Noble Blood - The Blood Countess Elizabeth Báthory

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

Elizabeth Báthory is famous for being one of history's most prolific serial killers, a Hungarian Countess who tortured and slaughtered hundreds of young women, protected by her power as a noble. But what is the story is a little more complicated? What if the political power that allegedly protected her was actually a target for her political enemies? Is it possible that history's favorite murderess is actually innocent? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong,

dance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised. In the more than two years since I've been putting Noble Blood out into the world, by far the most frequently requested subject for me to cover is the Hungarian countess Elizabeth Bathory. Chances are, if you're a fan of historical trivia or true crime corners of the internet, you at least have a passing familiarity with Bathory. She's often positioned, including by the Guinness Book of World Records, as the most prolific female serial killer

of all time. In the centuries since Elizabeth Bathory's life, her story has has traveled as folklore and word-of-mouth horror story, as pop history, and now spooky internet irreverence. The basic version of the narrative is that Elizabeth Bathory was a wealthy and powerful countess in 16th and 17th century Hungary, and that her estates became nightmare dens of sadistic torture that she inflicted first on her servant girls, and then, eventually, as time went on on the daughters of noblemen too, young girls who had been sent to her palaces to learn basic courtly etiquette. Stories of Elizabeth Bathory often include gruesome details of her torture, that she would take a girl and strip her naked before covering her with honey and sending her out into the fields to be devoured by insects. Bathory would stick needles beneath fingernails, cut off flesh, whip servants with stinging nettles,

or force girls naked into freezing ice baths. There was seemingly no end to Elizabeth Bathory's depravity, nor to her creative means of indulging her sadism. Most popular culture depictions of Elizabeth Bathory also include one very specific element, that the countess not only murdered young girls, but that she bathed in their blood, believing that it would keep her forever young and beautiful. It's the perfect detail, incredibly visual and cinematic. Can't you picture it now?

The aging countess, vain and ever fearful, lowering herself into a golden tub filled with crimson. It gives her motivation, for the murders beyond insanity or mercedism, it makes the story unforgettable. If you know the name Elizabeth Bathory at all, it's because you know Elizabeth Bathory the bloody serial killer, the blood countess. But what if we've been wrong about her this entire time? What if Elizabeth Bathory was completely innocent? In recent years, a few scholars have attempted to reframe

Elizabeth Bathory, not as a murderous, but as a victim of circumstances, manipulated by the Hungarian crown and the encroaching Habsburg power, punished for being a wealthy and powerful woman in the wrong family,

conveniently disposed of, untrumped-up charges. Those scholars suggest that, as so often happens, hundreds of years of rumors and exaggeration have taken root, and when a story is better than the truth, well, that story is almost impossible to kill. Now, personally, I'm not certain I'm fully convinced one way or the other. I think the

problem with certain pieces of evidence is that they can be explained reasonably in either direction. But to put the case into modern legal parlance, there's certainly reasonable doubt, and I think it's worth trying to understand why maybe a famous historical monster might have just been a woman all along. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. In the 16th century when Elizabeth Bathory was born, Transylvania was a principality within the Kingdom of Hungary. The Holy Roman Empire was a looming neighbor, ruled by the powerful Habsburg family. At certain periods in history, Hungary and the Holy Roman Empire would have the same monarch. That's what the Habsburg certainly wanted,

to consolidate their power for their leader not only to be emperor, but also King of Hungary and, why not, Lithuania and Poland as well. Transylvania was a pebble in their shoe, a stronghold for Eastern independence from Western Habsburg influence of these little principalities. And the Batheries were one of the most influential families, across those principalities. Elizabeth, born August 7, 1560,

was a product of an illustrious lineage. Her paternal uncle was the voivode or highest-ranking official of Transylvania. Her father was a baron. Elizabeth's mother was also a Bathory, and on that side, her grandfather was a previous vivode of Transylvania, and her uncle, Stephen Bathory, was the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.

