Elizabeth Bathory: The Bloody Countess

In today’s society there are some values that set the appropriate beauty trends and canons. Millions of people are obsessed with their physical appearance and do anything to try to be perfect. But is it something only current?

The truth is that over the centuries, the ideals of beauty have changed greatly and people have always striven to appear younger and more beautiful.

In fact, there are extreme cases in which truly crazy things have been carried out to achieve this goal.

One of the most prominent is that of Countess Elisabeth Báthory of Hungary, who is considered the female Dracula. Her history remembers her as one of the greatest serial killers.

La Biographie:

Elizabeth Bathory’s childhood was miserable, full of shortcomings and distorted ideas about society. She was born Gabrielle Erzsebet Bathory-Nadasdy; but everyone knew her as Madame Bathory, a name that would go on to embody infamy and the absolute desire for power. Despite these dire qualities, the countess is one of the most enigmatic shadowy figures of that period.

Her birthplace was the mythical Transylvania in an equally mythical year: 1560. Her family was one of the most powerful and rich in the region. Her relatives included a cardinal, a duke, and even the prince of Transylvania. Her cousin, Count Thurzo, was Prime Minister of Hungary, and even King Stephen of Poland was among her blood relatives.

Between religion and state affairs, this inorganic family had other interests: an uncle was a necromancer, an aunt was openly lesbian, and a brother won supporters among the mob for his love conquests, many of which he achieved through extortion. .

At the age of four, little Elizabeth Bathory is said to have suffered from violent tremors, spasms and convulsions. At eleven years old, when she was still playing with elaborate porcelain dolls, she was betrothed to Count Ferencz Nadasdy, a man she suspects had a strange obsession with insects.

Elizabeth Bathory was sent to spend time with her new family. Some historians agree that it was there that she began to manifest the first symptoms of a sadistic personality, perhaps in response to the harassment she was subjected to by her fiancé.

At the age of thirteen, Elizabeth Bathory became pregnant, and not precisely by Count Nadasdy, whom she accuses of being sterile and perhaps impotent; but of a poor and unknown servant of the castle. The boy was castrated in a private ceremony and then thrown to the dogs. Elizabeth Bathory, like many noblewomen, was sent to a remote family castle to give birth away from prying eyes.

The baby was made to disappear as soon as it was born. Some historians maintain that he was raised by a Hungarian maid who was paid a commission to leave the country. Others question this hypothesis, and maintain that Elizabeth Bathory always felt guilty for the death of her son. Perhaps the blood that she began to claim from now on was aimed at silencing the terrifying cries of that infant who was not even dignified with a name.

It is worth noting that, unlike most nobles of her time, Elizabeth Bathory was highly educated. She spoke perfectly Hungarian, Latin and German. Her culture was extensive and her manners were impeccable…perhaps too much so.

For many, Elizabeth Bathory’s strict protocol behaviour masked an obsessive, fragile, paranoid personality, whose world could fall apart with the simple omission of one of her many daily rituals.

It is thought that by this time Elizabeth Bathory’s sadistic inclinations were already known to her fiancé and the rest of her family. Oddly enough, this was not a red flag. This kind of violent and untimely attitudes were commonplace in the aristocracy, so that nobody considered the matter as something relevant.

On May 8, 1575, only 15 years old, Elizabeth Bathory married Count Nadasdy, 26. The couple settled in the sumptuous Csejthe castle, in the Nyira region of northwestern Hungary. However, the young couple saw each other rarely due to the prolific military activity of the earl, known as the “Black Warrior” because of his dark armour.

Ten years passed before Elizabeth Bathory became pregnant and had her first daughter, Ana. Then came Úrsula, Katherina, and finally her only son, Pàl.

On January 4, 1604, her husband died, leaving her a widow at the age of 44. As a first step, Elizabeth Bathory expelled her hated mother-in-law from her castle and locked the old woman’s trusted servants in the cellars.

To carry out these tasks, Elizabeth Bathory had the invaluable collaboration of the faithful Thorko, a personal servant of hers who initiated her into black magic and devil worship.

With the help of Thorko and also her old nanny named Ilona Joo, Elizabeth Bathory began methodically torturing some of the castle’s maids. Attracted by this festival of torments, other accomplices joined the countess’s thirst for blood: Johannes Ujvary, a consummate pervert, and two sadistic witches named Dorotea Szentes and Dárvula.

Around this time strange rumors began to circulate in nearby villages about sinister deeds within the castle walls. Unable to attribute those torments and vexations to a human hand, they spoke of vampires and dark demonic rituals. But those who knew Elizabeth Bathory’s personality shook their heads under their breath and whispered that the countess’s obsession with her beauty was more than just an act of feminine vanity.

