Dan Snow's History Hit - Elizabeth Báthory: The Vampire of Hungary

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

The inspiration behind countless gothic novels, Countess Elizabeth Báthory is said to be one of the most prolific serial killers of all time, accused of the murder of 600 girls during the late 16th century. Dan talks to Professor Kimberly Craft, a legal historian who has spent over a decade researching the life and trial of Countess Báthory and over a year translating original source material into English. Where does the truth lie, a conspiracy started by her enemies or a psychopathic vampire?Produced by Beth Donaldson and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. She's said to be one of the most prolific serial killers of all time. The name we have for her in English is Elisabeth Bathory, Countess Elisabeth Bathory. She was a Hungarian, a Hungarian noblewoman. She owned gigantic swathes of land in the Kingdom of Hungary at the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th, a time of huge religious turmoil, military confrontation between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Turks, and a time of misogyny, of witch hunts, of conspiracy. It is alleged that she tortured and killed hundreds of girls, up to 600 girls, between 1590 and 1610. And indeed, she didn't contest the fact that many young women had been killed in her service or around her castle. She's been the subject of endless gothic novels. She's intimately tied up with the

fable of Dracula. There was a film in 2008, a film in 2009, both about her. Never has there been more interest in this remarkable woman. I want to talk to Professor Kimberley Craft. She's a professor of legal history and she has gone back and translated all the documents that she could find around the witness gathering and the trial of Countess Bathory back at the beginning of the 17th century. She thinks the truth lies somewhere in between innocence and psychopathic vampire. The truth, as ever, is more nuanced, more conflicted, and in some ways, more difficult. Kim Craft has written a book, which she talks about at the end of the podcast. You can go and find out more as Halloween approaches. It might be the perfect thing to read. But in the meantime, folks, here's the podcast. Enjoy.

Kim, tell me about this Countess. Who was she? Where was she born? Hi, Dan. Countess Elizabeth Bathory, very enigmatic person in history. She was born in 1560. So we're really talking about the timeframe of roughly Queen Elizabeth I and Shakespeare and all the explorers coming to the New World. Elizabeth I and Shakespeare and all the explorers coming to the New World. And she was born in the Kingdom of Hungary, which at that time had been taken over by the Austrian Habsburgs, who were trying to form a dynasty around Europe. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turks are flowing in across the border trying to claim the land. So it's a very tumultuous period.

We also have the Reformation going on, where we have Catholics against Protestants. And in this background is this young girl who in English is Elizabeth Bathory, but in Hungarian, it would be Bátor Erzsébet. They do the last name first. We can pronounce it either way you'd prefer. And poor little Ercebet, she's this poor little rich kid growing up in this crazy world all around her. What's interesting, though, when she was born, it was a period of relative stability and peace for at least until she was about in her teens. There would be truces that would go back and forth between the lines. And a lot of times you'd have Turks and Europeans

actually trading until basically the government decided, wait, wait, let's start this war again. We need to enhance our coffers, take expensive prisoners and all those things that sometimes motivate wars in some cases. And it's a time where there's also a lot of transition between Christianity, which branch of Christianity. We have Catholics, we have Lutherans.

She's raised Calvinists in her time. She's raised with all of them in her family. Going on where it's confusing that way, she's got an uncle who's a Catholic bishop. She also is raised in her husband's court, which are very devout Lutherans. And then in her family's court, she's raised as a strict Calvinist. And meanwhile, of the common people, they're still practicing with using forest witches and spells and enchantments and elements of the old pagan traditions. So here she is in the middle of all of this chaos. It's going to lead to an interesting life for sure. How did she come to take up residence in this huge castle?

She's born into it, but the Bators are an old and distinguished Central Eastern European family. She's got a relative who actually is the king of Poland. She's again got her cardinal and bishop relatives. She has relatives who are voivodes. That's basically like a prime minister of Transylvania. Transylvania was a real country. It's now not called that anymore, but it's parts of modern day Romania and Czech Republic and in that area that was bordering Hungary. She comes from an ancient line, almost a dynasty.

