Elisabeth's haughtiness, it must not be forgotten that by the time of her birth Báthorys had been holding the highest offices in Hungary and Transylvania for 300 years. They had been warlords, counts palatine,
vajdas
and
voivodes,
senior prelates and judges, and they were the richest landowners in the Kingdom. Infamy and glory has been allotted to the Báthorys in equal parts, but much of what was written about them has been a sensationalist or sentimental travesty,
the documented events festooned with colourful ribbons of untruth and rags of wishful folk conjecture.

Of the generation that preceded Elisabeth, Count Stephen (one of many to bear the name), a gifted soldier and later Chief Justice of Hungary, had been instrumental in crushing Dózsa's peasant crusade, Christopher was made the ruler of Transylvania and Nicholas, an influential humanist, became Bishop of Vác – but there is one Báthory whose name is still displayed today above the doors of universities and charitable foundations in central Europe, whose tomb in the Wawel castle in Craców is piled with fresh flowers and covered with school emblems placed there in his honour by successive generations of students. The object of this veneration is Elisabeth's uncle, another Stephen Báthory, the King of Poland.

The Polish Diet, the Sejm, chose this Hungarian nobleman as the country's first elected monarch after the Jagiełłon dynasty died out and he has been celebrated for presiding over a glorious period in Polish history during which he consolidated the Polish position in the Baltic, defeated the Russian Tsar, Ivan the Terrible, and conquered the key port of Gdansk with the tacit support of Elizabeth I of England, with whom he corresponded and whose merchants he allowed freedom to trade in the region.

An English report sent from Vienna in 1576 mentions that a certain Baron Swendius ‘thinks much of Báthory's education, talent, prudence, industry, vigilance'
¹
, and Swendius was in the enemy camp. Stephen had studied at the University of Padua, where he was steeped in the spirit of humanism; he also knew the Habsburg court well, as his family had sent him there at an early age, as was the custom, to gain experience and influence. After the Battle of Mohács, however, he sided with the Hungarian successor King John Zápolya against the Habsburg claimant, Archduke Ferdinand, the brother of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles. Báthory became a diplomat in Zápolya's court, often travelling to Vienna for discussions and negotiations, later serving Hungary's next ruler John Sigismund, who also became the prince of the new state of Transylvania. When John Sigismund died, Báthory was the logical choice to succeed him, and he was given the Transylvanian crown. Needless to say, the Habsburgs tried to oppose him and he was able to enter his principality only at the head of an army, in 1572. When the Polish throne fell vacant four years later it was again the Habsburgs who were his rivals.

Talented though he was, the Poles did not choose Báthory for his personal qualities. Many of the Polish aristocrats did favour the Austrian claimant Archduke Maximilian, but not quite enough to force the issue at the parliament. Even after the French Prince Henri de Valois had been elected and had then abruptly abdicated, the anti-Habsburg faction remained the stronger, so Báthory's relative obscurity actually aided his claim. The Habsburgs stepped down, consoling themselves with the thought that a weak ruler on their eastern borders was better than one of their stronger western neighbours. The Turks, with whom Poland and Hungary were officially at war, also welcomed a weak and malleable king in Poland. Both the Austrians and the Ottomans regarded Transylvania as their personal fiefdom; both courts knew Báthory personally; and both thought that, once open hostilities had died down, they could pressure him into doing their bidding. In particular the Turks had supported Báthory in his claim to Transylvania, and hoped to collect their debt in the form of influence in Poland. A report in the Foreign State Papers in London says: ‘The Turk was never more peaceful than now, since he has gained the kingdom of Poland, which seems to open to him all the way to Saxony and Silesia.'
²

