She's the historically famous Blood Countess, and a real-life vampire. At the time, the ravishingly famous woman was spreading across Europe, and she believed that the blood of young virgins kept her looking good.
Elizabeth the Countess likely also inspired Stoker to write Dracula.
In 1546, Vlad Dracula (the legendary vampire and protagonist of the movie "400 Years of Bloodsucking Zombie Thrillers") and an expedition led by Transylvanian Prince Steven Bathory traveled to Wallachia to fight for the throne of the former ruler. About a century later, Steven Bathory's successor, Countess Elizabeth Bathory herself, became the embodiment of terror in Transylvania. The following is the story of Elizabeth Bathory.
Elizabeth Bathory was born in 1560 to the famous Bathory family of Hungary. The Bathorys were a prestigious family with deep ties to the Habsburg dynasty, with successive generations of men serving as kings of the Duchy of Duransiluviania, the most prestigious of the prestigious families. The family had many powerful relatives - among them a cardinal, a number of princes, a cousin who held the post of Hungarian prime minister, and none more famous than Istvan Bathory - who was prince of Transylvania and was King of Poland from 1575 to 1586. Elizabeth is said to have shown violent tendencies at the age of 4 or 5, possibly due to epilepsy or other neurological disorders, and possibly related to her "psychotic" behavior later in life. (Like most of the European aristocratic dynasties of the time, her family was plagued by psychosis caused by consanguineous marriages.) King Stephan of Poland was one of her more famous relatives, and she also had an abusive dual-gender aunt and a schizophrenic uncle. So it's not surprising that Elizabeth has had sudden epileptic fits since she was 4 years old. She was spoiled from an early age with a group of female governesses surrounding her and catering to her every need. Despite the effects of her seizures and aloof personality, Elizabeth was considered a bright and capable young woman.
At a young age, she once witnessed the execution of a treacherous gypsy. They had stuffed the poor gypsy into the belly of a horse that had been cut open alive and sewn inside. The executioner's face showed no sympathy or pity for the death of the victim. This incident had taught Elizabeth one thing - and it was this incident that had germinated her cruelty - that there was no need for punishment or fear of reprisal for killing a commoner.
Elizabeth had an incredible, cold beauty that made anyone who saw her large, deep black eyes feel unreasonably uneasy. From the time she was very young, she had a haughty, queenly demeanor. Her amber glass eyes shot with cruelty and formed her voluptuous and sultry bearing. For her beauty, she was more of a favorite than anything else. Taking a mirror and laying across the bed gazing at her face, she never got tired no matter how long it took. Her smile was absolutely invisible in the mirror, due to her narcissistic complex of wishing she could be more beautiful.
At the age of 14, she gave birth to a baby with a peasant's son at the castle of her future mother-in-law (Countess Ursula Nadasdy). And as early as age 11, she was engaged to Baron Ferencz Nadasdy.
The lavish wedding took place in the city of Varano on May 8, 1575, when she was fifteen. Emperor Maximilian II of Prague also sent congratulatory messages and gifts. She married a very prestigious but by nature cruel battlefield hero - 26-year-old Count Ferencz Nadasdy. The baron was a warlike man who preferred killing on the battlefield to enjoying a peaceful life at home, and the locals nicknamed him the "Black Hero of Hungary". At that time, no one promoted women's emancipation, but Elizabeth kept her last name. Her husband changed his surname to Ferencz Bathory.
The marriage was not at all unusual in the aristocratic circles of the time, but was a political union directed by her opportunistic mother. And the Nadasdy family improved its social status considerably as a result - the Bartoli family had more power due to its seniority. While there is much speculation about the marriage, it is certainly an indisputable fact that Ferencz went out a lot. For the first few years of their marriage, Elizabeth did not have children, and it was during these long periods of solitude that Elizabeth's sadistic nature began to rule.