And her old money family is very renowned also as warriors. Even the name Baator translates as heroic. Supposedly one of her ancient relatives was famous for killing a dragon and was knighted for doing this and got the family crest with claws that symbolized the dragon's claws and hand. It came to mean other things, I think, in her old time. She was very proud of that, you might say, very powerful, very domineering background that she comes from. It's a historical period where slavery is very common amongst the nobility. The serfs that they have working their lands under feudalism have very

limited rights, nothing like we would understand today very much. They would not be able, for example, to travel or to bear weapons or in some cases marry or do different things without the approval of the noble who owned the land that they were tied to. And sometimes they could be granted freedom, but that was a unique situation at the time. So, she grows up also in a world where coming from this very rich, noble, powerful family, the servants who work for them are beholden to her and her family who also act as administrators of law and justice over them. So whether it's a petty crime or it's a capital offense, someone like Elizabeth Bathory would feel very comfortable when she grows up running her estate and domineering her people.

And she does come to do that later on in life because she's used to it and she's raised to do that. Although she goes a little overboard, a lot overboard. Well, this is what we're here to talk about. Does she or doesn't she? Let's deal with the folklore first, the reputation. How does history remember her? History remembers her in two striking ways, almost a dichotomy or paradoxically. On the one hand, the folklore surrounding her began at the time she was still alive and then about 100 or 200 years later really started to explode. In her own lifetime, she was known as the infamous lady, or she was known as the Tiger of Chete, which was one of her chaktitsi, one of her castles.

And she already had kind of a reputation of being feared by people in her own time, but there was a lot of confusion or controversy exactly had she done anything criminal or did someone else do it. When she died, we get this period that follows, especially into the 17 and the 1800s, where the Gothic novel becomes very popular. We have, of course, Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein. The vampire lore becomes really, really fascinating in mainstream culture at that time. And we start to see the beginnings of a lot of folklore that grew out of the legend of the infamous Lady of Hungary. For example, in 1812, the Brothers Grimm are writing Snow White. And supposedly the Wicked Queen's character is based

off of Elizabeth Bathory. And we move a little bit further. There was some more gothic novels that came out around the time in the 1800s talking about the stories of her accidentally having a servant girl combing her hair one day. The servant girl pulls too hard. The countess becomes enraged and she wears a lot of heavy jewelry and rings. And in her anger at having her hair pulled, she basically takes her hand and smacks the servant girl behind her, drawing blood, you know, when the rings hit the girl in the cheek and the nose, and some of the blood gets on the countess's face and her hands, and as she's, you know, ew, trying to wipe it all off, suddenly looks back in her mirror and realizes all of her wrinkles have gone away. And it's almost like this magic beauty cream treatment where kind of like turning back to the servant girl,

get over here. I need more blood and, you know, trying it out. And these legends keep growing to the point where that's not good enough. Now the legend says the countess has to preserve magically her youthful beauty. She has to actually now start bathing in an entire bathtub of blood. And not any old blood will do. bathtub of blood. And not any old blood will do. It has to specifically be the blood of a young virgin girl, untouched by man, for it to work. And so now the legends, when we get into the 1930s, there are some Czech writers who really capitalize on this whole gory, spooky tale. And they're the ones that start coming out with fiction novels,

where Countess Bathory has now got set up the torture chamber with the Iron Maiden. And she's going out to collect dozens and dozens of girls and she's torturing them. And then, you know, draining their blood to put in her giant bathtub and keep herself magically youthful forever. And then when she can't get enough blood for her regimen, she'll go out and get more girls and so on and so on. And then the

stories get even more fanciful to the point where she's a vampire. That's why she also needs the blood. You know, originally it's just this beauty elixir, but pretty soon, no, she needs the blood. You know, originally, it's just this beauty elixir. But pretty soon, no, she likes the blood too. So then it morphs into she becomes a vampire. And by the time we get to modern times, you'll see film pay homage to her in the movie Staying Alive. There's an homage to her in Saw. One of the brutal murders is sort of based on her. She appears in the movie. It's a very campy movie from the 70s, Countess Dracula. Ingrid Pitt stars in that one. And it really kind of starts to put in the public's mind this idea that this is a sadistic lesbian vampire who bathed in the blood of over 600 victims for her magical beauty treatment and general entertainment purposes as well. Okay, so that's the gory gothic myth. Yes. What does the