Some hear that Elizabeth's parents were both batheries and weave that into their Halloween story about her, that being inbred was the source of her mental illness, her sadism. There were reports of her having epilepsy in her childhood. Surely that too, some believe, is the result of her parents' blood being too close. Fortunately for Elizabeth, her parents were from two extremely distant branches of the family. Though the name had been preserved, her mother and father were separated from their last common ancestor by seven generations and 200 years. But Elizabeth was sickly as a young child, prone to seizures that were diagnosed in the 16th century as falling sickness. Some say that one of the treatments involved opening a cut and letting the blood of a healthy person enter the body, And so that too is used as a morbid little detail to foreshadow Elizabeth's alleged bloodlust.

The rumors about Elizabeth Bathory's life are countless, and I've found that most sources on the internet either willfully forego actual evidence or just accept that Elizabeth today lives more as folklore than an actual historical figure. One of the rumors is that when Elizabeth was 13, she had an affair. with a peasant boy and gave birth to a child. There's no evidence of that. What we do know is that when she was 10 years old, she was engaged to Count Ference Nadashdi, who was five years older than her, and from one of the most powerful noble families

over in the Kingdom of Hungary. The pair were married when Elizabeth was 15 and Florence was 20 at an event with 4,500 guests in attendance. We don't know if the pair were in life. love, but they seem to at least like each other well enough to have five known children, three of whom survived to adulthood. But the purpose of their marriage, like most early modern marriages, wasn't happiness. This marriage codified an incredibly lucrative alliance,

one that would make the couple two of the most powerful figures in Eastern Europe at the time, with enough estate scattered across Hungary that an army could traverse the country by using their properties as protective lily pads. If it's difficult for you to visualize the very complicated geopolitics at the time, think of Transylvania and Hungary as a square rectangle situation. All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. Transylvania was a part of Hungary, but there were parts of the Kingdom of Hungary that existed outside of Transylvania. At the start of the 1600s, when Elizabeth was reaching middle age, Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II inherited and claimed both the titles of Holy Roman Emperor and King of Hungary. There was so much resentment and an

anti-Hapsburg independence movie in Transylvania that eventually forced Rudolph to abdicate the Hungarian throne and give it to his brother, Matthias. It was still in the family, but hopefully people would get less mad if it was more of a nominally separate kingdom. In 1604, after 29 years of marriage, Count Ference died while off-fighting the Ottoman invasion of Hungary, and Elizabeth Bathory became one of the wealthiest and most powerful women in the kingdom. She was sitting on an incredibly important land that she inherited from her husband's powerful Hungarian family, estates that she was already more than comfortable managing. She had managed them for decades while her husband was off fighting.

The properties were vast, and she was so wealthy that even King Matthias II was in debt to her. Meanwhile, over in Transylvania, her nephew Gabor Bathory was being crowned prince. With Elizabeth's wealth and rank, Gabor seemed like an even bigger threat to the Habsburgs of Hungary. Her estates were huge, stretching from the west to the southeast of the Hungarian kingdom. If the batheries wanted, Elizabeth could grant Gabor's safe passage. across the entire kingdom, giving him access to possibly claiming the Polish throne or even the Hungarian throne. The Batherys were a threat. This is the larger context in which Elizabeth Bathery was accused of terrible things. On December 30th, 1610, the Palatine of Hungary, Gregory

Thorso stormed into Elizabeth Bathery's castle, Chete, with a regiment of guards. The Palatine of Hungary, Gregory Thorzo, stormed into Elizabeth Bathory's castle, Chet, with a regiment of guards. The Palatine, the Palatine, Palatine is the highest ranking official of the country. Think of him almost like a prime minister. And Thurzo had been ordered by King Matthias to investigate the terrible rumors about the widow, Elizabeth Bathory. Thurzo had succeeded in his task and then some, eventually gathering hundreds of testimonies,

all of which were in agreement that Elizabeth Bathory was a murderer. Thurzo would write that he burst into the castle and found Elizabeth Bathory in the act of torture, with one young girl already dead at her feet and another strung up and being flayed. But in truth, according to the documentation of Thurzo's secretary at the time, Bathory was actually just eating dinner. It's hard to find where the stories of Elizabeth Bathory murderer began.