After moving to a new home her husband was once again on the warpath. Under the watchful eye of her nagging mother-in-law, the Countess grew more bored by the day. She longs for the luxury of Vienna. While her husband is on the battlefield, Elizabeth visits her lesbian aunt, Countess Karla Bathory, and when their orgies are outlawed, she truly realizes what she needs in her heart. Torturing girls with mature breasts gives her great pleasure, and she's not just satisfied with the carnal pleasures she receives; the study of black magic is also one of her passions. One of the castle's manservants, Dolko (Hungarian name Thorko), introduces her to a secret religious organization and begins to encourage her to use magic, while at the same time encouraging her to continue her sadistic ways. Her extreme vanity and narcissism further distorts her behavior.
In her early twenties, Elizabeth was bored and slowly discovered the "pleasure" she got from torturing her servants. Among her maids, she targeted adolescent girls. She tore their bodies apart with red-hot tongs, roasted them over a fire, or tortured them with a form of "star-kicking" (holding strips of grease-covered paper between the toes and setting them on fire while Elizabeth herself watched in agony as the victim tried to kick away the sparks).
She's also been known to rip the heads of those girls in half (that is, pry their mouths open hard with a tool and keep widening the angle until they break their necks and die). On her less perverted days, she just forced those maids to do their chores naked in front of hordes of men.
Elizabeth's depravity continued, aided and abetted by her nanny, Ilona Joo, her housekeeper, Johannes Ujvary, and her sorcerers, Darvulia and Dorottya Szentes, in a place known as the "Lady's torture chamber". She continued her depravity, aided and abetted by Darvila (Hungarian name Darvulia) and Dorottya Szentes, and inflicted various tortures of her own creation on the maids in a place known as the "Lady's Chamber". As she grew older, her desire for the flesh and blood of innocent young women intensified. She invented many new tortures, such as the "sweet agony", in which she tortured the maids with an iron, melted wax and a knife, then undressed them, smeared honey all over their bodies, and finally abandoned them in a grove full of hungry insects. There was also the "agony of water," in which a young girl was stripped naked, immersed in freezing water, and had ice water poured over her head until she froze to death.
Throughout her life, Elizabeth suffered from severe headaches. She not only stabbed her maids of honor with hairpins when attacked by an unprovoked attack of boredom, but also tossed and turned in her bed during epileptic-like spasms to bite the maids of honor who served her. Hearing the maidens wail in agony would make her own pain disappear incredibly.
When Elizabeth went in and out of the castle with a full-bodied, metal-shelled man, the people of the village began to believe that the man with the dark eyes and uneven teeth was Dracula himself, and that he had descended on Csejthe Castle. And some had seen blood appear around Elizabeth's mouth. Soon afterward, however, the mysterious stranger returned to the grave, and it seemed that Elizabeth could no longer bear the loneliness of being alone. At one point, she even ran away with the "mysterious stranger". When her husband, Baron Nadasdy, returns to the castle, he surprisingly forgives his wife for her infidelity.
During the first ten years of her marriage, Elizabeth was childless, as her husband spent little time with her for his "business", and then, from 1585 to 1598, Elizabeth **** had three daughters and a son.
In 1600, Baron Nadasdy, 51, died of poisoning. She threw her mother-in-law out of the castle and committed atrocities even more intensified. Prior to this, tales of the Lady's secret abuse of her maids of honor, which often led to their deaths, had been circulating. In spite of the dangerous reputation, the daughters of the poor people, still did not hesitate to go to the castle for their lives. One ugly dwarf, called Tooth Noshu, was ordered to search the neighboring villages for a target. The young girls originally entered the city in the mood as if they were going on an excursion. But once inside the gates, the chances of survival were slim to none.
As time passed, Elizabeth became more and more vain. But she was also aging, and her beauty was disappearing little by little. This led to the infamous "blood baths" of legend.
One day, a maid combed Elizabeth's hair for the 40-year-old accidentally pulled one of her hair, angry, she madly slapped the maid, blood from the maid's nose sprayed out, splattered on her face. And when the countess looked in the mirror to see where her face was splattered with blood a miracle occurred. The blood-stained skin gradually receded from the traces of time and regained its former beauty. She was overjoyed.
She consulted several of her accomplices, convincing her that the blood of virgins was the fabled fountain of vigor that brought back youth to those who bathed in it. She ordered the maid's throat to be slit and the blood poured into a huge barrel. Elizabeth then bathed in the still-warm blood.