historical record actually tell us about this woman? You know, Dan, that's the most fascinating thing and I think that's why it encouraged my research, because when you look at the historical figure, not from the fictionalized books or movies or video games, but the actual historical records, we find a person who is married. She has children by all accounts from her letters. She's a very good mother who is concerned about her children's health, their welfare, mentioning medical treatment she gets for them. She has written letters on behalf of her staff, her servants. She's lent them money in times of need. Turks had come into a village and kidnapped the husband of a local woman. She was doing a letter writing campaign to try to get him freed. She took care of her property. And then there's Countess Bathory, the socialite and the noblewoman who has a seat in parliament. She gives generously to the

Lutheran church. She has a printing press on her property and patronizes artists and writers. You would think she's Mother Teresa by the time you're done reading the public persona. She routinely goes to court. The emperor was invited to her wedding. It starts to beg the question of, well, wait a minute, if she's so famous and so well known as a noble and a socialite and doing all these good deeds, how is she also or when does she have the time to be killing 500 or 600 people? Where does she even put the bodies? And so when her husband dies, he's buried with national honors as a national war hero for fighting off the Turks. And at that point, the emperor owed her and her husband millions of dollars for financing his war chest. That's where it got me looking down the research trail of who is this woman that can serve tea to the prime minister? serve tea to the prime minister. And then it's so stressful that afterwards she goes and kills servant girls, you know, wipes her hands, says, clean it up, and then carries on like nothing

happened. Who is this person? You listen to Dan Snow's history, talking about the Hungarian Countess Serial Killer. More coming up. Did you know that some of literature's greatest characters were real people? It's so fascinating, isn't it, that some of the Three Musketeers are also based on real soldiers. That Sir Walter Raleigh wasn't all that he's been cracked up to be. Chemist, poet, scholar, historian, courtier. He could have been great in all these different things. And that if your name is Dudley, you better watch your back. For the Tudors, each one of them took something from the

Dudleys, either by working with a member of the Dudley family, or of course, by having one executed. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and I'm learning all this and much more, bringing you Not Just the Tudors, twice a week, every week. Subscribe now to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Is that true, though? Come on, Kim, you've done the research. Was she terribly smeared? Is it all gossip and witch hunting and false accusations? There's a very big school of thought that thinks that's exactly what happens. I've translated all the letters that we know of. And you can see that everything I've mentioned where she's telling her husband to please

be safe when he's off at war. And she's, you know, writing him letters about the health of the children and what's going on. And you see her letters of taking care of her estate, her letters that she's written to other nobles to raise army, to protect the people, the letters she's written to help this lady get her husband freed. That's all there. That's all real. And so the reality of that, the public face she had is so fascinating because even the day before her arrest, she's friends with the prime minister and

his wife. She literally calls the prime minister cousin. They've been family friends for years. She had just attended his daughter's wedding. And even up to the very end, even though he's got this warrant and he's out there coming in to arrest her, even he and his wife are still writing back and forth to each other. Is it possible that she could do all these horrible things that she's being blamed about? So we do have the record showing her to be this very upstanding citizen, which then begs that question,

but even the people of her time were wondering. It did lead to a trial, and the trial, there are over 300 depositions taken of people in all the surrounding area who were indeed talking about horrific things going on at her different estates. Was she arrested? She was arrested, yes. It was right around Christmas, she was giving a dinner party at the manor of her estate. And it's so interesting to imagine this. Here she is giving this prim and proper dinner party like nothing's happening.

She's got all her guests there. And it's almost like out of a movie where we have the letters attesting to this. And it's all translated there where here comes the prime minister. He's also got her son-in-law, the tutor of her son. So there are family members or people very close to her that are with the prime minister, as well as the townspeople who have come out, literally with the pitchforks and the torches, because they've been hearing these rumors. They've been seeing her servant girls show up in town, very badly beaten, scratched, cut.