One visiting priest had written to the king back when Elizabeth's husband was still alive, saying that he saw the two of them being noticeably cruel to their servants. The local Lutheran pastor, Janus Ponekenos, seemed to delight in accusing Elizabeth of witchcraft and cannibalism. He even wrote to Thurzo saying that Elizabeth would transform into a black cat and that she would stalk him at night. His clearly exaggerated outrage doesn't seem particularly easy to explain, at least from a religious perspective. Though Elizabeth's husband was Lutheran, Elizabeth herself remained a lifelong Calvinist,

just like her mother had been. But even still, she didn't renounce Lutheranism or hinder the religious freedom of the Lutherans on her land. Her records as a landowner indicate that she built schools and educated ministers and supported Lutheranism to the healthy extent that the local pastor should have been content with. Still, it's worth noting that before Thorzo's investigation into Bathory, there were no formal legal complaints made against her at any time, from either anyone on her estate or in her community, and this was during a period when the Hungarian legal system

kept meticulous records of all gripes and grievances. It was just rumors that swirled around her that motivated Thurzo to move on Bathory. King Matthias authorized Thurzo to investigate the rumors around Bathry. Bathory at the start of 1610, and the Palatine sent two notaries out into the Hungarian territories to gather whatever evidence they could. By October, there were 52 witnesses. Later, after Bathory's arrest, there would be over 300. The stories were damning. Elizabeth Bathory, they said, like to torture young girls, that she mutilated, even bit them, that she beat and beat and

stabbed and starved them. Almost all of the testimony, it's worth pointing out, was word of mouth, hearsay from people who had heard of Bathory's abuse, or from people who had had had relatives who had entered service at the castle, but who had never emerged. Elizabeth was arrested that night, December 30th, in her castle, along with four of her servants, her so-called accomplices. Thorzo tortured all of the servants into confessing to assisting the countess with various murders, although all four gave differing numbers of victims, ranging from 20 to 60.

One of the later witnesses would allege that an officer had told him that he had seen a ledger, the countess's own ledger of her murders, and that they numbered in these 600s. Under torture, one of the countess's servants gave Thorzo the location of a young girl's body buried on the estate. Before the torture, the servant had maintained that the young girl was one of eight who had died of the plague earlier that fall. Bristling with excitement, Thurzo and his men dug up the body, still fairly well-preserved having been buried in the cold dirt of autumn. Thurzo hoisted the decomposing plague-written corpse onto a wooden platform in front of the castle, and he invited all the servants and noblemen of neighboring estates to come and see,

come be witness, see the naked, tortured body of one of the countess's victims. Elizabeth herself was forced to stand there in full view, a punishment of public humiliation. Thorzo shouted at her to look at her poor victim. Though the body was more than two months old, Thorzo claimed that it was fresh, which no doubt colored the opinions of onlookers when it came to make their statements about Elizabeth's brutal torture. After all, they had seen the countess standing next to a clearly mutilated body. Though King Matthias urged Thurzo to follow the strictest legal procedures, Thurzo ignored the writ. He claimed to spare the Bathory family the shame of a public trial and to preempt the Orzo,

order of execution. The servants that had been arrested were tried and quickly put to death. But though Elizabeth had private hearings, she never had the large public trial that would have been standard at the time. She wasn't permitted to make a defense or speak on her own behalf. There was never a sentencing. Thurzo continued to claim that it was a mercy, that if she went to trial, she would be put to death. Instead, without a verdict, she would be put to death. Instead, without a verdict, She was merely detained under house arrest at the castle for the rest of her life. The rumors would only continue and grow. The Thorzo wrote to the king and said that she was bricked into a locked room.

