Countess Elizabeth Báthory may have been a butcher far more terrible than Jack the Ripper. In fact, the crimes attributed to her would make her one of the worst mass murderers in history.

Legend tells us this very rich, beautiful and high born woman tortured and murdered some 650 young women and bathed in their warm blood to keep herself beautiful. Was this horror story true? And if it was, why did she do it? And finally, did she ever pay for this carnage?
 

Torture as a Hobby
The Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory, born in 1560, lived most of her life in the late Sixteenth Century. The Báthorys were an especially highly placed, well connected, and powerful noble family. Stephen Báthory, a supporter of John I of Hungary, was made governor of Transylvania. His younger son, Stephen Báthory, became king of Poland in 1575. His brother, Christopher Báthory, succeeded him as prince of Transylvania

Elizabeth was the niece of Stephen Báthory, the king of Poland. Her family promised her to Ferencz Nádasdy when she was only ten and married her to him at fifteen. In keeping with custom, Elizabeth Báthory kept her birth name because her family was more powerful than her husband's.

She departed sharply from custom in her sexual behavior. During her betrothal, but before meeting her future husband, Elizabeth probably became pregnant and secretly delivered a child. She arranged for the infant to be adopted out and paid hush money to anyone who knew of her pregnancy. During her marriage, she indulged herself with male lovers while her husband was away--which was often since Ferencz Nádasdy was a professional soldier.

Nádasdy may or may not have known of his wife's murders but he was a cruel man himself and tortured servants when he was home (though he may not have tortured them to death). He had a maid who was supposedly "lazy" stripped naked in front of male servants, then smeared with honey and forced to stand for a full day while bees and insects bit and stung her.

The Countess had her own, very peculiar streak of cruelty toward servants--if they were female. Báthory punished them by placing a piece of paper between a woman's toes and setting it on fire. She chastized suspected thieves by heating a coin, then forcing the culprit to hold it until it sizzled a mark in her palm. If a servant failed to press the Countess's garments adequately, a hot iron would be held to her face until she was scarred for life. These treatments often resulted in death but that was neither surprising nor disappointing to the callous Countess.

Soon, and concomitantly with these stern punishments, Báthory pursued torture as a hobby. The infliction of humiliation (girls in their teens were routinely forced to strip naked in the presence of male serfs), terror, pain, and death was an exciting pastime similar to gambling or sports for Elizabeth Báthory. It is likely that as many as 650 women and girls, some as young as twelve years of age, lost their lives to her bloodlust.

A War on Women
One of the most striking, and troubling, things about this real-life horror story is its female-on-female character. All the murder victims were female. Most of the guilty, whether as procurers or torturers, were also women. That women were the procurers may be explained on practical grounds: in a sex-segregated world: women are more likely to mingle freely with each other and trust an offer of employment or hospitality from another woman.

Men did play parts in this tragedy. One torturer, a dwarf nicknamed Ficzkó, was male. Other men served as means to humiliate women (who were forced to parade nude in their presence) or to degrade them after death (soldiers who had no idea what they were eating were fed flesh of murdered females).

We cannot know what the feelings were of the men who watched peasant women forced to strip: they may have enjoyed this sadistic show but, then again, they may have been appalled but helpless to do anything about it. If the latter, they must be considered Báthory's victims as well. The men who were tricked into cannibalism were unequivocally victims. It is noteworthy, however, that she had no male murder victims.


How did Báthory get away with waging a femicide for over three decades? The deaths of enough women to populate a village could not have been a complete secret--and, indeed, it was not. What's more, many women and girls survived with faces and palms displaying the evidence of her cruelty.

To understand why Báthory got away with her crimes for as long as she did, we need to understand the position of peasants in her country at the time as well as the privileges accorded high birth. There had been a Hungarian peasant uprising in 1524, a generation before the Countess's birth. It had been crushed and the rebels subjected to truly diabolical punishments. Their leader was "roasted alive on an iron throne and his followers forced to eat his flesh before they themselves were broken on the wheel and hanged." (McNally)

During Báthory's day, McNally explained, "peasants were in general treated quite harshly, servants were often recruited by force and usually subjected to bodily punishment by their Hungarian overlords. They were considered chattel and had no real rights...A peasant could sometimes leave the service of the lord, according to the law, but in practice this did not happen, since the lord could accuse the peasant of some crime and have him convicted by the courts."