Some have escaped and told horrific stories. The local parish priests are being inundated with requests for burials for girls who keep dying on her estate. So there's absolutely rumors going on right now. And they raid her manor right in the middle of dinner. And they arrest her. In the manor house, they find two victims that are, I guess one might surmise they were going to be the after dinner entertainment,

who knows, in a very bad, brutally beaten state. They take care of the victims and then they take the countess and they go up to her castle on the hill. This is where they find the mayhem. This is where they find dead bodies, mutilated victims, victims half dead. They lock her up in that castle at that point. And then they start beginning preparations of arresting her servants who the whole time they're asking her, what did you do? And she defiantly says, I didn't do anything. My servants did all this. And people are saying to her, are you kidding us? There's dead people everywhere. There's bodies everywhere. You're telling us your servants did

this? And she said, yes. And she was very adamant about that. And they said, you're in charge. How would you let them get away with that? And she actually goes on record saying, well, even I was afraid of them. So what she's saying is almost nonsense. At that point, what they decide to do, once she's arrested and they lock her up in her castle, they're rounding up her servants. They have a trial for them separately, and then they're going to have another trial for her. And it's really interesting because the entire time she insists on testifying to what happened. She's adamant. I didn't do anything. Again, only my servants did this.

And even I'm afraid of them. And they would take it. So, Kim, can I interrupt here? No one is disputing that there's loads of dead bodies all over the place. No, that is in the record. Wow. Okay. Wow.

And it's on her land. There's no question. It's her castle, her property, dead bodies all over the place. That's absolutely true. Literally, the townspeople for the next couple of days were bringing the bodies down the hill from the castle on carts to either provide medical help to those who were still alive or to bury the ones who didn't make it. So these trials did proceed. Why was she not allowed to testify when she wanted to? And for, you know, listeners from

our time, that would seem unusual because an accused person is, unless they waive the right, they're always allowed to testify. In this case, though, in the legal proceedings in those days, we're talking the late 15, early 1600s, it was very different. It was testimony by torture. And whether you were thought to be guilty or innocent, everyone underwent a torture session to guarantee that what they said on the stand was going to be true. So what was interesting is her relatives, her son, her sons-in-law immediately started these letter writing campaigns to the prime minister, to the emperor, to the king, begging them, don't shame our family. Because again, this is a very high ranking noble woman. And the fact

that she's a woman as well, being accused of murdering potentially hundreds of people, there was a lot to be lost, not only family honor, but if she were convicted of these types of crimes, it was very possible that up to one third of her estate could be confiscated by the king and any debts he owed to her, which he did, he owed her about 17 million in today's money, the king would not have to repay her. So there's a big school of thought that thinks, oh my gosh, this poor wealthy widow is being preyed on by the crown because if they can find her guilty of a crime, they can take up to a third of her land from her that her family's not going to get. All the king's debts to her will be wiped out. So there's this

very big school of thought, like I say, that she's this helpless victim. I have to say that the records don't really prove that. What we see happening is the prime minister is working very hard to negotiate between the king who wants her naturally convicted, executed, take her property, get his debts wiped out. That works well for him versus her also very powerful family and neighbors and friends of the prime minister begging him, please don't disgrace our family. They're even making him offers if there's anything we can do to help you, you know, a little bit of bribes going on. Let us know. We'll be forever in your debt, forever in your service. And he's really kind of torn in the middle. They are also begging her, please don't let her testify.