Visiting priests at the castle would write and remark that she actually moved freely about the castle, at least until she died, three years later, at age 54. The story could be complete there. Elizabeth Bathory as a murderess for whom the extent of her crimes will never be fully known, a woman who was cruel and sadistic, who killed as many servants as she could, because she could, protected by her wealthy and powerful family. Only in the end, when she was no longer fully protected, her wealth and privilege at least allowed her to remain comfortable under house arrest,

guilty and disgraced, but not hanged by the neck. But in recent years, Hungarian scholars in particular have found that Bathory's case is less cut and dry than some people might believe. I don't know if there's a smoking gun one way or the other, but I think it's interesting and important enough to examine that there might be more gray area than originally meets the eye. Dr. Irma Shadeki Cardos posits that the, quote, eyewitness testimony of the hundreds of witnesses against Elizabeth Bathar. are less compelling than they might originally seem. For one, Thorzo had restricted his investigation only to the parts of the Hungarian kingdom where he had full power, and where many of the tenants were beholden to him. He obtained confessions under torture. The vast, vast majority of the testimony gathered is hearsay. There are no firsthand accounts of anyone

who was actually abused by the countess. Much of the later testimony, came after the witnesses would have seen a decomposing corpse on a platform with Elizabeth standing beside it while Thorsa was shouting that this was one of her victims. I think that would bias anyone a little, at least subconsciously. But again, though Thorzo claimed that his lack of public trial was to protect Elizabeth, it also conveniently prevented any recorded defense. Her disgrace and the rippling disgrace of the entire Bathory family was irreconcilable. It was also fairly convenient for Thurzo that his own son, Imre, happened to be the same age as Elizabeth's son, Paul. Paul, being the sion of two powerful families, would easily eclipse

Thorzo's son when it came to Hungarian politics, unless, of course, the Bathory's family fortunes changed. Dr. Shadeke Cardos also raises a fascinating point that many of the so-called tortures that Bathory was reported to have engaged in were actually well-recorded medical procedures for the 1600s in Transylvania where Bathory had grown up. In the 17th century, it was considered the duty of landowners and nobles to provide for the welfare of their tenants and servants. The lady of the house was responsible for the women and children. According to Shadeki Cardos, Elizabeth's letters aren't blood-chilling manifestos of a sadistic murderer. They're normal, reasonable business management. Elizabeth writes petitioning the king for her tenants. She installed in each of her estates,

herbalists and healers, and appointed the same personal healer that she used for her own children for her underlings. Coming from Transylvania, Elizabeth, was familiar with a more hands-on approach to herbal medicine and healing methods that would have been unfamiliar to the local people when she moved with her husband to Western Hungary. One of Elizabeth's most famous, quote-unquote, accomplices, was a woman named Anya Darbulia, a Croatian midwife and healer, and one of the few women who performed rudimentary surgeons on her patients so that the female patients wouldn't have to be treated by men. It would have been a rare and strange sight, maybe for some, to see a woman doing something like bloodletting,

even though bloodletting at the time was a conventionally accepted medical procedure. The medical texts of a contemporary Transylvanian doctor, Ference Papai-Purice, contain a number of procedures that, to the untrained eye, or to an eye mistrustful of a woman holding a knife, might look suspiciously like torture. Necrotic tissue needed to be cut. from healthy flesh to prevent infection from spreading. Maggots were a frequent blight. Boils and abscesses had to be lanced. Wounds needed to be cauterized with red-hot irons. For some ailments,

hot-cuping was recommended, and for those with fever or rubonic plague, a weak, sweating body would be shocked with an ice-cold bath. Stinging nettles were an old wives' cure for rheumatism and arthritis. Some seamstresses suffered from boils under their nail beds, a condition known as fingernail poison. The treatment was lancing fingertips under the nails with needles. Hearing those treatments out of context, and particularly if they were unfamiliar or gasp done by a woman, you can almost see where the stories of torture might have begun. Shedekhi Cardos also points out that the deaths that Thorso ascribed, to Elizabeth happened to coincide with outbreaks of disease. The eight girls whom Thurzo built his case