And so began a horrific ritual. With the help of witches, hundreds of young girls were kidnapped, all young and beautiful virgins, and taken to Elizabeth's castle, where they were tortured and their blood drained. Elizabeth used to gnaw on the necks and breasts of the maidens, sucking blood from the wounds and eating the muscles. Since then, the countess has bathed herself in the blood of virgins, and whenever she emerges from the blood-filled tub, the glow of youth seems to return to her.
Elizabeth's lackeys tricked many virgins into entering the countess's castle under the pretext of hiring maids in nearby villages, and the bodies of young girls drained of blood were abandoned outside the castle.
According to the record of the trial, Madame's manservant testified as follows:
"Madame's room was always filled with four or five naked maidens, and the whole looked as black as charcoal because of the blood that had been smeared on their bodies." In Vienna's lodgings, the room was like a sea of blood, and there was no way to walk. To get to the bed to sleep, ashes were sprinkled on the floor to prevent slipping.
She even ordered a full set of execution tools from a German blacksmith; and so it wasn't long before a massive execution chamber was built in the basement of Csjethe Castle, where she spent most of her adult life. In addition to the famous pool of blood baths and the Iron Virgin, there were cages of thorns and balls of iron thorns hanging from the ceiling. She ordered the hoofers to create something like a birdcage with sharp iron spikes facing inside the cage. The birdcage was hung high above the patio using a sliding device. The cruel Dorko (Dorka in English) kept the maidens in the cage and stabbed them with red-hot pokers, and as soon as the maidens stepped back, the iron spikes pierced their backs until they themselves pierced themselves on those iron spikes. The others were placed in the ball of spikes (hollow, but with iron spikes towards the center of the ball), which was pushed in a pendulum-like motion until the bodies of the girls in it were completely torn apart. At the time of the execution Elizabeth would stand under the cage and the blood would rain down on the Countess, who was waiting for her bath. This way the blood shower could be enjoyed.
By then, in Vienna, her reputation as the "blood-stained countess" had spread. According to rumors, the wails of young girls were heard every night at her residence in Vienna. By dawn, there was blood on the streets.
Elisabeth's reign of terror lasted many years. Casualty figures had risen to triple digits, something later confirmed by a roster recovered from the countess's writing desk. The bodies of the dead maidens were either burned, buried under the castle, or thrown into the wild to be devoured by wild animals. Shockwaves of horror penetrated the neighboring towns, but no one dared to come forward and denounce the Countess's bestiality. Even the clergy, who were supposed to be responsible for maintaining peace and justice, remained silent.
The rumors were rumors, but Elizabeth's position was becoming critical. An extremely powerful aristocrat could not have indiscriminately killed as many as 600 people and come out unscathed. But direct action against her atrocities was not taken until she had "exhausted" all the maidens in the surrounding towns. Nevertheless, she was too careless. Unsatisfied with the blood of lowly commoner maidens, she wanted the blood of noble maidens as well. She began to reach out to the lesser noblewomen. She built a false school, tricking the noble-born maidens into coming to her castle and promising to educate them, simply to torture them to death. Toward the end of her marathon massacres it began to get sloppy, as she casually threw the bodies of her victims out of the city to be devoured by wild animals, or had the priests bury severely injured maidens alive.
One of the priests finally alerted the King of Matthias in Hungary, who began an investigation into the countess's doings.
The search for the city of G?tter began in 1610, when on December 30, the Countess's cousin, Count Gyorgy Thurso, surrounded the castle at the head of a group of soldiers and cavalry. At the moment of the siege, bloody and brutal killings were still going on in the castle. When they arrived at the castle, the scene they saw was more horrible than expected: officials with swords, carrying torches towards the basement of the castle, with a strange odor coming out of their noses. One dead maiden collapsed in the foyer, another was already dying, her body covered in punctures. Others were hanging from the ceiling of the underground execution chamber like digested dead deer. more than 50 bodies were unearthed from the castle's underbelly. Other corpses can be seen on the inside. There were also living people who still had a breath left. According to the testimonies of the survivors, they were finally forced to eat the flesh of their slain companions when there was no food left to eat. Baron Thurso and Priest Janos Ponikenusz found the roster (Priest Berthoni's diary) that was in Elizabeth's bedroom dresser, listing the names of the more than 650 young girls who were massacred and the details of their killings. (Aadras Berthoni, a pastor at the Lutheran church in the village of Csejthe, realized the gravity of the facts when Elizabeth ordered him to burn the blood-sucked corpses, and he wrote all of his suspicions and speculations in his diary before he died.)
