Countess Dracula (40 page)

It is an irony that their Countess should have smeared herself with the red blood of virgins in order to render her own skin whiter, but it is no surprise that the ruddy-featured peasants of Nitra county, whose own skin would turn to copper-brown in the summer fields, would marvel at the delicacy and translucency of their social superiors, wondering if their indifference to their serfs' wellbeing was because they were literally bloodless. By the same token, the young girls who surrounded the Lady of the house would have contrasted visibly with their counterparts outside the manor: the combination of a closeted existence, the emotional tensions of adolescence, a diet poor in minerals could leave them ghostlike in appearance and prone to fainting and hysteria.

It was not only the flowing of female blood that triggered the nervous fantasies of male-dominated societies but also the cessation of that flow. In some ways Elisabeth Báthory did not fit the profile of the typical female scapegoat – she was not poor, powerless or noticeably infirm – but she was a post-menopausal widow, and a scold. Elderly women who outlived their men were an economic and psychological threat. They had accumulated knowledge and experience, acquired confidence and often came to express their views forcibly, but they were an affront to male pride and the natural order. Once these women were no longer engaged in the business of birth and nurture, they were redundant and without a niche in the hierarchy of being. The isolation and persecution of women was nothing new, and aristocrats were not exempt. Across Europe and in the New World there are striking parallels which start to suggest a pattern of social behaviour – by the women and by their oppressors – rather than a string of sensational coincidences. One particular case was the trial of Dame Alice Kyteler for witchcraft in fourteenth-century Ireland.

Dame Alice lived in Kilkenny in south-east Ireland and was a member of the Anglo-Norman elite who ruled over the native Celtic population. She was apparently possessed of great beauty and force of character. By the time the authorities moved against her she had outlived three husbands: an influential financier, William Outlawe, by
whom she had a son of the same name, and two wealthy squires, Adam le Blund and Richard de Valle. From the two last she inherited their whole estates, leaving their children, the natural heirs, resentful and impoverished. Soon after Alice had married for the fourth time to a gentleman named John le Poer, rumours of poisoning and witchcraft began to circulate, coinciding with her new husband's affliction by a mysterious wasting disease. Sir John himself denounced his wife to the ecclesiastical authorities, who began an investigation, supported by her late husbands' children and other prominent citizens of Kilkenny town. The Franciscan Bishop of Ossary, an Englishman, Richard de Ledrede, orchestrated the campaign of vilification against Alice Kyteler, her son William (on whom she doted) and the senior servants of her household, citing in evidence a litany of black-magic practices which became a template for the charges repeatedly brought against the witches of the west in the centuries that followed: desecration of the host and mockery of church rituals, animal sacrifices, sexual congress with demons, and the making of potions from ingredients such as the flesh of new-born children, the hair and fingernails of hanged men, offal, insects and noxious plants, mixed and boiled, it was said, in the hollow skull of a beheaded felon.
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The Bishop attempted to arrest the woman and succeeded in having her excommunicated, but his jurisdiction in such cases was not clear and Dame Alice, who refused to be summonsed, had her own powerful supporters. She in turn accused the Bishop of slander in the secular county court and managed to have him confined temporarily in Kilkenny castle.

In the course of a year, the relentless pressure from the church and the repetition of the terrible accusations, together with local resentment of the Dame's arrogant behaviour, began to turn official opinion against her, and eventually permission was given to put her on trial for her life.

The contrasts with Elisabeth Báthory's case are clear: Dame Alice's accuser was not as powerful as the Palatine Thurzó, and could not take her into custody or pass sentence on her without official sanction. The accused person's own husband joined in condemning her and provided evidence of her crimes (her magical paraphernalia and samples of her poisons and charms) to the prosecutors. But the similarities are also significant: by her personal high-handedness and sharp-tongued pride Dame Alice Kyteler had alienated her neighbours, terrified her servants and unsettled her male peers. Most importantly, by accumulating great
wealth and protecting it for her favourite heir, she had set herself up as a target for a jealous husband and a band of greedy relatives. The prosecution's figurehead, de Ledrede himself, stood to benefit materially if the heiress was found guilty and her estates forfeited. There may have been other factors, political or dynastic, which were involved in the affair, but the time elapsed makes it impossible for these to be ascertained. It is clear, however, that there was more to the Kyteler case than the charges of spell-casting and poisoning which were set down in the prosecutors' papers.