Downfall
The story of why Báthory's decades long crime spree was ended is highly ironic. There were three factors which contributed to her downfall. The first is that she started preying upon young girls and women of the lesser nobility. The second reason is that (perhaps because her atrocities had gone unremarked for so very long) she became sloppier in her disposals: she sometimes just tossed corpses out of her carriage to rot and be eaten by wolves. The third, and probably most important reason, for her arrest is that running a murder factory was becoming expensive (she had long ago killed off the young serf women who "belonged" to her estates and was having to send her henchwomen farther and farther afield to recruit the unsuspecting), so Báthory began pestering the King for payment on loans he had taken from her late husband. It was the King's desire to cancel these loans (under their law, they were no longer active if the person to whom money was owed was in prison); in large part, that led him to demand Báthory be arrested.

Here the modern reader is likely to experience suspicion. After all, Elizabeth was never allowed to appear at her trial and answer the charges--and she maintained her complete innocence until the end of her life. The accomplices who testified against her had been tortured.

Was this entire story trumped up so that King Mathias would not have to pay a bill he owed? That is extremely improbable since literally "hundreds of witnesses...testified at the investigations before and after the formal trial." Such a vast conspiracy, involving hundreds of people, "is not a likely prospect given the conditions of those times."

However, it says much about her society that none of the primary factors leading to the end of Báthory's crimes was horror at femicide per se and that one of them was a big honcho's desire to get out of a debt which he legitimately owed.


The privilege of high birth still held in the matter of punishment. The Countess's underlings were tortured and executed while Báthory herself was sentenced to imprisonment in one room at her own castle. She was walled up there, living in darkness and solitary confinement until her death a couple of years later.

The Vampire Legend
A major, significant, and lasting alteration in the Báthory story took root as she passed into legend--she became a vampire. According to the vampire myth, Countess Báthory was a very beautiful and vain woman. One day a servant girl was fixing her hair and pulled it too tight. The hot-tempered noblewoman punched the girl's nose, drawing blood. After washing the blood off her hand, she thought the skin where it had been looked fresher and younger. She then commanded other servants to kill the hapless girl and drain her body of blood so she could bathe in it.

Exactly when in her life this fateful incident occurred varies according to the account. In some, she wanted to retain her youthful complexion to please her husband and is quoted as saying, "It is my duty to be good to my husband and keep myself beautiful for him. God has shown me how to do this so I would be unwise not to take advantage of the opportunity." Other Báthory chronicles say she was an aging widow concerned about keeping up her appearance to catch a second husband.

In any event, the legend has it that the Countess murdered hundreds of young peasant girls, then bathed in tubs of their blood because she believed that the blood of young maidens (or "virgin blood") was a miraculous anti-wrinkling agent. In some stories, Báthory is said to have drank blood as well as bathed in it.

Professor Raymond T. McNally traveled to Bycta in Slovakia to research Dracula was a Woman, his study of the Countess's life and legend. He examined the archives of the court of inquiry held before the actual trial as well as the trial documents themselves. In neither is there any mention of tubs or pools filled with blood, nor blood drinking per se. There are reports of the Countess, in a frenzy, biting chunks of flesh from women. The blood was ingested along with the flesh but these were instances of werewolfism or cannibalism rather than vampirism.

How did the myth of the blood-drinking and bathing countess start?

When she was finally imprisoned, King Mathias II, the Báthory family, and the nobility in general, wanted to just forget the foul deeds of Elizabeth Báthory. Thus, the records of the court of inquiry and her trial were sealed and locked away from public examination. The King forbade even the mention of her name. Of course the silence was only a public one; there was no way to prevent people from talking in private about such a strange and horrifying character -- after all, so many peasants had relatives who had fallen to her bloodlust.