around had possibly actually died of the plague. They had been quarantined together and treated by two of Elizabeth's servants, and they had died when Elizabeth wasn't even at the castle. Elizabeth was frequently touring between her estates. The pace and freneticism with which the rumors of Elizabeth Bathory's guilt took hold of the countryside, could also possibly point to Thurzo's haste to make her guilt, quote, common knowledge. Common knowledge was accepted evidence in court at the time. Elizabeth's confinement meant that her relatives were able to take control of her valuable properties. A few of her son-in-laws knew in advance of Thurzo's impending, quote, surprise arrest. They even helped him to arrange it. King Matthias,

debts that he owed to Elizabeth were conveniently dissolved. I don't know exactly where I stand when it comes to a proclamation that Elizabeth Bathory was either a sadistic monster or completely innocent, a framed woman. Personally, I tend to find it a little easier to believe that a few hundred people living in close and unhygienic corridors at the start of the 1600s were more likely to have died from the plague than from a cruel and unusual Lady Dracula. People were suspicious of powerful women, and especially of powerful women with regional and religious differences.

Rumors were easy to spread, and Elizabeth Bathory's downfall financially benefited many people in power. But on the other hand, I also don't find it difficult to believe that a wealthy noble woman might have been exceedingly cruel, abusive, maybe even deadly in her treatment of servants. You'll notice that throughout this, I didn't mention the whole bathing in blood thing. Well, that's because that's objectively a complete fabrication.

There were absolutely no contemporary witnesses who alleged even rumors of Elizabeth bathing in the blood of young women to preserve her own youth, or doing anything with their blood. That rumor came over a hundred years later during the counter-reformation. In 1729, the Hungarian Jesuit priest Laslo Taroshi used the by then infamous saga of Elizabeth Bathery as a parable to discuss the dangers of becoming Protestant. He wrote that she was a Catholic who had broken bad and converted to Lutheranism, and that unleashed in her a bloodlust that caused her this demented Protestant, to sadistically torture servants and bathe in young blood in order to try to stay young herself. It's a compelling detail, and kudos to Turochi for his imaginative

creativity that still persists in the popular culture today, but it's just not true. Elizabeth wasn't even ever Lutheran. She was never a lapsed Catholic. As I mentioned, she was a lifelong Calvinist, So no bloodlust, but as for the murders, it's up to you to decide what's true and what's merely rumor. That's the saga of Elizabeth Bathory, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about her legacy. You can have opinions, you can have like a strong stance, and then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation.

There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHeart Podcasts presents Soccer Moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend Janet.

And we have been joined at the hips since high school. Absolutely. Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips, wider. This is a podcast we're recording. as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drink

sidebar why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer they had a bogo well then you got it do you want a white color or something here just hit it oh what are y'all doing microphones are you making a rap album oh I would come on could you move I would buy it cuts through the defense like a hot

knife through sponge cake that sounds delicious oh you're lucky I'm not a drug addict you're like I'm not an alcohol You're lucky I'm not a killer. I love this team and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Lists of pop history fun facts are littered with the type of historical anecdote that seems like it should be true. And so these anecdotes are just repeated often enough that they become fact.

One of those seems like it might as well be true is the idea that upon hearing the rumors of this Eastern European Countess from Transylvania, an Irish author named Bram Stoker while staying on the misty northern coast of Scotland, was inspired to write a story about a man who sucked blood from others to survive. His book, of course, became Dracula. Now, there's no real consensus on whether Bathory, directly, or even indirectly inspired Stoker, but Bathory did inspire another recent character in pop culture. In the video game Resident Evil Village, there's a glamorous woman with a large black hat and sweeping white gown who stands at over nine feet tall.

The character is named Countess Alcina or Lady Demetrescu. and she became an almost instant fan favorite, a villainous who rules over a feudal peasantry with allegations of murder and cannibalism swirling around her incredibly glamorous and incredibly tall person. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky.

The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz. Executive producers include Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. The show is produced by Rima Ilkha Ali and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at noblebloodtales.com. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes.

You can have opinions, you can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human