Because again, as this high-ranking, middle-aged woman to undergo torture before she's even allowed to testify, it was unthinkable to them. She, Bathory, in the meantime, is saying, bring it on. I'm not afraid of fire. I'm not afraid of anything. I'll show you. It's like, oh, my gosh, she's crazy. That's really the opinion of her relatives. Just shut her up. Just keep her quiet. So the trial, meanwhile, is going on without her. And there are many peoples of the trial, and I am a lawyer, I will say that it's a little bit different than what we have today. But in some respects, there are a lot of things similar. They sent out notaries across the entire countryside. They took testimonies and depositions of over 300 people. They had a very big panel of judges. It was open to the public. Reading the transcripts, you can see they made every effort to be fair. In fact, even some of the judges made comments, these very archaic comments that I really had to translate to figure out what does it mean. One judge said, we don't want to look through the finger on this. And I kept thinking, that's how it translated. What does look through the finger mean? And then I realized, oh, we don't want to point a finger. We don't want to make an unfair or false accusation. So I think they really did try

to keep it fair. And she was very lucky with the result. Her servants, who all of them under torture, but they all pointed, speaking of pointing fingers, they all pointed fingers at each other. They all admitted to the killings that they had done. So very clearly, a number of the killings, these butchering of these young girls that went on, they absolutely did themselves. They would say, however, that the lady asked us to do this. She told us to do this. Or they would blame each other. They blamed one lady in particular who had already died, saying that she was the worst. It's what we call the empty chair defendant. There's someone who's also committed a wrong deed, but since they're not here anymore

because they're dead, it's very easy for all the other defendants to say, well, the worst was from them because we can't prove it with them anymore. But they also admitted, like I say, to the wrongs and the killings they'd done. And they also very clearly said that the Countess herself very clearly said that the Countess herself participated. Her participation as described in the trial record is a little bit different than what the myths and legends would have us believe. The myths and legends would have us believe that Countess Bathory is the sadistic vampire who just gets this thrill or this rush out of biting her victims and torturing them and then bathing in their blood. It's almost a sexual fantasy or a fetish, really, the way the stories take it. But the trial transcripts tell a very different story about a woman who, to me, I'm not

a forensic psychiatrist, but she has a pathology nonetheless, where when she's under a great deal of stress or strain she conducts a very clean noble household but when she gets stressed and if her young servant girls do something wrong they don't iron her gown properly they don't make the bed right they don't do something this kind of thing could send her into a murderous rage where she would grab a cudgel, for example, like unscrew the leg of a chair and like a baseball bat and just literally beat this child into a bloody pulp, throw away the bat and tell her servants, clean this up, and then go off and conduct her day like nothing happened. Or after a very stressful social party, she'd be riding in the carriage home with

them, and she'd just be so stressed. You know, woe be to one of her girls who would fuss or complain, sitting loaded in this carriage with her, all of them wearing these heavy dresses and outfits, and start complaining, I'm hot, I'm thirsty, I have to, you know, I have to use the bathroom, you know, that could send her in a rage too. Like she would stop the coach and drag them herself in a rage into a nearly freezing river and soak them in it and then tell them, oh, feel better now, and then drag them back to the castle or make them walk through the snow. And usually they would die at the end of this. So it tended to be not someone who so much enjoyed it, but used it as a way to relieve stress,

if that makes sense. It's almost always after a really stressful event does the record show where witnesses will testify that she was stressed and she killed somebody or she beat them so badly they later died or she forced them to walk along the carriage for miles or just some crazy punishment that, again, with her upbringing in her mind, she thought that would be, it's okay. I own these people. They're my slaves, my servants. I'll teach them a lesson. And it's also a time, too, when in the wars going on, there were a lot of men who had died. And there's almost a kind of thing with her from little comments she would make, thinking that the surplus female population is too great. And in a way, I'm doing a service by pruning all these excess females when the fact

is we need more men, but they're all being killed in these wars going on. So I'm just trying to sort of restore the population balance. We get this kind of thinking that we see going on with her. So she spends four years under house arrest and then she eventually dies. It sounds to me like she was responsible for the death of her servants and some of her associates. You think she was responsible for that? She may not have been a vampiric serial killer that killed 600 people. Right. That's what I think, Dan, at the end of the day, doing the research, the 600 number came from the trial testimony of a child who was watching the proceedings and seemed to be very interested in it and wanted to, I guess you might want to say, show off.