The Countess's three witch co-conspirators were captured, while the Countess herself was imprisoned in her castle.
In 1610, the Countess and her co-conspirators were brought to court. The three witches finally confessed to the full crime after a long and harsh interrogation, but they tried to minimize their importance in the horror. In 17th century Hungary, it was impossible to get parole for a prisoner in jail. All three blamed the crime on a fellow witch who had died years before the trial as a co-conspirator with the countess. Over 200 witnesses were called to the court, but most could only offer hearsay as evidence. Still, the confessions were as horrific as the sights King Matthias and his soldiers had witnessed, and provided enough testimony for the court to convict the countess.
In January 1611, the trial was held in Bitcse (the city of Bizce), Hungary. However, Elizabeth did not appear in court and did not confess to any crime.
I must digress a little, but the reason for Elizabeth's failure to appear in court was not of her own choosing; in fact, she had been pleading with the King of Matthias, who had arrested her, to exonerate her. Unfortunately for her, however, King Matthias had no interest in scheduling her trial to be open to the public. Although there was enough evidence to prove her guilt, we must still note that she was not allowed to attend her own trial and defend herself.
Her co-conspirators were a bit worse off and received no favor or forgiveness. ***Criminals Una and Dorottya Szentes, wicked witches with Christian blood on their hands, had all their fingers ripped off with red-hot pincers before they were thrown into the fire. Another was beheaded and her body threaded onto a stump. Another witch, Erszi Majorova, was beheaded at a later date.
Protected by her noble birth, the countess did not share the fate of her co-conspirators. But Thurzo, as he was known in English, sentenced her in 1611 to never set foot outside her own castle. Rumor has it that he did so after "visiting" the torture chamber. (After refusing to serve as chaplain to the army, she was sentenced to life imprisonment in the castle until her death.)
After the sentence was finalized, the stonemasons went to the city to board up all the windows. Though she was alive, it was as if she was buried in a huge, dark tomb, and where light could get through, it was all sealed up without a single crack. It was only at last that a small hole was cut in the wall in order to get food and water to her room.
All the documents of the trial were hidden deep in the old castle, where Baron Turso remained.
On July 31, 1614, at the age of 54, Elisabeth dictated her final wishes and will to two priests from the parish of Esztergom, in which she wished that her family's property would be divided equally among her children, however her son Paul and his descendants would be the basic heirs.
On August 14, 1614, a jailer wanted to get a good look at the countess, as she was still said to be one of the most beautiful women in Hungary at the time, and after glancing in that little hole, he found her lying face down on the ground, dead. Elizabeth Bathory died in that little room of her own, four years after her imprisonment. Fifty-four years old at the time of her death. The bloodthirsty Countess of Transylvania had finally died in agony. Her body should have been buried in the town church of Cachtice, but the locals were very unhappy about having the infamous lady buried on their land, let alone in a sacred place. With this in mind, and the fact that she was the last of the Bartoli family generation, her remains were buried in the northeastern Hungarian town of Ecsed, on Bartoli family territory.
To her death, she never admitted her guilt or expressed remorse for what she had done.
The tower where she was imprisoned still stands in Slovakia*** and the country. A transcript of that sentence is preserved today in the Hungarian State Archives in Budapest. Through the long centuries.
Csjethe Castle is in ruins, but you can still see it today on the territory of the Slovak **** and state. Elizabeth is buried in her family cemetery, and the Hungarian parliament passed a bill banning the mention of her name. It was only after the fall of the ****ist regime due to the "Eastern European Revolution" that the document was made public. Despite the lack of hard evidence, Hollywood didn't stop making up cheap horror stories based on Elizabeth's legend. 1970's Countess Dracula was the first movie to be based explicitly on Elizabeth's story, but the villainess in the story was named Mathory. Sources close to the film reveal a new version of the movie about Elizabeth Bathory is in the works.
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