All historians agree in commenting on an anecdote that perfectly illustrates the violent character of Elizabeth Bathory. One day one of her maids accidentally pulled her hair while combing her hair. Elizabeth Bathory slapped her, so hard that she spattered her hand with blood from the girl’s nose. Immediately, almost like a reflex or long-held impulse, the countess felt the skin on her hand regain the freshness of youth.

There the monster awoke.

Excited by the theory that she could absorb the youth of her handmaidens through her blood, Elizabeth Bathory immediately summoned Johannes Ujvary and Thorko. Under her supervision they both stripped the poor girl naked and slit her throat while singing incomprehensible psalms and diabolical litanies.

They bled her out in a vat.

That day Elizabeth Bathory took her first bath in human blood.

Between 1604 and 1610, the dark agents of Elizabeth Bathory dedicated themselves to providing her with women between the ages of 9 and 16 for her bloody rituals. In a desperate attempt to keep up appearances, the countess persuaded the local minister to give the unlucky ones respectable funerals and burials. When the death toll grew alarmingly, the priest began to express doubts about him. Elizabeth Bathory was forced to bury her victims in the castle gardens under cover of night. Some say that it was this parish priest who officially denounced her to the king through her curia.

In those years Elizabeth Bathory had the habit of burning the genitals of the servants with candles, coals and red-hot irons for pure and insane fun. She also spread the practice of drinking the blood directly from the cheeks, shoulders, and breasts of her victims through vicious bites.

She additionally whipped the unlucky ones vehemently, and not on the back, as was the custom, but on the breasts. In this way she could see the faces terrified and gripped by pain.

”In her obsession Elizabeth Bathory believed that her blood would always keep her beautiful.”

According to the testimony of a witness who accompanied Count Thurzó to Elizabeth Bathory’s infamous castle, the first thing they saw upon entering was a young woman in the stocks of the courtyard, in a state bordering on death from the blows that had been given to her. Inside the castle they found a bleeding girl in the middle of the hall, and another dying with her body pierced by hundreds of red-hot needles.

In the dungeons they discovered a dozen more young women, some of whom had been cut, drilled, disjointed, dismembered, quartered, and other atrocities.

Fifty bodies were exhumed on the adjoining land. The entire castle was covered in stains of dried blood; every corridor, every room, gave off the fetid stench of death and decay. From the personal diary of Elizabeth Bathory, who wrote down with meticulous cruelty each of her “amusements”, we know that the number of victims amounts to at least 612 people.

Elizabeth Bathory’s tortures were accompanied by violent bacchanals. The cries of pain mixed with the erotic paroxysm of the countess and her agents. However, the main objective of these rituals was not sensual pleasure, but culminated in drinking the blood while it still flowed warm from the young women’s wounds.

In 1609, and as a direct consequence of the lack of servants in the area caused by this sustained slaughter, Elizabeth Bathory made a strategic mistake that would eventually kill her.

She began to adopt girls from good families under the guise of educating them in court manners. The last known victim was a 12-year-old girl named Pola. Her murder was particularly cruel, even if we’re talking about Elizabeth Bathory. Prudence demands the omission of lurid details. Suffice it to say that the young Ella suffered unspeakable torment inside a cage built in the shape of a sphere, too narrow to sit on and too low to stand. The interior was covered with thumb-long spikes. On top of this macabre cell Elizabeth Bathory and her henchmen performed an endless orgy, shaking the cage and causing the girl’s slow and excruciating death due to a countless succession of perforations.

In 1612 the judicial process against Elizabeth Bathory began. The countess took refuge in her nobiliary privileges, which saved her from appearing before the authorities except for cases of treason. Those who did appear before the law were her collaborators. The trial focused solely on the deaths of the young aristocratic girls. The poor girls never obtained the recognition of justice.

Except for Dárvula, that cunning witch who initiated her into Satanism, almost all of Elizabeth Bathory’s agents were tortured and burned at the stake. Katarina Beneczky, only fourteen years old, was the youngest of the countess’s collaborators, and she also saved her life at the express request of the mother of one of the survivors, possibly extorted to do so.

All the sorceresses who made up her court only had their nails pulled out for having soaked them in Christian blood.

Officially Elizabeth Bathory was never found guilty of her crimes, although she was locked up in a castle tower. Her room that served as her prison was bricked up and guarded by deaf officers. She left only a slit to pass the food to her.

On July 31, 1614 Elizabeth Bathory wrote her will and a kind of release which did not survive. On August 21 of that year one of the jailers saw her lying face down in her cell, her wall was knocked down and it was found that she had died.

Thus left this world, at 54 years of age, the bloody countess.

Elizabeth Bathory committed all kinds of atrocities in an absurd battle against time. Her tenacious and diabolical struggle to preserve her fleeting physical beauty ended hundreds of lives; although the irony of fate has left us a sentence that is at least disturbing in favour of the effectiveness of those sinister operations.

It is said that during her funeral the parish priest of the town of Eczed stated:

She was the most beautiful woman my eyes have ever seen.

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