Just as in the later Hungarian case, the only surviving documents were authored by those who had set out to destroy Alice Kyteler's reputation and who would gain from her downfall. Those documents record that, once the great lady's survival was in doubt, her servants and her neighbours were willing to offer testimonies against her. The parallels do not end there. While her enemies waited for the right moment to seize her, Dame Alice Kyteler, like Elisabeth, gathered together her movable treasures and left her family seat. Unlike Elisabeth, before the authorities could lay hands on her she succeeded in slipping across the Irish Sea to sanctuary in England, leaving her humbly born maidservant, Petronilla de Meath, to die at the stake for the crimes of which her mistress was also found guilty and sentenced to death
in absentia.
Dame Alice's son was convicted by the court, but his rank and his wealth saved him; he was pardoned and set free in return for generous donations to de Ledrede's church.

It is extremely difficult at this remove to pronounce a final verdict upon Alice Kyteler. She may in fact have been a serial murderer – her last husband's loss of hair and of finger- and toenails were possible symptoms of slow poisoning – and perhaps her maidservant was speaking sincerely when she scorned her judges and swore that her mistress was the greatest witch in all Ireland and England too. But it is no longer possible to see such sensational events in isolation. There were many other prosecutions of older women for witchcraft – notable examples come from as far apart as Estonia and Salem, New England, which may have been motivated at least in part by a quarrel over an inheritance or the coveting of land or money owned by the accused.
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As well as the misogyny that was universal in patriarchal societies, it has been suggested that there were deeper changes taking place in post-mediaeval cultures, with men unconsciously perceiving that women in general had gained too much power. By this theory the
cult of mariolatry – the worship of the Virgin – and the veneration of a host of sympathetic female saints had begun subtly to alter the balance of power in society and undermine men's unquestioned and absolute dominance.
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In Hungary, because of the special circumstances that arose in a country at war, women were even more in the ascendant, particularly those aristocratic women who had become emancipated by, in some cases, fighting alongside their menfolk or else by taking over traditional male roles in the family and on the estates. Deep-seated hostility to the female sex might explain not only the persecution of rich and powerful widows but why less privileged women were prepared to suffer the hardships of domestic discipline in the manor-house in return for a modicum of security and a measure of social advancement. Who is to say that the treatment they received at the hands of brothers, fathers or husbands at home was any better than the ordeals involved in a regime of servitude?

Other striking and authentic parallels to the experiences of Countess Báthory can also be found in the history of Hungary and its sister-state, Transylvania. It seems logical to look at how other noblewomen were treated, in particular widowed noblewomen, and at women who were persecuted.

One of the best-documented examples of the harassing and isolating of a widowed noblewoman occurred a few years after the death of Countess Báthory and with neat irony concerned the neighbour and former friend who had been instrumental in her capture and imprisonment and who then had robbed her. Lady Elisabeth Czobor, the wife of the Palatine, George Thurzó, once she had lost her husband and her eldest son was persecuted and ultimately ruined by the ruthlessly ambitious would-be Renaissance Prince, Nicholas Esterházy, who was assisted in his machinations by Czobor's own daughter-in-law.