I know something about it, too. And the little girl gets on the stand and starts saying, I heard that she killed 600 people and she left a diary and wrote their names in it. And at the time, the servants who participated in the killings and who were all executed for that. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanorjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit,

wherever you get your podcasts. Put the number at somewhere between 30 and 50 people. The king himself argued there were 300. We don't have really proof of that. But to say something under 100, which is not great, I think that's more a realistic number. So when this little girl gets on the stand and starts saying, oh, there were 600 people, I know this, and I saw the diary, and no one believed her even at the time. The adults in charge basically said, okay, do you know where this diary is?

And of course she didn't. And they did all kinds of searches when they were disposing of property, when they were giving property away to people and so on. No diary was ever found. Even to this day, people are always talking about if we can just find the holy grail of the diary. And I'm sorry, I don't think there's a diary. So I don't believe that little girl's testimony either, the same way they didn't back then. But she did kill. Well, it sounds to me like the reality is more nuanced and fascinating

than the kind of crazy myth about her just being a blood-drenched psychopath. But it's such a remarkable thing about life and feudalism and power in that part of Europe in that century. It really is. I agree with you that the true story is far more chilling. In fact, when we look at the depositions from witnesses who are talking about how they have seen firsthand or they participated in these killings or these maimings, some of these crimes. I mean, they would make Hannibal Lecter go, oh, wow, I never thought

of that. I mean, they're horrific. The things that were done, they're very brutal. And I like to joke that they were not politically correct in 1610 when these trials are going on. They're reporting them very factually, and they are grisly and gruesome what happened to these girls. It also begs a question. You don't see Countess Bathory or her servants being ordered to kill men. There's no men or boys that appear as victims. There might be one or two women of childbearing years, but the majority of these victims are between the ages of roughly 11 to 14 years old, which again can give rise to the whole we need a young maiden and their virgin blood mythology to go on. But I really think personally, again, this is only my opinion, going back to the sort

of pathology she has, that was around the time in her life when the countess was, her marriage was arranged. She left her parents' home. She went to live with her husband's relatives. And in those years leading up to her wedding, when she was 15, exactly that time period, 11 to 14, she was trained how to run the household, how to run the estate, how to take care of it. It was almost the equivalent of running a big corporation. A lot of times people think like, you know, a prince or a princess or nobility, they just leisure all day. They just do fun stuff all day when in fact, those of us who know, and especially you folks with a monarchy, you know that the working royals and the nobility are busy all the time. And when they're running these estates, it's like a big company where you've got staff, you've got bills, you've

got taxes, you've got to run the land. There's so much to do. And she's being taught this. She's a very high spirited young girl. She's, I really believe she comes to her husband's court as a very prissy, little know-it-all with a big mouth. I don't mean that meanly, but that's what you read between the lines. And her husband's estate, the tutors, the people in charge were not going to put up with this smart aleck little 11-year-old girl. They were going to teach her very quickly, and I think very brutally, how to become a proper wife and mother in this particular period of history. I think also she might have been the way she behaves. Again, I'm not a therapist, but I know people who are who made mention of this, I'll just share. She acts like someone who has been terribly victimized and abused probably during this age range in her own life, which is why when she's an adult and she's triggered and stressed, she's going to inflict very similar, the same kind of abuse she suffered. The only difference is

they couldn't kill her because of who she was, but they probably inflicted a lot of pain on her that she then inflicted on others that when she was triggered, that reminded her of herself and taking out that rage on them. Well, jeepers creepers, that's one hell of a story. Thank you so much, Kim, for coming on and talking about the counters. How can people follow your work? If anybody's interested in reading the translations, we have about 400 years of documents that have never been seen in English. In my book, it's called Infamous Lady, the true story of Countess Ershabet Batur.

And I leave it for you, the reader, to decide what do you think happened. Personally, I don't think it was a conspiracy to steal her land. I don't think she killed 600 people. I'm sorry, I don't think it was a conspiracy to steal her land. I don't think she killed 600 people. I'm sorry. I don't think she was a vampire. But did she kill people? And did she have a very, very severe psychosis? Yes, I think she did. But you decide for yourself.

Read the records. Kim, that was great. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. Yes, Dan. Thank you so much. It was wonderful. I feel we have the history on our shoulders.

All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. you