As is often the case, the compromise candidate proved to be a resolute leader and an expert tactician, playing the Turks and Austrians off against each other and making overtures to France and England. His wars against the Russians and the exploits of his generals were celebrated even in English broadsheets. Stephen also showed a trait which other members of his family, particularly Elisabeth's nephew Gábor, shared – a limitless ambition that was tinged with megalomania. He dreamed of creating a central and eastern European empire which would not stop at Transylvania, the Romanian Principalities and Poland, but would ultimately absorb all of Hungary, the Baltic States and Russia itself. Although such a vision may seem on the face of it impossibly grandiose, in the violent flux of international politics at that time it was a scenario that might have come about despite the Habsburgs and the Turks, providing death from disease or assassination did not intervene. A version of this picture – of a new dynastic European empire with the Báthorys at its head – tantalised the family members who came after Stephen as well as their supporters and protégés, and it may have sustained Elisabeth Báthory as she intrigued on behalf of her nephew Gábor.

King Stephen Báthory was an undoubted success as a statesman and as a military leader, and, almost uniquely, the stories told of his exploits from the seventeenth century to the present reflect the approval of those who decide the reputations of historical figures. For the Báthory princes who followed Stephen and tried to emulate him, neither fate nor remembrance was as kind. The tragicomedy of the career of the great King's nephew, Sigmund Báthory, was just as characteristic of the family and the time. This ‘handsome, stalwart weight-lifter and swordsman'
³
ruled Transylvania between 1581 and 1597, when his regime collapsed in ignominy and confusion. Sigmund was the son of Christopher, the younger brother of King Stephen of Poland and Transylvania, and much, perhaps too much, was expected of him – the curse of all the Báthory males. The late King had died childless (his consort, Anna Jagiełłowska, the Hungarians said had been ugly, old and barren) and the family had decided that of the new generation Sigmund was to be the ruler, Balthasar the soldier and Andrew the diplomat and man of God.

In the event, the dangerous morass of Transylvanian politics, the machinations of his domineering ally Bocskai and the pressure of an arranged marriage to Maria-Christina, a Habsburg princess, were too much for Sigmund. He abdicated four times and reclaimed his throne three times in eight years; having turned over the Principality to his warrior cousin Balthasar Báthory, he was pushed back into power by Bocskai and forced to execute his kinsman and wipe out the pro-Turkish faction which Balthasar had led and which had included two of his most faithful counsellors, his confidant Paul Gyulai and his tutor John Gálfi. He avoided his wife, who complained in letters to her family (‘those things have not yet taken place . . .') that Sigmund had not consummated their union; he was henceforth branded by history not only as capricious and sadistic, but as impotent, or bisexual, or a pederast, or all three. In fact Maria-Christina was suspected of frigidity by many Hungarians simply on account of her nationality; more charitably, she may have been under orders not to yield to her husband's advances for fear of giving birth to a new royal dynasty which would combine the prestige of the Habsburgs and the Báthorys and prove more powerful than either. At the same time, Sigmund seems to have been impressionable and highly strung and may have been persuaded by his Spanish confessor, Carrillo, that celibacy would spiritually ennoble him.

While he was in power Sigmund pursued a policy of terror against
many of his subjects, so that when he abdicated for a second time in 1599 in favour of another cousin, the peaceable Andrew Báthory, a cardinal who had spent most of his life in the humanist atmosphere of the courts and cloisters of Italy, the latter stood very little chance of holding on to the throne. On 9 November 1597, this Andrew, whose spies had been sheltered in Hungary by his cousin Elisabeth,
⁴
was trapped in a Székely village while on the run from the Voivode Michael the Brave. The Székelys recognised him as a kinsman of Sigmund, who had bribed them to fight for him, then cheated them of their reward. They cut Andrew into pieces, some of which were reassembled later so that his body could be exhibited to his subjects in the capital, Alba Julia. The cardinal's head, bearing an axe wound above the right eye, was portrayed in engravings resting on a cloak before being sewn back on to the rest of the remains.
⁵

Sigmund returned again to the imbroglios, and his subjects had little to choose between the cruelties perpetrated by his enemy, the Habsburg General Basta, and his own forces' excesses. After Sigmund temporarily abandoned his followers in 1602:

The people of the region were forced to flee to the forests, to the high mountains – in the horrible cold. But they could not hide! They were tracked down in the woods, dire cruelties were committed, many were burned with fire, many had their heads twisted, so that their eyes started out from their heads – many of them were later seen begging, who had been men of property beforehand, carrying themselves well; many were burned with hot iron, their stomachs and backs were burned with live coals, thongs were cut from their backs for merriment, many were hanged by their hair and straw-fires were lit under them – they [Basta's men] laughed at it. What they did to women, I will not relate, as it was such an infamy. Those Magyars among Basta's troops were alike, women's breasts were cut through, their hands drawn through the wounds, and in this way they were hung up on nails.
⁶

Finally pushed aside and into exile and obscurity in Poland, Sigmund was, much to everyone's surprise, still alive in Silesia when in 1613 the last member of his family to achieve a temporary glory, Gábor Báthory, was murdered.

When we turn to the more obscure corners of the family, history even more quickly becomes confused with fabulation. Father Revický's 1900 life of Countess Báthory provides examples in the form of quasi-scholarly cameos: ‘One of her uncles was a very lustful man, and his sinful passion destroyed his health early on in his life. But he did not care: when his wife died he married one of his wife's former maidservants, which brought great shame on his family in those days.'
⁷

Lady Klára Báthory, Elisabeth's aunt on her father's side, has been remembered in the histories as an insatiable bisexual adventuress – ‘that madwoman, who picked up lovers on all the roads of Hungary and bounced chambermaids on her bed . . .'
⁸

The nobly born pastor and man of letters Bornemissza was the first to mention her, when he referred to his own sins and those of his contemporaries in his sixteenth-century work,
The Temptations of the Devil,
a polemic against suicide which reveals the prevalent attitudes to sin and abnormal behaviour among the Hungarian elite.
⁹
Bornemissza cites Klára as a sinner, simply stating that she had a lover and that the lover killed her husband. The popular version of Klára's story is that her first husband, Stephen Drugeth, died after a few years of marriage and she had her second husband, the bedridden Lord Anthony Losonczy smothered in his bed. In the words of Revický, the priest of
Č
achtice, who is retelling nineteenth-century stories:

Klára Báthory, the wife of Michael Várday [sic], became the murderer of her husband because she wanted to enjoy her sinful passion of love with her husband's best musician, who was a violinist. Her lustful passion – according to the letter from Cardinal Forgách – had grown so much that even in the prison where she was confined as a murderess, she made sinful love with her guards and with other prisoners.
¹⁰

Her other husbands and lovers included John Betko and Bálint Benkő of Paly. Then the story lurches into the fantastic. Klára was said to have taken up with a very young lover and made him a present of one of her castles. The amorous pair were taken captive by a Turkish pasha, who had the young man skewered and roasted on a spit. Klára's punishment was to be raped by every member of the Turkish garrison in turn, before being put out of her misery by having her throat ceremonially cut.

The notorious aunt was reconstructed for the 1995 novel in English
by Andrei Codrescu. In this version she is, perversely, unmarried, but the voracious sophisticate serves as one of the young Elisabeth's many initiators into the carnal mysteries.
¹¹
But little is known of the real Klára's character, and her sins must be partly mitigated by the fact that most historians confused her with Elisabeth Báthory's younger sister of the same name, adding that lady's husband to the list of the older Klára's victims. She has also provided a useful element otherwise missing from the myth: the decadent, worldly mentor who might have initiated Elisabeth into a life of sin. There is certainly no hard evidence of her lesbianism, which was in any case an abomination that was literally indescribable with the words available at the time. She seems more like a headstrong English noblewoman of the nineteenth century whose contemporaries could not forgive her for living openly with her secretary – a commoner – whom she later took as her third husband. If Klára had been younger and less sure of her status, a family court would normally have been convened and she would have been put under trusteeship. But the message that infuriated squires and plebeians alike was that, in her rarefied world, a Báthory again went her own sweet way in proud disregard for the conventions that the rest lived by.