The excitable and ingenuous Lady Czobor was widowed in 1616 at the age of thirty-eight. Her letters and her behaviour after George Thurzó's passing revealed that the death of her husband had shocked her very deeply. After some months she gathered her strength and began to assume some of the responsibilities of her late husband, and to cultivate his memory. In her instructing of Imre, their only son, she constantly cited George as a paragon of moral and political probity and as a model father and upholder of the true faith.
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Imre had fathered two daughters but was without a male heir when
he died unexpectedly in 1621. The rumours suggested that he had been poisoned, but by whom was never made clear. Whatever the truth, the main branch of the Bethlenfalva Thurzós was thereby extinguished. Having lost all her close male relatives, Lady Czobor's position as heiress to the bulk of the vast family holdings quickly became untenable. She lost the estate of Tokaj with its prize vineyards and its rich tithes. The rising star of the new aristocracy and Palatine-to-be, Count Esterházy, was distantly related to Czobor through his first wife, Lady Ursula Derssfy, and he used this fact to lay successful claim to two more Thurzó castles and promised one of Czobor's daughters that he would send his private army to resolve a dispute over her estates. The threat had the desired effect. In October 1622, less than one year after the mysterious death of Imre Thurzó, Nicholas Esterházy ordered a comprehensive inventory of the Bytéa estates. A valuation showed them to be worth 8,000 florins. He then impounded the properties. Two years later, in 1624, he put the final touch to his campaign of acquisition by taking as his second wife George Thurzó's daughter-in-law Lady Christina Nyáry, Imre's widow (who had always hated her mother-in-law) and removing the grandchildren from their grandmother's care. Lady Czobor tried to keep the children with her and appealed to the courts and the King, but when Esterházy became palatine in 1625 he easily persuaded the Diet to grant him custody. Elisabeth died, emotionally and physically broken, at the home of her favourite daughter Barbara shortly afterwards.

The most tenuous claim was all it took to launch a challenge against a vulnerable heiress, after which it was largely might that established right. The surviving members of the Thurzó line were not strong enough to oppose their enemies, and the powerful families to whom they were connected (as in Báthory's case, the sons-in-law played a duplicitous role) were not willing to compromise their own positions to support a widow and a dying dynasty.

There is another true story from seventeenth-century Hungary whose denouement came more than two decades after the Widow Nádasdy's lonely death, but which echoes the Báthory scandal in many ways. Not only does it concern the dispossessing of a troublesome widow, but it ends in the trial of that widow for the brutal murder of her servants.

The woman in question was a member of the senior aristocracy and
a relative by marriage of the Thurzó family, at whose wedding feasts she would have met Countess Báthory, twenty-three years her senior. Her name was Anna-Rosina Liszty, known usually by the latinised form of her surname, Listhius. She was born in 1583 to János Listhius and Anna Nauhaus.
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The Listhius family originated as burghers in Transylvania and were related to a bishop who was an influential figure in Hungary at the time of the defeat at Mohács. They were ennobled in 1554, and in 1560 and again in 1586 the family received the important benefits and estates which formed the basis of their dynastic wealth. Anna-Rosina's grandfather, the senior member of the family, first became Bishop of Veszprém, then of Györ, his sons were given the finest education and on reaching their majority were appointed regional judges. Little is known of Anna-Rosina's mother except that she was already a widow when she married János Listhius. The family strengthened their power in the prescribed manner by arranging marriages for their offspring and Anna-Rosina was duly sent to marry Lord Stanislas Thurzó in 1598 at the age of fifteen. (We should recall George Thurzó's letter to his wife revealing his misgivings about the match: ‘She is no Dido, but if Stanislas likes her so much that he cannot live without her, what can I do against it?'.)

Stanislas Thurzó presided over a court that was renowned for its ostentation; he, like his cousin George, became palatine in 1625 after the interregnum of Sigmund Forgách. In the years following their marriage he and his wife had seven children in quick succession, four of whom survived to reach adulthood. According to letters between husband and wife, Anna-Rosina showed no extraordinary mental states or eccentricity until after 1610 when she became subject to hysterical or epileptic fits followed by periods of depression. In a letter of 1621 to George Thurzó's widow Elisabeth Czobor, the family wrote:

thanks be to God, now she is much better, and as your ladyship has written, that nothing of her deeds should be spoken of and nobody should mention this before her. But now conscious, she knows herself what she has done, and what she has spoken of. She is now firmly fixed upon it that her throat should not be bound and no one should use a knife in her presence, and people should care for her and be vigilant and when the sickness comes on her – because it came upon her before – it first strikes her on her left toe with great pain, then to her heart, then goes away . . .
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