When Father Laszlo Turoczy wrote Ungaria suis cum regibus compendio data (Hungary, A Dated Compendium with Its Kings), it was the early 1720s. The infamous Countess had been dead over a hundred years so Father Turoczy was able to include her life and crimes in his chronicle. He obtained copies of the trial documents--but he also drew upon stories he had been told by peasants. At the time, a vampire scare was spreading across Europe and the word of mouth tales reflected the contemporary terror, Professor McNally believes.

This writer would like to suggest a second explanation for the vampire legend and its tenacious hold on the public imagination: it seemed to reconcile the enormity of her crimes with the fact of her gender.

Murder, especially when committed on a massive scale and for pleasure, is, with some reason, generally thought of as the province of the male. Vanity, on the other hand, is considered the classically "feminine" fault. Bathing or drinking blood seems a macabre parody of the lengths (radical, life-threatening diets, painful cosmetic surgery, etc.) to which women routinely go to look beautiful.

Concomitantly, the vanity/vampiric motive for Báthory's crimes flatters the male ego by declaring that a woman would mass murder to catch a new husband or keep her present husband happy. Indeed, the latter version of the myth makes Báthory a kind of “Fascinating (or Total) Woman” gone gynocidally berserk.

A third, and related factor, in the durability of the vampiric myth is that her supposed belief in the magical properties of "virgin blood" also appeared to explain the sex of Báthory's victims. In all periods in recorded Western history, including the present, "female virgin" has been a redundant phrase.

Which brings us to the question: why did the real countess murder only other females? The answer is, of necessity, speculative and we must look to the explanations given for the same-sex choice of victims in the far, far, more common case of the male serial murderer who murders only other men--Gacy, Corona, Berdella, Dahmer, et. al. It is theorized that in the murderer, violent impulses, and the need for dominance and control over another person have become fused with sexuality; thus, a heterosexual man murders women, a homosexual man, other men.

Another theoretical factor often included in the explanation for male-on-male serial murder is that the murderer despises his homosexual desires and so avenges himself against those who attract him or share those desires. That is, the male victims are representatives of the traits (effeminacy, weakness, cowardice, etc.) the murderer most fears in himself.

Were sexual and murderous impulses fused in Báthory? Yes, but since she was bisexual rather than lesbian in her preferences, we might ask why only her lesbian sexuality was fused with brutality. It is possible that she despised her lesbian desires and not her heterosexual ones and, thus, sought to destroy those who aroused the "unnatural" yearnings.

Additionally, as a woman herself, she knew the special humiliation that other females would feel at being paraded naked in front of men and thus may have gotten a special thrill out of this psychic torture.

The Countess was a sexual sadist on a grand scale. Former FBI profilers John Douglas & Mark Olshaker address this kind of sadistic killer in their book The Cases that Haunt Us “….the motivation for the act [of murder] can be summed up in three words: manipulation, domination, and control. These are the elements that give the perpetrator a heightened satisfaction that he does not achieve from anything else in his life.”

Perhaps, as a character in Andrei Codrescu's Blood Countess speculates, Elizabeth Báthory despised being a member of the "inferior" sex. She may have felt that by a kind of sympathetic magic she could "avoid pain by causing it.” Thus, she inflicted torment and death on others "in retribution for their being women."

Báthory bears a striking resemblance to the Wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. A servant testified at her trial that the Countess made incantations to her mirror and would gaze into it "for over two hours at a stretch." In the unexpurgated, not-for-children tale, the Queen asks that Snow White's heart (or lungs and liver) be brought to her. When the man ordered to murder the young lady returns with the same items from a deer, the Queen commits what she thinks is an act of cannibalism. This is akin to the blood-drinking Báthory of myth--and the biting Báthory of history. When the Wicked Queen's "crime was exposed, slippers of iron were heated in a fire until red hot, and the queen was forced to put them on, and to dance until she dropped dead." Much more severe than Báthory's actual punishment, it would have been poetic justice for the woman who burned faces and hands for trivial infractions.